Technology

How to make a DVD on the cheap

My copies of the new Anchor Bay US releases of Tenebre and Phenomena arrived this morning. Unfortunately, as you will know if you've been following discussions of these new editions, you'll already know that both are less than stellar.

If you were expecting gorgeous new high definition-sourced transfers, you can think again: to my eyes, both appear to be "fake" 16x9 upconverts of the old non-anamorphic masters. The new Phenomena appears to suffer from some overzealous noise reduction, which causes smearing. This is particularly noticeable during the second shot in Chapter 2, where, if you look at the grass at the bottom left hand side of the frame, you can clearly see it smudging and smearing as the camera sways slightly. And, given that they are derived from the same masters that were used for the previous releases, both are still missing material - a few seconds in the case of Tenebre, around six minutes in the case of Phenomena.

Audio (and lack of subtitle) options are identical to the previous releases. In other words, this means that the original mono (for Tenebre) and stereo (for Phenomena) mixes are nowhere to be found. Both discs include 2.0 Dolby Surround tracks, but these are both down-conversions from the 5.1 remixes created by Chase Digital.

The bottom line is that, from an AV standpoint, I really don't see there being much point in picking up these new DVDs provided you already own either the old AB disc or another version. These are by no means awful discs, but the sad fact, for AB, is that, since they released their original DVDs of these films, other companies have come along and done considerably better, so to recycle these old masters in 2008 really is a bit much. The new featurettes that have been provided for both films are very good, and I really enjoyed hearing from the various participants (including finally putting a face to a name with the first on-screen appearance I've seen of Franco Ferrini on the Phenomena featurette), but it's really a question of whether these two short documentaries justify the price of the new discs.

Regarding the issue of the ongoing debate about which version is the best, there is no doubt in my mind that the best all-round version of Tenebre is the Dutch release from A-Film, entitled Shadows. While this release is bare-bones, and it's true that it does suffer from some colour timing issues in its second half, they are considerably less severe than on the Japanese DVD (which is admittedly the sharpest-looking of the bunch). It is also completely uncut (as is the Japanese release) and features by far the cleanest English audio track I've ever heard for the film, especially in comparison to the one used by AB, which sounds pretty noisy and scratchy.

Things get a bit trickier for Phenomena. The best-looking release, by far, is the Japanese one, and it is also the full-length integral version, but unfortunately, presumably as a result of using a longer cut of the film which sometimes includes shots which differ in length from the English version by a frame here and a frame there, several dialogue scenes are rendered in Italian only on the English audio track. If you're prepared to do a bit of piecing together in a video editing program, you can put together a satisfying version, but if you intend to play it straight from the disc and watch it in English, you'll have to be prepared for some key narrative scenes being in Italian, despite English audio existing for them.

I've posted some screen captures comparing these new releases to various other versions that are available at Dark Discussion.

Snow, sand, softness and sharpness

The look of this BD is best described as "inconsistent". Some shots look extremely good and indeed rank up there with the best of high definition, but on other occasions things tend to look a bit soft and filtered. This is particularly evident during the earlier scenes which take place against the snowy backdrop of 12th century France. In some instances (such as Example 2), I wonder if the image was pre-filtered to prevent the dense snow from choking the life out of the MPEG-2 encoder. Having said that, this is certainly one of the best MPEG-2 encodes I've seen, perhaps beaten only by Sony's Resident Evil: Apocalypse.

Kingdom of Heaven: Director's Cut
(20th Century Fox, USA, MPEG-2)

The best pics in London

On Wednesday, while on my lunch break, I spied in the local Borders the UK Blu-ray release of Tim Burton's latest extravaganza, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, complete with a rather fetching tin case. Back when Paramount originally announced this for release on HD DVD in the US, it was one of my most anticipated purchases, so you can imagine my disappointment when the HD DVD was cancelled and the film then failed to materialise on Paramount's Blu-ray slate, despite (as far as I can gather) all of their other cancelled HD DVDs making the jump to Blu-ray. Luckily, Warner, who own the rights in the UK, have come to our rescue with an extremely nice release indeed, one that more than does the film justice and ranks among the best the studio has ever released for either format. The one failing, as seems often to be the case with the bit rate misers at Warner, is that some visible compression artefacts do creep in at times, one of the most offensive examples of which is visible in the first screen capture.

