Spiky

How is Piglet's Big Movie on DVD? We borrowed it from the library and the kids love it. But the VHS from the library was 1.85:1 even though the box claimed it was cropped to 4:3. (not that I'm complaining about that) And the video quality was atrocious. Light colors, esp browns like Kanga, had insane lines running through them. This was clearly visible on a SDTV of 27", so this isn't just that it was blown up an a PJ or something. Certain colors were also clearly a crappy halftoned computer mess, with a background of one color and little dots of another to fool your brain at a certain distance. But it was visible on my 27" at 10' and on a 20" at 5'. Utterly ridiculous. Is this what it looks like on a DVD? It looks like they made it with a tiny color palette instead of using a "millions" palette.

I'm just trying to figure out if this was some sort of mistake or other bizarre issue with this particular tape. Or if the DVD would look the same or what? Maybe somebody did a bad copy over this tape to make it OAR, although it looked like a VHS version with previews and whatnot.

Anybody with VHS or DVD who can help?

EDIT
Actually, the box simply claimed "reformatted to fit your TV", which I assume means 1.85:1 is OAR and the tape was supposedly chopped to 4:3. I have no more background knowledge to know what's what.

mlindber

Sounds like the VHS was dubbed from the DVD and they didn't have a means to disable Macrovision. The DVD should be fine.

The Exister

I rented the DVD for my son a few weeks ago and it looked pretty good to me.

Decker

It looks fine. More vibrant than The Tigger Movie. It's not as good a film, but it's OK. Extras are very sparse as well. But the picture is just fine.

Here's a review.

Spiky

No, it wasn't macrovision. Macrovision affects the brightness and color levels across the screen. This was just certain colors that looked like poor color use in the first place, plus something like combing or perhaps poor deinterlacing or the chroma bug. Not that it should be deinterlaced by the time it was copied to VHS, if it was copied. And I've never seen the chroma bug only on tan/brown, usually red is the easiest to see. It definitely wasn't combing like I've seen before, either.

Interesting in that review: no word of jaggies, which is essentially what I saw on the tape. No word of questionable colors, either. Hmmm....

It was a strange phenomenon. Of course, no one else noticed it, too young to care. Oh well, sounds like the DVD would be worth having. I'm sure it was just a bad overwrite.

Thanks for the comments.