Wake up Amazon !

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Xilef_Darklight
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Wake up Amazon !

Post by Xilef_Darklight »

Well,... I don't know about you people, but I CAN'T WAIT for the complete TFG1 Season 1 DVD box set... I know it probably won't be released in Feb. since they always seem to find a way to delay these things,... but why doesn't amazon.com make it available for preorder yet ? Waiting to see if WAMO is gonna screw up again printing the discs ?
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Auntie Slag
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Post by Auntie Slag »

I thought it would be good too.

However, I think that Denyer mentioned in an earlier post on this subject that its something like 5 or 6 episodes per DVD.

This means that to have the entire G1 series on DVD would cost something like £300.

That's a helluva lot of money. I wouldn't spend that much on it, and I really don't have a clue as to how many TFG1 episodes there are.

I kind of thought they would all fit on one DVD. Shows what I know eh?

I think compared to lots of others here I am a very casual TF fan, in that I haven't seen all the episodes, I only collected the UK comics up to issue 157 (a strong regret of mine), and so on.

I really like TF's, and my knowledge is all from the eighties, just stuff that's never left my brain since then.

D@mn, it would be really nice to own them, but I've got to be realistic when there's so many other things I have to buy that are necessities. When I'm rich i'll buy them.

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Windcharger

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Xilef_Darklight
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Post by Xilef_Darklight »

Originally posted by Windcharger:
its something like 5 or 6 episodes per DVD.
Yes, but 6 episodes per DVD is still way the heck better than 3 episodes per VHS tape, and it's in chronological order, PLUS you've got bonus materials like original toy commercials and creator interviews (apparently) PLUS the audio is totally redone in AC-3 5.1. PLUS, they are using original prints this time, instead of worn out tapes like what they did for Starscream's Ghost. Hehe.. True I'm not rich either and I have more important shows to worry about (like Babylon 5 just begun on DVD)... but hey,.. it's TF... we freaks always find ways to save a (hundred) buck(s) or two...
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Post by Auntie Slag »

Heh heh,

True, and to paraphrase a certain Autobot regarding this;
"I hope that they do it with style, or don't bother doing it".

I might be asking for a small miracle, but they do happen, just like in Miracle on 34th Street.

Regards,
Windcharger
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Jim
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Post by Jim »

The first boxset will be 5 DVD (which will have a VHS counterpart of 5 tapes). The format will most likely be 4/3/3/3/3. Rhino announced it will remix the audio in 5.1 and the only other bonus mentioned at this time will be animation cels (pretty cool). Not sure about the other on dvd material yet. The release date is aim'd for Feb 28. Usually, a (e-)retailer will post the item up for preorder about 4-6 weeks prior to release date. Look for the preorder to appear around the end of Jan is the Feb release date holds.

Oh, and it you wanna get a cheap price, check out www.bestprices.com Image They got the Rhino DVDs for 33% off.


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Post by Denyer »

There be 98 episodes of G1... which, at about 60Mb per DivX file is 9 CDs worth... now, bearing in mind that DivX is MPEG4 technology, and DVDs are MPEG1 & MPEG2 (outdated algorithms only useful at high bitrates), it'd probably take a handful of DVDs to achieve decent VHS quality.

The thing is, VHS quality is about as good as it can get, because some of the original stock reels have apparently decayed significantly (the reason given previously for some eps never making it to tape before now.)

6 eps per DVD is better than 3 per VHS, but to be perfectly honest, large chunks of the series are quite crap and don't really deserve the extra quality... Plus, doing series by series repeats is stupid because season 1 is about 16 eps, season 2 is 40-something, season 3 is about 30, and season 4 is only 3... it doesn't balance, and like I say, IMHO there's a lot of dullness in the middle.

I'm an extremely casual fan when it comes to the series... the Movie is likely as far as I'll go with the DVDs, unless they have a bumper double-pack of More Than Meets The Eye, Call Of The Primitives (hey, novelty value!), Dark Awakening, The Return Of Optimus Prime and Rebirth.

I reckon rights-owners of old series such as TFs ought to start selling DivX downloads... heck, even Windows Media if it'd get them moving.

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Post by Xilef_Darklight »

Originally posted by Stuart Denyer:
(...) and DVDs are MPEG1 & MPEG2 (outdated algorithms only useful at high bitrates)
Completely false. Yes for MPEG-1... but MPEG-2 is BETTER than MPEG-4 as MPEG-4 was NEVER meant for home theatre... It was made ESPECIALLY for the internet... (smaller file size). In quality, MPEG-2 remains the best. ALSO... I might add.. MPEG-1 might be outdated by MPEG-4, but you can't play your downloaded internet DivX MPEG-4 files in your DVD player. With MPEG-1, if formatted in VCD standard, you CAN play back your MPEGs on a DVD player... Just FYI...
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Post by Denyer »

Except that VCDs are rubbish, since ~600Mb of MPEG1 footage is quite poor if you want more than an hour of it.

No, MPEG4 was never intended for home theatre, but has had far more development thrown after it than either of its predecessors. The specifications (even of extisting file-formats) are moving far beyond original intentions.