When you look at these pictures, you may notice what looks like smearing in the fine details of Johnny Depp's face. Unfortunately, this is the result of the process that seems to be being used more and more frequently on big budget films - an automated spot/wrinkle remover which I'm sure is very flattering for the actors but has the unfortunate side effect of making them look like porcelain dolls. It was inconsistently applied in Resident Evil: Extinction, making Milla Jovovich look at times as if she was made of plastic, and it appears to run rampant in The Golden Compass (the details of which I shall go into in a future post). For Sweeney Todd, however, oddly enough it appears that only Depp's cheeks and the bridge of his nose are affected, and it only seems to have been applied to close-ups. It's not a failing of the transfer, but it does provide an example of how really good high definition transfers make this sort of tomfoolery easier to spot. Ironic, really, when you consider that it was probably applied in the first place because someone got ants in their pants about "imperfections" on actors' faces being more visible in HD.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
(Warner, UK, VC-1, 27.1 GB)

Why I hate sound cards

Over the last few days, I've been getting to grips with my new system. So far, in all but a single area, I'm 100% satisfied. It runs fast, it runs quiet, and it's reliable... until, that is, you put sound into the equation. I specifically picked out Auzentech's X-Fi Prelude 7.1 sound card for this new system, because it offers real-time encoding to Dolby Digital (Dolby Digital Live), as well as featuring Creative's X-Fi chipset, and therefore being compatible with their EAX 5.0 hardware audio acceleration (third parties can include EAX support for their sound cards, but only in software and only up to version 2.0). Other sound cards support Dolby Digital Live, and others (i.e. those from Creative) support EAX 5.0, but to the best of my knowledge this is the only one which supports both.

Unfortunately, to call the Dolby Digital Live implementation buggy at present would be a massive understatement. Every so often, the Dolby Digital stream seems to simply die, leaving me with an intensely irritating endless loop of the same snippet of sound being repeated over and over, a bit like a record that has become stuck. Disabling and re-enabling Dolby Digital Live fixes this, but this is not exactly a viable solution when it happens every four or five minutes, as it did when I played the demo of Bioshock last night. It also happens when I'm watching TV via Windows Media Center or playing a movie or video file in PowerDVD or Windows Media Player, which rules out this being a software problem. It's also not a problem with my audio receiver, as the issue occurs even when it isn't switched on. Other people have reported this problem too, and some have contacted Auzentech directly about the matter. One posted the manufacturer's response:

Thank you for contacting Auzentech.

We have concluded that the DDL driver is still unstable.
(Crackle, Noise, To get sound back, we need to re-check the DDL)
We are working on the next driver continously and bring out the conclusion as soon as possible.

We appreciate your support and patience.

On the plus side, at least they acknowledge that there is a problem. On the downside, this post is more than three months old, and more driver updates have come along since then which have failed to solve the problem. Perhaps the DTS Interactive (the DTS equivalent of Dolby Digital Live) support which is supposed to be getting added before the end of the second quarter of 2008 (which, by my reckoning, gives Auzentech just under a month to make good on this promise), will be more stable? Until then, I've disabled my Prelude and gone back to my old Audigy.

Oh, and, for various reasons, it's clear that I'm going to have to keep my installation of Windows XP around for certain tasks. One of these, currently, is playing Hellgate: London, which, on the Audigy, only seems to be able to output 2-channel audio in Vista. (With the Prelude, I was getting full 5.1 support, but what use is that when the sound is constantly getting stuck in an endless loop?) Another is playing Unreal Tournament 3, which appears to have a bug which causes the game to crash after a few minutes' play when using the OpenAL audio mode. The solution? Disable OpenAL. All well and good, but, in Vista, you need OpenAL to be enabled in order to get 5.1 audio. Ah, sound cards. Don't you just love them?

(Incidentally, I can't get the DirectX 10 mode to work in Hellgate. When it's enabled, I am greeted with a blank screen when I attempt to run it, occasionally with an error message telling me that an "unknown software exception" has occurred. Apparently, from what I've read on various forums, getting DirectX 10 to work with this game is basically a case of pot luck. It's becoming more and more obvious that Hellgate's coding is a joke.)

The final thing that I need XP for is transferring music to my MP3 player. No, I'm not kidding. Do you remember how, a while back, I posted about problems with video playback in Vista? Originally, I thought that the culprit was the ArcSoft TotalMedia TV capture software I had installed. Well, this morning I discovered that the blame should in fact be laid at the door of Sony's SonicStage software, which I need to install in order to get my computer to interface with my MP3 player (curse Sony and their stupid proprietary formats). The moment I installed it, my video playback went belly-up. Uninstalling it didn't fix things, but performing a roll-back via System Restore did. Just to make sure this wasn't a coincidence, I repeated the trick three times, and each time, video playback went wonky as soon as the SonicStage installer had finished working its magic. So now, if I want decent video playback in Vista, I have to use XP to transfer MP3s to my player. The thing to do, I suspect, is to get my hands on a new MP3 player (Sony's more recent players allow you to simply drag and drop music on to them without having to deal with any proprietary software), but I've just bought a new computer, so you'll forgive me if I don't feel like shelling out yet more money for new hardware.

