The TV and Streaming thread Series 3

[Lexx]

I just binge watched The Lower Decks. It was ... ok, I guess. Not as bad as I feared, but also not exactly great. Basically it feels like any other such animated tv show from the last two years.

Generally it feels very similar to Final Space, but that one is much better, imo.

At least it's not as stupid as Picard and STD, etc.

Edited January 22, 2021 by Lexx

[majestic]

3 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Additionally, I often times prefer watching DVDs at their native resolution for the intended level of visual clarity since I'm usually (although not always) watching on a computer monitor anyways, which you can't do with bad 1080p upscales.

Mhm, going with the preview of the screen captures it's pretty obvious that your video is the superior source (at least in that particular scene). I guess that's from the Italian DVD then?

I was basing this assertion purely off watching Sailor Moon on a 54" 4K TV, with an older Panasonic DVB-C(2) receiver/BR player as the source of the video. The DVD source is much blurrier than even  the YouTube video (although admittedly it is definitely not the Italian one), and the colors of the latter are better too. I could potentially look into the settings of the BR player and see if it upscales the DVD to 1080p and turn that off and leave it to the TV to upscale entirely. It might make a better job of it.

I don't watch videos on my computer if I can help it. In fact, I guess it wouldn't really matter what source I used if I did. I picked the screen I'm sitting in front now based purely on being Free/Gsync compatible with a 144Hz refresh rate and a 1ms gray to gray latency. The image is far too bright even with really low settings on contrast and brightness, the blacks aren't nearly black enough and the colors are better not talked about. You've probably guessed it - it's a gaming monitor with a TN panel.

[Raithe]

Caught up on the end of season 7 of The Blacklist.

Interesting how they handled the final episode. They were halfway through filming it when covid restrictions locked everything down. Since a couple of months went by without them being able to resume shooting, they got people to animate what hadn't been shot, and had the cast zoom their lines, then put it all together with what had been filmed.

[Bartimaeus]

1 hour ago, majestic said:

Mhm, going with the preview of the screen captures it's pretty obvious that your video is the superior source (at least in that particular scene). I guess that's from the Italian DVD then?

I was basing this assertion purely off watching Sailor Moon on a 54" 4K TV, with an older Panasonic DVB-C(2) receiver/BR player as the source of the video. The DVD source is much blurrier than even  the YouTube video (although admittedly it is definitely not the Italian one), and the colors of the latter are better too. I could potentially look into the settings of the BR player and see if it upscales the DVD to 1080p and turn that off and leave it to the TV to upscale entirely. It might make a better job of it.

I don't watch videos on my computer if I can help it. In fact, I guess it wouldn't really matter what source I used if I did. I picked the screen I'm sitting in front now based purely on being Free/Gsync compatible with a 144Hz refresh rate and a 1ms gray to gray latency. The image is far too bright even with really low settings on contrast and brightness, the blacks aren't nearly black enough and the colors are better not talked about. You've probably guessed it - it's a gaming monitor with a TN panel.

They are the Italian DVDs, but I've also looked at the Japanese and Australian DVDs and both of them seemed a lot better than that YouTube video. I can only assume that Germany(?) got completely hosed with their DVDs...but also I should also note that the US DVDs are supposedly a lot worse than either the Italian, Japanese, or Australian DVDs, but I've never taken a look at the US DVDs personally because everyone seems to ignore their existence due to their badness, so maybe you're not alone, . I've also never read anything about the German DVDs - usually not a good sign for their quality if there's nothing much mentioned about them. I find it super annoying that such vast differences in quality can be found between different regions and even different countries within the same regions for shows, especially when released simultaneously.

I should clarify that with the exception of Netflix stuff, I literally never *not* watch things from a PC, since even my TV has an HTPC that I play stuff from (I have a decent 16 TB of non-SSD HDD space for media playing, which I'm almost at the limits for), and I don't have cable. This is also why I need a PC upgrade sometime in the near future - encoding stuff with my generations-old i7 is getting to be a hassle, and for a few shows I've just started leaving them in a raw unencoded format. I refuse to mess around with physical discs (and also it's absolutely no good for over-the-network and Plex streaming, which is a must for me), so that's why I keep everything on the HDDs. So yeah, very different kinds of setups between us, .

