The Anime Blu-ray Video Quality Thread

[Naiera]

Great white buffalo

The fact that it will be cheaper, before customs, than the same item through Right Stuf is just icing on the cake.

[S127]

Question for anyone... having a small but growing number of non English friendly JP releases myself, do you watch them raw, sync the subs or are fluent in Japanese?

[MoonFly]

Originally Posted by Sylontack

If someone grabs some AoA screens and gives me the timestamps and episodes I can mirror them with the Hanabee/MVM counterpart (same as last time, when I get back from my trip, part 2 is shorter I'm back in about 2.5 weeks/December 15th), or so can anyone else with sooner access to their sets. Last I recall when I took a look the Region B release fared pretty well on 4 discs, and included the Character Commentaries which are pretty decent features regarding specifically the Monogatari series. Nisemono I'm a little more worried about being on 2 discs but I can provide access to both of those Region B sets if nobody else can.



Sure. Sorry for the delay a lot of the places I've been staying at only have WiFi in their lounge areas which I don't care to lurk in. As I said I only did episode 1 out of laziness and time constraints but it's a reasonable indicator either way.

NAGI NO ASUKARA

1 JP | NISA
2 JP | NISA
3 JP | NISA
4 JP | NISA (OP)
5 JP | NISA (OP)
6 JP | NISA
7 JP | NISA
8 JP | NISA (ED)

My 2 cents is that the JP release is EASILY noticeably better, however the NISA release is far from poor quality and considering the far lower price and English support over a small difference it's still worth it, part of me is glad to have a minor excuse to continue getting the JP singles though .
Realistically given the state of most western releases I'd have no qualms if every western release was at this level even if that level isn't identical- as it is close considering the disc count and file sizes and wouldn't be very noticeable in movement on any TV I'd be viewing it on at least.

Thank you Sevakis, the colors and brightness are right!! So glad I bought the release too!

[Naiera]

Originally Posted by S127

Question for anyone... having a small but growing number of non English friendly JP releases myself, do you watch them raw, sync the subs or are fluent in Japanese?

Get SRT subs and use them on MKV files. Works very well on the Oppo BDP-103.

[vincentric]

Quickly checked out Blood Lad. Little disappointed by it, noticed more banding than I would have liked. Nothing too severe though, am gonna scrutinize it a bit more when I get a chance and post some pics and stats later perhaps after work.

[S127]

Originally Posted by Naiera

Get SRT subs and use them on MKV files. Works very well on the Oppo BDP-103.

If it's playing soft subs during BR playback that's the plan, I just haven't gotten around to actually trying to do it myself yet.

[vincentric]

Was able to get some Blood Lad pics and stats posted up.

There are slight issues with compression blocking but it's negligible for the most part. Aliasing is sometimes noticeable but I believe this one may be source related. Banding is the biggest culprit here, though it's nothing too severe, it's moderate enough to be noticeable even during daytime sequences. All in all, the PQ looks good overall in spite of some of its flaws.

The first 9 screenies are from ep1, the next 6 from ep5.








Also saw some some ghosting in one of the scenes. But it was intended and used as a stylistic effect. From ep1 -


The first disc contains eps 1-5 and are each given 6.2 GB of data | around 5.9gb for the video and 300mb for the audio (EDIT - corrected an error on my part; it's 5.1 GB for the video and 1.1 GB for the audio) -



Nice. Aside from aoa, that's more data than what we usually get. Would have liked to have seen 7, or even 8gb, per ep utilized, there's certainly room for it but hey beggars can't be choosers I guess.

[vincentric]

Finally took a comparison between the 1080p complete set, and the 1080i dual volume release of Bodacious Space Pirates. Just had time for one quick comparison though.

Don't have access to the 1080i release and used a screenshot from the review (image 3) to compare.

There is a big difference. To simply put, the 1080i version looks like crap compared to the 1080p one -

bodacious 1080eye | bodacious 1080pee

Now am not sure if that's the result of the poor jpg compression that br.com is using, or crappy encode. For parity, I compressed my png (2.9mb) image to jpg (293kb - almost the same file size as the br.com image) -

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/637/22...cbec8203_o.jpg

It still looks miles better than the br shot so for now will have to say that the 1080p encode is an improvement over the 1080i one...but I'll do more comparisons. Blu-ray Definition has a review up of the 1080i version as well but with higher quality jpg screenshots. I'll try to match some of them with my own from the 1080p set when I get another chance.

[vincentric]

Was able to compare some more Bodacious images.

I used 5 images from the BR Definition 1080i review to compare with the 1080p set (at the exact frame). For parity, I compressed my lossless png caps down to jpg to approximately match the br def image quality.

There are interesting differences. The most noticeable one is that the 1080i picture looks slightly darker but am not sure if that's because of calibration differences between my monitor and theirs, or differences in the encode itself.