30 gigabytes of joy

30 Days of Night is one of four Blu-ray releases I received or otherwise picked up over the course of the week, which I shall be rolling out gradually with the added bonus of a series of delectable images. This is a film with a quite understated visual style - muted colour palette, murky lighting and a fair amount of grain. It also looks very nice indeed in high definition, albeit not always in the way that you would associate with so-called "demo material". Another solid release from Sony.

30 Days of Night
(Sony Pictures, USA, AVC, 30.7 GB)

Swoon

Three months after announcing their intentions to break into the Blu-ray market, Blue Underground have provided a tantalising glimpse at some of the titles we can expect to see from them. While no release dates have been announced, these titles alone should be enough to whet the appetite of any serious cult cinema fans:

- The Final Countdown
- The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
- The Stendhal Syndrome
- Maniac
- Vigilante
- Fire and Ice

The brief preview trailer, available on their site, also shows material from Two Evil Eyes, Dead and Buried and Uncle Sam. We're being promised 50 GB dual layer discs, 7.1 Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio tracks, plenty of extras and (contain yourselves) D-Box Motion Code support.

Ringo Starr was in The Simpsons once...

Now that I have a Blu-ray drive in my main computer, I've been taking the opportunity to look through some of the discs I haven't provided screen captures for yet. The Simpsons Movie is a title that immediately leapt out at me as a prime candidate for the PrintScreen button, mainly because it's one of those discs that many reviewers have praised to the heavens, describing it as "perfect" and "flawless", and other such hyperbolic nonsense. In actual fact, Fox's encode of The Simpsons Movie features quite a lot of unsightly ringing, as a result of having been filtered.

(Lyris and myself, by the way, have all sorts of wacky names for the various artefacts that plague digital video. Ringo Starr, as you can probably imagine, refers to ringing. Stick around and you may get to meet Dusty Springfield, Billy Brickwall, Waxy O'Connor, and our old favourite, Mega Bloks.)

Why would anyone filter high definition content in the first place, especially material as basic-looking as Homer Simpson and his bland family? Well, I can't say for sure, but it looks suspiciously like a technician left his or her software at the default settings and popped out for a leak, leaving the encoding software (or hardware) to wreak havoc. It's not just that there's ringing: for some reason, several shots show a bunch of errant hues showing up in the ringing, especially visible when you zoom in (Shot 3 is particularly affected by this).

The Simpsons Movie
(20th Century Fox, USA, AVC)

Vroom!

This is my first post from my new and improved computer. I ended up picking up the components I previously discussed a little earlier than I had originally expected, which means that I've effectively treated myself to an early birthday present (my birthday is at the beginning of July, and my parents have said they'll give me some money towards this venture). The bits and pieces arrived yesterday, and setting them up went surprisingly smoothly, particularly considering that, in the past, I've always relied on more tech-savvy parents and siblings to assist me when putting together a computer. I'd estimate that building it from the ground up took a little under two hours, at which point I was free to put my feet up and watch as various installers grumbled and ground.

Given that I ported my old hard drives over to the new machine, I was rather hoping I could get away without reinstalling Windows, but this, alas, was not an option. Windows XP actually started up, which surprised me no end as Vista failed to boot as all, but it was in a more or less unusable state as every single component had been changed and the poor thing simply didn't know what to make of all this new hardware. (The fact that I had no USB functionality was a pretty major problem as it meant I was without keyboard or mouse, hardly the best position in which to find yourself, as I'm sure you'll agree.)

I'm running Vista currently, and my plan is to stick with it unless I come across any significant problems. As a backup plan, I installed XP on a secondary partition, but my plan is to leave it alone unless I absolutely have to use it. I'd much rather have a single operating system, and Vista's DirectX 10 compliance provides a fairly significant incentive for gamers to use it. (Of course, you'll have to wait 'til I've had a chance to install a DirectX 10 game like Hellgate: London before I can actually provide some thoughts on it.)

No doubt I'll run into the usual teething problems associated with a complete system overhaul (I'm still ironing out the kinks with my new sound card, for instance), but so far, I have to say that things have been a lot more painless than I had any reason to expect.

We interrupt this programme for a special report

Sorry about the lack of updates lately. I'm currently knee-deep in putting together a paper for the departmental Postgraduate Symposium, which takes place over Monday and Tuesday next week. My presentation is on Monday afternoon, and, while I'm nearing the home stretch as far as my paper is concerned, I want to take the time to make it as good as possible, so I've been spending pretty much all the time I have available on it.