Edited January 22, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[majestic]

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

So yeah, very different kinds of setups between us, .

My computer setup gets a lot of laughs and weird looks when people actually see it. I was an avid MMORPG gamer for a long time. My /played across Everquest 2, WoW and SWTOR is measured in years (as in net time played at 16000+ hours). Frightening, really, and not counting the time when I was still at school that I've spent playing Quake and Quake 3 online, and I was... pretty good at it, so naturally guild colleagues expected my setup to be all decked out in great MMORPG hardware.

Most notably a gaming mouse with two hundred and a half buttons while I'm actually using a Logitech LS1 (a mouse that is roughly a third the size of my right hand). I got accused of using a mouse with programmable click macros while playing SWTOR once (they are or at least were forbidden by the terms of service back then). I almost fell off the chair laughing my behind off.

I'm really peculiar about the devices I use. I used PS/2 mice until computers no longer had PS/2 ports and had a 5:4 aspect ratio screen up until actually not that long ago when it died and was replaced with the 16:9 one I have now.

But this has nothing to do with TV or streaming. Ho humm. Guess the TL;DR here is, yeah, I understand where you're coming from here. Heh. 

Oh and you could potentially add the 5000 hours GOG Galaxy is telling me I've played across all my connected platforms (GOG, Steam & Epic).

I think I might play too much, ey?

To make this not completely off-topic, the original German DVD version really got the shaft in terms of quality. I think I mentioned that before, but there are actually two video tracks for each episode - one Japanese original, remastered, and the original German dub version. Because screw effort, right? Why bother having one good quality video track and multiple audio sources, that would have required some actual authoring.

Way to go, just lower the bitrate and the resolution a bit.

But I just noticed that along with the blu ray version there were also new DVDs released. They're bound to be better than the old ones, at least. If they're based on the same remaster that the blu rays are then it wouldn't be better than the Italian DVD source though, when the new remaster isn't any better than the old DVDs according to your information it might really be better to go look for that Italian video source somewhere else.

Fun Sailor Moon fact of the day, did you know that there was a Sailor Moon themed Euro Dance group called Super Moonies in Germany in the late 90ies?

I mean, yeah, that's bad in every way. Heh.

Edited January 22, 2021 by majestic
Added the name of the band.

[Bartimaeus]

1 hour ago, majestic said:

My computer setup gets a lot of laughs and weird looks when people actually see it. I was an avid MMORPG gamer for a long time. My /played across Everquest 2, WoW and SWTOR is measured in years (as in net time played at 16000+ hours). Frightening, really, and not counting the time when I was still at school that I've spent playing Quake and Quake 3 online, and I was... pretty good at it, so naturally guild colleagues expected my setup to be all decked out in great MMORPG hardware.

Most notably a gaming mouse with two hundred and a half buttons while I'm actually using a Logitech LS1 (a mouse that is roughly a third the size of my right hand). I got accused of using a mouse with programmable click macros while playing SWTOR once (they are or at least were forbidden by the terms of service back then). I almost fell off the chair laughing my behind off.

I'm really peculiar about the devices I use. I used PS/2 mice until computers no longer had PS/2 ports and had a 5:4 aspect ratio screen up until actually not that long ago when it died and was replaced with the 16:9 one I have now.

But this has nothing to do with TV or streaming. Ho humm. Guess the TL;DR here is, yeah, I understand where you're coming from here. Heh. 

Oh and you could potentially add the 5000 hours GOG Galaxy is telling me I've played across all my connected platforms (GOG, Steam & Epic).

I think I might play too much, ey?

To make this not completely off-topic, the original German DVD version really got the shaft in terms of quality. I think I mentioned that before, but there are actually two video tracks for each episode - one Japanese original, remastered, and the original German dub version. Because screw effort, right? Why bother having one good quality video track and multiple audio sources, that would have required some actual authoring.

Way to go, just lower the bitrate and the resolution a bit.

