Home Page | About Me | Home Entertainment | Home Entertainment Blog | Politics | Australian Libertarian Society Blog | Disclosures

The Transporter cover

Blu-ray Reviews: The Transporter

Not previously published
Last updated 25 September 2009


The Transporter
2002 - Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment South Pacific Pty Ltd
Director: Corey Yuen
Starring: Jason Statham, Qi Shu, Matt Schulze, François Berléand, Ric Young, Doug Rand, Didier Saint Melin, Tonio Descanvelle, Laurent Desponds, Matthieu Albertini, Vincent Nemeth, Jean-Yves Bilien and Jean-Marie Paris

Movie: 3.5 Picture: TBA Sound: TBA Extras: 1.0


No review as yet.


Facts
Running time: 92 minutes
Picture: 2.35:1, 1080p24, MPEG2 @ 18.83Mbps
Sound: English: DTS-HD Master Audio 24/48 3/2.1 @ 4520kbps (Core: DTS 24/48 3/2.1 @ 1536kbps); Italian: Dolby Digital 3/2.1 @ 448kbps; Commentary: Dolby Digital 2/0.0 @ 224kbps
Subtitles: English, English for the Hearing Impaired, French, Spanish
Extras: English, Italian, Italian (Titles), Italian (Commentary), English (Commentary)
Restrictions: Rated M (Australian rating); Locked to Region B

The following video bitrate graph was generated by BDInfo 0.5.2:

The Transporter video bitrate graph


Comparison: Blu-ray vs PAL DVD

Here are some comparisons between the Australian PAL DVD and the Blu-ray versions of this movie. Both the DVD version was one I had previously purchased, while the Blu-ray version was a commercial copy provided to me by Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment South Pacific Pty Ltd.

In the following examples, at the top of each is the full frame (suitably shrunk down) used in the comparison, with a 250 pixel wide detail from the frame underneath. The left side is from the PAL DVD. The image was captured digitally from the disc (using VideoReDo Plus), scaled up from its native 720 by 576 resolution to 1,024 by 576 (to present in the 16:9 aspect ratio), and then, in order to be comparable to the Blu-ray version, from that to 1,920 by 1,080. The detail is from that last scaled version, and has not been rescaled again. The right side is from the Australian Blu-ray (captured using the command-line media player MPplayer). This has not been scaled at all.

Since different applications were used to capture the two frames, I am not normally comfortable comparing the brightness or colour between the two. For those visitors from NTSC lands, generally PAL DVDs are just a touch sharper than NTSC DVDs.

The main problem it seems to me is that much of this movie was short without quite the precision of camera focus taken with a lot of other movies. Still, the Blu-ray remains an improvement over the DVD, with more detail and clarity, especially in the near-elimination of compression artefacts.

Comparison 1

Comparison 2

Comparison 3

Comparison 4

Comparison 5

Comparison 6


© 2002-2009, Stephen Dawson