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Rome Season 1 release date, Stargate SG-1 masters?

Substance

Well-known member
⭐️⭐️PATRON⭐️⭐️
Earlier this week, season 2 of Rome (HBO) showed up on the Kstore. I immediately purchased it assuming season 1 should be right after. Am I correct to assume this?


An unexpected but a great surprise was the HD versions of Warehouse 13 seasons this week. Again, immediate purchase for me.


Even more unexpected was the SG-1 season 1 (SD only) release today. There is an HD Blu-ray release from last year and HD streaming is available now from Netflix and others. These are confirmed to be upscales (fake HD) and they have defective multi-channel audio soundtracks, 2.0 audio matrix’d into 5.1, rather than discreet 5.1 audio. Is the Kstore master from the same source as these or the previous masters which were SD only but had true 5.1 audio?
 
Which titles get released - and sometimes missing seasons - is a mystery. I don't know if K reaches out to studios and requests titles or if they just take whatever they're given, no questions asked. For example, "The Expanse" is missing the last two seasons. And KStore only has it in HD, even though UHD versions of all seasons exist.

They are also missing the original two seasons of "Twin Peaks." (The sequel season was produced by a different studio, and who knows if KStore ever asked the original studio for the original seasons...)
 
Which titles get released - and sometimes missing seasons - is a mystery. I don't know if K reaches out to studios and requests titles or if they just take whatever they're given, no questions asked. For example, "The Expanse" is missing the last two seasons. And KStore only has it in HD, even though UHD versions of all seasons exist.

They are also missing the original two seasons of "Twin Peaks." (The sequel season was produced by a different studio, and who knows if KStore ever asked the original studio for the original seasons...)
Great points. I am not sure if not advertising what(content) is coming, when(release schedule) they are coming and where (masters) they are coming from is a ’lack of’ resources issue or it is a preference as the mystery can/could ‘potentially’ help sales. We probably won’t get a true answer to this because the answer itself is a marketing strategy as well.

I have been a Kscape owner for over a year now. I check the store for new additions literally everyday except Sundays (never seen a Sunday release). I was surprised when The Expanse season 4 was released on the store. There still isn’t a Blu-ray release for anything beyond season 3. Prime produced the seasons from 4 to 6. The season 4 on Kstore gives me hope that seasons 5 and 6 are eventually coming. I am pretty sure Prime will reserve the UHD versions to their streaming platform however the Kstore’s HD versions look and sound significantly better than the Prime’s UHD versions.

Having said all this, I often wonder with only 5 to 8 titles added everyweek, how the Kstore will ever catch up with the physical media or streaming. One would expect a lot more catalog titles should be added each week. So I am also very curious for the answer to your question whether if K requests the titles or they are given whatever. I have about 3000 titles on my K system and it could easily be double of that if the store wasn’t missing a million catalog titles. Of course the answer could be, I am just one person, the majority of the k owner may not care anything other than the new releases. So, what do I know?
 
Many owners agree. I have clients and friends that will not buy any content that has seasons unless all current seasons are available. If all seasons are available on disc, or with other vendors, they will not buy from K if any season is missing.

Jim
 
Substance > I would imagine it would be in K's interest to offer as many titles as possible because some of us will fill our servers and need to get more hardware. We can't fill those Terras if back catalogs are not nurtured. I am curious if there is an actual curator of their library, someone who reaches out to studios and says "Hey, we'd love titles A, B, and C." As you say, there is a huge amount of material in existence and KStore is just scratching the surface. Whether it's by design or not...who knows. Maybe we should start a thread with title requests that someone at Kaleidescape will take to heart! (Unless such a thread already exists?)

I've also noticed there are quite a few titles still in SD format, that exist in HD (and some in 4K).
 
BTW, good to know "The Expanse" looks and sounds great. I did buy Seasons 1-4, and have only seen it via Amazon. I plan to rewatch the series with the KStore purchases.
 
There isn’t HD versions of SG1 until season 8…

This is an interesting case.

Seasons 1-3 were shot on 16mm, scanned and edited on composite digital D-3 tape. Therefore, these masters are forever locked to 480i composite NTSC resolution. Even if they get rescanned and re-edited, 16mm film does not offer much more resolution than SD. They could however edit them in component digital 4:2:2 format and master them in SD progressive scan.