But I just noticed that along with the blu ray version there were also new DVDs released. They're bound to be better than the old ones, at least. If they're based on the same remaster that the blu rays are then it wouldn't be better than the Italian DVD source though, when the new remaster isn't any better than the old DVDs according to your information it might really be better to go look for that Italian video source somewhere else.

Fun Sailor Moon fact of the day, did you know that there was a Sailor Moon themed Euro Dance group called Super Moonies in Germany in the late 90ies?

I mean, yeah, that's bad in every way. Heh.

Now that you mention it, I do recall you saying before that your DVDs had two video tracks. I didn't really think about it at the time, but DVDs for TV shows are already usually so bit-starved to try to pack as much as possible on them, that *had* to have had a terrible effect indeed upon them, so that starts to make more sense.

I have health problems with my hands (which also makes it so I can barely game at this point - actually what has made me more open in experimenting with random movies and shows like Sailor Moon, since I've never been a big TV/movie watcher!), so I actually have a left-handed mouse...for my left-hand, and also I have a different left-handed mouse...for my right-hand (for some reason, I find this particular left-handed mouse more comfortable for my right-hand than actual right-handed mouses). I switch between them, they're both on my desk at the same time. Furthermore, when I *really* can't use either mouse, I also have a controller that has mouse + some keyboard controls bound to it so I can use that instead. Then, I also have a special keyboard that instead of being tilted normally where the farther-away keys are tilted upwards while the nearest keys are down, it's instead the opposite with the first row of keys being tilted up and the back keys being down. I have gotten a lot of funny comments about my setup, but it's unfortunately necessary. And kind of similar to you, I prefer 16:10 over 16:9, but sadly, that aspect ratio is virtually dead. So yeah, I guess we're peculiar people, .

This song is totally on brand and pretty much exactly what I expected for a Sailor Moon-themed German eurodance group, .

Edited January 23, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[majestic]

29 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

Now that you mention it, I do recall you saying before that your DVDs had two video tracks. I didn't really think about it at the time, but DVDs for TV shows are already usually so bit-starved to try to pack as much as possible on them, that *had* to have had a terrible effect indeed upon them, so that starts to make more sense.

I have health problems with my hands (which also makes it so I can barely game at this point - actually what has made me more open in experimenting with random movies and shows like Sailor Moon, since I've actually never been a big TV/movie watcher!), so I actually have a left-handed mouse...for my left-hand, and also I have a different left-handed mouse...for my right-hand (for some reason, I find this particular left-handed mouse more comfortable for my right-hand than actual right-handed mouses). I switch between them, they're both on my desk at the same time. Furthermore, when I *really* can't use either mouse, I also have a controller that has mouse + some keyboard controls bound to it so I can use that instead. Then, I also have a special keyboard that instead of being tilted normally where the farther-away keys are tilted upwards while the nearest keys are down, it's instead the opposite with the first row of keys being tilted up and the back keys being down. I have gotten a lot of funny comments about my setup, but it's unfortunately necessary. And kind of similar to you, I prefer 16:10 over 16:9, but sadly, that aspect ratio is virtually dead. So yeah, I guess we're peculiar people, .

I'm glad you found some setup that works for you but that... sucks. I'm sorry to hear (well, read) that.

31 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

This song is totally on brand and pretty much exactly what I expected for a Sailor Moon-themed German eurodance group, .

How much do you have the vocalist?

Also! Related Sailor Moon question, what did you think of the episode where Chibi-Usa befriends a pliosaur? There's a definite trend of episodes involving beaches to be really weird, mostly useless and borderline bad. Assuming that episode was actally on the Italian DVDs. It often gets omitted.

[Bartimaeus]

Eh, to be fair, I hate like 99% of vocalists' voices...and she's no exception.

It was included. It was fine - definitely total filler (kind of had DBZ filler vibes going on), not as wacky or ridiculous as the beach episode from season 1 (um, somehow - with dinosaurs and a volcano exploding with zero relevancy to the plot of the show), but it was fine, haha.

[majestic]

33 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

Eh, to be fair, I hate like 99% of vocalists' voices...and she's no exception.

