DVD oddities

[MrBrown]

Checking out some of my DVDs, just to see, what I have, I found some oddities in releases...
...not that these are things that should be something preserved. And not regarding faulty discs, but seem to be choices done willingly for the release.

I don't talk on oddities, like flipper discs with the movie split up to two sides. i.e.: Limited DVD Lord of the Rings trilogy, with the cinematic and the extended Version on one Disc, splitted onto two sides. Even If flipper Movies were not that common, expecially with normal length movies. Some where done in the pre "DVD9 mastering is standard" era. (Starship Troopers first DVD release, at least in Germany, was a DVD-10, with turning around in the movie).

And I am not talking easter eggs.

I thought of/found oddities like:

Terminator 2 - japanese PIBF-1001 DVD release
So, what is odd here? It is a DVD9 (okay), but the Movie itself is split into two separate movie titles on the Disc itself.
Title 1: Running Time 1:19:44 (Chapters 1-42) Ending with Sarah driving away to assasinate Dyson...
Title 2: Running Time 0:56:42 (Chapters 1-28) ...starting with John and Temrinator figuring her plan.

As if the split it manually to avoid the Layer Change inside the movie.


Jackie Brown - first german DVD release
This one is kinda funny. The Movie is open matte 4:3 on the Disc. But.. you can watch it matted to widescreen... with the help of a subtitle stream, just containing black on Top and Bottom to make a softcoded letterbox matting to 1.85:1...
I am sure this way of matting is exactly the part of the frame the director wanted to matte for cinema.. yeah... for sure!

Jackie Brown - first german DVD release
This one is kinda funny. The Movie is open matte 4:3 on the Disc. But.. you can watch it matted to widescreen... with the help of a subtitle stream, just containing black on Top and Bottom to make a softcoded letterbox matting to 1.85:1...
I am sure this way of matting is exactly the part of the frame the director wanted to matte for cinema.. yeah... for sure!

That's just silly

[MrBrown]

Jackie Brown - first german DVD release
This one is kinda funny. The Movie is open matte 4:3 on the Disc. But.. you can watch it matted to widescreen... with the help of a subtitle stream, just containing black on Top and Bottom to make a softcoded letterbox matting to 1.85:1...
I am sure this way of matting is exactly the part of the frame the director wanted to matte for cinema.. yeah... for sure!

That's just silly

Exactly. That's why I thought it was a nice laughable thing to share as oddity.
I would not believe that a company would do such a silly thing, if the DVD won't stand in my collection.

At least I have a open matte full screen release of Jackie Brown...

caps-a-holic Comparison
(just check out image 4... warning: NSFW : )

[spoRv]

Jackie Brown - first german DVD release
This one is kinda funny. The Movie is open matte 4:3 on the Disc. But.. you can watch it matted to widescreen... with the help of a subtitle stream, just containing black on Top and Bottom to make a softcoded letterbox matting to 1.85:1...
I am sure this way of matting is exactly the part of the frame the director wanted to matte for cinema.. yeah... for sure!

That's just silly

Exactly.

Don't think so... it's a great way to have two versions (open matte and letterboxed) on a single disc, with just few KBs more added for matting... a thing I was trying to reproduce using subs on BD, but had problems with ff/rew.

[MrBrown]

Jackie Brown - first german DVD release
This one is kinda funny. The Movie is open matte 4:3 on the Disc. But.. you can watch it matted to widescreen... with the help of a subtitle stream, just containing black on Top and Bottom to make a softcoded letterbox matting to 1.85:1...
I am sure this way of matting is exactly the part of the frame the director wanted to matte for cinema.. yeah... for sure!

That's just silly

Exactly.

Don't think so... it's a great way to have two versions (open matte and letterboxed) on a single disc, with just few KBs more added for matting... a thing I was trying to reproduce using subs on BD, but had problems with ff/rew.

That would only work, if the intended matted Version is exactly in the center of the full screen image, and is supposed to have the same seen image in the wide. As soon as the different aspect ratios are suposed to have each some more information compared to the other aspect, like the widescreen has lesser image on top and mottom and more on the sides that way of matting won't result in the true matted version.

So in most cases it wont really work.

[jerryshadoe]

You have a point...

How often do we see widescreen films that are matted "dead-center" throughout the entire feature?

[spoRv]

How often do we see widescreen films that are matted "dead-center" throughout the entire feature?

...sometime it happens... e.g. Jurassic Park... I admit it could be a rare case, but in that case, it will be useful, don't you think?

[MrBrown]

It could be some interesting kind of preserve the combination in a movie file, when anamorphic widescreen has not a better quality, compared to the 4:3 version.
But on BluRay it won't be a good option, because the 4:3 Open Matted Version would be pillar boxed, and the soft Matted Widescreen would result in a much smaller Frame on the screen.

If it would happen to have the Open Matted Version in a width of 1920 then the height would be (in the case of 4:3 ratio) 1440 pixel, and that would not be BluRay standard...

But it would be nice to have such a none standard 4:3 HD version with soft subtitled matting. That would safe some space, but I believe, that most players would have a problem playing it...

[spoRv]

...a 16:9 open matte version will be 1920x1080 (or 1920x1040 if 1.85:1) while a (matted) 2.35:1 version will be 1920x816...

[MrBrown]

It depends on what AR the open matted is... I was more thinking of 4:3 open matte, like Jackie Brown, Evil Dead (original).