They were originally broadcasted in 4:3 open matte ratio. D-3 master tape was converted to D-1 component and matted to 16:9 for the DVD release. This process doesn't doesn't add any improvements to video.

I have the Laserdisc release for the pilot episode which is the only open matte 4:3 home release. It also has the Dolby Stereo broadcast soundtrack in uncompressed PCM. Unfortunately, they released only the pilot on Laserdisc.

Seasons 4-7 were shot on 32mm, scanned and edited on composite digital D-3 tape. D-1 format was super expensive and was rarely used for TV. Although 32mm offers much higher resolution, the final master is bottlenecked by the D-3 tape and has similar video quality to the first 3 seasons except some finer grain (32mm vs 16mm). Season 4 and 5 were broadcasted in open matte 4:3 ratio but matted to 16:9 for the DVDs. Seasons 6 and 7 were broadcasted in HD and in 16:9 ratio. These might be on D-1 or better mastering tape. I don't have any info on this.

Season 8-10 were shot on HDCAM and mastered in 1080p24. All shots were composed for 16:9 ratio.

Let's look at the home video releases. All seasons were released on DVD. Most season episodes were spread on 5 DVD-9 discs which roughly 40GB of data per season.

There is a recent box set release in Blu-ray disc format. The video on these discs are upconverted from SD masters for the first 5 seasons. Almost identical to the earlier DVD releases. Season 6 and 7 also have poor video quality and might be upconverted from SD too. Season 8 to 10 are natively HD. There is a mastering flaw on the audio soundtracks. They are on lossy Dolby Digital encodes to begin with. The rear channels are faux surround and not natively discreet. The early DVD releases also had Dolby Digital encodes but they were in true discreet 5.1.

Now let's look at the Kaleidescape releases. Season 1 and 3 are in SD. The store does not specify the audio soundtracks. It is safe to assume, you get the Dolby Stereo and Dolby Digital soundtracks as common with most SD releases. The question is if the K release has the correct Dolby Digital soundtrack or the flawed one like in the Blu-ray disc release. Another curious point is the K version is 70GB for the season 1 and 80GB for the seasons 2 and 3. This is double the DVD releases. Does this mean the original 16mm films were rescanned and remastered in digital component 4:2:2 format? I think the data size increase indicates that. If this is true, and the Dolby soundtrack is the true discreet mix, the K version is the definitive home video release even in SD resolution. Perhaps, I should bite the bullet on purchasing the K versions and compare all. My only worry is the possibility of the flawed audio soundtrack.

Apologies for the lengthy post. I am a bit enthusiastic about the 90s/00s sci-fi TV shows. I hope someone from Kaleidescape can provide a little more information about the master they used :)
 
I did a quick check on Season 1, and the audio is DTS Stereo for the episodes I checked (I would expect them all to be the same). I'm sorry I don't know anything about the source mezzanine file in terms of the video presentation. As far as I know there was not a big re-scan/remaster effort undertaken in the production of the mezzanine files, so the video on our downloads is probably similar to the DVDs although possibly at a higher video bitrate since we didn't have to ensure that we fit onto optical media.
 
I did a quick check on Season 1, and the audio is DTS Stereo for the episodes I checked (I would expect them all to be the same). I'm sorry I don't know anything about the source mezzanine file in terms of the video presentation. As far as I know there was not a big re-scan/remaster effort undertaken in the production of the mezzanine files, so the video on our downloads is probably similar to the DVDs although possibly at a higher video bitrate since we didn't have to ensure that we fit onto optical media.
The UK store recently got the first 3 seasons of SG-1. Are these identical to the US version? I see the same file size for all but shouldn’t the UK release be in PAL format?

Also, any chance we will get the remaining 7 seasons to the store?
 
@MikeKobb

I purchased these first 3 seasons of SG-1 today. There is something awfully wrong with these encodes. These are DVD quality downloads as the info card confirms but my M500 outputs them at 1080p60 (while it's supposed to output 480i60 per its settings).

There is heavy deinterlacing artifacts like combing which tells me the source material is SD but upconverted to HD. If I must speculate, the interlaced source master was bob & weaved because it falls apart as soon as there is any motion in the image. Its so bad that its unwatchable.

