Hold off on Echo Bridge BD titles.

[Derb]

I'd aviod these Echo Bridge titles if you can wait till I get a chance to view them.

I briefly viewed Artie Lange's Beer League & the Mpeg-2 video quality isn't that great. Pretty much a hit & miss with compression issues here, there & everywhere + the 5.1 Dolby Digital track is at 448kbps (btw - I only rate 5.1 channel discs if there is that option) & the only other audio option is a 2.0 LPCM track at 2.3mbps. If your fine with 2 channels only you will probably not find the audio a problem as it does sound quite better than the 5.1 mix, actually so much more so that from what I've heard, the 5.1 mix isn't an improvement at all over SD DVD audio.

10.5 - Apocalypse
Artie Lange's Beer League
Blackbeard (2005)
Category 7: The End of the World
The Curse Of King Tut's Tomb: The Complete Miniseries
The Last Sentinel

[Sehnzeleid]

I could have told you to stay away even without checking one out.

Just because they're inexpensive doesn't mean their even worth their meager price.

I like to think of them as "Dollar Tree's best selling DVDs now on Blu-ray"

This was just posted at Digest: 10.5 Apocalypse BD Review.

[dugpa]

I was just going to say, aren't they the BD equivalent of the $1 dvds that use old crappy transfers and the cheapest encoding possible. I don't see why anyone would expect these to look good.

[Sehnzeleid]

Originally Posted by dugpa

don't see why anyone would expect these to look good.

Or even if they looked amazing, it's not like the content would be any better.

"The color is astonishing, but I feel stupider after watching for anymore than 5 minutes..."

I honestly think many BD enthusiasts fall into this "1080p somehow makes dreck better/worth owning" cycle so they purchase an enormous amount of what is ultimately filler.

[Ruined]

I loaded up Beer League and the transfer looked "okay," not terrible. I say this because I saw Beer League in the theater and it looked terrible in the theater, so I think it is mostly source limited since it was such a cheapo production. I'm not sure how much you can blame on the encode job with such a crappy source material.

That being said, I only briefly checked it out on my 1680x1050 22" monitor, I haven't put it under my bigscreen scope yet. Either way, for the $8 I paid for it I'm satisfied considering its low-budget roots. Lets face it we probably wouldn't see it at all on BD if a top-notch BD was the criteria for releasing since it did poorly in theaters and was so low budget.

The other movies on the OP's list look like crap in general, so I'd hold off simply because they are poor movies.

[Derb]

Originally Posted by Ruined

I loaded up Beer League and the transfer looked "okay," not terrible. I say this because I saw Beer League in the theater and it looked terrible in the theater, so I think it is mostly source limited since it was such a cheapo production. I'm not sure how much you can blame on the encode job with such a crappy source material.

Just finished watching this & yeah I agree it isn't as bad as I thought. I viewed the opening sequence & made a quick judgement call. The image actually gets better but nothing to shout home about. Too bad about the audio though. There is 0 HD audio in this one... 6 channels that is.