Still, I've also taken the time to hammer out some plans for my new computer. Having weighed up the possibilities, I think I'm going to go with the following:

Case and PSU: Antec Sonata III Piano Black Quiet Mid Tower Case - With 500W EarthWatts PSU

Motherboard: ASUS P5K-E/WIFI-AP AiLifestyle Series P35 Socket 775 Socket eSATA 8 channel Audio ATX

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3GHz (1333MHz) Socket 775 6MB L2 Cache OEM

CPU cooler: Scythe Mine Rev-B

RAM: Corsair 4GB Kit (2x2GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 XMS2 Memory Non-ECC Unbuffered

Video card: Gecube HD 3870 512MB GDDR3 OC edition Dual DVI TV Out PCI-E

Sound card: Auzen X-Fi Prelude 7.1

I already have my optical drive (an LG GGC-H20L Blu-ray/HD DVD combo) ready and waiting. Plus, I'll retain my current monitor, audio system, keyboard, mouse and hard drives.

I feel pretty comfortable with the motherboard and RAM, since my brother bought exactly the same models for his machine and both are serving him very well. Plus, I'm an ASUS loyalist through and through and have bought motherboards from them (barring my current Shuttle) since 2002. I decided to go with a fast dual-core CPU rather than spending more money on a quad-core with a lower clock speed. I'm well aware of the benefits of a quad-core system when it comes to video encoding and other CPU-crunching activities, but, when it comes to gaming performance, which will probably be my primary concern, I suspect I'm better off squeezing as many megahertz as possible out of a dual-core system, given how few games take advantage of more than two cores.

Any thoughts on this system? Any suggestions?

I don't like World of Warcraft (or: how I learned to stop worrying and love Guild Wars)

I've written about Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft in the past. Going from the initial "This is okay" to "Hopefully it gets better than this" phases, through the dreaded "This is actually pretty boring" period before finally reaching my "No way is this worth $15 a month" epiphany, I've come to the conclusion that this is one game I simply don't "get". It epitomises the "donkey/carrot/stick" school of game design (to quote Ray Milland's character in Dial M for Murder): effectively, the designers have created a game where the constant promise of eventual reward (the carrot) encourages the player to keep moving forward, while the threat of falling behind or not getting your value for money (the stick) dissuades him or her from staying put.

Now, I have absolutely no problem with this framework, provided the journey itself is actually fun. If exploring the world, hacking up monsters and collecting loot is a pleasurable activity in its own right, as it is in, say, Blizzard's earlier Diablo, then the continual performance of bigger and better locations, monsters and loot is no bad thing. When this becomes a problem is when the fundamental game mechanics prevent me from getting any enjoyment out of this process, as is the case for World of Warcraft. The other day, nearly two years after I last played the game, I had a sudden urge to give it another whirl. Therefore, I left it on overnight, downloading around 2 GB worth of patches and content updates, whipped out my credit card, laid down $15, logged myself in and sat down to re-enter the world of Azeroth.

First problem: I never did succeed in taking a character beyond Level 19, and, given that the game is now nearly four years old, this understandably set me pretty far behind the curve. In a world where 70 is the current maximum character level, starting out at such a low level feels a bit like being placed in the remedial class. Oh well, I thought, might as well take the opportunity to re-familiarise myself with how the game plays. So off I went to hack up some gnolls for Harry Hardwick and gather a few crimson bandanas for Melissa Silkloins or whatever their names are.

Second problem: none of this is actually any fun. After persevering for a couple of hours, I quickly came to the conclusion that I'd once again wasted my money. Now, at the current exchange rate, blowing $15 isn't the end of the world, but any transaction where the goods delivered are sub-par is annoying. It's particularly annoying when, as is the case with World of Warcraft, it's hard to shake the feeling that the problem is with me rather than the game. Maybe I just don't "get it". After all, the game boasts a record of 10 million subscribers (that's a whopping 62% of the MMORPG market share), and I find it hard to believe that they're all just complete morons staring slack-jawed at the screen and dumbly clicking the mouse in the hope that they finally get to chomp on that delicious-looking carrot. On the contrary, from what I can gather, the game takes some degree of skill to master. There's also the fact that, in piddling around the smaller scale early areas and levels, I'm missing out on the high end epic battles and quests that are supposedly the game's main draw.

But the problem is that I have absolutely no desire to persevere with the early stuff so as to eventually reach the better material that supposedly comes later. The gameplay mechanics strike me as fundamentally crap, with slow, clunky combat that feels like an unsatisfying trade-off between turn-based and real-time, chunky, unappealing graphics, and seemingly endless hours of trawling on foot from location to location (for a fee, you can purchase a ride from one major city to another using flying mounts, and, once you hit Level 40, you can purchase a horse of your own). This is, in my opinion, definitely the weakest game in the Warcraft franchise, and I struggle to name any other Blizzard game that I've enjoyed less. Honestly, I'd rather play Rock 'n' Roll Racing again than this.

