Question about the TNG DVDs

[MaximRecoil]

As far as I know there have been 3 region 1 releases of TNG on DVD:

1. The original individual season releases from 2002, all of which were packaged together for a complete series release in 2004 - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation_-_Seasons_1-7

2. A complete series release in 2007 - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/TNG_Complete_Series_Boxset

3. Another complete series release in 2016 - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation_-_The_Complete_Series_(DVD)

They contain 48 DVDs, with the 2007 release containing a 49th "bonus" disc, and they mostly contain 4 episodes per disc.

4 episodes per disc is pretty typical for 1-hour-time-slot shows released on DVD, but they are normally DVD-9 discs (double-layer / ~7.92 GB capacity). I just got the 2016 release in the mail and they are on DVD-5 discs (single-layer, ~4.38 GB capacity), which is utterly absurd.

I'll use the TOS DVD releases as a point of comparison. The original releases that started in 1999 were on DVD-5 discs, but they only contained 2 episodes each. Each episode was a little over 2 GB, which is acceptable in terms of bitrate. The complete series release in 2004 used DVD-9 discs with 4 episodes each. That allowed for up to about 1.9 GB per episode, which isn't quite as good as the 1999 releases, but still acceptable.

Back to the TNG episodes in my 2016 box set: they are only around 1 GB per episode which is definitely not acceptable for MPEG-2 compression. This is a blatant case of them being cheapskates (DVD-5 discs are cheaper than DVD-9 discs).

I know the TNG picture quality is inherently poor because they were transferred from Betacam SP rather than 35mm film elements, but that doesn't mean they should make the problem worse by starving them of bitrate. Since I often watched this show when it originally aired when I was a kid, there's a nostalgia factor to the look of a TV broadcast from a Betacam master tape (especially on a CRT TV like I use), but there is no nostalgia whatsoever for digital compression artifacts caused by low bitrate. Betacam SP was an analog format so it had no compression artifacts, and NTSC TV broadcasts were also analog, so they didn't add compression artifacts either.

My question is: are the 2002 and 2007 TNG DVD releases also on DVD-5 discs? If you have one of the earlier releases and a Windows PC with a DVD drive, the way to tell is put one of the DVDs in and look at its icon in "My Computer." It will say "0 bytes free of X GB," like this:

If it's over 4.38 GB then it's a DVD-9.

 

[Tosk]

The 2002 releases are DVD-9s. Each ep is usually around 1.8 to 2gb.
And the re-releases are usually just straight repressings of the original discs with no alteration. Are you positive your set is not a bootleg? What creation date do the VOB files have?

 

[MaximRecoil]

The 2002 releases are DVD-9s. Each ep is usually around 1.8 to 2gb.
And the re-releases are usually just straight repressings of the original discs with no alteration. Are you positive your set is not a bootleg? What creation date do the VOB files have?

I checked the first DVD and the creation date for all of the files including the .VOBs is 3/7/2024; the same goes for the second DVD, and probably all of them. That's weird, because if this set was released in 2016, I'd expect the files to be no newer than 2016.

I took a look at the outer cardboard sleeve and it has a copyright date of 2020 (CBS Studios Inc.), which is also weird. Another thing that's weird is that it also says, "Dual-Layer Format: Layer transition may trigger a slight pause." So these are supposed to be DVD-9s, but they definitely aren't.

If these are bootlegs then it's a very high-end bootlegging operation. All of the packaging is perfect. The outer sleeve is semi-glossy card stock with perfect offset printing; even the tiniest text is razor sharp. The disc labels are perfectly screen printed. There's some text on it that's too small for me to even read with the naked eye, but under a magnifying glass and strong light, the text is perfect ("A VIACOM COMPANY" under the Paramount logo). Screen printing of that quality is very difficult to achieve. The DVDs are pressed, not burned writable DVDs. Each of the two plastic cases had a foam insert inside to keep things from rattling around, and before I opened it, the shrink-wrapped box was inside a perfectly fitted plain cardboard box to protect it (not the shipping box and not corrugated; it was form-fitting and folded closed with flaps). That's a level of care that I wouldn't expect from bootleggers.

The UPC number is 032429349903.

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

I don't know if this is any use to you, but I've got the 2006 slimline Region 2 DVDs and the episodes are about 1.5 GB each. It does seem like you might have ended up with a very impressive bootleg.

 

[MaximRecoil]

I don't know if this is any use to you, but I've got the 2006 slimline Region 2 DVDs and the episodes are about 1.5 GB each. It does seem like you might have ended up with a very impressive bootleg.

Thanks for the information.

