pragmatic use of DVD format with iTunes

Usually I've only converted DVDs a few at a time to work inside iTunes, so it was my recent short blitz of about 30 DVDs that made me take a little more notice of the format.

My pragmatic view is that it is still 'good enough' for many movies, even though there's increasing HD streaming and the declining Bluray as alternatives.

Traditional European PAL standard television has 625 lines of which 575 are used to make the actual picture, with the rest for controls and suchlike. The Americans use NTSC which uses 525 lines of which 483 are used to make the picture.

As a consequence, PAL DVDs are usually either 576 or 540 lines in their source definition. The normal width is 720 pixels, making a total pixel count of around 400,000 or 0.4megapixels.

In practice, the width is often stretched to make the wide-screen formats which mostly show up on television as 16:9. The original widescreen movie formats with 35mm film stock use anamorphic lenses to compress the image widthways and then have it stretched back out when projected in a cinema. See the squashed looking car below...

Otherwise, only a small part of the film frame would be used when making the movie.

Television/computer playback uses a similar trick, stretching letterbox and widescreen formats so that they look right on replay.

That's how systems like Panavision worked and the technique persists to this day, although increasingly with digital filming, the sensor ratios can be adjusted for the format.

It also means that home entertainment systems have to handle upscaling from the standard definition format, so that the picture isn't just a small rectangle in the middle of the screen.

Ever since the old cathode ray tubes gave way to flat panels, the number of available pixels (lines and columns) has been increasing. The commonest 1080p HD format has, yes, 1080 lines instead of 575. Blu-ray goes to 1920 across × 1080 lines of pixels. The newer 4k is 3840 x 2160 (8 megapixels) and 8k is 7680 × 4320 (33.2 megapixels). Naturally, as the pixels increase, so does the replay bandwidth requirement.

Confusingly, digital cinemas have either 2K cinema screens (2048×1080 or 2.2 megapixels) or 4K cinema (4096×2160 or 8.8 megapixels). And IMAX? It's often a projection of 70mm film although they are also using doubled up 2k projectors nowadays.

Whew.

So back to my conversion of DVDs. Tradeoff of content, quality and convenience.

I'll simply preserve the original quality of the DVD. That means the maximum I can squeeze out of the DVD is 720x576. With anamorphic conversion this goes up to generally a maximum of 1080 across. The rest becomes a function of the upscaling available on the playback equipment. 15 minutes to convert, auto-catalogue with MetaZ, adding the 1.3Gb image size with 5.1 sound to iTunes.

And you know what? For practical day-to-day viewing at normal distances, the DVD quality still seems fine as a tradeoff between quality and convenience. Wanna see that old favourite movie again? Yes, it's here and right now.

Of course I'll still watch movies in higher definition from streaming or occasional Bluray (weird that it auto-corrects to blurry?) and I'll sometimes notice the difference for the first few minutes. Then the story kicks in and with a few exceptions, the technical wizardry isn't as significant.

adding some indie movies to my iTunes library using Handbrake and MetaZ

I was recently reminded by blogger Naomi that my DVD player can support multi-region DVDs. Useful if I really want to see something that isn't available in the UK. Mostly, our DVD player hardly gets used because of online films, but I did that thing to get it to work properly for all-region playback again.

It made me think about getting a few more movies that were on my 'want-to-view' list but which were not available on any of the streamed services.

I hit eBay and to my surprise found a random bundle of around 30 DVDs which were nearly all ones I wanted to see. It looked far more curated than most of the eBay 'job-lot' collections which are suspiciously like the unsellable ones from a car boot sale.

So I took the plunge and bought the inexpensive bundle. It turned out the fella selling them was on a meditation retreat somewhere, so they took about three weeks to arrive. Now I've a fresh selection of recent and mainly indie film titles to work through.

I'll add them to my iTunes library as well, so a spot of Handbrake + MetaZ is required to get them converted.

The thing about that particular combination is that it can make the videos looks the same as others downloaded from the iTunes Store, complete with the plot precis, actor and production credits, certificates, run-times etc.

I mainly convert videos on the Mac using Handbrake's 'Normal' setting. It nearly always finds the correct DVD track of the main movie and a couple of decent soundtracks (2 channel and 5.1). Occasionally a movie with a Theatrical and a Director cut will cause it to ask which one to use.

If there's subtitles, dubbing or a director's commentary (like some Swedish films that have an alternative English language dubbed soundtrack, or foreign films requiring subtitling) then there's usually a customisable combination, although for most movies there's no need to tinker with any of the settings.

MetaZ can be run after conversion and adds the same information that the iTunes store includes. It's slightly more fiddly with a TV series, although Handbrake happily handles multiple episodes on the same DVD.

The end result seems to me to be indistinguishable from the iTunes layout, and the video quality can be at the highest level available from the original DVD.

It's a handy way to keep videos catalogued, compared with having them laying around in cupboards and shelves and makes them available on demand, from any device including when I'm stuck on the bike turbo.

Which reminds me...

you've got the kind of nerve i like

As part of the 'fixing the iMac' project, I decided to clean up the iTunes library by de-duplicating some of the excess tunes. I think it's a factor of the number of devices that get plugged into the Mac and sometimes upload their tracks to the main list.

A side effect was that the next time the iPod in the car was plugged in, it wanted to be reset to the new library. Fair enough, it would be far more convenient to listen to the Decemberists without 20 copies of 'Eli the Barrowboy' popping up during the play sequence.

I left the rebuild to run overnight and plugged the iPod back into the car today. Just one thing I hadn't expected. My old default "won't offend anyone" Norah Jones startup was replaced by an intense nosebleed inducing Hed Kandi mashup when the iPod first boots.

It doesn't look good at traffic lights playing filthy disco and bomb blast bass lines as a default selection.

I've decided to go with something far more mellow by the delightful Tiny Ruins instead. The video version above is a live acoustic guitar take of the piano and double bass version on the album. It's one of those albums to play all through with a quiet glass of wine.

There's another chain reaction from the iMac incident - I've noticed the number of sundry disk drives that have sprouted and should really be rationalised. Worryingly, I can remember eventually getting to the first Terabyte of data but nowadays that seems to be a minimum increment (gulp).