Will the DVD season sets display on a CRT?

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TheatreStyleKai
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Will the DVD season sets display on a CRT?

Post by TheatreStyleKai » Sun Aug 21, 2022 6:23 pm

I'm interested in picking up the "season sets" (1 through 4 specifically) and I'm curious whether or not I can get them to display on an old CRT television, but I can't seem to find any information online whether the video is presented in progressive or interlaced. I want to be certain before I make any purchases, as I discovered a certain other Toei DVD anime series that was framed in 4:3 but was unsuitable for for my TV because it was 480p.

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Majin Man 101
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Re: Will the DVD season sets display on a CRT?

Post by Majin Man 101 » Fri Aug 26, 2022 7:00 am

TheatreStyleKai wrote: Sun Aug 21, 2022 6:23 pm I'm interested in picking up the "season sets" (1 through 4 specifically) and I'm curious whether or not I can get them to display on an old CRT television, but I can't seem to find any information online whether the video is presented in progressive or interlaced. I want to be certain before I make any purchases, as I discovered a certain other Toei DVD anime series that was framed in 4:3 but was unsuitable for for my TV because it was 480p.
There is so many layers here to what you are saying that I do not even know where to begin. First off, which season sets are you referring to? Blue Bricks, orange bricks, or lime bricks? Also, a DVD should technically only have the ability to support 480i with very few and strange exceptions, but the players themselves have the ability to display 480p. I think you should be good; however, I can't say for certain if you have had problems with other DVDs in the past.

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MasenkoHA
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Re: Will the DVD season sets display on a CRT?

Post by MasenkoHA » Fri Aug 26, 2022 10:03 am

Majin Man 101 wrote: Fri Aug 26, 2022 7:00 am . First off, which season sets are you referring to? Blue Bricks, orange bricks, or lime bricks? .
He's posting this in the Kai subforum, so presumably he means the Dragon Ball Z Kai season sets, in which s1-4 covers the first 98 episodes.

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Re: Will the DVD season sets display on a CRT?

Post by VegettoEX » Fri Aug 26, 2022 10:53 am

The progressive encoding (23.976fps) of the video stream should have no effect whatsoever on the aspect ratio display on an older tube TV; assuming your DVD player is capable of progressive stream play (which basically all after, like, 2000 or so were), it will automatically interlace on the fly for the CRT to display.

What's an issue is the Blu-ray spec not allowing for 1080p 4:3 streams -- they have to literally be 16:9 streams with 240 pixels of black bars on each side hard-encoded into the video file. THAT would absolutely result in a sort of double-pillar-boxed (small video window inside black borders on all sides) if you were to somehow get that down onto a CRT.

(There was a similar problem in the past with DVDs before anamorphic encoding, which allowed the encoding to take advantage of the non-square pixels in the 720x480 space -- this let them encode a widescreen version of the film into the anamorphic encode, which would then be handled on the fly by the DVD player and TV to properly display with or without top/bottom borders on a widescreen vs. 4:3 display, respectively. What they used to do before that was purposefully add the top/bottom borders on the DVD video stream to maintain the aspect ratio... which was fine for a 4:3 TV, but would result in extra top/bottom/left/right borders on all sides if played on a widescreen TV.)

Anyway, that all is to say: I believe the Japanese Kai DVDs were anamorphic cropped widescreen (despite the Japanese Kai Blu-rays being the aforementioned 4:3 inside a 16:9 stream), whereas both the FUNimation DVDs and Blu-rays maintained a proper uncropped 4:3 aspect ratio. I'm fairly certain a FUNimation Kai DVD would properly display in full 4:3 on a CRT through a modern DVD player without any pillar bars anywhere; its progressive frame rate would have no effect on any of that.
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TheatreStyleKai
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Re: Will the DVD season sets display on a CRT?

Post by TheatreStyleKai » Wed Aug 31, 2022 4:01 pm

I'm going to make a startling confession here and admit that I'm not very tech savvy.

I realize now that the problem I actually had was that the DVD I was trying to watch was advertised as being presented in 4:3, when in reality it was in widescreen with black pillar bars on the left and right side baked into the image. And because my disc player recognized it as a widescreeen video it also placed black bars on the top and bottom of the screen - leading to the image appearing as if in a much smaller box in the middle of the screen. Not understanding the problem I jumped to the assumption that the problem had to be that the video was attempting to display in progressive scan and the television didn't know what to do with it. I hope I didn't confuse too many people with this!

The good news is that I've had the chance to try the Kai DVD on my CRT and the picture looks great, arguably even better than on flat screen with bluray. I know this is more subjective, but the video really benefits from being presented on the display for which it was intended.

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Re: Will the DVD season sets display on a CRT?

Post by KingVegetto » Tue Nov 08, 2022 12:11 am

TheatreStyleKai wrote: Wed Aug 31, 2022 4:01 pm I'm going to make a startling confession here and admit that I'm not very tech savvy.

I realize now that the problem I actually had was that the DVD I was trying to watch was advertised as being presented in 4:3, when in reality it was in widescreen with black pillar bars on the left and right side baked into the image. And because my disc player recognized it as a widescreeen video it also placed black bars on the top and bottom of the screen - leading to the image appearing as if in a much smaller box in the middle of the screen. Not understanding the problem I jumped to the assumption that the problem had to be that the video was attempting to display in progressive scan and the television didn't know what to do with it. I hope I didn't confuse too many people with this!

The good news is that I've had the chance to try the Kai DVD on my CRT and the picture looks great, arguably even better than on flat screen with bluray. I know this is more subjective, but the video really benefits from being presented on the display for which it was intended.
There was an interesting video on how video games running on a CRT PC actually play smoother due to the almost-instant refresh rate, whereas an LCD screen will always have some lag, so i'd imagine it's the same deal with a CRT-TV. Many older video games were made with CRT TVs in mind and don't look quite the same on an HDTV, so it does not surprise me that it's a similar case with DVDs on those older TVs.

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