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Worth getting Blu-ray player for anime?


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Garuda7



Joined: 31 Jul 2012
Posts: 3
PostPosted: Mon Sep 03, 2012 3:34 am Reply with quote
Hello, I would like to start collecting anime and was wondering what your thoughts were on buying them in blu-ray form. Of course I would like the best quality, but I'm a bit hesitant on dropping ~60 for a blu ray drive(for my computer), then $50 for blu-ray software, then extra per blu disc over a regular DVD. If there is a definite quality increase, I'll go for it, I'd just like to know what you guys think first. Thanks!

(extra info- my monitor is 23" at 1920x1080)
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誤称



Joined: 12 Mar 2012
Posts: 549
PostPosted: Mon Sep 03, 2012 3:37 am Reply with quote
There is a definite improvement in sound if nothing else improving from DVD to BD. Personally, I didn't do it in my computer, I bought a BD player that supposedly also plays video games and streams internets.
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Garuda7



Joined: 31 Jul 2012
Posts: 3
PostPosted: Mon Sep 03, 2012 3:40 am Reply with quote
誤称 wrote:
There is a definite improvement in sound if nothing else improving from DVD to BD. Personally, I didn't do it in my computer, I bought a BD player that supposedly also plays video games and streams internets.

Haha, thanks for the info. A PS3 is a little out of the price range right now(and besides, I'm a PC gamer!) but I do have some high quality headphones that could benefit from the blu ray.
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Polycell



Joined: 16 Jan 2012
Posts: 4623
PostPosted: Mon Sep 03, 2012 4:38 am Reply with quote
If you're willing to lose the menus, you can always use MakeMKV. I believe it can stream directly to VLC or MPlayer if you don't feel like policing dumps.

EDIT: Also, I've found that HD is always worth it, at least for native-HD productions.
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marie-antoinette



Joined: 18 Sep 2005
Posts: 4136
Location: Ottawa, Canada
PostPosted: Mon Sep 03, 2012 8:03 am Reply with quote
If you are just looking to get it for anime, my answer would be that it depends on what shows you are watching.

For what I watch, it would not be worth it because the visuals generally aren't really all that fancy (I have a player but the only anime I specifically bought in Bluray is Madoka Magica). The rest of my collection is all DVD and just fine (well, there are a few more I might have gone Bluray on if I rebought them but most of them, not so much).

But if you mainly watch the shows that have better art/animation or plan to use it for other entertainment too, then sure, it definitely makes a difference but that difference is more impressive on the shows/movies that look damn good in the first place.
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yuna49



Joined: 27 Aug 2008
Posts: 3804
PostPosted: Mon Sep 03, 2012 8:30 am Reply with quote
If your monitor has HDMI inputs, you could just buy a $60-70 Blu-ray player and connect it directly to the monitor.

In general, BD transfers of movies are usually worthwhile since filmstock has more "resolution" (used loosely here) than digitized frames. Current anime TV series are generally captured at 720p, but there are older series like Moribito that were presented in the 16:9 format but still captured at 480p.

If you are in the US and have a reasonably high-speed Internet connection, you should take a look at Crunchyroll's HD streams and compare them to the 480p versions.
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walw6pK4Alo



Joined: 12 Mar 2008
Posts: 9322
PostPosted: Mon Sep 03, 2012 12:10 pm Reply with quote
If you're buying any analog (drawn on cels, shot on film, remastered digitally, typically pre-2000) anime on BluRay, you're getting an incredibly better looking picture than any DVD, even a well crafted dual-layer using the transfer, can offer you. That's if the remaster was well done, most things are but there's a few really bad ones out there, like 3x3 Eyes. When an HD transfer is done well, like Riding Bean, Venus Wars, Five Star Stories, Nausicaa, and Akira, the effect is dramatic. It's not just "bigger", the fine grain structure is resolved in the picture, lines become sharper, and colors are corrected to what they should have appeared like physically. It doesn't just apply to films and OVAs, TV series like Escaflowne, Berserk, Cardcaptor Sakura, Nadia – they look fantastic in HD. Escaflowne especially, some shots look practically 3D and give a real sense of depth in the art direction.

For digital anime, anything pre-2008 is likely an upscale. Those don't always make for good BDs, but a few cases like Kanon 2006 and Clannad season one make the cut. From 2008 on, things are at least 540p if not higher, so BD benefit begins to take effect. As we continue on, native resolutions for digital anime should increase, and there's no doubt higher budget films and OVAs will all be natively 1080p shortly, if they're not already. The benefits for digital anime on BluRay over DVD is that it isn't being upscaled by your system, all the info is on the disc.
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P€|\||§_|\/|ast@



Joined: 14 Feb 2006
Posts: 3498
Location: IN your nightmares
PostPosted: Mon Sep 03, 2012 1:06 pm Reply with quote
walw6pK4Alo wrote:
For digital anime, anything pre-2008 is likely an upscale. Those don't always make for good BDs, but a few cases like Kanon 2006 and Clannad season one make the cut. From 2008 on, things are at least 540p if not higher, so BD benefit begins to take effect. As we continue on, native resolutions for digital anime should increase, and there's no doubt higher budget films and OVAs will all be natively 1080p shortly, if they're not already. The benefits for digital anime on BluRay over DVD is that it isn't being upscaled by your system, all the info is on the disc.
This brings me to something I've been wondering about. I have a DVD player that upscales to HDMI. It doesn't play BluRays, but I can connect it to my 1080p PC monitor to play DVDs and they look nice. Even the forementioned Moribito DVDs look great (but still noticeably different than actual HD quality). One of the reviews that someone made of my monitor is that it works poorly with 720p content, but the upscale feature of the DVD player compensates for that. So how exactly does it do that? Upscaling 720p or lower content to get an effective 1080p-like image.
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Tuor_of_Gondolin



Joined: 20 Apr 2009
Posts: 3524
Location: Bellevue, WA
PostPosted: Mon Sep 03, 2012 1:17 pm Reply with quote
Past,

Well for TVs it works like this: either the player *or* the TV can do the upscaling. If you have a cheap TV, it might not be able to do it at all, in which case the player will do all the upscaling. If the roles are reversed and you have a poor player but an excellent TV, then the TV would do it.

