Wouldn't it work in all of the players? The video would be AVC and the file structure would be the same as if it were an HD BD. It wouldn't be just like playing a DVD, on a technical level.

Maybe they could use a different color for the case, like black but in the same style and size as typical BD cases.

Yes, there would probably be some buyer confusion. Which is probably why they have that rule about the main feature on BD discs having to be in HD.

It's a shame that that precludes practical and useful applications like this though.

10 minute short film in HD then load the rest up with "bonus" materials in SD.

Yeah they look bad, but i collect old kung fu films, and having that many movies on 1 disc is great. I have whole shelf of Wu Tang releases on individual DVD's, so I would welcome more like this.

I believe that some of the older Simpsons seasons are upconverted from standard definition. This happens a lot with anime too.

Just came across an SD-BD title, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: The Complete English Language TV Series Collection Blu-ray" with 52 episodes in SD:


https://smile.amazon.com/Wonderful-W...dp/B072ZPQ421/

It looks to be all on one disc. the "SD-BD" logo on the top left in intriguing, as well as the banner "All 52 episodes in Standard Definition." Maybe the BD standards have been relaxed a bit, and as long as the box clearly stated the content is in SD, putting it on a BD is OK.

I always hoped there would be more of this. Complete SD Series on fewer discs. Oh well.

There was already something else last year:


https://www.amazon.com/Samurai-Pizza.../dp/B018ENE3G6


And I wouldn't mind more like this.

Is that Wizard of Oz series any good?

Fist of the North Star (anime) is getting released soon as SD on Blu-ray. This may be a growing trend in anime since Sentai has announced they are abandoning DVD releases.

I've never bothered much with TV or anime series on DVD, what with time commitment and all the season sets and (in the olden days) the bulky packaging, but were these SD BDs to become more commonplace -- especially for obscure/gonzo stuff or themed, multi-film collections with quality SD transfers -- I'd happily pony up. I'm actually surprised it's taken this long for a distributor to take this route. Prior to this I can only recall crappy collections of SD films like this one, where the quality wasn't much better than smeary, early generation YouTube apparently. Mill Creek could certainly do well with sets like these.

The Samurai Pizza Cats set is from the same distributor, Diskotek. This thread has some reviews and even some screencaps:
http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread....5#post11761545

On the plus side, from the screencaps, the BD appears to be the same quality as the previous DVD release.


I can't find any reviews of the Wizard of Oz series BD.

I don't have a professional review, but one of the readers of the HDD blog bought the disc and confirmed that the episodes are 480i MPEG-2 encodes. So, basically the files for DVD transferred onto a Blu-ray storage medium.

His brief comments: "Dual layer disc. Each episode is about 830 meg. MPEG2, 29.97fps, I720x480 Interlaced. Audio is AC-3 (Dolby Digital) Stereo 2.0. Video looks like it was sourced from tape, there is analogue noise, and film wobble. Running each episode through Adobe Premiere with Warp Stabilizer, Neat Video and a deinterlace should make it look considerably better"

http://www.highdefdigest.com/blog/bl...s-aug-29-2017/

Heh, interesting. They have a bunch of these on Amazon.De (Look up Rocko's Modern Life, Invader Zim, etc) but to my knowledge they are all Region B locked and no subs. I would be all for this as long as the source material is SD and it's not going to look any better, etc, etc, etc. Also the price should be modest. I would easily buy a properly produced one of quite a few cartoon series (X-Men Evolution for example). Oh and please provide subtitles for pete's sake. Hate that crap, cheap is one thing, useless is another.

Actually, I was wondering if the cartoon was any good

But thank you anyways.

I have that Westerns Unchained disc, still sealed in the unwatched pile. Maybe sometime when I have 2 weeks with nothing to do I'll crack it.

There are quite a few concert BDs that are SD video.

SD upconverted, or straight SD? Any examples?

Yeah, I'm not aware of any. Examples?

Don't know if they are up converted or not.
Off the top of my head: several of The Rolling Stones From The Vault concerts and The Who Live at Shea Stadium.
They're designated as SBDs.

The Who Live at Shea Stadium is an upconvert, and maybe slightly cropped:
http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/The-Wh...130521/#Review
I think the main appeal of the Blu-rays of a videorecorded concert is the lossless audio, but Eagle Vision did at least upconvert the SD video.

Not sure if I like the idea of these SD-to BD releases. I'm sure they're all just straight SD 480i, non-upcoverted. If they were upconverted, they'd look even worse due to abysmal compression and video bitrates. I think this is a new level of shovel-ware. 25 movies on 1 BD50??!! 52 episodes on 1 BD?

That's less than 2 GB per movie and less than 1 GB per episode. With such bit-starved content, I'd imagine the PQ can't be very good, in fact WORSE than the DVD-counterparts. Full of artifacts, macroblocking, smearing, etc.

5 GB per move is acceptable for 480i, MPEG2 content, 7-8 GB per move is better yet. That's 4-5x the bitrates that the above releases are exhibiting!

Even steven quality would be ok. If a DVD-9 has 4 episodes of a 1 hour show, 20 episodes would fit on a BD-50 at same quality. Since there would be a few episodes left over, just split the season with 12-13 episodes per disc.

Yeah, if the complaint is about space, then it's not so much about "SD on BD" but "SD on 1 BD".

I think we can all agree that the "25 films in one" sets are a bad idea.

However, for Samurai Pizza cats, all 52 episodes were originally released as a 8 DVD set, meaning 6-7 22 minute episodes per DVD. The comparison here puts the DVD at a little under 1GB per episode.
http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread....5#post12730075

The SD-BD uses AVC codec over MPEG2, so the more efficient compression balances out the slightly reduced space per episode. So in this particular instance, fitting them all onto a single BD didn't really compromise quality over the DVD release.


But yes, splitting content over multiple BDs would allow for quality comparable or better than DVD while still using fewer discs.

is there a point in upconverting 480i content on the disc itself? Won't the blu-ray player or DVD automatically upconvert?

There's the possibility that a professional pre-rendered upconversion on a Blu-ray could be better than the real-time upconversion a Blu-ray plater does, especially since the quality of the scaler varies between players. It may not be worth the increase in bitrate storing it in HD though.