I know, hence the question.

[rjshae]

Seeing that Snowpiercer is essentially a Generation ship concept, how long until we get an actual Generation ship series on TV?

[Gfted1]

I watched the first 3 episodes of WandaVision. Pretty good so far.

[ShadySands]

Watched 3 episodes of some teen angst faerie magic show on Netflix. It reminded me a little bit of the Magicians but unlike that show my not liking the protagonist wasn't as big of an issue.

[Lexx]

Reminds me that I still haven't continued with Cobra Kai season 3. For some reason after the first 2 episodes I felt completely burned out and couldn't find the motivation yet to move on with it.

[melkathi]

It doesn't get better.

 

I chose to watch something else.

Started Duck Tales yesterday. Season 1 Episode 1 from 1987.

[Raithe]

I have to admit, I haven't gotten into the nostalgia kick to watch Cobra Kai. Then again, I was a kid in the 80's who never thought The Karate Kid was brilliant. I appreciate the pop culture value, and some of the quotability, but I never really liked most of the characters and thought it was a pretty generic of that whole genre.

I have way too much backlog of tv to catch up on to add to that pile.

[Lexx]

I was never big into Karate Kid either. Watched the movie maybe once. However, season 1 of Cobra Kai was really good. It's just that once it got picked up by Netflix, the quality dropped hard and they turned a good promise into just another generic drama show.

[Hurlshort]

WandaVision is very good. I have no idea where it is going to go, but so far the first 3 episodes are great. I watched it with my daughter and it flew by way too fast.

[Guard Dog]

Watched Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Pluto almost all last night 

[Raithe]

The whole point of who is bully who is still fairly on point from the Karate Kid tho..

 

[InsaneCommander]

Attack on Titan

Wow. The last episode was probably the best thing I ever saw on tv. And that means a lot considering how good this show is.

Spoiler

Probably nobody will ever regret challenging an enemy to appear as much as Zeke.

 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

More Sailor Moon. It is one of the dumbest things I have seen but it's charming and more entertaining than whatever edgy cw or netflix **** is dropping lately.

[Bartimaeus]

28 minutes ago, KaineParker said:

More Sailor Moon. It is one of the dumbest things I have seen but it's charming and more entertaining than whatever edgy cw or netflix **** is dropping lately.

Exactly how I felt starting out. Supremely stupid, but also hilarious and nice (and also specifically the first season gets funnier as it goes on right up until the end, as it gets more and more ridiculous and almost starts becoming a meme of itself).

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

11 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

Exactly how I felt starting out. Supremely stupid, but also hilarious and nice (and also specifically the first season gets funnier as it goes on right up until the end, as it gets more and more ridiculous and almost starts becoming a meme of itself).

I'm watching the evil pet episode right now and it's just ****ing hilarious. 

[majestic]

9 hours ago, KaineParker said:

I'm watching the evil pet episode right now and it's just ****ing hilarious. 

The one where one of the great seven Youma is inside the fat cat that's been hitting on Luna (because the other evil pet episode is near the end of Sailor Moon R, and wowsers that would be a quick binge on your part)?

edit: No, it's not. I just realized you mean the one near the beginning where everyone buys these weird little pet things that turn them miserable and jealous.

One of the best things about Sailor Moon is how you can pick out any number of scenes, talk about them and people who have never seen the anime are left to wonder what the hell is going on and how anyone could even being to enjoy this, yet it still makes perfect sense in-universe because the show's just like that and never stops or, heaven forbid, apologizes for it. Glorious, just glorious.
 

Spoiler

 

Later in the show, i.e. during Sailor Moon S, you get a scene where the bad guys who are tirelessly working on bringing about the end of the world are playing Twister:

Everything about this scene is awesome. It runs for over two minutes, is batsh*t insane and the artwork is fantastic.

 

And yet, even amongst all this bedlam it still finds time for character development and the odd commentary on 90ies Japan or broader issues here and there.

Edited January 25, 2021 by majestic

[Raithe]

For the geek discussion...

https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/how-babylon-5-made-star-trek-better/