Luckily, there's a solution. It's called Guild Wars, and it's like World of Warcraft, only fun. Straight off the bat, this game, which was designed by several ex-Blizzard staffers, seems to tick all the right boxes. First of all, it's free to play, meaning that you pay a one-off fee to pick up a boxed copy of the game, and then you can play it for as long as you like at no extra charge. As with World of Warcraft, they don't delete your characters due to account inactivity, either, so you can abandon it for months or years at a time and then hop back in where you left off. Secondly, and fairly fundamentally, it's actually fun to play. Right from the word go, everything about it is more polished, more fluid, more appealing and just generally slicker than World of Warcraft. The combat is fast-paced and satisfying, and any location that you've previously visited is just a couple of mouse clicks away, thanks to the fact that you can instantaneously jump to cities and outposts from the world map instead of having to walk, fly or ride to them. Crucially, the "donkey/carrot/stick" problem is nowhere to be found. You can actually max out your character fairly quickly (Level 20 is the highest you can get), which means that, once you're there, the "Just another half-hour and I can hit the next level" incentive is no longer present, so the missions have to be enjoyable in their own right. To Guild Wars' credit, they are, and it doesn't matter that you can hit Level 20 before you're even a quarter of the way through the game. The experience of playing the game itself is enjoyable enough without character building even coming into play.

Guild Wars also makes use of the concept of instancing, meaning that, while towns are communal, whenever you enter a combat area, a separate copy of the location is created for you and your party, meaning that you don't have to worry about someone coming along and stealing your loot or kills. Perhaps this detracts to some extent from the social aspect of games like this, but all that sort of thing is still possible in the town areas: it just means that you have to assemble your team before venturing out into the wilderness. Also, for social pariahs such as myself, the fact that you can hire computer-controlled henchmen to help you take on your opponents, rather than having to hope you can find another player or two whose goals match your own, is a big plus in its favour.

I'm currently playing the original Guild Wars "Prophecies" campaign and am having a blast inching my way towards completing it. Beyond that, I still have the "Factions" and "Nightfall" campaigns to finish (three separate Guild Wars campaigns were released, all of which can be purchased separately and work as stand-alone games, but which interlock to create a much larger world). There's also the Eye of the North expansion set, which requires a copy of one of the three original campaigns and will supposedly help ease the transition into Guild Wars 2, which is apparently going to have its public beta later this year. Warcraft schmorcraft - you can take your monthly fee and stick it in a very private place.

Get your tools ready

The upgrade bug has bitten me again. Partially inspired by how cheaply Lyris was able to assemble his fancy new quad core system, I've begun to look into the possibility of once again purchasing a full-size system to replace my small form factor Shuttle PC.

Primarily, this is because I would like to purchase additional RAM and a DirectX 10-compliant video card, the better to enjoy some of the latest games. Unfortunately, my Shuttle only has room for two sticks of RAM and a single slot video card, and most of ATI's more powerful DirectX 10 cards have whopping great fans on them that require more space than a single PCIe slot affords. On top of that, a more powerful video card would also almost certainly necessitate a heavier-duty power supply, one packing considerably more oomph than the paltry 250 watt affair that came with my Shuttle.

Finally, a superb bargain was recently pointed out to me: an LG GGC-H20L Blu-ray/HD DVD combo drive for a very reasonable £77.54, complete with the Blu-ray/HD DVD version of PowerDVD. Knowing that such a bargain wouldn't be around for long, I snapped one up despite the fact that, as a SATA device, I wouldn't be able to use is in my Shuttle system, which only has two SATA ports, both of which are being used by hard drives. It arrived today, and will have to sit on my shelf until I get my new system. Well, actually, I tell a lie. It's currently sitting inside Lyris' computer, so at least it's being put to use for the time being.

As for the other components, I'm going to pick up an Auzen X-Fi Prelude 7.1 sound card (see my earlier post on the sound card issue for more information) and the best trade-off I can find between performance and price in terms of ATI's current generation of video cards. My brother seems to be pretty happy with his ASUS P5K-E motherboard, so I suspect I'll pick up one of those too. That only leaves memory (probably 4 GB, despite 32-bit operating systems only managing to access around 3.3 GB total), a processor (I'm still unsure as to whether to get a quad-core system, or simply go for the fastest dual-core I can get my hands on), a case and a power supply (I'll probably end up getting the latter two together). If I play my cards right, this shouldn't bankrupt me completely.

XP SP3 released; "trounces" Vista in speed tests

Hot on the heels of announcing that Windows XP will no longer be sold as of June 30th this year, Microsoft has clarified that it will in fact continue to provide free support (including security fixes) for the product until early April 2014 - a relief, I'm sure, for users who have no plans to switch to Vista in the near future. Myself, I have no major complaints about Vista beyond a handful of sound and game-related problems that I hope will be solved once I get my hands on a newer sound card, but I can certainly understand people's reluctance to leave XP behind. XP is, after all, a mature, stable operating system whose long-standing problems are widely known about and can be solved fairly straightforwardly, if they have not been fixed completely via the various hotfixes and service packs that have been made available. To borrow a (fallacious) axiom from Apple, "it just works". Seriously, today I was trying to remember the last time my system crashed while running XP, and I came to the conclusion that, in the twelve months that I've had this machine, the answer is "never".

