The Anime Blu-ray Video Quality Thread

[Naiera]

The worst anime Blu-rays I've seen are those where the encoding was completely botched, like Penguindrum and Canaan, and bad upscales, like Eureka Seven and Toradora.

Single disc Sentai seasons, Persona 4 and Code Geass from Kaze, etc. don't look TERRIBLE. It's annoying, since they could do so much better, but it doesn't hurt my eyes or anything when I watch them.

Aniplex, BV or an actual Japanese release is still the tits, though. It's easy to see where all that extra bitrate goes.

[Naiera]

Does anyone have that list of botched Sentai encodes? I can never find it

[chronoclast]

Originally Posted by Naiera

Does anyone have that list of botched Sentai encodes? I can never find it

Bad 1080i encodes:
Legends of the Dark King
Ghost Hound
Dream Eater Merry
Canaan
Penguindrum
Bodacious Space Pirates (parts, I don't know on the collection)
Fate/Stay Night (parts, collection is still bad despite being 1080p and it has ghosting)
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0
This Boy Can Fight Aliens

Botched encodes:
Horizon In the Middle of Nowhere (one episode has tons of aliasing)
Colorful the Movie (encode is royally screwed up for a minute towards the end of the film, poor compression throughout)
Xam'd (compression on the parts isn't good, gamma levels are botched on some episodes of the collection)

I think that's everything.

[Naiera]

Thank you!

The Bodacious collection is better, as far as I remember.

Someone mentioned Kamisama Dolls earlier. I have it and watched it, but honestly can't say if it's as botched as Penguindrum or Canaan.

[BigOnAnime]

Originally Posted by chronoclast

Bad 1080i encodes:
Legends of the Dark King
Ghost Hound
Dream Eater Merry
Canaan
Penguindrum
Bodacious Space Pirates (parts, I don't know on the collection)
Fate/Stay Night (parts, collection is still bad despite being 1080p and it has ghosting)
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0
This Boy Can Fight Aliens

Botched encodes:
Horizon In the Middle of Nowhere (one episode has tons of aliasing)
Colorful the Movie (encode is royally screwed up for a minute towards the end of the film, poor compression throughout)
Xam'd (compression on the parts isn't good, gamma levels are botched on some episodes of the collection)

I think that's everything.

What about the audio issue ones, where all the channels got stuffed into one speaker? I know Kids on the Slope was one of them. Then there were some with lossy audio.

[Naiera]

Kids on the Slope had faulty audio? On both tracks? Kind of the wrong show to **** up the audio on...

[pikagreg]

Originally Posted by Naiera

Kids on the Slope had faulty audio? On both tracks? Kind of the wrong show to **** up the audio on...

I thought they fixed Kids on the Slope post release? I remember when I got my copy, RS also sent a small envelope with an alternative disk.

[BigOnAnime]

Originally Posted by Naiera

Kids on the Slope had faulty audio? On both tracks? Kind of the wrong show to **** up the audio on...

When they first released the show, one episode on I think the Japanese track only had all the channels like stuffed into the left speaker. They did do a recall, but there were other shows with this sort of issue they never fixed. It also apparently happened on some old ADV singles back in the day as I've heard, so this sort of issue isn't entirely new to them.

And then there's ADV's BD release of Elfen Lied. It still has muffled audio on the English dub on every episode except the OVA. I own it and it's still strange what's going on, there's even a difference on the OP/ED which are in Japanese... Play like the ED on Japanese, switch it over to English, and while it's the same song in the same language, bam, it sounds worse.

[DavidN]

Originally Posted by BigOnAnime

When they first released the show, one episode on I think the Japanese track only had all the channels like stuffed into the left speaker. They did do a recall, but there were other shows with this sort of issue they never fixed. It also apparently happened on some old ADV singles back in the day as I've heard, so this sort of issue isn't entirely new to them.

And then there's ADV's BD release of Elfen Lied. It still has muffled audio on the English dub on every episode except the OVA. I own it and it's still strange what's going on, there's even a difference on the OP/ED which are in Japanese... Play like the ED on Japanese, switch it over to English, and while it's the same song in the same language, bam, it sounds worse.

The Mayo Chiki BD also has the issue with muffled audio and the music and sound effects being significantly louder than the dialogue on the Japanese track.

[Naiera]

Do we have stats for the JP releases of Patlabor movies 1 and 2? Just to compare with the Hong Kong releases I have.

[Sylontack]

Originally Posted by chronoclast

Bad 1080i encodes:
Penguindrum
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0

I've said it a few times but because Penguindrum is such an important show to me that I want everyone to experience I'd like to reiterate to people reading this that while the US BD encode is garbage, if you can play Region B discs the Australian Siren Visual release is reasonably damn close to the JP singles as far as the parts I checked fare. I think it is still 1080i (but I mean it's still only a very small visual difference between it and the JP release, unsure if that was p or i) like the Sentai release but it also takes up the same amount of disc size (4xBD50s vs 8xBD25s) and it's the only English release out worth a fan's time imo. It also has better cover art .

