Season ONE OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Discussion Thread

Discussion in 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' started by Mutai Sho-Rin, Jul 24, 2012.

  1. Quinton O'Connor

    Quinton O'Connor Commodore Commodore

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread

    ^ Haha. Live long and prosper, eh?
     
  2. LastRideOut

    LastRideOut Lieutenant Junior Grade Red Shirt

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread

    I concur with the sentiment that a poor authoring job was done on the discs. While the audio problem doesn't affect me (I'm deaf, so, I don't care) the fourth disc was mistakenly labeled as Star Trek TNG S1 D5 although the menu says Disc four. Inexcusable really. Was someone asleep at the authoring controls? Wow.
     
  3. cbspock

    cbspock Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread

    Wonder how long this will take Paramount to fix. How could they let this slip through their quality control. Wouldnt they check a sample?


    -Chris
     
  4. Mott the barber

    Mott the barber Commodore Commodore

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread


    I've heard about the Hurley rumor over the years as well.
     
  5. Maxwell Everett

    Maxwell Everett Commodore Commodore

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread

    Looks crisp, clear and bright to me. Are you seeing this on a particular episode? Are you sure you don't have some kind of auto-brightness setting turned on on your HDTV?
     
  6. Maxwell Everett

    Maxwell Everett Commodore Commodore

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread

    I was wondering if anyone else might notice that! :)
     
  7. LastRideOut

    LastRideOut Lieutenant Junior Grade Red Shirt

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread

    I certainly did! I had to rename the disc after copying it to my computer. I copied all the discs to my computer, and then individually de-muxed out the episodes. I do this because, honestly, the subtitles found on most blu-rays, including this particular set, are shit. A transparent background, to appease hearing people that don't want the subtitles to "get in the way". So, after de-muxing the episodes out, along with the .sup files, I OCR the .sup files to .srt files. This way, I can change the font, size of font, and lastly, add in a black opaque background so that the subtitles are ALWAYS readable regardless of the scene.

    Try reading the blu-ray subtitles on a light background, or a background that has snow as a backdrop. Yeah, good luck with that.
     
  8. Sho

    Sho Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread

    ^ Always found it really sucky that Blu-ray continues to use baked-in raster subtitles. The software machinery that the spec requires to read a disc is certainly sophisticated enough that on-the-fly player-side rendering, and thus more user-customization, would be possible. Maybe they wanted to avoid the legal pitfalls / licensing costs of font file formats and rendering engines.
     
  9. LastRideOut

    LastRideOut Lieutenant Junior Grade Red Shirt

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread

    Yup, the only advantage that the analog-based DVD format has over Blu-Ray is that DVDs are capable of transmitting captions on line 21 for decoding by the television. Captions have always been better, because they typically are descriptive audio captions as well (example; [PHASERS FIRING] ) but, SDH subtitles are becoming more prevalent. Thank goodness. The ST TNG S1 set has SDH subtitles, which I'm grateful for, because there is no difference between Closed Captions and SDH subtitles, content wise.
     
  10. Skywalker

    Skywalker Admiral Admiral

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread

    I find it kind of funny how they spent so much time and effort on getting the video quality just right, only to drop the ball on the audio. :p
     
  11. LastRideOut

    LastRideOut Lieutenant Junior Grade Red Shirt

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  12. Sho

    Sho Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread

    About that text color, is that color-coding by speaker or universal?
     
  13. LastRideOut

    LastRideOut Lieutenant Junior Grade Red Shirt

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread

    It's universal. Yellow is a bit easier on the eyes. The subtitles can't discern speakers, but, occasionally, you will see something like this:

    [PICARD:] Engage!
     
  14. Sho

    Sho Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread

    One more reason to go for non-raster subs, I guess ... in a structured non-graphical format you could naturally tag text spans with sound sources and then have the player chose to assign a random text color to each tag or not, from a user-configurable subset of the gamut that doesn't conflict with their potential color-blindness.
     
  15. LastRideOut

    LastRideOut Lieutenant Junior Grade Red Shirt

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread

    The problems with assigning a color to a character;

    1. It would require me to think during the presentation, AND read the subtitle
    2. Distracting

    Reading subtitles happens in real time, obviously, and I prefer not to have to think, I would rather be entertained. If colors are assigned to characters, I would have to remember the colors for each character, and then remember who is speaking when I see the color. That won't work.

    This is where closed caption really excels. Captions are positioned as close as possible to the speaker. If Picard is on the left and speaking, the caption will be on the left side. When Riker speaks, and if he is on the right side of the screen, the caption will shift to the right side of the screen.

    Subtitles, both regular and SDH subtitles, have never mimicked this behavior until recently. SDH subtitles on the blu-ray will sometimes be positioned near the speaker, but simultaneously. It's a clusterfuck trying to read left to right when two lines of subtitles are displayed on each side of the screen for a total of four lines of subtitles. Insanity. My OCR'd subtitles remove this annoyance. In the closed caption instance with Picard and Riker, as soon as Picard is done speaking, the caption disappears and then shifts to the right when Riker speaks. SDH subtitles do not do this. It is displayed, simultaneously. But, the last few years have been an improvement, so, for that, I am glad.
     
  16. Sho

    Sho Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread

    ^ I'm not sure your reservations about color-coding would hold true in practice, though. Many chat applications offer the option to randomly color the nicknames of chat participants (usually using a stable hashing algorithm that always assigns the same color to the same nickname), and users of these apps often come to rely on identifying chatters by their color entirely and just ignore the actual name text and claim that the contrast achieved by the different colors greatly aids in speed-reading (by giving a tell-tale sign of when the stream of messages switches authors, etc).
     
  17. MiKE42

    MiKE42 Ensign Red Shirt

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread

    Well in this at least, the UK Blu-ray got it right.
    'Disc Four' really *is* Disc Four!

    (I just checked my set!)
     
  18. LastRideOut

    LastRideOut Lieutenant Junior Grade Red Shirt

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread

    You may be right. It may not be that difficult once one gets used to it. After thinking about what you said, it could conceivably be practical if color is assigned in terms of rank.

    In any case, I'm thankful that I have the technical competence to be able to do what I do. Many deaf people are stuck with what they are given. I know quite a few people who are deaf that have difficultly reading the subtitles on blu-rays.
     
  19. LastRideOut

    LastRideOut Lieutenant Junior Grade Red Shirt

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread

    Does your UK set have the audio defects with the 7.1 channel stream? If it doesn't, then it tells me the audio problem occurred in the authoring stage of the US version.
     
  20. MiKE42

    MiKE42 Ensign Red Shirt

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    Re: The OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Season 1 Discussion Thread

    I dunno abt the 7.1 channel problems, I`m not sure if it could tell as I don`t have a 7.1 setup at home.

    But I`ve already noticed a problem on the 2.0 track.
    In the opening credits of 'Encounter at Farpoint'
    the sounds effects of the Ent-D, are out of synch with
    the images!
    Doh

    Given that this problem has been reported on the US release as well, I suppose that we can assume the UK blu-ray is just as buggy as the US one! :sigh:
    (and I assume the Australian one will be when that is released here next week!)


    Cheers