Anyway, the point of this little preamble is that Microsoft recently released its third Service Pack for XP. While it contained little new content, it did cobble a good two and a half years' worth of updates together into a single download, which is definitely a plus. Considerably more surprising, then is the claim that an installation of XP with Service Pack 3 performs 10% better than the same machine running Vista with Service Pack 1. Myself, I've been running SP3 for a little under 48 hours and can't claim to have noticed any significant speed boosts, but in any event I had no complaints about XP's performance anyway. Vista does have some very nice prefetching technology which, over time, significantly reduces the startup time of programs and the loading of files, but I have to be honest and say that my gut reaction is to say that XP is faster than Vista in terms of overall usability. Of course, as the article in question rightly points out, basing your benchmarks on Microsoft Office performance is not exactly all-encompassing, but the part of me that finds using XP to be a slightly smoother experience than using Vista is nodding its head in agreement.

Paramount, Criterion go Blu

I'm sure everyone else has already reported on this by now, but Paramount have, not particularly unexpectedly, relaunched their support for Blu-ray with the announcement that Face/Off, Next and Bee Movie will be coming to the format on May 20th, followed by Cloverfield and There Will Be Blood on June 3rd. No word yet on Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which was initially announced for HD DVD at around the same time as There Will Be Blood, but disappeared along with that and several other titles when Toshiba turned off the ailing format's life support machine. Presumably it will materialise before too long - I hope so, because, out of all of these, it's the one I'm most interested in seeing.

Paramount also plans to re-issue its entire back catalogue of Blu-ray titles, starting with eight titles on May 20th.

The real news, however, is that, after spending a considerable amount of time umming and erring from the sidelines, the mighty Criterion has finally announced its intention to get with the winning team and begin releasing in high definition. Announced via their most recent email newsletter, Criterion states that it will begin rolling titles out in October, with each released priced the same as its standard definition counterpart and porting over all the bonus content from the legacy release. Currently announced titles include:

- The Third Man
- Bottle Rocket
- Chungking Express
- The Man Who Fell to Earth
- The Last Emperor
- El Norte
- The 400 Blows
- Gimme Shelter
- The Complete Monterey Pop
- Contempt
- Walkabout
- For All Mankind
- The Wages of Fear

Now, here's hoping they have the sense to do away with their nonsensical pictureboxing practice for their Blu-ray titles.

The day approaches...

It's time for me to go into shameless promotional mode, but for good reason. After months of secrecy, I'm finally able to tell you something about the DVD project Lyris is working on. This is the first public announcement of this release anywhere, so consider yourselves lucky indeed.

Later this year, new DVD label Mondo Vision will be releasing its debut title, the first ever English-friendly release of Andrzej Zulawski's La Femme Publique ("The Public Woman"), initially released in 1984 and starring Valérie Kaprisky, Francis Huster and Lambert Wilson. The name of Zulawski may be familiar to some of the Dario Argento fans visiting the site, since Argento has identified his 1981 film Possession as one of his favourites and a key influence on Tenebre.

This upcoming US DVD release is special for a couple of reasons. First of all, the film has never been released on any format in an English-speaking territory. As such, Mondo Vision's DVD will feature the first ever English subtitle translation of the film. Secondly, I've had the opportunity to see the transfer for this film at various stages of its encoding, and I can honestly state that the final encode, completed a few days ago, is one of the best I have ever seen in standard definition. To say that this blows away what most of the other independent and also major studios are routinely putting out would be a gross understatement. Don't take my word for it, though: feast your eyes on the images below (click the smaller thumbnails to view them at their full size).

Not filtered, not edge enhanced, not noise reduced, not tampered with in any way.

Specifications for this release include:

- Digitally restored transfer mastered in high definition progressive video (1.66:1 anamorphic widescreen, dual layer)
- French Dolby Digital 2.0 dual mono audio
- First ever English-language subtitle translation (optional)
- Feature length audio commentary with Andrzej Zulawksi and Daniel Bird (recorded specially for this release)
- Exclusive new interview with Andrzej Zulawski (recorded specially for this release)
- 1984 theatrical trailer
- Image gallery
- DVD-ROM content (original screenplay and high resolution images)

In addition to the standard single-disc release, a limited edition will also be released featuring a bonus CD containing the film's original score, as well as a special commemorative booklet.

