Technical Issues and Questions

[Michael Kerpan]

We wanted to watch the new BRD of The Innocents tonight -- on our 3-month-old Sherwood BR player. No dice -- except for lighting up the front panel and making a bit of disc noise -- totally dead. Drawer wouldn't open. No response to a USB flash drive. No signal of any sort to the TV.

[Matt]

Shockingly, the Sherwood has a 1-year warranty. It could be like pulling teeth to get it replaced, but you're not stuck with it.

[Perkins Cobb]

I have a friend who successfully returned two consecutive Sherwoods that died during the warranty period, so it can be done. However, I wonder if a replacement unit would, at this point, have the new firmware & would thus not be region-free.

Michael, my own Sherwood has had a couple of tantrums where it wouldn't read any discs at all, but it started behaving again after I unplugged it for a while. Sounds like yours is deader than that, though, alas.

[Michael Kerpan]

I've written to Sherwood's tech support department -- and will report back as to what happens (or doesn't happen). But for now, Innocents and Early Summer must sit neglected and unwatched. ;~{

I'll keep re-trying the Sherwood every day or two -- but I may not feel much confidence in it, even if it does revive.

Even if a new replacement unit has the dreaded new firmware, I wonder if Sherwood could/would ship it locked to Region B (as I don't need to use it for Region A or for DVDs).

[denti alligator]

This is scary. I wonder how long my Sherwood will last.
It freezes up on me every now and then and I have to shut it down (via front power switch), even while it tries to read a disc. I let it sit and it works again.

[Michael Kerpan]

I looked inside my Sherwood -- to see if anything obvious was wrong (loose cable, clearly blown fuse). No clues to be seen -- but some of the workmanship was pretty shoddy.

[Norbie]

I'm sure that most of us remember the good old days of analogue video tapes, and
the whole thing of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy...etc. where with the next
generation we lose the PQ. Ever had the experiance of watching a film that is like five
generations away of the original copy, and noticing how crapy the image was?

Now..... does the same thing happen with digital copies?

Say i have an original cd of The Beatles Help! album and i copy it to my hard drive using
a lossless decoder. Now i take that copy onto another external drive, and the copy of
that onto my ipod. All the time i'm using a lossless decoder.

So as i go from one generation to the next, do i lose some of the quality of the recording
as i would of if i was using an analogue tape?

Thanks, and sorry for not making myself any more clearer.

[perkizitore]

Even if a new replacement unit has the dreaded new firmware, I wonder if Sherwood could/would ship it locked to Region B (as I don't need to use it for Region A or for DVDs).

I am pretty confident that you can replace the current firmware with an older version.

[Numero Trois]

Say i have an original cd of The Beatles Help! album and i copy it to my hard drive using
a lossless decoder. Now i take that copy onto another external drive, and the copy of
that onto my ipod. All the time i'm using a lossless decoder.

Even with "lossless" decoders technically there's going to be a certain degree of lost audio quality no matter what. Now this difference may be extremely minor. Most people either don't notice or don't care to notice. What really matters is if you notice the difference when you play back the copy. If you don't like what you hear, then you may want to stick to the original CD. For some people it doesn't make a difference. For me, even with the highest possible bit rate I still notice "something" missing with many copies that I make. But is this difference enough to hassle with CDs and LPS all the time? Maybe sometimes but not always.

So as i go from one generation to the next, do i lose some of the quality of the recording
as i would of if i was using an analogue tape?

For audio and video, even with current available technology available for PC there's going to be some degree of lost information when making copies. It's just that the difference is nowhere near as bad as with analog. As long as the best possible sampling rates are used. One may barely if at all notice the difference.

[zitherstrings]

If you rip from a CD in actual lossless then differences you hear are your imagination. A CD is digital and if format is truly lossless digital coding will not be lesser. Of course if you do it in the wrong way, or the CD is bad/drive not great there can be loss introduced.

Also you can copy that rip five million times and no, there won't be deprecation. Copying digital source replicates code digit by digit. Unless your computer is making errors there's no room for loss there. If you're re-encoding it each time there likely will be loss because you'll probably be using compressed formats.

[mfunk9786]

I have a question regarding Blu-ray (and DVD, to a lesser extent) transfers.

I've always wondered why, when a film has an opening title sequence overtop of filmed action or images comparable to those throughout the film, why these sequences look so dirty and low-resolution [with a whole lot of movement and flicker of the image in some cases] compared to the rest of the film. Surely companies aren't just ignoring these sequences, so I figure there must be a technical reason.

[Matt]

Most of these kinds of sequences were done using an optical printer, meaning the film material in that section has been rephotographed, perhaps a couple of times. That introduces a loss of clarity, as well as more grain and possibly some dust and scratches (which Blu-ray makes very apparent). There's no way, really, of removing all that and making it look pristine without redoing the titles (or the fades to black, or the cross-fades, or the superimpositions, or whatever effect was achieved optically).

I say enjoy it, it's an artifact of the way films are (or used to be) made.

[zedz]

The overlaid credits would have been an optical, so the footage behind them would have lost at least one generation (if there were dissolves or other opticals applied to the footage, it could have been two or more). It's related to the pop and drop in resolution you often get on either side of an optical dissolve (as opposed to an in-camera one), and the further away from the negative you get, the more pronounced these things become.

