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tenia wrote:If someone can explain me how you can have information for the surround speakers in a 2.0 soundtrack, it would be highly appreciated.

By default, Dolby Pro Logic uses five audio streams. However, the encoded audio is still two channels (the other three are "loaded" into them), left and right. What this means is that your receiver has to do the split (extract the additional three streams). This specific encoding was done for years to maintain backwards compatibility with older 2-channel systems. Naturally, this is where the issue with Criterion's release is:

If you bitstream, you essentially bypass the process I described to you above - your receiver does not extract the additional three streams, it only processes the two-channel audio your player sends (bitstreams). For you to discover that there is an issue with the Pro Logic track, you must change your audio set up, meaning that that you must stop bitstreaming and instead leave your receiver do all of the decoding (when you bitstream, your player does the "decoding"). Early in the life of Blu-ray, this was what most people did, as not all players could bitstream the major audio codecs. For example, not all players could bitstream DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 tracks, including the PS3. I don't know if you remember, but the PS3 had an upgrade that took care of that.

Back to Criterion: Perhaps the best thing to do would have been to encode the audio tracks as Artificial Eye did. Have a plain DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0/Dolby TrueHD 2.0/or LPCM 2.0 track AND another DTS-HD Master Audio 5.0/Dolby TrueHD 5.0/or LPCM 5.0 track (whichever you prefer). This way, if you bitstream, like pretty much everyone else out there, you won't have to tweak your system to get the surround activity. For me personally the plain two-channel audio is just fine.

Also, Tenia, here's a link for Dolby Pro Logic II directly from Dolby.

I hope things are clearer now

At last, a man who knows! Thanks, pro-bassoonist - you've solved my problem. I usually bitstream from my Oppo 93 and Oppo 83, because that is what Oppo recommends for receivers capable of decoding DTS-HD MA and Dolby TrueHD (I have a Pioneer SC-LX83). So I've been getting decent stereo playback in DTS-HD MA on Blue, White and Red, but no surround. I reset my Oppo 93 from Bitstream to LPCM, and immediately my receiver made available all its Pro Logic options for "Blue", and I could replicate the "centre speaker only" fault on "White". (I didn't test "Red".) It's nice to know there's a workaround, although I'll probably stick with bitstream and DTS-HD MA stereo. And I'll be sending back "White" for replacement, but only because I can't avoid returning Carlos disc 2 (episode 3).

After this set of posts, the mystery was cleared up enough to instigate trying them out on my setup also. I normally run multichannel LPCM, so no streaming issue to get in the way there. When there's a 5.1 DTS HD-MA soundtrack present, or a Dolby TrueHD one, my receiver shows "MULTI CH DIRECT" (or "MULTI CH IN", doesn't seem to matter sound-wise which way that's set).

When playing the DTS HD-MA 2.0 discs, there is no "MULTI CH", just my normal "DIRECT", which can readily be changed to "DOLBY PLII cine". So checked each of the three, and Blue and Red had plenty of sound to go around all the surround channels, White was confined to the center channel. Receiver's OSD showed the signal coming in as PCM 48kHz 2/0/0 from the player for all three discs.

Besides that being cleared up, lesson learned is to pay more attention to the 2.0 discs and whether they should be listened to with ProLogic activated or not.

You guys are killing me. And you further convince me to keep my cheap DVD player and cheap tv. ](*,)

It's typically a lot easier to figure out when you actually do it than it is to talk(/read) about it without having tried it out first. Worth the bother if the things blu-ray has to offer matter enough to you.

I bitstream from my Oppo BDP-80 to my Yamaha RX-V2067 - 'White' flashes between DTS-HD MA and Pro-Logic on the amp's readout (and delivers one channel), and only if I request the signal 'straight' on my amp does it stick to DTS-HD MA. A simple comparison between the films in the set easily highlights the fault on my system, 'Blue' and 'Red' delivering a combination of DTS-HD MA properly split by DD Pro-Logic?

EDIT; Ah, it seems older amplifiers may not be able to apply Pro-Logic to lossless audio tracks, while newer amps can.

pro-bassoonist wrote:I hope things are clearer now

I indeed understand much better now , as I didn't know you could embedded surround info in a 2.0 track.
I also understand where I was missing the point : since the track is 2.0, I wasn't surprised to "only" have 2.0, and wasn't looking to anything more spatialized than this.

Why did they not separate into a more modern codec? Were they hoping to preserve the original experience, warts and all?