Two more Zulawski titles, L'important c'est d'aimer (1975, starring Romy Schneider, Fabio Testi and Klaus Kinski) and L'amour braque (1985, starring Sophie Marceau and Francis Huster), will also be released this year.

http://andrzej-zulawski.com/AZF/index.php

The pain, the pain!

This morning, I was looking through some of the DVDs I haven't blown the dust off in a while, and I came across the Region 1 Deluxe Edition of Luc Besson's Léon, a favourite of mine. This is a film that, to the best of my knowledge, has never been adequately represented on DVD, with every release falling way short of decency standards. Every release I've seen for myself, or have seen screen captures of, has suffered from a crippling lack of detail, not to mention massive amounts of ringing and mosquito noise. The overall look is that of an ancient master that has been trotted out again and again over the years, which makes the Superbit logo and claim that it has been "mastered in high definition" on the back of the Deluxe case completely absurd.

Even so, I wasn't prepared for the utter horror of just how bad this transfer, from a major studio who have done some absolutely stellar work, looks:

Now, bear in mind that this has been blown up to 1920x1080 resolution, but I wanted to do this to give you an example of just how bad the ringing is, and to approximate how this might look on a large display. Even at its default resolution (see here) it looks pretty outrageous, more like what you might expect from a crummy DivX bootleg downloaded from one of the dubious sites that offer such material.

"Deluxe" my left wallnut! This film is crying out for a re-release - a proper one, not just the same old master hauled out and run through the blender again.

There's no place like... haven't I been here before?

This is beginning to feel a lot like musical chairs. Yes, I'm back in Windows XP again. This time the problems that led to me beating a hasty treat from Vista weren't video playback-related, but problems of another sort. On this occasion, dipping my toes into the world of gaming in Vista proved quite perilous, with most of the problems stemming from audio.

As with video playback, audio has been quite significantly rewritten for Vista. In previous versions of Windows, a software layer known (somewhat confusingly) as the Hardware Abstraction Layer was used for DirectSound and DirectSound3D, essentially allowing software to talk directly to the sound card through the Windows kernel (the operating system's core). Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, Microsoft decided to do away with this in Vista, completely removing the DirectSound3D HAL, meaning that games which use DirectSound3D for their advanced audio effects are, in Vista, unceremoniously stripped of their razzmatazz, with their sound rendered as plain old 2-channel non-accelerated mush. (You can read more about this at Datalk.com.)

A problem, I'm sure you'll agree, particularly given that a considerable number of games, including some released recently, use DirectSound3D. Games which use the OpenAL format are safe (in theory - more on that in a minute), but they are still few and far between. Luckily, Creative Labs, who made my sound card and own a sizeable chunk of the PC audio market, came up with a solution: a program called Alchemy, which purports to convert DirectSound3D-based games into OpenAL, thereby restoring hardware audio acceleration and multi-channel effects. This only works on their own sound cards, so if you don't own a Creative card, you're out of luck. Oh, and unless you own one of their recent X-Fi cards, you have to fork over $10 for the privilege of getting the advanced audio effects you already paid for. Still, credit to Creative for actually doing something about this wholly unacceptable issue. The list of games officially supported by Alchemy is still quite small, but theoretically any game using DirectSound3D can be made to work, some with a bit of tweaking.

All well and good, but where does that leave the OpenAL-based Hellgate: London, a game which I play quite extensively and am used to enjoying in all its 5.1 surround sound glory, but am suddenly reduced to hearing in stereo only despite there being no earthly reason for this? Playing with Hellgate's own options menu doesn't work, and neither does Alchemy (unsurprising, since Hellgate doesn't use DirectSound3D). When I asked about this problem in the game's technical support forum, the representative who replied was unable to suggest anything other than updating my sound drivers (already done that) or turning down the hardware audio acceleration in the DirectX Diagnostic Tool utility, an option that isn't actually available in the Vista version of that programme.

To be fair, my sound card is ancient by computing standards. I bought it in 2002, and the last driver update for it was released over a year ago. Perhaps it's not surprising that Hellgate has problems with it... I just don't understand why these problems weren't present in Windows XP. Oh well - I'll no doubt be picking up a new sound eventually anyway. I currently have my eyes set on Auzen's X-Fi Prelude 7.1, which is based on Creative's X-Fi chipset and adds a bunch of additional features, among them real-time Dolby Digital (and, once the requisite patch is released, DTS) encoding.

In the meantime, however, another gaming problem reared its ugly head: I experienced three sequential system crashes while playing Command & Conquer 3. For no apparent reason, after about 15-20 minutes, the display would be lost and the machine would stop responding to my commands, requiring a complete reboot. I've clocked in a good 40 hours of this game in XP, and have never seen it crash once, yet, on my first attempt to play it in Vista, it went completely belly-up.

