orangerunner

After buying the 2008 "The Day the Earth Stood Still", I noticed that the bit-rate was quite low on the DVD after checking out the video files on the computer.

It is on a dual-layer disc (8.7G) and registers only 5.04G, leaving a lot of blank space that could have been filled using a higher bit-rate for a better picture or more extras.

By contrast, I popped in "Collateral" (2004) which was only the feature with an audio commentary & no extras. The bit-rate for that disc was 7.46G which really maximized the disc space for the best possible picture.

Yes Man is a single layer flipper disc.

I'm beginning to believe the theories that they are trying to make the DVD version appear even more inferior to the Blu-ray copy than they should be.

Any other possible reasons?

Boba Fett

Yeah, that sounds awfully shady to me, that a recent film is only taking 5 gigs on a dual layer disc. Most dual layer discs from studios take around 6.7-7.5gigs of space.

Drexl

Which version did you get? I don't know the configuration of the editions, but from the reviews it looks like the 3-disc set has some extras, including a 30-minute documentary of some sort. They may have encoded the movie to leave room for that, but dropped the doc from the 2-disc version without re-encoding to fill more space. Then again, I don't know if that doc is on a separate disc.

That said, they don't always fill the disc. This has been going on since before BD was introduced.

crs

You don't measure bitrate in bytes or data size alone.

A small data size doesn't necessarily mean picture quality is poor, there's many things to take into account. The compression algorithms are complex and highly depends on the contents of each frame. Two movies with the same length might compress to very different data sizes while still maintaining good picture quality.

madcougar

That was the least of this movie's problems.

orangerunner

All things being equal from the master source, a higher bit-rate means less compression which equals a better picture.

The version I have has no extra features, just the film with 5.1 Surround.

There probably is a version of the disc that had extras which did fill the extra space but were not included on this disc.

That said, I suppose the bit-rate of the feature itself is identical to the version with the extras.

TomOpus

As crs said, you have "bitrate" and "file size" confused.

The bitrate might be low. As you play the movie, check the bitrate and come back tell us what it is. Again, it's not the filesize. Go to a site like DVDBeaver where they compare bitrates of different releases of the same movie. Here's one such comparison for the ORIGINAL "Day the Earth Stood Still" DVD Comparison

crs

Yes, this is true, but only to a certain extent. Most DVDs use variable bitrate. Even the average bitrate for the whole film will not always give you a clear indication of picture quality. Many scenes will peak at a low bitrate but still have perfectly fine picture quality. As I said, compression is highly dependable on the content of each frame. A movie without lots of camera motion (a dialogue driven movie perhaps), will compress very well and maintain good picture quality even at a low bitrate.

orangerunner

True enough. A movie shot in 2.35:1 that uses little camera movement and is shot mostly at night wouldn't necessarily need a higher bit-rate than an action film transferred full screen shot during the bright daylight hours.

I think you'd have to agree that when the feature (no extras) does utilize the enitre space on a dual-layer disc it generally gives you a better looking picture than when it's compressed further to make room for the extras.

crs

The DVD specifications allow a maximum peak bitrate of about 9800 kbps. Most DVDs average at about half of that. A higher average bitrate, especially above 6000-7000 kbps, will only yield miniscule differences in picture quality.

But sure, The Day The Earth Stood Still would probably benefit from a higher bitrate, but a lot less than what you would think.