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Region 4 Winners and Losers

Region 4 Winners and Losers

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Title Best
Dio-Evil or DivineR1
    Both the Region 1 and Region 4 releases contain identical extras and menus, however the features are very different indeed. I'm lucky enough to have the Region 1 NTSC release on hand for this comparison, and the news is not good. It seems that neither release is perfect. In fact, I am hesitant to recommend either of them. The transfers differ greatly, and I hope that with the following details you'll be able to make an informed purchasing decision of your own.

    Firstly, it is worth noting that the Region 1 release is coded for all regions, contrary to the packaging.

    As I have already stated, our Region 4 release has irritating audio sync issues associated with each soundtrack, placing the image ahead of the audio. We also have an unbelievably neglectful layer transition, placed during the track Heaven and Hell which interrupts the song considerably. This pause may be less of an issue on players that have a large playback buffer, however the fact remains that it is there, and it could be better.

    Both video transfers have an average video bitrate of 7Mb/s and suffer from similar colour bleeding problems, which stem from the video source and not its transfer to DVD.

    The Region 1 release has entirely different issues, mostly concerned with video quality.

  • The full frame 1.33:1 image has been matted as 1.78:1. That is, black bars have been placed on the top and bottom of the image, and 16x9 enhancement hasn't been included. I have verified this using screen captures and quite a bit of screen area has been chopped out of the Region 1 transfer for no apparent reason, other than to create a fake widescreen image.
  • The level of MPEG grain in the NTSC transfer is unlike anything I have seen and is terribly hard to watch.
  • Quite a number of digital post production effects have been scattered throughout the Region 1 video transfer, perhaps to hide the video compression issues - these include black & white portions of video and a strange, jerky effect that seems to skip frames. The jerky effect is used prominently during Simon Wright's drum solo, and looks plainly cheap and ugly.
  • The Region 1 disc doesn't have any of the audio sync problems that have been introduced into the Region 4 release, which is a bonus.
  • The Region 1 layer transitional pause is placed between the songs Fever Dreams and Holy Diver and is much less disruptive.

    So there you have it, you can choose either the butchered, over-compressed video transfer of the Region 1 release or the out-of-sync Region 4 with a terrible layer transition.

    It's a hard call, but I'm going to favour the Region 1 NTSC release on this occasion because despite its poor video quality at least some effort has been made to make the layer change pause less disruptive, and of course the audio is perfectly in sync with the video.