The more objective difference is that compression blocking has been slightly reduced in the 1080p picture. Banding also looks to have been slightly reduced in the 1080p picture, as well -

01 Bodacious 1080i dual volume | Bodacious 1080p complete set

02 Bodacious 1080i dual volume | Bodacious 1080p complete set

03 Bodacious 1080i dual volume | Bodacious 1080p complete set

04 Bodacious 1080i dual volume | Bodacious 1080p complete set

05 Bodacious 1080i dual volume | Bodacious 1080p complete set

From the looks of it, the 1080p encode for Bodacious Space Pirates does offer an improvement, even if only slight, over the 1080i one. Having said that, the 1080p encode taken as a whole still looks pretty fugly, the banding in particular is often severe enough to join the ranks of Sentai's worst.

[SeaFox]

Looking at those back and forth, I don't think it's the entire image that's brighter, but only the red channel that has been boosted. Look at areas in green or blue, not really any difference there. But areas with skintone and lighter regions look brighter because they contain red (in addition to green and blue).

Banding reduction is very noticeable in that last screenshot of the ship.

[vincentric]

Yeah, you are correct, it just looks more red. And the banding is indeed more noticeably reduced in the last shot but as a sort of trade off, the aliasing in turn looks worse.

[djfred93]

Originally Posted by vincentric

The first disc contains eps 1-5 and are each given 6.2 GB of data | around 5.9gb for the video and 300mb for the audio -

That's not a lot for 2 audio track ? It's a 16 bit 48 khz 1500 kbps ? And compared to a 24 bit 48 khz track ?

[vincentric]

Made a mistake, went back and checked and it's actually 5.1 gb for the video and 1.1 gb for the audio. There's an eng and jpn language track, both are 2 channel PCM at 48khz at 2.3mbps.

Sorry for any confusion, I'll edit and correct the stats in the main post.

[vincentric]

Do DVD vs BD comparisons already exist for Fullmetal Alchemsit? If not, having recently picked up the CE for it, was thinking of doing some within the next few days.

[BigOnAnime]

Originally Posted by vincentric

Do DVD vs BD comparisons already exist for Fullmetal Alchemsit? If not, having recently picked up the CE for it, was thinking of doing some within the next few days.

Not really, though you also need to tell us which DVD's you're comparing. The singles had the alternate angles back when FUNi did that (To solve the credits issue*), and it hurt video quality. The two part releases reduced the disc count, and dropped the alternate angles, and from what I've heard are a significant improvement. Those are the DVD's I own, I've never had the singles, the VC singles, or the four part release (Which re-used those discs).

*By credits issue, I'm talking about leaving the Japanese credits alone, or translating them, and potentially removing JP staff. Unfortunately after FUNi dropped alternate angles, they kept doing credits wrong, and remove JP staff in favor of their own (Like their release of 2.22 I've heard removed nearly all of the JP staff credits). You'd get disasters like this (Still pisses me off both epilogues got hurt hard by FUNi's incompetence), or Trigun (The releases that are not the Remix singles or the AC release), where you get only OP 1 on every episode as it was the only clean OP they got. The proper way to do credits is leave them alone, translate them later. Sentai, VIZ, Rightstuf, and even Media Blasters got this down, FUNi's still stuck in the past, doing it wrongly like ADV, Geneon, and everyone else at the time did. (Another reason pasting credits on the clean materials you got method was wrong, it hurt video quality on the OP/ED)

[MoonFly]

Originally Posted by vincentric

Do DVD vs BD comparisons already exist for Fullmetal Alchemsit? If not, having recently picked up the CE for it, was thinking of doing some within the next few days.

Not sure, but I heard the singles dvds are the worst where the later box set releases later on are better.

From what I watched of the FMA BDs, there's some pretty bad banding in some scenes and banding that occurs in scenes that I wouldn't even suspect for banding to even be there, along with some compresion I noticed rarely but there's probably more than what i did notice (been a while since I looked at it, was gonna do a full rewatch but then got caught up in other things).

[vincentric]

Thanks BOA and Moon for the info.

I only have the singles, iirc - 13 discs in a 4x12/3x1 layout.

Had no idea until now those had inferior PQ, well, I can still do some comparisons if any of you are still interested, if not, I'll just leave it to someone else with the improved DVDs to do it.

[BigOnAnime]

I'd still like to see something, especially compared to those DVD's (I have no idea how bad they truly look-heard nothing but bad things about the singles video quality), particularly during scenes that would be more problematic (Darker, lots of motion).

[vincentric]

For sure, I'll get it done this weekend, perhaps sooner if I get a chance.

[Naiera]

Those old FUNi discs truly are horrible. Not just FMA, of course.