Retail DVD in 480i !?

[charlesr]

My daughter has a DVD of Dora the Explorer (Dance to the rescue!) from NickJr. It's PAL.

I ripped it to the PC for streaming and when playing back it had hideous combing on anything moving. I reripped it with decomb on in handbrake and now it's fine. So is the original mastered in 408i and not p? If so, how shoddy is that?

The same thing happened on a TellyTubbies DVD. Is there something about kids stuff? "They'll never notice"

[sj33]

It would be 576i, but yeah it's shoddy. They presumably so it so they can use the same master for digital TV too.

[charlesr]

Terrible. And er yeah. Oops. 576i. God I'm such a noob to all this PAL stuff.

[sj33]

I certainly don't think there's any excuse for interlaced in this day and age. Who the hell do they use to master their material?! Hell, get Lyris on the job.

[randombs]

I think pretty much every telly DVD I own is interlaced(they're all UK).

I thought interlacing would have the added benefit of allowing them to fit more episodes on one disc, but I imagine it's just quicker to release them that way and let our players handle the de-interlacing.

The random DVD's that I've got with some Japanese music CD's are also interlace city.

[Lyris]

Hello!

Actually, having it interlaced is often the best thing for the material, if it was originally produced that way.

I'm not an expert on Dora the Explorer (would you be worried if I was?) but I imagine the situation will be this. It's produced at 480i/60 (so the original US masters will be interlaced anyway). This means that if the NTSC version was played back on a Progressive TV, the frame rate output by the screen would be 60 fps.

Now, to step down to PAL, it has to be standards converted to 576i/50hz. That already incurs a frame rate penalty. Played back on a Progressive TV, the frame rate output by the screen will be 50fps - just 10fps off of the original.

If it were to be authored as Progressive, the final output frame rate would be 25fps. Nowhere near the original; it would change the look of the show. (That is also the case when you deinterlace it on a computer).

So, the DVD being presented in 576i/50hz is actually the 2nd-best possible scenario, because DVD does not have a true 50p or 60p mode (it was designed in the 1990s, remember). The best possible would be for it to be released in NTSC, but then you would have complaints from grandmothers with wooden televisions who wouldn't be able to put it on for their kids.

In fact, DVD is for the most part inherently interlaced since it was designed for 1990s TVs. There are sort-of Progressive Scan features on it, but the system is designed around interlacing. In fact, just about all PAL film DVDs are encoded Interlaced (stupid stupid stupid) despite the material on them being 100% Progressive.

I thought interlacing would have the added benefit of allowing them to fit more episodes on one disc, but I imagine it's just quicker to release them that way and let our players handle the de-interlacing.

Actually, Interlaced video needs a higher bit rate to look good. That's because the various compression tools that make up MPEG-2 (motion estimation, run-length coding) work better with smooth, natural edges, and encoding interlaced needs each frame to be split into two fields.

Releasing the content as Interlaced if it was originally produced Interlaced (usually the case for TV) is better than them trying to convert it to Progressive and screwing it up (trust me, they almost certainly would).

[randombs]

That's interesting about PAL DVD's almost all being interlaced. I always thought the films were progressive as my dodgy PowerDVD de-interlacing is obvious when it's at work but I've never seen it kick in with films, only with telly stuff(judders and generally looks blocky).

As for cartoons(especially telly cartoons), I'd have thought botch-job frame rate adjustments would be easier to pull off as the animation's not that smooth to begin with. I have PAL Interstella 5555 and the music is at the correct pitch so I initially assumed they just did that, but maybe it was meant to be PAL in the first place(Daft Punk being French and that), despite being animated by Japanese guys?

[Lyris]

Interstella 5555 is a special case. I saw the PAL version and immediately noticed it was a standards conversion (as you say, the music is at the correct speed/pitch, since that is set in stone and can't change, the video has to be changed to fit into the TV system, not the other way around). It's full of jaggies and ghosted frames and all the other standards conversion lovelies.

So I bought the US disc, and guess what? It's a standards conversion... of the PAL master! Yes, a double-standards conversion! I don't think an original clean version has been released anywhere.

[randombs]

I wonder if the Japanese version would be the original, then? I hope not.

I just Googled and I found this:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=152511

Almost a year ago you were commenting on the same thing. Spooky!

[Lyris]

It's likely that the film is going to be that way forever. I imagine that with a French band having animation produced in Japan, that conversions have taken place at some point in the production.

A clean BD version is one of my most wanted titles. But it was probably produced in standard def, so I'm doubtful.

Edit: if you want to see a crap standards conversion right now, turn on BBC Three and have a look at Family Guy, yowza.

[mekanor]

You know, I'm not down with all the technicalities (I just see ugly/jaggy/poorly compressed video and get annoyed), but things like this make me wish I could start up some sort of digital distribution service that would release nice, clean, well encoded proper resolution mkvs of shows/films.

Surely there is a market for people who want quality older SD tv shows and non DNR scrubbed films.

[Lyris]

I think that market exists: Blu-ray owners

[Dogg Thang]

Well Lyris knows his stuff and it's interesting to read his post on it. In its native format, you shouldn't see much interlacing at all on something like Dora so what you're seeing will mostly be a result of the conversion from NTSC. In its native format, being quite limited animation, each frame should pretty much look like it's progressive even if technically output interlaced. The only places you might see it are camera moves and transitions like cross dissolves. Though, even then, some places prefer to output progressive.

Though I have seen some nasty mistakes in my time, like having the fields reversed (meaning every changing frame of movement results in a flicker).

[charlesr]

Hmm, so Lyris, sorry if I'm missing something, but how come this looks bad, but say an episode of 24 (pal dvd) looks ok? (The result is the same on both my LCD pc monitor and my Panny PH9).

[Widegoat]

I'm not familiar with the specific technical details of the version of 24 PAL that you are looking at - but it is likely that the original material is NTSC and progressive (non interlaced).

Ages ago I saw first series of 24 PAL (the original box set release) and the standards conversion is far from perfect.