I am also curious about the Tokyo Magnitude release. What's the episode distribution on the Sentai set? I heard the US release wasn't very good but I have the AUS Siren Visual release and it looked fine, and I'm not sure if they re-used the discs or not.

[chronoclast]

Originally Posted by Sylontack

I've said it a few times but because Penguindrum is such an important show to me that I want everyone to experience I'd like to reiterate to people reading this that while the US BD encode is garbage, if you can play Region B discs the Australian Siren Visual release is reasonably damn close to the JP singles as far as the parts I checked fare. It is still 1080i like the Sentai release but it also takes up the same amount of disc size (4xBD50s vs 8xBD25s) and it's the only English release out worth a fan's time imo. It also has better cover art

For Penguindrum I'd recommend waiting to see if Sentai's complete collection fixes the problems whenever they get around to actually doing one. There is no reason at all for that show to be 1080i.

[Sylontack]

I've heard nothing but stellar reviews on the PQ for Nagi no Asukara from NISA and I trust them and Sevakis to provide a quality release, but as it's 3 Discs could I get any reassurance or comparative evidence before I spend $200 AUD on a show I want to import from Japan too anyway? It's not looking like Siren will have it in time for the convention this weekend so I'm resigned to importing from the US at a higher price :P

[Z-95]

Fate/Stay Night (2006)

Comparing the US Sentai release (complete 3-disc edition with 1080p video) with the JP Geneon BOX.

Video:
JP: 35103396 bps
US: 19998560 bps

Audio:
JP:
Japanese LPCM 2.0 1536000 bps
US:
Japanese DTS-HD MA 2.0 2105500 bps
English DTS-HD MA 2.0 2124359 bps

Subtitles:
JP: None
US: English, English Signs and Songs

Extras:
JP: Textless Opening 1-3, Textless Ending 1-2, Curtain Raiser, Rider's Shinji Observation Diary, Event screening promotional video
US: None

Packaging:
JP: Chipboard artbox, 4x digipacks holding the discs, artbook
US: 3-disc viva case

[vincentric]

Originally Posted by Naiera

Do we have stats for the JP releases of Patlabor movies 1 and 2? Just to compare with the Hong Kong releases I have.

MakeMKV, or BDInfo, and or both?

I posted some MKV ones here: https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.p...0&postcount=71

If interested, will try to get some BDInfo stats, as well.

[Naiera]

I sold them already. I'll get the Japanese releases later this year.

[vincentric]

I know it's a well known fact by now that Funi's Psycho Pass release contains some of the ugliest banding. Am late to the party and finally saw it for myself and... yeah, to put it kindly, it's pretty bad.

It contains shitty bitrates as well. Using MKV, the first disc with 8 episodes uses a total of 31gb of which around 8.5 is used for the DolbyTrueHD audio. So around 22.5 for the video, on avg, that comes out to around 2.8gb per ep. That's pretty terrible and it shows. On top of the fugly banding, there are a lot of blocky compression artifacts.

I wasn't even sitting that close from my tv pausing every frame trying to nitpick each pixel, was just watching regularly from 8 feet away and could see the crap while in motion.

These were all captured within the first two minutes of the first episode:

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/744/2...834a2539_o.png
https://farm1.staticflickr.com/716/2...db61e861_o.png
https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5642/...a60a1773_o.png
https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5747/...cb7a1cae_o.png
https://farm1.staticflickr.com/624/2...534b9303_o.png
https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5830/...1e70c2f8_o.png
https://farm1.staticflickr.com/571/2...1806d5d1_o.png
https://farm1.staticflickr.com/629/2...969755c9_o.png

I quickly skimmed through the rest of the disc and noticed banding and compression artifacts in nearly every scene. I'm usually very fair when it comes to price vs quality but in this case, this isn't even worth a free download, imo. I love the show but I wish that AoA encoded it instead, I'd pay the higher price.

Am still not sure how in seven hells this was given a 4.5 out of 5 for its video. It's a 1.5 at best, imo.

Edit: Just ripped the second disc and slightly less video data is used here, the total amount used for the three episodes is around 8.1gb/2.7gb per ep.

[Naiera]

God. F*cking. Dammit.

[BigOnAnime]

I still wonder how the JPBD is by comparison. Banding can be baked into the source at times unfortunately. Though even if it does have it, it probably still looks much better than this crap.

[mp3dom]

The FUNi release have the brightness problem and enhanced color banding due to the classical "error" in the encoding pipeline. So, JP release have the right brightness level and a lot less bandings. However, the banding/posterization problems affects the JP release too. The first 2 volumes of the JP release suffers from this (albeit, to a lesser degree). For the next volumes, they applied some debanding during the encoding process to mitigate the problem (I'm always referring to the JP release).
Here's three shoots coming from the vol.1 JP release:

http://114.imagebam.com/download/W3Y...0/PSYCHO01.png

http://114.imagebam.com/download/goG...8/PSYCHO02.png

http://114.imagebam.com/download/-vQ...5/PSYCHO03.png