I asked the eBay seller (who has 100% positive feedback with ~63,000 items sold; located in the US and a member since 2010) where he got the box set and his reply was:

Hi, we get them from a big US distributor, all sellers get them from the same place including on Amazon and Walmart. I never open the sets or watch DVDs so I couldn't tell you one way or another.
If you don't like the set for any reason just let me know and I will issue a full refund and a return label.
I will send your message to the distributor, if I get a response I will let you know.
Thanks.

I also sent an email to Paramount asking about it, but I haven't gotten a reply yet, and if I do get a reply, it will probably be from someone who has no idea either way. If I do get a useful reply from a huge corporation about a technical question it will be the first time ever.

 

[Tosk]

I checked the first DVD and the creation date for all of the files including the .VOBs is 3/7/2024

Personally, I'm thinking that says it all.
The most recent official re-release came out in 2020, as far as I'm aware.

 

[MaximRecoil]

Personally, I'm thinking that says it all.
The most recent official re-release came out in 2020, as far as I'm aware.

Yeah, I think the 2024 creation date is strange, but I don't know their procedures.

I just found this in a review of the green box set (2007) on Amazon from 2010:

I have one of the seasons in the silver set and the quality difference is night and day. On the silver set they used dual layer to fit 9+GB on each disc. On the green set, the same number of episodes per disc but half the data, only 4.6 GB.

Of course, it's always possible that he got a bootleg.

At this point I want to know for sure one way or another only because it affects whether or not I'll return it to the seller. I've already opened it of course, which is the only way to know that they're DVD-5s, so I wouldn't feel right returning it (even if the seller would allow it) if it's not confirmed to be a bootleg.

I'm going to track down the original 2002 releases either way (and just hope those don't show up with DVD-5 discs too).

 

[MaximRecoil]

Okay, I've confirmed to my satisfaction that this box set is definitely a bootleg. I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but it occurred to me a few minutes ago that, if it's a bootleg, it almost certainly wouldn't be encrypted (CSS). To make a bootleg you have to remove the original encryption that ~all commercial DVDs have (DeCSS), and I can't imagine any bootlegger bothering to put the encryption back in when they make their bootleg DVDs.

An easy way to tell whether or not a DVD is encrypted is to simply try to copy a .VOB file from the DVD to your computer through Windows Explorer. As a control, I tried it with a 1999-release TOS DVD, and this is what happens:

And I know that ImgBurn will give a warning if trying to make an ISO image of an encrypted DVD too, so I tried that with the same TOS DVD:

Then I tried to copy a .VOB file from one of my TNG DVDs, and Windows happily and successfully copied it to my desktop:

And ImgBurn also successfully made a full ISO image of it with no complaints whatsoever, and it plays perfectly when mounted in a virtual drive.

So the chance that these non-encrypted DVD-5s are legitimate is somewhere between zero and none.

I'm still amazed at the quality of the bootlegging job though. I wonder if the bootleggers are working out of the same factory that produces the real ones. That's been known to happen with stuff that's produced in, e.g., China. Just the screen printing on the labels alone demands a very high-end setup. I'm a screen printer myself, and there's no way I could print text so small that you need a magnifying glass to read it. Text that small would never even wash out of my emulsion to begin with. Here's a 300 ppi scan:

https://i.imgur.com/3dmmY9e.png

Keep in mind that at 300 ppi, it's showing up on a standard 72 ppi screen at a little over 4 times its real-life size, and that "A VIACOM COMPANY" text is still tiny. If I'd scanned it in at 72 ppi so that it displayed at actual size on a monitor, that text wouldn't even be readable.

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

I just tested that with my region 2 disc and I did get the same copy protection error. My TNG disc labels look nothing like that, different release, but my remastered TOS discs do have a similar design and they're all correctly centred around the hole in the middle, so that could be another tell.

 

[MaximRecoil]

I just tested that with my region 2 disc and I did get the same copy protection error. My TNG disc labels look nothing like that, different release, but my remastered TOS discs do have a similar design and they're all correctly centred around the hole in the middle, so that could be another tell.

Yeah, there is a zero percent chance of a major studio releasing copyrighted content on DVDs with no copy protection.

Screen-printed labels with less than perfect registration aren't unusual on optical discs, nor in the printing industry in general. In many printing applications there isn't the obvious reference point that you get with a perfect circle (optical disc) that makes less-than-perfect registration particularly noticeable, especially when the label runs so close to the center hole. In my [now known to be bootleg] set, most of the disc labels have good registration, but the one I happened to scan didn't. But with all of your disc labels having good registration, I agree that it could be a tell.

The lack of encryption is a conclusive tell though. That's simply not done. Authentic commercial DVDs containing copyrighted content have been encrypted since day one, and they aren't going to stop any time soon (even though CSS was cracked in 1999).