Usually, you want the player to do it as quality player has more power set aside to deal with specifics like upscaling 720P to 1080P while the TV can focus more on things like color palate, greyscale, and stuff like that.

For a computer, I'd guess it's actually the GPU that does the upscaling if the player isn't up to snuff, not the monitor itself, but I'm not certain of that.

I wouldn't bother getting a BD player for my computer, to be honest. A monitor is just too small for me to be able to properly appreciate the improved quality you get from a decent BD anime.
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yuna49



Joined: 27 Aug 2008
Posts: 3804
PostPosted: Mon Sep 03, 2012 1:23 pm Reply with quote
Past wrote:
So how exactly does it do that? Upscaling 720p or lower content to get an effective 1080p-like image.

Upscaling consists of interpolating pixels based on the color values of the ones surrounding it. A 720p frame consists of 1280x720, or 921,600 pixels. When the frame is upscaled to 1080p, those 921,600 pixels become the basis to generate 2,073.600 pixels. It should be obvious that there cannot be any additional real information in the upscaled frame. Instead the new pixels are generated by averaging the ones around it.

I haven't a clue what the person you're citing is talking about. "Anamorphic" DVDs use non-square pixels to encode a 16:9 frame into the 720x480 format of DVDs. There are no 720p DVDs. Upscaling DVD players take advantage of the anamorphic format, but they don't magically create 720p content out 480p originals. Nothing can create additional information that doesn't exist in the original source.
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Polycell



Joined: 16 Jan 2012
Posts: 4623
PostPosted: Mon Sep 03, 2012 1:44 pm Reply with quote
Past wrote:
One of the reviews that someone made of my monitor is that it works poorly with 720p content, but the upscale feature of the DVD player compensates for that. So how exactly does it do that? Upscaling 720p or lower content to get an effective 1080p-like image.
It sounds like your monitor just has a crappy scaler, which isn't surprising since they're made to be run at their native resolution and just offer the scaler to deal with cases where that's not possible(usually the BIOS). The DVD player just uses a smarter algorithm.
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P€|\||§_|\/|ast@



Joined: 14 Feb 2006
Posts: 3498
Location: IN your nightmares
PostPosted: Mon Sep 03, 2012 2:14 pm Reply with quote
yuna49 wrote:
I haven't a clue what the person you're citing is talking about. "Anamorphic" DVDs use non-square pixels to encode a 16:9 frame into the 720x480 format of DVDs. There are no 720p DVDs. Upscaling DVD players take advantage of the anamorphic format, but they don't magically create 720p content out 480p originals. Nothing can create additional information that doesn't exist in the original source.
Oh thanks for clearing that up, that makes sense. I don't know if the reveiwer was only talking about content on DVDs and I don't remember if he actually specified SD, 480 or 720p. I think what he meant was that anything that wasn't full HD and not upscaled didn't look good, which is pretty obvious since the monitor is only displaying the image it's given.
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One-Eye



Joined: 08 Mar 2011
Posts: 2261
PostPosted: Mon Sep 03, 2012 3:04 pm Reply with quote
I've got a Sony BD stand alone player and an LG internal BD player for my PC. Cyberlink Power DVD9 came with my internal player and works fine with both DVDs and BDs. I think BD is worth it if you have a decent sized screen and decent audio set up. Redline BD and Evangelion BD looks awesome on my HDTV. This doesn't mean you need a 60 inch screen and 6 speakers, something more modest can still impress. However, if you are on a budget, you may just want to wait till later for BD. You could do as someone suggested and get a cheap stand alone BD player if your monitor has an HDMI input and hook it up that way. Some anime looks pretty good on DVD and not all anime looks great on BD. Also if you are on a serious budget and are only going to pick up a few titles to begin with (anime BDs are not always cheap) you may want to save some money and stick with DVDs until you are better situated to take advantage of HD. Just my 2cents.
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Kruszer



Joined: 19 Nov 2004
Posts: 7983
Location: Minnesota, USA
PostPosted: Mon Sep 03, 2012 3:18 pm Reply with quote
No, it's not worth it, unless you really want one of those very rare shows that was only released on BD. Otherwise, DVD is the way to go because it will save you money and you're not going to see much of an improvement in the picture from animation to justify it.

Last edited by Kruszer on Mon Sep 03, 2012 3:39 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Tuor_of_Gondolin



Joined: 20 Apr 2009
Posts: 3524
Location: Bellevue, WA
PostPosted: Mon Sep 03, 2012 3:32 pm Reply with quote
Yeah, my short reply to the OP would be: it's not worth it if you're going to see it on a 23" monitor.

Wait until you have something worth seeing it on, something where you'll clearly notice the difference between 720P and 1080P, and then get it.
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