Live from Austin!

A couple of nights ago, I noticed my TV/DVD combination was acting up. PAL DVDs would play with a horrible irregular juddering motion. I checked broadcast TV and the PS3, and they were both fine; I checked the DVI/HDMI cable, that was fine also. I started to suspect the DVD player.

Friday, I bought a new DVD player. $44 at Fry’s Electronics. It had the same problem. Further investigation and experimentation eventually revealed that the issue was a setting on the TV.

The short summary: If you have an NTSC Sony BRAVIA TV but have no analog video sources, find the CineMotion setting in the TV setup, and make sure it is turned off, not set to auto or on. Even if you have some analog video sources, you should turn CineMotion off if you don’t use analog sources to watch movies. You don’t need it, you don’t want it, all it can ever do is mess up your signal. The long explanation follows…

Conventionally, movies are shot on film at 24 frames per second. When they are transferred to US NTSC video via a Telecine machine, the 24 frames per second must be converted to 29.97 frames per second, or 59.94 fields per second–which I’ll call 60 fields per second for the purposes of this brief discussion.

The process used is called 3:2 pulldown, because the first frame of film used to end up turning into 3 fields of video; the second frame of film ended up as 2 fields of video; the next was 3 fields again; and so on, alternating. Nowadays, frame buffers allow the 2 and 3 field allocation to be varied, so you tend to get 2:3:3:2, which results in fewer video frames whose contents are taken from two different film frames. But all pulldown options share the same fundamental defect, which is that the frames of the movie are no longer all of the same duration. This tends to make tracking shots and motion look somewhat odd.

Modern digital HDTVs don’t need pulldown. The HDTV standard, ATSC, mandates that TVs support 24 frames per second–and also 23.976 fps, which is the speed 24fps movies used to be slowed to before performing 3:2 pulldown, so as to end up with 59.94 fields per second. So an HDTV can display a 24fps movie at 24fps. If it’s a 120Hz set, it can even display movies with no split frames at all, as 24 goes evenly into 120.

Sony BRAVIA HDTVs therefore have a feature called CineMotion buried away in the setup menus. This detects incoming 3:2 pulldown video, and dynamically works out the pulldown pattern, reverses the pulldown and recombines the fields into 23.976 frames per second, buffers them, and then shows the result at exactly 23.976fps. Your movie motion looks smoother and more natural as a result.

My DVD player only pumps out a progressive signal (480p or 720p) via HDMI, so the TV never needs to do reverse pulldown. If the DVD is a movie, the MPEG-2 video file is 24fps, and the DVD player turns that into 24fps digital stream to the TV. So I have no use for this advanced CineMotion feature. It’s only applicable to analog interlaced video sources, and the only analog video source I have is the Wii–and that’s 480p via component cable and never shows 24fps movies, so it doesn’t need processing either.

Somehow, CineMotion got turned on in the setup menu–either as a default, or maybe I was playing with settings and turned it on without realizing what it was. And sadly, there’s a bug in Sony’s TV firmware: it doesn’t seem to check whether the source is interlaced before applying CineMotion post-processing. Instead, it just checks the frame rate of the decoded frames to decide whether to buffer them.

PAL video is 50 fields per second, or 25 frames per second. This seems to be close enough to 24 frames per second that it triggers the CineMotion buffering. The TV tries to take the incoming 25fps video, and show it at 23.976fps. This results in disaster; every now and again, the TV realizes it has fallen too far behind the incoming data stream, and drops an entire frame to catch up.

So that is why my UK DVDs were looking like crap. I turned the CineMotion feature off, and now everything looks good again.

So I have a second DVD player which is, strictly speaking, unnecessary. However, there’s an upside. My original player was state of the art 4 years ago, but technology has marched on. The new $44 DVD player upscales to full 1080p, the native resolution of the TV. This seems to give a better picture than upscaling to 720p and then having the TV upscale again. The fancy noise reduction and motion smoothing of the old DVD player are also unnecessary, as the new TV has even better implementations. As a final benefit, the new player has true HDMI out rather than DVI, meaning I get audio and video through the same cable, with no need to adjust timing between the two. I also notice that the new player is very light and runs cool, whereas the old one had a lot of circuitry packed in and would get hot. So, I’m keeping the new DVD player and retiring the old one.

Ah, technology, where the state of the art from 4 years ago is today’s doorstop.

Oh, and if you want a region-free DVD player, pick up a Coby DVD288 at Fry’s.

The New York Times reports that most people have decided to sit out the HD format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

I’m one of them. I remember DCC vs MiniDisc. MiniDisc won, if by ‘won’ you mean ‘lingered for a few years longer’. I also remember SACD vs DVD-Audio. Both of those lost, in that even people who have DVD players capable of playing DVD Audio (like me) typically don’t bother to hook them up to support it (like me). I saw an SACD player in someone’s house at Christmas, but it was being used as a CD player.

As the guy from Sony admits, the improvement from DVD to HD is pretty marginal unless your TV is 40″ or greater. This seems to match my conclusions from comparing 1080i OTA HDTV to upscaled DVD on our TV.

