I am a mild-mannered person who doesn’t spend more than 3 seconds being annoyed at something, and even then it’s mildly. But if I were a person who got more annoyed at things I’d be annoyed at the utter wasting of the advantage of DVD technology.
I picked up a simpsons dvd today and saw that it contained 4 episodes! this is the amount they put on the video version! What happened to all that extra space? why not put another 10 on? because a DVD can fit roughly 14 half hour episodes of something on it.
I suspect that cartoons (like simpsons) will compress far more than real footage (because there is far far more oportunity for the mpeg decoding algorithm to remove data) so maybe you could fit as many as 30 episodes on one DVD!
Also - when DVD was in the development stages I read many articles that said something along the lines of - if you combine all the advances of dvds - multi-layering, multi-side , greatly increased resolution you can get as much as (if I remember rightly) 30 gigabytes on one DVD! But dvds actually fit only 7gigabytes.
Of course I know why this is the case - Money. Companies can make more money if customers have to buy more dvds to get the same amount of simpsons. Maybe the technology it’self was limited (from the potential 30gb) to maximise the amount of money that can be made from it.
the 30gb figure could easily be wrong, but I definately remember them saying it would be able to fit far more than 7!
There aren’t that many companies that are willing to use DVD-18s (dual sided, two layers/side). Last I’ve heard, it is cheaper to make 2 DVD-9s (single sided, dual layered) than a single DVD-18.
Besides, dual sided DVDs don’t have any artwork. Blech. :mad:
BTW, I find it somewhat interesting that they’ve released simpsons DVDs individually in the UK. In the US, the only simpsons DVD that’s avalable is the complete first season box set. 3 discs, 6 episodes each on the first two discs. 1 episode + special features on the last disc.
Just the Simpsons? Hope you don’t look into buying Anime, then. 26 episodes spread out across at least 6 DVDs, sometimes 8. $160 for Cowboy Bebop, about $150 for Outlaw Star, $200 for Trigun… I have no CLUE how much one of my friends spent on Robotech before he stopped, and he was only about halfway through the Masters episodes. No wonder my friends and I are all broke. If they really packed it in, all of that could have been on 6 DVDs, maybe even 3 if they really crammed it in.
You were right about the money thing. Take South Park for example. In the US, you get 4-5 eps per disc. Lately, the discs have been issued in themes. In the UK, you can get entire season sets! By the time this season ends, there will have been approximately 85 eps. At 4-5 shows per disc and a price of about $15/disc, you’ll end up with about 20-22 discs for a total price of $330+. I’m guessing season sets would be priced at $30-40 each, thereby totalling $240-300 for the projected 7 seasons the show will have been produced.
Actually, there’s a sweet spot in cramming 1/2 hour episodes on 1 dvd. Assuming you’re using a 9 gb disk, 6 is pretty much the absolute upper limit you’re going to get without getting really absurb video/audio artefacts. And that’s assuming you don’t want any extras on the disk. For most tv shows I’ve seen on dvd, 4 episodes is about the norm. Any less and you’re screwing the customer, any more and you risk damaging the content.
Agreed. Prime example of screwing the customer: Columbia House DVD club’s offerings of 2 episodes of one-hour shows per DVD. Patently absurd, particularly since in many cases we’re talking about black & white shows with mono, lo-fi soundtracks. Four episodes per disc would be easy; hell, HBO fits four episodes of The Sopranos on one DVD, and those have 5.1 Dolby Digital soundtracks!
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