Maybe I should have spoilered that, because once you start seeing these things (like hearing the big splice in 'Strawberry Fields Forever') you can't unsee them.

OR - what Matt said.

[MichaelB]

The overlaid credits would have been an optical, so the footage behind them would have lost at least one generation (if there were dissolves or other opticals applied to the footage, it could have been two or more). It's related to the pop and drop in resolution you often get on either side of an optical dissolve (as opposed to an in-camera one), and the further away from the negative you get, the more pronounced these things become.

And, as Matt says, these things are often a lot more apparent on Blu-ray than they are even on a 35mm print, because the latter will almost certainly be at least one and possibly several stages further removed from the negative. Whereas if the Blu-ray transfer was sourced from the original neg, or a fine-grain interpos, then the qualitative difference between footage that's been run through an optical printer and footage that hasn't becomes much more marked.

For a similar example, I never used to be bothered by the way that 1970s British TV kept cutting between studio scenes shot on videotape and location work shot on 16mm, because the quality of VHS and even broadcast television at the time minimised the differences. But they're really glaring on DVD, and I imagine Blu-ray would make the difference even more obvious, if anyone's mad enough to transfer, say, the primarily SD (and analogue PAL) Dad's Army or Fawlty Towers to Blu-ray from both videotape and film elements.

[colinr0380]

To back up MichaelB's statement, here's that Screenwipe segment about changes in TV editing practices (and swap out reality television for Michael Bay and you've probably got a description of blockbuster films too!)

[mfunk9786]

Thanks for the information, guys!

[David M.]

Say i have an original cd of The Beatles Help! album and i copy it to my hard drive using
a lossless decoder. Now i take that copy onto another external drive, and the copy of
that onto my ipod. All the time i'm using a lossless decoder.

The sound quality would stay the same, since the encoder would be lossless.

Even with "lossless" decoders technically there's going to be a certain degree of lost audio quality no matter what. (...) For me, even with the highest possible bit rate I still notice "something" missing with many copies that I make.

Not true. Unless there is a fault in the encoder design, the lossless encodes will sound the exact same as the original PCM uncompressed data.

For audio and video, even with current available technology available for PC there's going to be some degree of lost information when making copies.

Also not true, if you're talking about simply copying files from one disk to another. The data stays the same. Quality gets lost if the data is compressed with a lossy format.

[Roger Ryan]

Back to the optical printing issue for a moment...

You don't see this issue with modern films due to the all-digital editing environments, but they were always part of films using an optical/chemical process. TAXI DRIVER is a great example: Scorcese's credit sequence features layer upon layer of dissolves and superimpositions...which then dissolve into the film's opening shot of Travis Bickle entering the taxi manager's office (all multiple generations down). The reverse angle cut returns the film to the first generation and it's a startling change in clarity within the same scene.

Once you become aware of this in older films, you can usually tell if the shot will end in a dissolve or if some special optical superimposition will occur by the slight degradation in image quality.

[Matt]

Once you become aware of this in older films, you can usually tell if the shot will end in a dissolve or if some special optical superimposition will occur by the slight degradation in image quality.

That's why I kind of love it, just as I love film grain and reel change marks--all of which have nearly vanished in our digital age. But I'm not a film snob, I love digital video noise, too.

[Forrest Taft]

I've had an Oppo dvd player for a year now, and I'm very happy with it, but for the past week it has started to act very strange. Whenever I play a non-widescreen disc, the image is automatically stretched, and I have to change the picture size on my TV - very annoying having to change back and forth all the time. I can't remember this ever happening before, and the only setting I've changed recently was some de-interlacing stuff on the Oppo (it was a Warner Archive disc I was watching...). If anyone knows what I have to look for on the setup menu, I'd appreciate some help. It's an Oppo DV-980H, by the way. I realize the problem could be with the settings on my television as well, but have no idea how to go about fixing it. ](*,)

Edit: "Sqeeze Wide Screen TV", as opposed to "16:9 Wide", seems to do the trick. Have no idea why the player at one point decided to switch to 16:9 by itself, though...

[domino harvey]

Isn't there a setting about exporting in native aspect ratio? That might do the trick

[David M.]

Yes, "16:9 Wide/Sqz" (a badly labeled option) is what should be selected on a 16:9 TV to prevent 4:3 material getting distorted.

[Forrest Taft]

Thanks for your replies. Just found the manual (thought I'd thrown in the trash...) and it does say that the 16:9 Wide setting will stretch 4:3 sources, whereas the 16:9 Wide/Auto setting will preserve the correct aspect ratios. There is no 16:9 Wide/Auto setting on my setup-menu, so I assume they just changed the name to 16:9 Wide/Sqz, as it seems to be doing the trick. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to buy some groceries.

[Michael Kerpan]

Got my BDP-5004 back from Sherwood. The good news, it works again. The bad news -- the region setting codes don't seem to work anymore -- and it can't play region B BRDs. I've tried changing the code with both the drawer open and closed (with no disc). After I enter the codes, I get a red circle with a slash through it -- which seems to indicate that the code is being rejected as invalid.

[knives]

I've finally gotten a R B disc to test out my Sherwood, but It's not playing. I punched in the code 875102. Is there any part of of the menu screen or something else I need to go to to get it to work?