Tind
Dandy Guy, in Space
Hey there!
We all know that some animes have differences in box quality if we compare the US release with the UK release, however I now know that sometimes there are differences in DVD quality too. If any1 knows any differences that he/she experienced, please share here.
Myself I start the topic with my favorite anime, Dance in the Vampire Bund, which unfortunately has quality differences compared to the USA release. Since I own both UK and US DVD releases of Dance in the Vampire Bund, so I took the time and completely disassembled both DVD releases, so here are the differences that I found between the US and UK Dance in the Vampire Bund DVD releases (some are minor but some are really irritating):
-menu: Manga changed the menu backround and menu music in the UK DVD
example of US and UK DVD DISK 2:
Why? Don't know, don't care. Personally, I think the UK DVD's menu is better (not just the backround and music, but the buttons too, it was irritating to find that at the US DVD the "back button" is the bat on the bottom of the screen):
-missprint: first I thought that Manga changed the number of episodes on disk 1, because the inner cover in the DVD case says that DISK 1 has 7 episodes (the US has 6), however it "only" has 6 episodes as the US DVD (and DISK 2 has the other 6 episodes).
Not to mention that under this missprint, there is another one, where they say we get 6 extras: "Intermission 1-12", "Original Japanese commercials", "Pomotional video", "Textless songs", "Trailers". We got all of these, except the trailers.
-extras Not counting the American anime trailers, both releases has the same extras:
-lower bitrate: the UK release has higher resolution because of the PAL format (720x576) compared the the US release's NTSC format (720x480), because of this the size of the video file is larger, so Manga had to reduce the bitrate so it could fit the DVD9 disk, however Manga wen't overboard with the bitrate reduce.
Bitrate comparison:
To make things worse, Funimation used 5.1 audio at the creditless OP and ED to bring out the max from the extras, however, Manga used 2.0 audio instead!
DVD size comparison:
Manga is using DVD9 disks too, so why did they have to leave ~1,5 GB space free and lower the quality instead? Just by removing the American anime trailers from DISK 2 they gained an extra 500 MB space...standing really close to the TV I can spot picture distortion at the UK DVD....but at least it's just 1-2 pixels which can be hardly spoted, if some one is watching the TV from normal distance. But still the fact is, instead of using all available space, they just lowered the video and audio quality and changed 5.1 audio at certain points to 2.0 audio for no true reason.
-Audio lines not coded properly+trash
I found 3 audio tracks that are not coded properly:
1) creditless OP audio track
2) creditless ED audio track
3) menu backround audio track (1) and 3) are using the same badly coded tracks)
They were probably trying to convert the 5.1 audio to 2.0 (still don't know why...) but they did not encode the new audio tracks properly, since now they have the sound quality if some one recorded it while sitting on the toilet. Last time I saw (I mean heard) same quality audio when I was editing DVD audio tracks and 2x 2.0 tracks were next to each other perfectly synced. I made 2 videos showing you guys the differences in the audio quality:
UK & US creditless OP comparison (audio quality):
UK & US creditless ED comparison (audio quality):
(The reason why the US audio sounds a bit slower is because of the NTSC format and FPS differences)
The background music in the menu is using the audio track from creditless OP, so of course, the music in the menu is badly coded too. Personally I think most of the buyers think that creditless OP and ED are the most important extras on a DVD and not the trailers so for me it is a bit irritating that they screwed them...but at least the trailers and intermissions are fine.
I have to mention also that DISK 2 is full of trash. All extras only have Japanese audio tracks (Funimation did not dub the extras), however Manga put the same audio tracks on all extras, 2 times, only difference that they marked the 2nd Japanese track as "English". For this reason even tho they had to make 1,5 GB+ free space on the DISK, they waisted 33,5 MB (they used the same subtitles 2x times too) of space with trash (not to mention that the IFO files are full of trash too).
I tried out what could happen if I convert the American NTSC audio to UK PAL and on first attempt I got same bad quality too, but on second attempt I tried a different way to encode it and this time it was ok.
Comparison of the original Audio and the reencoded (to my ear "fixed") audio:
(The reason why the other audio has higher sound is because the sound was a bit low on my TV's built in speakers, so I amplified it)
If I could hear that the first attempt to encode was not good, than why didn't the person in charge of this at Manga hear this?
Oh and +1 more for trash, because when I was looking through the IFO files, I found this:
What does Dance in the Vampire Bund got to do with Vampire Knight, besides the fact that Manga is the distributor for both series?
Long story short, what do you get for paying for the UK Dance in the Vampire Bund DVD?
If you buy the official UK release of Dance in the Vampire Bund, you get a factory defective DVD that almost has (or at some points maybe even worse) the quality of an illegal Chinese bootleg release from Malaysia. Are we happy? I'm not.
(Nobody tell me that the mentioned audio tracks are fine, they are not!...or in Britain it is normal for music to sound like if I was listening to it on the toilet?)
Let's summ the problems I found:
-3 not correctly coded audio track
-unnecessary converted 5.1 audio to 2.0
-unnecessary lowered bitrate
-a lot of trash left in the video files and IFO files
So, 2 questions:
- Who do I need to contact to get a full refund? If I wan't a cheap bootleg, I order 1 from Malaysia through Ebay
- If I send this information to Manga that this release is factory defective (I don't think that I only got a lemon), I wonder, will they recall all releases and fix them (technically they should, since the current release is defective and UK probably has a law too that prohibits selling factory defective merchandise) ?
ps: Please don't ask me to provide the audio tracks that I encoded or the patch I made to apply fixes easily to the disks, because technically Manga owns them, so I can't make them public.
Price
Forgot to compare prices -_- I tried to search for lowest prices for both releases and the prices I found are:
US ->30 GBP
UK ->15 GBP
The US price is 2x higher, however you get 2x DVD and 2x Blu-Ray disks packed separately in DVD cases which can be found in a bigger, specially designed hard box, with overall better disk quality, while the UK DVD just comes in a plastic DVD case with worser quality DVD disks.
So, the UK DVD is exactly what you pay for...it has half the price, but you don't get BR disks, you get worser quality packaging and overall worser quality anime disks. Just like a bootleg from Malaysia lol