I'm not talking about qualitative differences which are distinguishable only under close examination or observed frame-by-frame... I'm talking watching, on a decently large TV, from a sensible viewing distance, where the ability to manipulate parts of the image at the playback codec level are valuable. Plus, MPEG1 is unlikely to sprout decent VBR anytime soon...

Similar analogy: I'm more than aware of what happens to audio data when you feed it through MP3 or Ogg compression... but am I actually bothered by listenable difference at reasonably high bit-rates? We're a generation of "good-enoughs"... why else d'ya think Napster was so popular? Smaller yet acceptable is the way forward.

I don't own a DVD player, and the only use I will have for a drive (hopefully extremely soon) is to rip things... because DVD discs are pathetically easy to scratch irreparably. It's a fairly good archival format, but not for frequent watching; the density of the physical medium makes it inherently fragile.

CDR is cheap, it's expendable, it isn't going anywhere. People (film executives aside) are happy with the results of mathematical ingenuity... so, the logical conclusion is that it's worth selling it to us.

I don't care about DVD. It was outdated before it was released; poor digital rights management and content protection, flaws in the mechanisms for scanning between disc layers, doesn't even offer much in the way of audio to a population which averagely struggles to notice frequencies beyond the 18KHz range...

I'll save the "digital" = "aiming to be more real than real" rant for another time, but to conclude this one... Image MPEG4 is the future! Image

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Post by Xilef_Darklight »

Originally posted by Stuart Denyer:
Image MPEG4 is the future! Image
I agree with you there. Somebody recently posted a DivX MPEG-4 file of the 1982 animated classic "The Last Unicorn" on alt.binaries.multimedia.cartoons (Usenet newsgroup) and I was AMAZED at the quality of the thing,... truely stunning... LARGE frame size NO IMAGE NOISE and SMALL file size... the whole movie is.... 720 MB ! (oops... too big for a CD-R...). Anyway... Just FYI, I got a used DVD-Video movie for Christmas from a friend and it was all scratched... (And I mean SCORCHED !).. BUT... the whole disc plays FINE on my DVD player... so the format is not SO fragile after all... also.. what would be good, in my opinion, is if like MP3, the companies made DVD players that could read MPEG-4 DivX discs... now THAT would be cool. ps: VCDs are NOT rubbish... they are still quite good if done properly... I'll gladly show you some of mine, if you want. My ICQ number is 22464865 (BOnes)

[This message has been edited by Xilef_Darklight (edited 12-30-2001).]
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Post by yakumo »

Can anyone answer this question for me please, with the Maverick DVD released on the 31 Dec, and the Box set later next year in Feb. Doesn't it make the Maverick sort of redudant?, I was thinking of getting it, but if the box set comming out....
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Post by Denyer »

Cartoons do work especially well with MPEG4 if treated carefully (many VirtualDub filters to drool over the results of...)

I know MPEG1 ain't dead by any means... just like MP3 isn't dead despite being hopelessly outclassed by Ogg and even Microsoft... nice to hear that there are decent players out there, too; I'd guess there are more problems with DVD drives than players...

MPEG1 can be done well; just as DivX can be done appallingly (I've seen far too many movies where the idiot encoding didn't trim off the black strips, causing serious blurring and poor compression along those edges...)

You're not BOnes Malor- (er, can't quite remember the last name), by any chance? Dude who did some stuff for this place and TransFans a while back (D&D rings a bell, somehow...) Actually, it might still be there, been a while since I actually touched the site... yeah, that's it; http://tfarchive.com/bones_movies.html

Nice to meet ya! Image

BTW, it's probably feasible to overburn an 80-minute blank to do something with that movie; or you could try the 90/99 minute stuff, dodgy as it may be...

http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq03.html#S3-8-2

Yakumo, I think the idea is that there's a box-set per series... so there'll be a small one of a few discs for Season 1, then they'll probably split Seasons 2 & 3 each in half...

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Post by Xilef_Darklight »

Originally posted by Stuart Denyer:
You're not BOnes Malor- (er, can't quite remember the last name), by any chance? Dude who did some stuff for this place and TransFans a while back (D&D rings a bell, somehow...) Actually, it might still be there, been a while since I actually touched the site... yeah, that's it; http://tfarchive.com/bones_movies.html

Nice to meet ya! Image

Yup... That's me ;:-) Formerly known as BOnes Mandalorian (aka Boba Fett's Mandalorian armour... that's where it was from... dum name... hehe I seem to have a thing for dum names...). As for my movies... well ... My current MPEG-1 movies look far better now than in the old days (the old vids on tfarchive)... The difference is that I use better encoding tools now than were available at the time. Better source materials too. I just make a big deal about VCDs because I find them cool in a way.. near VHS quality on a CD-R that plays on MOST DVD players... I just think it's a great way for people to share old cartoon memories on each other's TV screens (instead of just PC) via the internet. my dream is to make a huge cartoon VCD library on FTP. But I don't want to bother Brendan too much with it so I'm still looking for ways to do this myself. Anyway, for now I have a web site (unfinished) I work on to better educate people on the VCD format and Usenet newsgroups. You can go there at http://www.mandalorenet.cjb.net
I should start working on my web site again pretty soon...
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