Asian import DVD's
Well, I got my 5 seasons of Babylon 5 DVD (again, Asian collectors editions) that I paid $62 (plus $30 S&H) for. This time, a friend has the full US version discs, and confirmed that the disks he has are dual layer and around 7.38GB per disk. Well, the Asian collectors editions that you buy on Ebay are (once again) only single layer and only about 4.35GB. Looks like they are using some video recompression on the VOB's and then burning them to single layer DVD's and saving money. There are also some very obvious mis-spellings on the boxes (like it says "The Complete Fourtht Season").

Video is pretty grainy, blocky, and you can see a lot of artifacts (especially jaggies on the edges of dramatic color changes, like ships in space). This is all on a computer screen so far, and I'll have to see how it looks on my progressive scan DVD player on my HDTV as well as on my HTPC on the same HDTV. I'll see how it compares to the US Version this weekend, too.

Anyway, I'm going to be VERY upset if I find out these aren't even authorized by Warner Brothers, as they have the WB logo and also show all sorts of Dolby Digital TM stuff.

Still, I'm looking forward to watching this series. I've heard it is great!

- posted by Jeff @ 8:05 PM | 0 comments