I'm afraid that was the straw that broke the camel's back, and I came scarpering off back to XP, where I'll stay until I can solve these problems. I'm sure they can be fixed - after all, I eventually got to the bottom of my video playback issues - but for now, I'm going to stick with what I know rather than waste countless hours trying to make Vista behave itself.

Greetings from Vista

I'm back inside Windows Vista again, this time permanently, I hope.

Why? Well, it all started when my brother put together a new computer, a quad core system with 4 GB of RAM to enable more efficiency in his DVD projects (the first of which I hope will be announced before very much longer). Among the components he picked up for it was a new video card, an ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro, which gave him access to the advanced deinterlacing and other hardware video acceleration technologies that weren't available on his previous Radeon X800. As I previously explained, problems in the hardware video acceleration department were responsible for me crawling back to Windows XP with my tail between my legs. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I discovered that he was getting perfectly good deinterlacing, with subtitles, in Vista using Windows Media Player.

A reinstall of Vista later and I discovered the reason for my video problems. It seems that installing the ArcSoft TotalMedia TV recording software that came with my TV stick buggered up Vista's EVR video decoding, to the extent that, even when I uninstalled TotalMedia and removed all references to it in the registry, it still continued to be borked. Completely reinstalling Vista was the only way to solve the problem, and solve it it did. (I don't need TotalMedia anyway because Vista Home Premium comes with the very slick Windows Media Center, which has its own TV viewing and recording capabilities.)

So, here I am, just about as happy as I can possibly be with Vista. There are still some niggles to be worked out - it looks as if EVR video playback, at least on this video card with these drivers, suffers from blocky chroma upsampling (see the image above, from Pocahontas) - but the situation is much better than it was before.

Update, May 2nd, 2008 02:42 PM: Well, slap my face! It turns out XP's handling of chroma upsampling (in PowerDVD, Media Player or Media Player Classic - take your pick) is identical to that of Vista, and I can't say it's bothered me unduly before. It just goes to show the things you spot when you're in nitpick mode. Ah well, at this point I can't claim that XP offers anything that Vista doesn't give me, so I suppose you can officially call the earlier operating system dead and buried as far as my system is concerned.

Blu-ray brattiness

Unfortunately, high definition doesn't make Juno MacGuff any less moody and obnoxious than her standard definition counterpart, but she, her posse and their surroundings certainly look considerably more detailed and lifelike, courtesy of one of 20th Century Fox's best transfers to date. "Grain!" I hear you say. "Good!" I say. Juno has a look not unlike that of Atonement (HD DVD screen captures here), but is considerably less eroded, resulting in a far more satisfying experience overall. The clots at DVD Town, IGN ("Only marginally better than the standard [definition DVD]" - pffffft!) and the like may have been pretty lukewarm in their reactions to this transfer, but rest assured that Captain Whiggles will be giving it a glowing appraisal come review-time.

Juno
(20th Century Fox, USA, AVC, 26.9 GB)

FYI: PS3 DTS-HD MA no longer MIA, OK?

Source: High-Def Digest

Proving once again what a versatile and admirably future-proof piece of hardware it is, the Playstation 3's latest firmware update will add internal decoding for DTS-HD Master Audio to its Blu-ray playback capabilities. DTS-HD MA decoding is supported on some of the more recent high-end players, but given how cheap the PS3 is, this seems like a remarkable deal. Now if only I had an HDMI 1.3-compatible audio receiver to take full advantage of it...

The update, version 2.30, is due out tomorrow.

There's no place like home

My Windows Vista experience has been temporarily halted, after slightly under 72 hours. I've come to the conclusion that the video playback situation, at least in its current state, is too inconvenient for me to stick with. This morning, when I popped in The Maltese Falcon, I discovered that PAL overlay playback is severely borked: material such as subtitles and menu selection gets drawn for NTSC resolution, which means that everything is displaced and wonky. It's something that can be worked around, but it makes it a pain the neck attempting to select anything on a menu, and means that, when watching a film with subtitles, the text ends up half-way up the screen. Oh, and for some reason, screen capturing in PowerDVD doesn't work for PAL discs in Vista when hardware acceleration is enabled, which means that, when taking screenshots for reviews, I first have to switch the player into software mode. Not the end of the world, of course, but a giant pain in the neck and something I don't see the point of continuing to struggle with.

Beyond the video support, I have no major issues with Vista whatsoever. Then again, I don't exactly have any significant complaints about XP either (other than that it doesn't look quite as pretty), and its video playback works the way it's supposed to. For the time being, though, I'm going to continue to use XP and hope that a solution to my video woes eventually materialises, either in the form of better drivers from ATI, better DVD software from Cyberlink (or anyone else, come to that), or an end to this "no overlay" nonsense from Microsoft.