Jack Ryan S3 E3
Man… Im watching Stargate sg1 with my kiddo. My Plex server is down for a bit… so I switched over to prime for an episode or two…
It’s dark, it’s audio is horrible, it’s 4:3 formatted it’s horribly compressed and it has commercials.
Talk about a poor viewing experience.
Not watching is better than watching…
I canceled Prime a year ago, just before their announced price increase, and it’s been great. I sign up for free, month-long trials of Prime on their website a few times a year, and I just accept slower, free shipping the rest of the time.
i’ve watched more than a few shows that have been brutally hacked into wide format from the original 4:3. the practice is horrible. they need to stop pulling that shit and let the viewer decide whether to crop the frame or not–or put a proper pan & scan up instead of a blind hack job and leave the original format available, too.
The worst part is that even buying SG1 on Bluray gives a bad experience, because they fucked up the 5.1 audio.
So what did the pirates do? Combined the Bluray video with the better DVD 5.1 audio! Best of both worlds.
Huh I wondered. That makes a lot of sense.
The version I have looks and sounds so much better than the blurays I have… Tho like you said better audio, widescreen and I’m fairly certain it’s been ai upscaled as well. I’d have to go back and look but my physical disks don’t hold a candle…
SG-1 was shot in widescreen from day one, on cameras that had framing marks for 4:3 and 16:9. A 4:3 cut was sent to TV networks and a 16:9 cut was canned until the show was released on DVD.
SG1 was shot in film and mastered in 16:9. 16mm in the first 3 seasons, 35mm 3-7, and then they moved to digital HD cameras season 8 onwards.
Many shows from the 90s were [edit: shot on film]. That’s why you can get a widescreen HD release of Seinfeld, among others.
That’s not always a good thing. If it was meant to be 4:3 the extra space on the frame can have set rigging, lights, microphone booms, and in case of stunts even crash pads.
It’s one of the reasons the HD rescan of Buffy:TVS sucks. That still needs a proper 4:3 HD remaster.
Right, but the general public only ever saw the broadcast versions, which were predominantly in 4:3. Also, Seinfeld was only shot in 4:3 as it’s a multi cam sitcom. The widescreen version you’ve seen is a crop of the original 4:3 picture.
The tradeoff kinda made sense at the dawn of streaming, when the transaction was basically trading quality for better pricing and convenience.
Nowadays? Yeaaaaah I don’t know about that chief
Crazy to think that we lost all the advantages that streaming offered, kept all the disadvantages, piled on a few more disadvantages on top of that, and people went “sure that makes sense 24 bucks a month worth it bro”
All these companies play the frogs in a pot game. Slowly make things shittier and shittier in tiny increments and everyone’s sitting there in boiling water eventually like “this is fine.” I mean there’s still people with cable TV in 2024. And Netflix has done nothing but get worse for the last 3-4 years and their subscriber count just had a decent boost last year so they were like “lol sweet, we’re canceling basic ad free tier in 2024, eat shit”
It’s felt pretty damn nice to finally give all these companies the boot. They got too greedy. But there’ll still be hordes of people just happily paying an ever rising price for this stuff I guess.
Most people would not be able to discern the difference between the top 2 images. Chroma subsampling? Aliasing? Bitrate? These are words that we understand but your average TV watcher has never heard uttered.
I hate that i have to agree with you.
Last time my wife was watching a movie. It was a local file, and when i walked by, i saw that it was at max 720p and a bit choppy. I remarked that she should tell me which movie it was so i can replace it.
She asked “why would you?” - and i know that her eyes are in perfect shape. She simply does not recognize it when a video plays at crap quality, and she would have to search hard in the above pictures, while i saw the difference in an instant.
She hates ads just like me tho, so a pirates life it is for her :-)
streaming just has godawful UX now as well. the apps play you commercials while in the menu, you have to worry about buffering, you aren’t allowed to take screenshots (which is the most numbskulled DRM i’ve ever seen; they allowed it in the old days and everything was fine AND either way people have ALREADY managed to rip and share the raw footage. what’s the point??), 75% of the fucking content on amazon you have to pay an extra fee for, media appears and disappears at the whim of pigheaded suits, prices go up every 6 months because fuck you, the blindingly stupid netflix ‘single family home’ restriction…
watching tv is meant to be fun, not introduce a whole other layer of bureaucratic bullshit into our lives
Honestly, the netflix “single family home” thing isn’t as bad as I first imagined. I still share my account and we never have any problems.
Yeah I have. They’ve propted me a couple times to confirm that I am in the single family home. Just confirm it and that’s that. (We’ve made a shared email account for netflix specific). Maybe that’s not the full force of the crackdown?
Maybe I’m blind, maybe it’s me viewing this on a phone, but I legitimately can’t tell the difference.
I can see the difference around the actor’s skin and the environment, its less fuzzy. It’s hard to tell the difference, definitely. It’s compression quality.
What you have to understand about lossy compression is:
- it throws out data you won’t be able to perceive in ideal conditions (color ranges)
- it throws out data that doesn’t change between frames
Yeah, if the streaming providers ever switch over to AV1 that would be an interesting comparison.
AV1? that’s a codec, right? I see in the preferences section for Piped. Is better than AVC (h.2640)?
It’s also better than H.265/HEVC. Plus, it’s open-source and royalty free.
Yes, AV1 is the next big deal. You can compress the hell out of the video and it still looks near original. I’ve re-encode some of my locally ripped movies for fun to see how it looks and it’s really impressive.
it still looks near original.
Presumably you know, but for anyone else: the word for this is “transparent.” It’s when the codec leaves no noticeable artifacts.
I wonder if the apple vision pro is able to play AV1 files 🤔 i guess, would be really bad if not