Then there are the downsides. The most obvious being the sluggish performance. For Blu-ray, typically it takes 30 seconds after hitting the power button before the disc tray opens; 30 more seconds after inserting the disc before you see menus. Of course, that’s the optimistic case, it can be much worse. Assuming it actually works at all. And to think I get impatient waiting 10 seconds for my DVD player.

Then there’s region encoding. I like being able to buy UK TV shows and movies legally and watch them, and I’m not prepared to go back to having a disc player that’s limited to US releases. So I’m not buying Blu-ray until region-free players become available.

Then there’s ripping video. Sure, it’s kinda specialized, but as iPods and portable video players and video-capable phones become more commonplace, it’s increasingly appealing. I did consider ripping some TV shows to watch on my BlackBerry on the plane this Christmas.

So as far as I’m concerned, wake me when the war is over and I can get a player that plays the winning format, in all regions, for under $300. Until then, I’m not interested. Even if I get a PS3, I can’t see myself buying any Blu-ray discs.

I’ve had it for over a month now, and I have to say the Oppo OPDV971H is great. If you dislike censorship, like obscure movies, or download unavailable TV shows and movies from the Internet, this is the player for you.

In a nutshell: It will play any DVD from any country in the world, on any TV in the world. It’ll also play XviD and DivX Pro MPEG-4 files on CD-R, CD-RW, or DVD-R, at resolutions up to 720×480. It runs at 110 or 240V, 50 or 60 Hz, so you can plug it in in any country.

If you have an HDTV, it has HDMI/HDCP and DVI output. If you have a reasonably new non-HD TV, it has component output and S-video. If you have an old crufty TV, it has plain old composite video too.

It has a Faroudja DCDi chip in, which is pretty much the state of the art in consumer upscaling. What does that mean? It means your regular DVD can be interpolated up to a proper 720p or 1080i signal, so you don’t see pixels or scan lines on your HDTV. It also does cross-color suppression, so your classic black and white movies stay black and white. It also does 3:2 and 2:2 pulldown, to turn movie DVDs into 24 fps progressive signals.

There’s the usual optical digital output for the audio, or coaxial digital if you prefer. It handles DTS as well as Dolby Digital 5.1. The onboard digital circuits are 192KHz 24 bit, and there’s a 3D virtual surround encoder for those who don’t have 6 speakers and don’t have a receiver that’ll do the job. There’s an adjustable delay to deal with lip sync problems caused by the advanced video processing; I find 30ms is about right.

It supposedly plays DVD-Audio. I haven’t tested that, because DVD-Audio is crippled into uselessness by its DRM—you can’t rip it for your iPod, car, or computer, and you need three extra cables because the music industry won’t allow the signal to travel digitally.

It also does slideshows of JPEGs burnt on a CD, and plays MP3s if you make sure the filenames are short (12 characters + extension).

Yes, it handles anamorphic just fine. Play anamorphic PAL region 2 releases on your NTSC TV, play PAL DivX rips scaled up to 720p, play NTSC DVDs on a PAL TV.

And the best bit: it’s $200, including the cables.

There are a few tiny downsides. The remote’s a bit crap (all the buttons look identical and the labels are hard to see). The disc drawer feels disturbingly flimsy. Sometimes the DivX decoder can’t quite keep up the frame rate at high bitrates, and you get a visible tear in the bottom third of the screen—but that doesn’t seem to affect DVDs. Oh, and it’s a bit slow to boot (you have to wait 3-4 seconds after power up before the tray will eject).

So: I say get one and give the finger to the MPAA. Watch the uncensored Region 3 version of Eyes Wide Shut. Watch UK comedy and Japanese Anime. Download bizarre 50s educational movies from the Prelinger Archives and view them from the comfort of your couch.

Well, I was up until nearly 01:00, but I finished the San Francisco DVD in time for Christmas. The first burn had something wrong with the menu screen; iDVD is incredibly picky about what file format you use. (PNG works, TIFF doesn’t.)

Another iDVD problem is that if you use the “automatically add slideshow to DVD-ROM” checkbox, then it often either crashes (OS 9) or locks up (OS X) during encoding. Solution: Add second copy of files to DVD-ROM section manually.

DVD #2 is complete. This one records the hellish 1997 flight to Minnesota that destroyed my back. I kinda hurried the edit, because it was the first piece of video I shot, and it shows in the source material. There were also a bunch of random short fragments that I found on the tape, that I put on a separate menu screen. I screwed up a soundtrack edit on one of those, but c’est la vie. I’ll be a perfectionist on the upcoming San Francisco trip.

Sent my mother a copy of DVD #1. Digitized an hour or so of video for DVD #2. I think this one’s going to come out much shorter, it’s earlier material. I’m glad I went through the stage of recording tedious and boring shit at excessive length in only a year.

I have burnt the first DVD successfully! Now to design some cover artwork, and send one to the family…

It looked like Dark Star on DVD was disappearing from the stores, so I decided I had to get a copy. Picked it up for $10 including shipping.

If you’re not familiar with this particular cult movie, all you need to know is: (a) it was written by the same guy as “Alien”, and inspired that movie; (b) it’s a comedy; and (c) it was directed by John Carpenter. If that isn’t enough to get you interested, consider the original poster tagline: “Bombed out in space with a spaced-out bomb”.