nitin77

this has to be some of the worst transfers I have come across yet most reviews dont seem to mention this. The first three seasons played absolutely fine on my setup, but there are breakups and aliasing very very frequently in this season.

anyone else experience this?

WMAangel

Haven't seen The Wire yet, but I can't imagine anything being worse then some of those "Dawson's Creek" seasons where they cram six full episodes onto one dual layer disc....that's just about five hours, and the artifacting/pixelization is just horrendous....

sb5

I brought this up back when Season 4 was reviewed. The reviewer originally gave the "anamorphic 1.78:1 ratio widescreen" Video a 4 star rave; after someone pointed out the erroneous widescreen comment, he took off half a star, removed the 1.78:1 reference, and wrote something about grain and dirt not really related to my comment (and then directly copied and pasted the video section for his later Season 5 review).

Season 5 looks just as bad; I think I remember hearing that The Wire switched how it was shot (from film to cheap digital, maybe?) between 3 and 4 to save costs, but I'm not sure (anyone confirm?). That may account for the video quality drop the first 3 seasons and the last 2.

If you watch the "Previously On" segment at the beginning of The Wire Season 5, the video quality drops when going from the clear first 3 seasons footage to the grainy Season 4 footage, so it doesn't appear to be a problem with the DVD's themselves, but with the source.

*EDIT* Wait, when you say "breakups", do you mean the video actually stutters and freezes? If so, your DVD's might have a problem unrelated to the terrible video quality.

noworries81

Can't really remember how the video was, though I also don't remember being annoyed about it. Dexter S3 dvd got four stars for the video, though, and that had the worst transfer I've seen in a long time on a DVD.

sb5

Just to show that other reviewers did notice the drop in quality - DVDVerdict's reviews of the 4th, 5th, and Complete Series all bring up the video quality discrepancy.

nitin77

sb5,

cheers, thought it wasnt just me. And by breakups, I meant line breakups.

cheers for the dvdverdict review, glad someone did comment on it. I thought there was something wrong with my system since it wasnt mentioned on most review sites.

Kory

They went from fitting an entire season on five discs for seasons 1, 2, and 3, to fitting an entire season on four discs for seasons 4 and 5. That's the main reason for the lower quality transfers, because they still looked great on TV.

sb5

That's true of Season 4, but Season 5 (mainly because it was only 10 episodes) went back to only having 3 episodes (at most) per DVD like the first 3 seasons, yet the video still looks terrible.

While I'm sure squeezing 4 hour-long episodes onto a single DVD contributed to S4's compression issues (the DVDVerdict review does mention in the S5 review that it looks slightly better than S4), there's got to be an additional explanation. Like I said, watch the "Previously On" segments in S5; the video quality is different based on what season they show footage from.

WMAangel

Four hour-long episodes per dual layer disc is pretty much the acceptable standard for TV show releases on DVD by most studios...
Of course, most network shows run closer to 44 minutes due to time for commercials, and HBO shows usually run just about the full length of the hour....however, most seasons of The Sopranos have at least one disc that has four episodes on it, and I don't remember seeing any specific complaints about compression issues or bad transfers on those discs...