Several years ago i picked up a DVD set of 15 old classic movies. For whatever reason i just now got around to peeling off the wrapping and popping one in the player. To my dismay, despite the size of the box the set came in it's on only two discs! The same packaging could easily have held 8 discs. They did at least use dual-layer, but even still there's about 10 hours on one disc and 11 on the other. The average bitrate seems to be somewhere in the 0.9Mbps range and the quality is astoundingly bad, looking like webvideo stuff from 15 years ago with horrible pixellation and macroblocks sliding and smearing all over the image whenever there's more than the slightest bit of movement.
It was a bit amusing in one scene when one actor passes a newspaper to another and while the paper moves across the frame the various letters on the page all broke up and wandered in separate directions, like someone pouring alphabet soup across the screen! Then when the paper became still it took about half a second for all the letters to rearrange themselves in the right places and become clear again.
What's sad is that while i probably paid less than $5 for this set, i would gladly have paid $20 for it to have been put on 8 discs instead of 2, and it probably would have cost the production company less than $3 more. Alas. It reminds me of the days when the cheap movies came out on VHS in ELP instead of SP just so that the production company could save a few cents on each tape. Some of these were classics not available anywhere else or i would have gladly paid more for a much better copy. Nerts!
Anyway, there have been a few discussions lately on appropriate bitrates for DVD encoding of longer material. The lesson is, don't cheat yourself, your video, or your viewers. Use higher bitrates and spread it over more discs if necessary! :)
It was a bit amusing in one scene when one actor passes a newspaper to another and while the paper moves across the frame the various letters on the page all broke up and wandered in separate directions, like someone pouring alphabet soup across the screen! Then when the paper became still it took about half a second for all the letters to rearrange themselves in the right places and become clear again.
What's sad is that while i probably paid less than $5 for this set, i would gladly have paid $20 for it to have been put on 8 discs instead of 2, and it probably would have cost the production company less than $3 more. Alas. It reminds me of the days when the cheap movies came out on VHS in ELP instead of SP just so that the production company could save a few cents on each tape. Some of these were classics not available anywhere else or i would have gladly paid more for a much better copy. Nerts!
Anyway, there have been a few discussions lately on appropriate bitrates for DVD encoding of longer material. The lesson is, don't cheat yourself, your video, or your viewers. Use higher bitrates and spread it over more discs if necessary! :)