UK/US British TV sets

[Happy_Evil_Dude]

Hello,

I've been debating for a while now whether to buy British TV shows through their US or UK releases when the choice is available.

Are there differences between what 2Entertain, Acorn, Universal, etc put out in the UK compared to the equivalent titles put out by PBS or BBC in the US?

I notice that sometimes a UK version is listed here as being "1080/50i" whereas the US or even French version is listed as "1080p". Is the 1080p automatically better or is it actually essentially the same?

Thank you.

[David M]

The original format without conversions is usually best. It depends on each individual release, but a good rule of thumb is to buy European content from Europe.

British TV shows will be shot for 1080i/50, so the BDs will be in that format. US BD players and TVs do not have to support the 50hz formats, so for release in these territories, a frame rate conversion is done. There are two ways to do that, one of which changes the playback speed, the other doesn't but degrades the motion quality a little.

So, it's not as simple as 1080i vs 1080p unfortunately.

[stargazeruk]

Originally Posted by Happy_Evil_Dude

Hello,

I've been debating for a while now whether to buy British TV shows through their US or UK releases when the choice is available.

Are there differences between what 2Entertain, Acorn, Universal, etc put out in the UK compared to the equivalent titles put out by PBS or BBC in the US?

I notice that sometimes a UK version is listed here as being "1080/50i" whereas the US or even French version is listed as "1080p". Is the 1080p automatically better or is it actually essentially the same?

Thank you.

2Enterain's for BBC content at 1080i (like the later doctor who's) are usually just flagged as 1080i but are actually encoded in progressive scan but flagged for compability (Unless you unluckly get one of their early releases which not been fixed was a joke they encoded at 1080i@60).

Some of the doctor who blu-rays mostly I seen suffer from this. If they choose not to do a 50i release they slowed down the release to 24fps for 1080p but since they encoded the picture as progressive scan and just flagged it as 1080i they do not need to do this for the UK market.

As for the others. Usually I get a few American shows and not got many UK shows on blu-ray so I can not say.

Usually the 24p ones are slowed down and its usually worth seeing if there been comparisons to check if they are better in PQ or not. My rule of thumb is for BBC content get the UK editions and then the rest look to see who has the best PQ and is it enough to justify not getting the native framerate edition.