The digital files that WB has put on Amazon and iTunes have been de-interlaced just like DS9. Done very poorly, not to mention but in B5's case, the widescreen masters were not the best in the first place.
Babylon 5
- Thread starter Kail
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Could someone tell me what de-interlacing actually is? I gather it has something to do with those kind of black splotches that sometimes show up on things you watch. Often it happens when up against black clothing or nighttime scenes or just when the show or movie has some kind of dark moody lighting.
Jason
Jason
Nope. After a year, the council was eliminated entirely when the Religious and Worker castes split off to fight the Shadows, while the Warriors who'd been training for the most awesome test of martial prowess imaginable for thirty generations sat it out once it actually arrived.
It's a very '90s end-of-history idea, giving power to the exploited (and disinterested) lower class to move past all the old scores and petty bickering of the prior generation of leaders (remember Sheridan's "We'd be better off if politicians were men of the people" routines?) and focus on "real problems" and not the made-up issues politicos want to debate. Of course, the 21st century has done a pretty good job of wiping the "politicians are all crooks, parties don't matter, vote for personalities if you vote at all" meme out of American discourse. Babylon 5 was a very pre-9/11 story (I don't think in this era of multiple massive political demonstrations a year, including in the first world, it'd make as much sense for Ivanova to foreshadow Clark's takeover of the government based on Santiago's chin-strength).
On the other hand, it's also possible that the Worker caste is most populous numerically. Everything in Minbari society seems to be divided equally among the three castes (for instance, as alluded to above, a third of their ships are owned by each caste, even though under normal circumstances they'd be run by integrated crews), but we never heard of any kind of quota system or anything ensuring they'd be equally distributed (indeed, the quick-and-easy "Calling of my heart" system for switching castes is pretty strong evidence against it), and economically speaking, you'd need very few priests and soldiers compared to the number of miscellaneous citizens to keep society running. Plus, with the Warriors always off fighting, and many of the religious caste people we've met being cloisters like Lennier (given how he crushed on Delenn, didn't seem like there was a lot of hanky-panky going on at the Temple), it's possible the Workers are the only ones who are raising children in any number.
Those sound more like data-rate issues. Interlacing problems are when there are thing horizontal stripes in moving objects on screen, like you're looking at it through a comb.
Now that you mention it, I remember the kind of comedy they did about politicians in the 90s. Clinton jokes focused on him being fat. Futurama ran that episode where the two candidates were clones of each other, and Saturday Night Live ran segments joking about how Gore and Bush were identical.
It's kind of gone the other way, where everything is about party, politicians vote lock step, and people will tolerate nearly anything in a person so long as they are in the right party.
But I don't think it's until 2016's outsider candidates that people imagined the possibility of politicians not just being corporate drones.
Good point about that culture in the 90s, in Santiago's election it's portrayed as there being little difference who wins. People felt that way in 2000 and certainly do not feel that way now.
If bandwidth is limited and the data rate is lower than the rate that is required to transfer all the information for each frame, a digital picture, which is rendered as a number of separate rectangular regions, looks quite blocky as each region is only displayed for low spatial frequencies. The higher frequency information, which provides fine detail, is selectively truncated. Issues with artefacting on DVD and BD discs are a little different - ringing, contouring, posterising, aliasing - those are an effect of compression algorithms used in the conversion to digital from an analogue source. A player should have no problem keeping up with rendering all the information on a disc, but it will display any compression artefacts that are encoded in the data.
Anyway, that's my take on it. A audiovisual professional will be able to correct my perhaps overly simplified view.
How the video is compressed. To reduce file size, different codecs (compression-decomression algorithms) do different tricks, and one of them is throwing away stuff that's less "important," like areas that are very dark, or mostly the same color. If the black splotches you're talking about are squares or rectangles, that's definitely because the video was compressed at a lower data-rate.
I'm fairly sure England was mentioned as qualifying for the Football World Cup in ENT, and Worf accidently killed another Football player when he was a teenager. As well as a few other mentions in ST
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Soccer
I think that is how most people still see most politicans. Trump is seen as something different. Something worst than we could ever imagine. How people feel in the long-run is if we get more Trump's or if things go back to the usual crooks we expect.
Jason
So is the solution basically to get faster internet? I don't have the fastest speed but not the slowest either.
Jason
In this case, no. It seems like Amazon is using a lower-quality source than the DVDs, possibly made for when internet was slower and they didn't think they'd need a better-quality version since no one's internet would be fast enough to receive it.
I just assumed the quality was 'bad' on Amazon because that's what there is and watching on a 13 inch screen I never noticed. But yes it's really bad. The first season of TNG on 'best' film quality is 6.84GB per hour of streaming, for Babylon 5 it's barely over 1GB.
I'm guessing the source is the DVDs, but poorly encoded in the early days of Amazon's streaming service. You could make better versions from the DVDs now. Though the best thing would be a 4:3 release -- either from the original broadcast masters (what appears to be on vudu.com), or better yet a new scan of the film prints JMS has mentioned in recent tweets.
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Reading the posts above, I'm kind of glad B5 isn't available on Prime in the UK. Poor video quality is likely to put newcomers off.
Even better would be a HD release with CGI done to match the 16:9 format the show was filmed in. But that is a pipe dream.
I've never watched the show before and I'm still putting up with it fine. Small screen I can' tell. Plus it makes the CGI look better in comparison.
I suspect you're in a minority in that respect but it sounds like it would look crappy on a big TV.
Apparently, it is now possible to train neural networks to sharpen images, enhance detail, and even fill in missing areas of a frame with predicted content to expand its aspect ratio from 4:3 to 16:9. It would be interesting to see what the result would be when applied to B5 and its CGI.
I was thinking more about Bernie Sanders. He inspired a lot of emotional reactions in people because he seemed like a man who said what he meant and didn't just say what market research said would make them popular, then do whatever the donors told them to. I said 'Outsider candidates' because I remembered that that's also how Trump supporters saw Trump, accurately or not.
It's a good thing Mordon never asked Trump what he wanted. He would have had a full on climax. (Or did he?)
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