Anime DVD Release Comparisons

[micpp]

Originally Posted by HaiiroYurei

Hey, I'm bumping this thread to ask about the various DVD releases for the Oh My Goddess! OVA's. As far as I can tell, there's four English-friendly releases:
-The initial Animeigo release
-The MVM release
-The 2006 "Remastered" Animeigo release
-The Madman Entertainment release

I hear that the video quality varies wildly between releases. Does anyone know which stands up the best?

So, the original Animeigo, MVM, and Madman releases are actually the same discs (the Animeigo release was coded regions 1, 2 and 4, and MVM and Madman used the same disc masters). The quality on these is pretty ropey, as I think Animeigo was using old composite masters from their VHS and LD releases. It does have multiple angles on the OP and ED to switch between the Japanese credits and textless credits (with English credits applied by softsubs) which is an interesting feature, similar to early Funimation discs.

The Animeigo remastered release uses the same encode as the Japanese DVD release, with the English audio tracks added in. I think this technically makes the maximum bitrate go out of spec in some places but I haven't known this to cause any playback issues in practice. This uses a newer and cleaner film transfer for the episodes without any composite video weirdness (although I think the OP and ED are still composite-sourced due to the video-generated titles). Although unlike the previous release it's locked to Region 1. The special features are carried across and the remastered Animeigo release adds liner notes as a menu option (I think early pressings of the original Animeigo release had the classic "recipe card" style liner notes included as an insert).

So the remastered Animeigo release is the one to get, unless an HD transfer eventuates one day. It's got much better video quality than the earlier release.