DVD Question....

[FozzieBear]

Hey All,

I just have a question that is confusing me at the moment...

With double sided DVD's (eg. The Muppet Movie) How it says Side A - Widescreen, Side B - Full Screen. To get the widescreen version, do I have the word widescreen label facing out or do I have it facing down? I cant figure it out......

 

[frogboy4]

You place the disk in with the label for the version you want face up. It is confusing if you think about it since the print of the film is actually on the other side.

 

[FozzieBear]

Thanks frogboy! Thats another one of lifes problems solved!

 

[frogboy4]

No prob. Actually, I wish more companies would do the double siding. I don't think there's a need for the silkscreen on the front. How many videotapes or laserdiscs had elaborate silkscreens on the front? Just a weird observation. I guess the double siding is more expensive.

 

[anathema]

Originally posted by frogboy4
No prob. Actually, I wish more companies would do the double siding. I don't think there's a need for the silkscreen on the front. How many videotapes or laserdiscs had elaborate silkscreens on the front? Just a weird observation. I guess the double siding is more expensive.

It does cost a bit more to produce, yes, but the main reason it's not common is because consumers don't like it, and there's really no need whatsoever for it - dual layer is a much better solution.

The basic problem with a double-sided disc is that you have to be even more careful when handling it not to get marks on the playing surfaces, and there's only a tiny tiny area available to print the disc's title. Someone with poor vision could have serious problems trying to read the tiny lettering around the hub!

So far as I recall, the only double-sided discs I have are a couple of flippers (which consumers reacted very badly to over here ;-), and a couple of discs with the widescreen transfer on one side, and the pan/scan version on the other - an equally pointless exercise, since it's perfectly feasible to set the disc up so that it will play both widescreen and pan/scan from the same transfer! Not that anybody seems to be doing this :-(

As an aside, some manufacturer has just started shipping double-sided DVD-Rs. How on earth you're supposed to label these escapes me!

 

[frogboy4]

Originally posted by anathema
... it's perfectly feasible to set the disc up so that it will play both widescreen and pan/scan from the same transfer! Not that anybody seems to be doing this :-(

See, I've always thought that. Maybe it doesn't work on all sets or players. That's the only thing I can think of - or that the widescreen might only be visible on widescreen TVs. But couldn't there be a zoom feature encoded in the options? The real reason that these versions are seperate is becasue companies can make twice the money.

I see no problem with double-sided disks. It's more compact. Maybe the label could be extended since there would be more used area. Either way, it's a long way to go for a point. LOL! I just wish that widescreen was more readily available. Video stores often rent out only Pan-and-Scan versions instead of buying two coppies. To me, it's a bad investment. Monitors will eventually be widescreen and they'll have to buy all new disks.

 

[anathema]

Originally posted by frogboy4
See, I've always thought that. Maybe it doesn't work on all sets or players. That's the only thing I can think of - or that the widescreen might only be visible on widescreen TVs. But couldn't there be a zoom feature encoded in the options? The real reason that these versions are seperate is becasue companies can make twice the money.

I've read that there may be some problems with certain players not implementing the feature properly, but I don't have the references to hand. A DVD player can be configured to output for a 4:3 or a 16:9 display. In the case of the former, most players will letterbox an anamorphic image (some may instead crop the sides off) in the absence of pan/scan instructions on the disc. In any event, the picture formatting is done by the player - the TV is irrelevant. If your player is set to 16:9 and you try to play a widescreen disc back through a regular 4:3 TV, the picture will be compressed horizontally by the TV set. (Technically, it's a 720x576 or 720x480 picture, same as a 4:3 image - the widescreen set actually stretches the image ;-)

Some titles are released as two separate packages, 4:3 and 16:9, in which case, yes, the company is (possibly) making more money (although not that many people will buy both versions!). However, at least in the UK, a disc with both pan/scan and widescreen versions on it retails for exactly the same as a disc with only one version, so the marketing logic is probably that they can save money by only producing one disc, despite it being a little more expensive to make.

