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Forum - View topicNEWS: Stand-Alone Complex Blu-ray Box English-Dubbed, Subbed
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icepick314
 Posts: 486 Location: Back in the Good Ol' US of A |
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it sucks that English channel only gets 2.0 stereo instead of 5.1 like Japanese track...
i think i'll wait for US version to be released later... |
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Randall Miyashiro
 Posts: 2451 Location: A block away from Golden Gate Park |
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This is great news and I hope that Manga ends up finally releasing it on Blu-ray here. I actually ordered this DVD on Blu-ray at TRSI's buy 2 get one free Manga Entertainment sale back in January 2007! Since it was cheaper than the standard edition tin (which I also ordered) and the Street Fighter box set this Blu-ray edition was my free DVD which has been on hiatus over the last year. I hope that TRSI will still ship me a free copy since it is still "on order" and has the free price listed.
I'm also waiting for my copy of Higlander Special Edition which I ordered from the same sale over a year ago since it was cheaper than the Macross II movie and Virus Buster Serge box set. This DVD now has a March 31 2008 release date so it looks like I still might be getting this "free" DVD. I suppose this is the dangers of ordering most of my DVDs when they are first announced. |
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halo
Posts: 356 |
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I doubt Bandai Visual will sell the HD rights when they can charge fans an absurd price on both sides of the ocean.
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Randall Miyashiro
Posts: 2451 Location: A block away from Golden Gate Park |
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The rights to distribute a title is not format exclusive if I understand correctly. This is probably the reason why the VHS Viz released Galaxy Express movies have not been released by any other companies on DVD, and I believe the same goes for Urban Vision who released Space Cobra. These companies can sit on the rights for the DVD relesae even though these rights were aquired before DVDs existed. Many of these VHS era companies also released LD versions of their titles as well. The UMD era of titles are also distributed by the companies that hold their DVD distribution rights. I believe this is also how companies can release their DVD catalog as downloadable videos although I do not know much about this new area of technology. Of course if the license expires, like in the case of Wings of Honneamise, Gunbuster, and Patlabor BVUSA can feel free to grab these titles as they have done so in the past.
This is the case with US based companies since the HD versions of almost all movies are distributed by their non-HD distributer. This does however differ between countries so a US Buena Vista distributed film like Prestige will be released by them in standard def and Blu-ray in the States, while Warner released it on standard defintion and HD-DVD in the UK. Likewise both standard def and Blu-ray editions of SAC in Japan are released by Bandai Visual. |
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edzieba
Posts: 704 |
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Nice, but I'll be waiting on a blu-ray release of the actual series, not just the compilation movies.
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Rosyna
Posts: 40 |
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Well, the compilation movies are pretty dang good. But I don't quite understand why it is 4 BD 50 discs. I thought H.264 could easily allow more episodes a disc. But then again, the Yukikaze release (which contains 5 episodes) was shipped on 3 BDs. Maybe there's some crazy license agreement in Japan that says "no more than 2 episodes a disc". |
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hughvh
Posts: 11 |
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I'll buy a Blue Ray player if this comes out in the states. I'm with you edzieba, I hope they do the full series on Blue Ray.
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ManSlayer07
Posts: 214 |
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I don't really get why "Just put all of the content on one BD-50" gets asked so much. It's 1080p, it requires a very high bit-rate which results in a higher file size. You could easily put all three movies on a one disc if they were in SD (480i/p). Even with AVC/H.264 (or VC-1) the run time is what's really causing the disc count: two of the three movies are 2.5 hours long and also 3 hours of extras (although we don't yet if those are all in HD or a mix of HD and SD or in what codec). About Yukikaze: it's a 480i to 1080i upscale (like the Japanese Air TV BD-box except that one is 480i to 1080p) which required an extremely high bit-rate for it too look good (it gets close to maxing out). I hear that it does look pretty good though. And about "no more than 2 episodes per disc": the recent Japanese Utawarerumono BD-box has the entire 26-episode series, in both English and Japanese, on 4 BD50s in native 1080i. 
