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…
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.
“it’s a strange game. The only way to win is not to play.”
You shoukd consider cancelling prime, bezos doesn’t need more moneys ^^
Stargate was 4:3, so there’s that…
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.
Yeah I really doubt streaming would change anything to 4:3.
Disney+ famously changed classic Simpsons to 16:9 and in the process, cropped enough to make some visual gags not work, but I can’t imagine them preferring 4:3 over 16:9.
SG1 was shot in 4:3 until like season 8 or so.
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.
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”
Maybe I’m blind, maybe it’s me viewing this on a phone, but I legitimately can’t tell the difference.
Zoom in on the guy’s face. The one on the right is crystal clear in comparison to the left.
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
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
