My unofficial Collectors' Edition DVD

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

OK. So here's the story. In China we don't get PAL DVDs of Avatar, and everybody knows that NTSC movies are just horrible. The framerate needs to change from 24fps to 30fps, which results in a lot of stuttering. Even worse, NTSC has bad resolution and for a great movie like Avatar, resolution is EVERYTHING.

So here's what I did. I used the collectors' edition Bluray, ripped it, and then used Avidemux to encode it into a two-pass MPEG-2 PS file at 7.3 GiB. This creates a great video. I then add subtitles to it and burn it with DVDStyler. To save space for the video bitrate I only included one sound track (Dolby Digital 5.1 448kbps) and two subtitles (English and Chinese). The Chinese subtitles were from a guy on another forum. It is way better translated than the official version, so I included his version instead of the stock one which came with the BluRay.

And I doodled a bit on GIMP and came up with a cover. I then went to a place where they print stuff on DVDs for the equivalence of 1/6 USD. Here is the result: (sorry about my crappy webcam)





Notice "Uniltìrantokx".

Here is a screenshot of the video itself:

It would be wonderful if somebody uploaded the same frame from the official DVD.


DISCLAIMER: This work is entirely legal because 1. There was only one copy made 2. No redistribution 3. No public showing of result. This lies within fair use rights of users.

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

Sry for doubleposting, but if you wonder why I did that, the only reason was I wanted to beat my cousin's official version (which isn't even collectors edition) in terms of quality. He was amazed...

[Yayo]

If you can only acquire NTSC, how did you gain access to a Blu-Ray version?

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

NTSC Blu-ray. NTSC Blu-ray is at 23.976 with a soft telecine marker that makes most standalone players upscale to 29.97fps, which stutters. Computers have no problem removing the marker and getting 23.976fps, which is stutter-less. The only problem is that NTSC DVDs in China are "hard telecined" which means that you need sophisticated software to remove the stutter, which unfortunately does not exist in either TVs or DVD players.

Converting 23.976fps to 25fps generates very minimal stutter that is almost unnoticeable, and compared to NTSC DVD's 720x480 pixels, PAL has 720x576 pixels. Smoother motion and better picture than official.

I also don't understand why PAL stuff is so hard to get when China is a PAL country. Most vendors are in the misconception that since NTSC comes from America, and America is more advanced than China, NTSC must be better than PAL. So unfortunate are we! It seems that only the lucky guys in Europe get PAL DVDs.

In China nobody cares about technical stuff. Here is a TERRIFIC example:

China recently switched to digital cable TV. The quality was acceptable, but there was something that really bugged me. The China Central Television-1 station broadcasted with a 16:9 ratio, which looked great on my HDTV. However, all other stations broadcasted with a 4:3 ratio. Ignoring this fact, the set-top box decides to stretch everything to 16:9, with no option disabling this feature. Of course I can compensate that with the TV remote by setting the AR of the TV, but unless you constantly switch ARs on the remote, it is either CCTV-1 really skinny and others normal, or CCTV-1 normal and all others fat. I chose the first option, but it seems that nobody here even thinks that the ugly stretching of 4:3 images onto a 16:9 AR is even perceptible. Tawtute ayskxawng...