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Rosyna
Posts: 40 |
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So are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? |
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Porcupine
 Posts: 1033 |
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I have only recently started downloading and watching fansubs critically so I'm not an expert yet, but it seems to be that H.264 (also known as MPEG-4 AVC) allows for, and is optimized for, fairly good-looking video at bitrates only a quarter that of standard MPEG-2 compression. The amount of MPEG artifacting is kept under control by various new methods. However, I believe they do come at a cost. For example H264 files tend to be washed-out looking (contrast is lost), even though there are few noticeable "traditional" MPEG artifacts. At high bitrates, Sony claims that MPEG-2 provides for better quality than H264, using the same high bitrate for both formats.
Anyways, on a separate note, I wonder if this news means that potentially any digitally-produced TV anime could see a true HD release in the future? Because from what I know, GiTS:SAC is a relatively older series. I guess these are the "movies" or compilations so-to-speak, but they are still made from the original TV shows that are 4-5 years old or so. |
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ManSlayer07
Posts: 214 |
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I disagree and the upcoming Gundam 00 BD boxset will be yet another example (I'd expect that to be 4-5 discs).
Fansubs are a tricky example since they're so massively compressed and not many of them are directly encoded off of uncompressed transport streams (I can only think of one series currently that is). And H.264/AVC and VC-1 typically achieve what MPEG-2 can at half, not a quarter, of the bit-rate but as the bit-rate gets higher and higher the video codec becomes useless. And about GitS: SAC, it does have HD masters as the R1 DVDs say (I think it's also been confirmed in a few other places). Also the season compilations are a little more than recycled footage since Production IG actually went back and improved the anime (to theatrical quality IIRC). |
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Cain Highwind
Posts: 316 |
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Definitely waiting for a release of the series.
Besides, don't the summary movies use a different cast (from Ocean Studios) than the moves? I don't hate OS, but I'm really fond of Epcar and McGlynn. |
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Porcupine
Posts: 1033 |
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ManSlayer, yeah I agree that fansubs generally come from already-compressed sources. But usually that's Japanese television or the Japanese DVDs, and it seems that in both cases the original MPEG-2 bitrate is high enough (higher than American DVD standards or American digital broadcast standards) that the quality can be considered to be extremely good such that it doesn't unfairly hamper the final quality of the re-encoded fansub. Of course, so far maybe around half of the (relatively few) fansubs I've downloaded are bad video quality due to other reasons, such as improper capturing of the digital TV broadcast (often using analog cables), or improper re-scaling and/or filtering of the original video (not sure why re-scaling is often done in the first place).
But anyways I am trying to judge the performance of H264 on those quality fansubs that are not rescaled and either ripped directly from DVD or properly captured digitally from digital cable TV. I know the official line is that H264 should provide comparable quality to MPEG-2 at half the bitrate. But my experience so far is telling me that it provides comparable quality at a quarter of the bitrate. "Comparable" is a tricky word though. The H264's I've seen are definitely worse video quality in some ways than American DVDs that are 4x larger in file size. But in other ways the video quality is comparable or even better. But like you said, supposedly as one increases the bitrate (closer to the Japanese standard than the American standard though) the benefit of H264 is supposed to disappear or even become harmful. But I've never tested this side-by-side for myself, as I've never seen a high-bitrate H264 before (and it would also have to come from an uncompressed source in this case to be fair, as you said). |
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cyberbeing
Posts: 135 |
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It's too bad this doesn't include the series as well and is just the 3 OVA movies (Laughing Man, Individual Eleven, and Solid State Society).
The reason for 4 discs is probably because they put one movie on each disc and then have a separate bonus disk. Amazon seems to be selling it for 21,756 yen (~$202) so you can think of it as $60 per OVA movie and $22 for the bonus material (or however else you want to break it down). |
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melonbread
Posts: 317 Location: UK (London) |
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And it's fair that most R1 releases only get 2.0 Japanese language, while they have 5.1 English? |
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