Since about the early/mid 2000s it's been a very simple matter to create a bootleg DVD that has the same files and file structure as the original (professional-level packaging / labeling is a different thing altogether though). There have been readily-available programs around since then that automate the process, including the option to transcode the video from a DVD-9 disc to fit on a DVD-5 disc, while leaving the menus and all the other file structure intact.

By the way, I just got a message from the seller after I told him this is definitely a bootleg:

Thanks for that information and I am very sorry about that. I will issue you a full refund now, I don't need the set back as there is nothing I could do with it except toss it.
Thanks for you understanding and I will issue the refund.

And he did indeed issue the refund.

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

I'm glad this saga had a happy ending!

 

[Gaith]

Crazy story! I just got the complete Blu-ray set for Christmas and don't ever expect to go back to SD TNG, but I do have fond memories of just how warm and vivid its bright colors looked on those old-school TVs.

 

[Qonundrum]

Crazy story! I just got the complete Blu-ray set for Christmas and don't ever expect to go back to SD TNG, but I do have fond memories of just how warm and vivid its bright colors looked on those old-school TVs.

^^this

I still remember the day when I got season one DVD set, loved the box and everything, put in "The Arsenal of Freedom", and saw a TV test pattern bleed through in a scene. The baked-in "CC" logo at the start is one thing, certainly, but the vertical color bars? That had to have bene from the editing suite, likely due to local interference between multiple video sources, for which one had the test bars up and was adjacent and/or insufficiently shielded, possibly from poor cable quality. One wouldn't likely think anything of it when transmitted over the air in 1988 (bunny ear antennas were all the hip rage), but on home video disc released in 2002? Nope, there's only one cause remaining, and that's what's baked into the master tape image (which was converted into digital format for home video release. (Yep, "on digital" is a bit double-meaning because that refers to that 6000-character online code to stream it from a server with, as well as it being on a physical disc.))

 

[MaximRecoil]

Crazy story! I just got the complete Blu-ray set for Christmas and don't ever expect to go back to SD TNG, but I do have fond memories of just how warm and vivid its bright colors looked on those old-school TVs.

Blu-rays don't work well with my SD 4:3 CRT TV (which is my preferred display for watching TV shows from the 4:3 era) because they have baked-in pillar-boxing to pad the 4:3 picture content out to 16:9. The BD specifications don't even allow a 4:3 display aspect ratio for HD content. It's only allowed for SD content, which, on BDs, is normally only used for bonus material, especially stuff which was originally produced as DVD bonus material, which they can reuse as-is on a BD.

If you watch a BD with 4:3 HD content (1440 x 1080 pillar-boxed to 1920 x 1080) on a 4:3 TV, you end up with window-boxing (a thick black border around the whole picture; the result of combining letter-boxing with pillar-boxing).

DVD was introduced in 1996 when 4:3 TVs were still the norm, so it allows for a 4:3 DAR (as well as a 16:9 DAR). And since DVD's 720 x 480 resolution is more than enough to max out the resolution of any SD CRT TV; for me, it's the perfect format for old TV shows.

I originally bought Star Trek: TOS on BD, because that was before I realized that I get more enjoyment from old TV shows when I watch them on a CRT TV the way I, and everyone else did, when they originally aired. When I came to that conclusion, I re-encoded the BDs to DVD resolution, cropping off the pillar-boxing in the process, and I was happy with that for a while, but the BDs have overly saturated colors, too much contrast, and are on the dark side. BDs use a different color standard than DVDs do (Rec. 709 vs. Rec. 601), because it's intended for modern displays (modern color timing trends don't do old TV shows any favors either IMO).

On the other hand, DVD's color standard stays within NTSC limitations, so a DVD looks like it could be an NTSC TV broadcast. So I decided to buy the actual TOS DVDs (the ones released in 2004 in the plastic clam shell cases), and I like them better than my BD re-encodes.

Here's a comparison of the BD vs. DVD colors, etc.:

TPLKFe4

In some scenes on the TOS BDs, the colors are so saturated that it makes Spock's skin look as green as Lou Ferrigno's when he played the Incredible Hulk, and it makes it look like he's wearing bright magenta lipstick as well.

I ordered a complete set of the original 2002 TNG DVD releases, advertised as "like new" condition, but it won't get here for another 5 days according to the tracking number. It didn't help that the seller took 3 full days just to get around to shipping it. For now I can only keep my fingers crossed that those don't turn out to be bootlegs too. I figure it's a lot less likely for such an old release.

