DVD vs Blu Ray

[Spike_at_ya]

Is it just me or since the release of Blu ray has the quality of DVDs been deliberately been reduced to boost Blu ray?

I noticed this when I bought Captain America triple play and was showing a friend the difference between, DVD, Blu ray and a DVD upscaled on a Blu ray player.

But the next day I was watching Mission Impossible 2 on DVD on my Blu ray and it's looked amazing compared to the quality of the Captain America DVD on the Blu ray machine.

Has anyone else noticed this?

[roddersj04]

I was watching my DVD of Thor and my god, the screen was so dark during the scenes on the front giant planet. It was darker than when I saw it in cinemas.

I do think DVDs are being sabotaged, due to the diminishing lack of extras on DVDs, reserving all the featurettes and commentaries for the Blu Ray, which is stupid.

[Spike_at_ya]

I'm glad I'm nit the only one that has noticed this deterioration in DVD quality. It's not fair, especially since there is still a big Market in DVD, until blu ray prices drop.

[Ed the Head]

I noticed this with Harry Potter DH pt1.It looked a little grainy.Then i got the wife the BluRay box set for xmas spotted the difference immediately.

[Charlie]

Dunno, but the packaging is not always as good.

My Generation Kill DVD came with a small booklet, which was part of the blurays extras. I think I prefered the paper copy. Most Bluray releases have no extra packaging these days.
Also takes ages for some of them to load. I mean, what the point of having to wait 5 minutes for a flashy menu to load when all you actually want to do is watch the damn film. And there is no need for it, as I have a couple of disks that hit the menu screen a second or two after the tray closes. Surely thats the ultimate menu. No animated pictures, just a static button thats says "play".

[SimonG]

Originally Posted by roddersj04

I was watching my DVD of Thor and my god, the screen was so dark during the scenes on the front giant planet. It was darker than when I saw it in cinemas.

That's not just on the discs, mind. I downloaded the film via the PlayStation Network and those scenes were so dark it was nigh on impossible to tell what was going on. I had to fiddle with the picture settings to try and brighten things up.

[Tiny]

It might have something to do with the different compression types used on DVD. I've noticed that some DVD's upscale perfectly, while others don't and I'd guess it's mostly down to how tight the compression is. More up to date movies seem to be getting longer run times, which means they need tighter compression than say a ninety minute movie from a couple of years back. I'm sure someone, somewhere, did a more technical breakdown so I guess I'll go looking for that. But in the meantime, I'm betting that the compression used is the main culprit of bad upscaling.

I guess it's also plausible to assume that certain companies might take advantage of this to make their Blu Ray versions more appealing, by using the tightest compression possible on their SD versions.

Five minutes for a Blu Ray to boot? For me, Star Wars takes around 40 seconds, and I find that annoying! Maybe update the firmware on your player?

Worst thing for me is when I get a Blu Ray disk that looks no better than my upscaled DVD, now that's a real kick in the pants.

[Charlie]

Perhaps 5 minutes is an exageration, but the Alien set takes about 2-3 minutes.

That was after updating the firmware, It would not work at all before I did the update. Some disney ones take a while too.

[Tiny]

Originally Posted by Charlie

Perhaps 5 minutes is an exageration, but the Alien set takes about 2-3 minutes.

That was after updating the firmware, It would not work at all before I did the update. Some disney ones take a while too.

Hmm, don't have the Alien set, was worried about it looking no better than the DVD's upscaled (especially Aliens). But generally I find Blu Rays load quite quickly now anyways, a couple of years ago that wasn't the case though, and they really could take anything up to three to four minutes to load.

Star Wars is the only one I've noticed recently, as I was quite surprised to see the little loading clock show up.

[Kudos]

Self pimpery ahoy! I did a blog on this subject last week and it's up on the main SFX site now. I thought it might interest some of the posters in this thread.