Season ONE OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Discussion Thread

[Jeff O'Connor]

^ Haha. Live long and prosper, eh?

[LastRideOut]

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.

[cbspock]

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

[Mott the barber]

Jeff O'Connor wrote:

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I've read somewhere (infamous opening words, I know...) that part of the reason McFadden left was because she felt really uncomfortable around... uh, who was it... Maurice Hurley, I think? That he was making advances on her?

Crazy stuff if true. But I don't even begin to remember where I heard it is, so eh. Not trying to spread nonsense, though. I know I read it somewhere...

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

[Maxwell Everett]

Sagart wrote:

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Has anyone noticed a problem with the opening credits? The Enterprise seems to move in and out of, well, a dullness, the brightness of the ship changes. The names of the cast lack brightness as well; the picture gets brighter as the Enterprise moves into shot after Wil Wheaton's name. Anyone else seeing this?

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?

[Maxwell Everett]

LastRideOut wrote:

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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.

I was wondering if anyone else might notice that!

[LastRideOut]

Maxwell Everett wrote:

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I was wondering if anyone else might notice that!

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.

[Sho]

^ 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.

[LastRideOut]

Sho wrote:

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^ 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.

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.

[Skywalker]

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.

[LastRideOut]

Here is a link to a screenshot I took, which shows the subtitles I've OCR'd from the blu-ray.

http://i150.photobucket.com/albums/s...engrabHD-1.png

[Sho]

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

[LastRideOut]

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!

[Sho]

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.

[LastRideOut]

Sho wrote:

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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.

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.