Defective or Disappointing UK Anime Discs

Vincentdante said:
Yeah there's technically nothing wrong if they refuse to offer replacement discs but I believe AL and MVM offer replacements for international orders regardless (correct me if I am wrong).

I'm UK based so I don't have a horse in the race, just feel sorry for the buyers who got screwed over a bit.
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MVM said in a mail last week when I inquired about it to ask Funimation first, as they were not able to say at the time if they would be able to offer replacements or even get a new corrected version of the release in stock. I'm emailing them again today to ask about returning my order.
 
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Cyber City Oedo 808 BD remaster is bad. It's blurry, lots of details are erased, there is posterization and they didn't bother to fix the blocky chroma. Fansubbers could whip up a much better filter-chain that doesn't damage the picture like that.

I think the worst part is that it seems to be remastered from DVD MPEG-2 encodes. Traces of DVD artifacting are still visible:

Left: BD / Right: Russian MC Entertainment DVD (supposedly a port of R2J DVD which the BD is probably based on)




I know we were told to temper our expectations, but this is ridiculous. Really should have just been SDBD.

More screenshots

Anime Limited UK BD


MC Entertainment RU DVD
 
Scavenger said:
I think the worst part is that it seems to be remastered from DVD MPEG-2 encodes. Traces of DVD artifacting are still visible.
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Daft Question: Are there DVD AVC encodes and if so would that have been a better one to use for a remaster?

(the more I learn about video quality, the better :3 )
 
Looking forward to watching Cyber City Oedo this weekend. I said this over on another forum but looking at those pictures the Blu-ray clearly looks better to me. See what it looks like on my TV though.
 
Just spotted this by Justin Sevakis on Cyber City Oedo over on Blu-ray.com forums. I have to say I agree with him it looks pretty good for the most part (obviously it’s a pity it’s not better but you’ll see why). I’ve noticed issues (still to watch Ep 3) but its mainly been the dark areas of the picture... I’ve not really noticed much of the other stuff from the pictures posted.

It’s because literally nothing better is available. The remaster tape is gone. The old master CPM had looked worse. There’s literally nothing else to work with. It was either this or nothing.

We filtered this video six ways from Sunday. Weeks of encode time. You guys definitely cherry picked the worst looking frames. Can’t deny they’re accurate, and that this disc is not ideal or something that I’m going to hold up as a reference quality disc, but in motion it looks quite watchable. I ordered a copy for myself. Sorry if you aren’t satisfied but there’s literally nothing else to be done, by us or anybody else, unless the missing remaster tape is found or another new transfer is done somehow.
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Scavenger said:
I respect Justin, but I rolled my eyes when he mentioned cherry picking.
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I will admit that didn’t sound great. It sounded like he was annoyed which I don’t think he should be. I do understand people’s frustration with the quality of the Blu-ray.
 
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Dan said:
I will admit that didn’t sound great. It sounded like he was annoyed which I don’t he should be. I do understand people’s frustration with the quality of the Blu-ray.
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I think a lot of the frustration comes from a lack of transparency on AL's part. The only reason I knew to expect Cyber City would be an upscale is because I went onto CD Japan and checked that there wasn't a Japanese blu-ray. AL's product descriptions almost never tell you one way or the other. Regarding the condition of the source they used, when it has known faults it would be good practise to put a disclaimer to the effect that the disc used the best materials available from the licensor. Mill Creek do that with some of their tokusatsu releases.
 
iirc it was mentioned in passing during one of the Cloud Matsuris that it was going to be an upscale. Many people don't actively follow anime news like some of us here do and they wouldn't find out about the upscale until release.

For now I've made my peace by remuxing audio/subtitles from Blu-ray to a DVDrip of the Russian remastered DVD. Best of both worlds.
 
When I watched Violence Voyager (on the Third Window Films set - The Weird and Wonderful World of Ujicha Blu-ray release), a strange moment occurs very early on in the film and I honestly thought it was my disc - but it turns out that Just Passing Through experienced the same thing.
There is one problem on this disc; at 2:32 into the film, the image freezes for a handful of frames and the sound drops out. This is an annoying glitch, but doesn’t mar the film considerably. It feels more like a bad layer change on a DVD.
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It's a minor defect but hopefully the distributor fixes it for their next print run.
 
B The Beginning suffers from the same I-Frame Pulsing issue as Birthday Wonderland, so it's constantly alternating between properly encoded frames and badly encoded frames. The discs are also missing the Creditless OP, as well as three variants of the Creditless ED (there's four total).

EDIT: I'm not sure to what extent it affects things, but there's missing subtitles in the Full Subtitle track for the background text at the beginning of Episode 1. They are missing from Netflix's Full Subtitle track as well, however are present in the English subtitles on the Japanese BD. In both cases they can only be seen on the Signs track.
 
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Mangaranga said:
B The Beginning suffers from the same I-Frame Pulsing issue as Birthday Wonderland, so it's constantly alternating between properly encoded frames and badly encoded frames. The discs are also missing the Creditless OP, as well as three variants of the Creditless ED (there's four total).

EDIT: I'm not sure to what extent it affects things, but there's missing subtitles in the Full Subtitle track for the background text at the beginning of Episode 1. They are missing from Netflix's Full Subtitle track as well, however are present in the English subtitles on the Japanese BD. In both cases they can only be seen on the Signs track.
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To follow up on this as well, it also uses the Netflix stream version rather than the Home Video master.
 
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