 

[MakeshiftPython]

In the case of trying to avoid pillar boxed 4:3 blu-rays on a CRT set, I would just rip the blu-rays and use Handbrake to crop the video files. Put the video files on a USB drive, plug it on the blu-ray player that’s connected to the CRT set and BOOM, you got a proper 4:3 presentation.

 

[MaximRecoil]

In the case of trying to avoid pillar boxed 4:3 blu-rays on a CRT set, I would just rip the blu-rays and use Handbrake to crop the video files. Put the video files on a USB drive, plug it on the blu-ray player that’s connected to the CRT set and BOOM, you got a proper 4:3 presentation.

Yeah, that's what I did with my TOS BDs before I bought the 2004 TOS DVDs (as I mentioned in the 4th paragraph of my previous post), though I used FFmpeg along with a batch file I made to do a whole folder's worth of files automatically, like this:

for %%a in ("*.mkv") do ffmpeg -i "%%a" -vf "crop=1440:1080,scale=704x480:flags=lanczos,pad=720:480:8:0,setsar=sar=10/11" -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -c:a copy "E:\Star Trek\Season 1\%%~na.mkv"
pause

But I don't like the BD's colors, contrast, and low brightness level (I could tweak those things when re-encoding, but I'd rather have the professional made-with-CRTs-in-mind results on the official DVDs). I also didn't like not having a backup of those files on factory-pressed discs. The BDs work as a backup but only in a roundabout way, i.e., if I lost the re-encodes I'd have to re-encode 81 episodes again in order to restore them from the BDs to their final configuration (which takes a long time), whereas with DVDs, they are already in the configuration that I want.

 

[Sim]

This thread made me realize that my "Hill Street Blues" DVD set is a bootleg!

It's on DVD5s, there is no copy protection and when looking closer, booklet and covers look like color Xerox copies.

 

[MaximRecoil]

This thread made me realize that my "Hill Street Blues" DVD set is a bootleg!

It's on DVD5s, there is no copy protection and when looking closer, booklet and covers look like color Xerox copies.

That sucks. I'm guessing it's too late to get a refund?

I went through my DVD sets that I have for several other TV shows and they all check out: DVD-9s, copy-protected, and professional printing. Though, as I found out from my TNG bootleg set, some bootleggers these days are going so far as to use professional printing. I'd be surprised if any of them use DVD-9s though, let alone copy protection. If any of them did use DVD-9s, then it wouldn't matter that it was a bootleg from a video quality perspective, because they'd almost certainly be 1:1 copies of the originals (minus the copy protection), but fraud still sucks either way.

 

[Sim]

That sucks. I'm guessing it's too late to get a refund?

I went through my DVD sets that I have for several other TV shows and they all check out: DVD-9s, copy-protected, and professional printing. Though, as I found out from my TNG bootleg set, some bootleggers these days are going so far as to use professional printing. I'd be surprised if any of them use DVD-9s though, let alone copy protection. If any of them did use DVD-9s, then it wouldn't matter that it was a bootleg from a video quality perspective, because they'd almost certainly be 1:1 copies of the originals (minus the copy protection), but fraud still sucks either way.

Yeah, I bought it three years ago. The vendor doesn't appear to be on Amazon marketplace anymore. I even got a 2nd set as replacement, shortly after the purchase, as in the set I got first, one DVD was missing and another was double instead ... the vendor was nice and just sent me a new set.

I think I will keep it, because for the time being, there are no other options for sale on Amazon (it was never released in Germany, so I rely on imports, and they are rare and/or overprized). And even if the bitrate is lower than on DVD9, I guess it's still not worse than on most streaming services.

Another plus is that they also removed the region code, so I can play it on any region 2 player.

When I noticed the cheap looking covers, I assumed that the set was produced by a minor label that had bought a license for such older niche interest stuff the major companies don't think is worth releasing ... the idea it's a bootleg only crossed my mind now.

 

[MaximRecoil]

The complete set of 2002 releases arrived today, 2 days early, and I checked the first disc of season 1, and it's legitimate: DVD-9 (7.86 GB used) and copy-protected:

The episodes are ~1.9 GB each (~3.8 GB for the double-length first episode), or ~1.8 GB each after removing the 5.1 audio tracks from them (I only care about the 2.0 audio tracks; I did the same thing with my TOS DVDs). By contrast, the bootlegs were ~900 MB each after removing the 5.1 audio tracks.

These DVDs are, in terms of picture quality, like having the Betacam SP broadcast tapes that were sent to TV stations when TNG was originally on the air, and if played on a CRT TV over an RF connection (I use a Sony BD player connected to a JVC VHS VCR via composite/RCA cables in order to make use of the VCR's RF modulator), it will look exactly like an original over-the-air broadcast (with perfect reception) looked back then, minus the commercials.