Maybe something with the metadata on the download file which flags it as HD video and the M500 outputs it as such?

Note: I can confirm the audio is DTS 2.0 at 48kHz.
 
@MikeKobb

I purchased these first 3 seasons of SG-1 today. There is something awfully wrong with these encodes. These are DVD quality downloads as the info card confirms but my M500 outputs them at 1080p60 (while it's supposed to output 480i60 per its settings).

There is heavy deinterlacing artifacts like combing which tells me the source material is SD but upconverted to HD. If I must speculate, the interlaced source master was bob & weaved because it falls apart as soon as there is any motion in the image. Its so bad that its unwatchable.

Maybe something with the metadata on the download file which flags it as HD video and the M500 outputs it as such?

Note: I can confirm the audio is DTS 2.0 at 48kHz.
Same here on all three seasons. I tried some other SD downloads and all is 480i60 except these Stargate SG-1 seasons.
 
I am ok with SD material upscaled to HD but if it is done right. I sent an email to support a few days ago. So far no reply but I hope they will address this issue otherwise I am deleting these downloads and going back to DVD imports.

Note: Season 1 is in DTS 2.0 where as Season 2 and 3 are in DTS 5.1.
 
I’m sorry, I missed your original message on Tuesday. I will escalate within the team. The company is on holiday tomorrow (Monday) so the earliest anyone can look at it (if they weren’t looking at it already because of your support email) would be Tuesday.
 
@MikeKobb

I purchased these first 3 seasons of SG-1 today. There is something awfully wrong with these encodes. These are DVD quality downloads as the info card confirms but my M500 outputs them at 1080p60 (while it's supposed to output 480i60 per its settings).

There is heavy deinterlacing artifacts like combing which tells me the source material is SD but upconverted to HD. If I must speculate, the interlaced source master was bob & weaved because it falls apart as soon as there is any motion in the image. Its so bad that its unwatchable.

Maybe something with the metadata on the download file which flags it as HD video and the M500 outputs it as such?

Note: I can confirm the audio is DTS 2.0 at 48kHz.
Vudu says these are 480p. I assume that you have the M500 set to “Passthrough”. What do they look like if you pick 480p or 1080p resolution for DVD‘S on your M500?

John
 
pass through doesn’t always work well if the content has weird cadences. My M500 is set to 480i for SD video. This works for all other SD content, downloaded and imported except SG-1 downloads.
 
My point was that if it truly is 480p, then you are comverting the progressive to interlaced and then back to progressive with your video processor. That’s a lot of conversions to affect things. The M500 does a great job of upscaling (and de-interlacing) so I always have DVDs output at the highest resolution on my m series players.

I was just curious if this would fix your issue with these SD downloads.

John
 
My point was that if it truly is 480p, then you are comverting the progressive to interlaced and then back to progressive with your video processor. That’s a lot of conversions to affect things. The M500 does a great job of upscaling (and de-interlacing) so I always have DVDs output at the highest resolution on my m series players.

I was just curious if this would fix your issue with these SD downloads.

John
Hard to say. Kaleidescape calls SD downloads “DVD quality”. Region 1 DVDs are 480i60. If I import a DVD, I know the raw output is 480i60. How about the downloads? Are they 480i60 or 480p30? Looking at download sizes, almost all DVD quality downloads match the DVD import size. From this, it is safe to assume, those downloads are direct ports from DVDs.

Kaleidescape says the download masters are the mezzanine file provided by studios’ streaming content team. I believe this is partially true. I think the earlier masters were DVDs and Blu-rays as those have the exact file sizes and extras. Now the SG-1 seasons don’t match the DVD size as I compared above. These are mastered from elsewhere unless the incorrect encoding caused the discrepancy on the file sizes.

@MikeKobb

I tried a few things. The “DVD quality content“ resolution setting on the M500 has no effect on these titles. The “Blu-ray quality content” setting changes the output resolution. This proves that the M500 thinks these are Blu-ray quality downloads. If I set the resolution to pass through, the output is 720p60 but the image has heavy random noise and deinterlacing artifacts. If I set the Blu-ray quality content resolution to 480i then I get the clearest image. There is definitely an issue with the flagging of this content as I suspected on my earlier post.
 
Sounds like you have tried everything that I would.

John
 
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