I see no problem with double-sided disks. It's more compact. Maybe the label could be extended since there would be more used area. Either way, it's a long way to go for a point. LOL! I just wish that widescreen was more readily available. Video stores often rent out only Pan-and-Scan versions instead of buying two coppies. To me, it's a bad investment. Monitors will eventually be widescreen and they'll have to buy all new disks.

The label area cannot be extended, as this would break the DVD spec. Like CDs, DVDs start recording from the hub and work outwards. This puts the start of the data track in a very specific physical location on the disc.

I gather that widescreen TVs are not yet as common or as popular in the US as they are in Europe. This leads to the studios being reluctant to put stuff out in widescreen, because of the number of uninformed punters who write to complain about the 'missing bits of the picture' - Disney are complete sods for doing this. We now have the classic 'chicken and egg' situation The customer won't buy a widescreen TV because they can't get anything to play on it, and the studio won't release anything in widescreen because no-one will buy it...

It's not so bad over here - pretty much everything gets released in its original aspect ratio, with very very few exceptions - and the exceptions do not sell well...

 

[frogboy4]

Hmm. Very interesting. I still feel that the pan and scan versions are a ploy because eventually these same "punters" are going to complain about the vertical bars when they eventually get widescreen monitors. LOL!

Disney's claim about including both pan and scan and widescreen on the same disc is that it will reduce quality. So is that officially a bunch of garbage like I think it is?

 

[anathema]

Originally posted by frogboy4
Hmm. Very interesting. I still feel that the pan and scan versions are a ploy because eventually these same "punters" are going to complain about the vertical bars when they eventually get widescreen monitors. LOL!

As I said in a lecture a few months ago, one can deduce that the average viewer is - at best - uninformed...

To put it another way: the world is full of idiots, and probably always will be...

Disney's claim about including both pan and scan and widescreen on the same disc is that it will reduce quality. So is that officially a bunch of garbage like I think it is?

Oh yes Complete and utter rubbish! For starters, there's nothing to stop them from doing a double-sided disc. If they don't want to do that, all they need to do is add the pan/scan instructions to the widescreen copy, and it should work fine. What might cause a drop in quality is if they try to put both versions of the film on the same side of the disc; then again, a single layer can hold more than 2 hours of video without noticeable problems, so long as it's encoded carefully (I've done this myself), which is enough to cope with most films, so a dual-layer disc would suffice. The normal claim I've heard from Disney is the usual witterings about 'the consumer doesn't want widescreen', which is what led to the pan/scan releases of MCC and MTI last year. (Interestingly enough, while the UK MCC release was pan/scan, our MTI is anamorphic widescreen. Go figure...)

Disney have a poor reputation for playing fast and loose with certain aspects of the DVD spec. The 'Toy Story' boxset, for example, has some pretty spectacular (technically speaking) menus on its extras disc, which either don't work at all, don't work well, or run horribly slowly on many many players (including some of the 'reference' machines). I don't think Disney actually broke the spec when that disc was authored, but they came very very close to the edge. They also have 'Disney DVD', complete with a modified DVD logo. I have no idea how they pulled that one off, but the usual licencing agreement prohibits modification of the logo. Of course, were I a cynical man, I could argue that this means that since the discs do not carry the official DVD logo, they are not required to be compliant with the DVD spec and so Disney can do what they like with them...no wait: I am a cynical man :-D

 

[frogboy4]

LOL! I've noticed that the special features on my Kermit Swamp Years DVD don't work properly on my DVD Rom drive. It fast forwards through all the menus so you have to click quickly. It's kind of funny, but very sad. It really is hard to wade throught the standards these days.

Heck, even VHS tapes had issues. I've worked at a video store before and have first-hand knowlege that for no apparent reason, some tapes will not work in certain VCRs. It isn't a PAL/NTSC issue. Just for some reason even some upscale VCRs wouldn't read the information on some recordings propperly. Weirdness. And I know that CD specs were also ignored in the 80s. I owned several players that didn't play certain discs. Heck, they boycotted Sinede when everybody else did. LOL!