According to a poster over at the blu-ray.com forums, the corrected White Blu-ray is now available.

Here's the official e-mail (also, includes info about Carlos replacement)...

Hello Chris and Happy New Year,

Good news! We are glad to report we've received the corrected WHITE disc. We will be exchanging the Blu-ray discs directly from our New York office. Please send your WHITE disc, disc only please, to my attention at the address below. With the disc, please include your email address and postal address. Please do not include any packaging with your disc. When we receive your disc, we will send you the corrected copy and a $10 gift certificate to Criterion.com! The corrected CARLOS discs are not yet ready. If you would prefer to wait, and send your two discs together, that is no problem. We will send out another email when the CARLOS replacement disc is ready. Thank you for your patience while we were sorting out this audio issue! Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns, and thank you for supporting Criterion!

Best,

Jon

The Criterion Collection
Attn: Jon Mulvaney
215 Park Avenue South
Floor 5
New York, NY 10003

So will this disc replacement program apply to all or just a few (like those who actually contacted Jon and got an e-mail back)?

This only affected the surround audio track, correct?

Drucker wrote:This only affected the surround audio track, correct?

The original release's 2.0 track is fine through a standard two-channel set-up.

I sent an e-mail to Jon Mulvaney a week ago to ask about getting a Blu-ray disc replacement for "White" and have not received a reply. Should I take a chance and just send the defective disc in and hope for the best (that Criterion will send me a replacement)?

Very disappointed with the lack of response from Criterion.

Just follow the instructions in the email posted by ccfixx, don't worry about not having received a reply from Criterion.

OK, I'll try that. Thanks for the suggestion.

I received my copy of the revised "White" Blu-Ray, and can report it does correctly decode to Dolby Surround, with dialogue centered and surrounds surprisingly active. The disc itself has "second printing" included on the legal text running around the edge of the disc to differentiate it from the original.

I did notice, since I was concentrating on the sound, that there is some awkwardness in the original mix during the conversation between Karol and Mikolaj in the subway. Several of Karol's lines ("I still love her", "Beautiful") stand out sonically from the rest of his dialogue - they have an ADR'd quality, and there's a phasiness that causes the dialogue to leak a bit into the surrounds and lose its place in the center channel. It's not the same effect as the dialogue echoes that are mixed into the surround channels to capture the reverberant qualities of the subway location - it seems more like an artifact of the limitations of Dolby Pro-Logic decoding, using phase cues to pull a four-channel mix from two channels of audio.

I was concerned at first that Criterion had somehow made another error for the second printing of the BD, but I found the audio in this scene sounds exactly the same on my Miramax DVD, so I believe it's intrinsic to the original sound mix.

ZiggyMonroe wrote:In addition to any sound issues on White, look at the Framing issues on Blue.
In most cases it doesn't matter much but when Binoche lowers her head and her chin is awkwardly cut off it's frustrating the full frame isn't used.

This was shot with a cell phone camera so the image isn't great but you can see the difference.



Also check the DVD Beaver site for the comparisons, especially the coffee cup and the blond woman's locket. The bottom of the frame is similarly cropped.

The picture quality of the Criterion Blu-ray is so nice it's a real frustrating shame they didn't get the full frame.

Blue does appear to be improperly framed. Has anyone else noticed this?

_shadow_ wrote:I received my copy of the revised "White" Blu-Ray, and can report it does correctly decode to Dolby Surround, with dialogue centered and surrounds surprisingly active. The disc itself has "second printing" included on the legal text running around the edge of the disc to differentiate it from the original.

Does anyone know how this relates to the exterior packaging?

Does seeing "First printing 2011" on the back of the box mean that it's a copy that has been sitting in the store (or warehouse) for months and still has the problematic disk?

Or did they start putting "Second printing" disks inside of boxes that explicitly say "First printing"?

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It's been years since I last watched the trilogy and I don't think I'll be rewatching in the next two weeks, but:

[meme]"White" is the best movie in the trilogy//Change my mind[/meme]

I've always preferred White to Blue and Red, from the moment I first saw it back in 1994. And while the other two are now very much generic European arthouse films, White is an increasingly fascinating snapshot of a time that really wasn't being documented elsewhere by eastern European cinema at the time - that of the immediate post-Communist environment, the dog-eat-dog entrepreneurialism, and the sense that everything could collapse at any moment. (István Szabó's near-contemporaneous Sweet Emma, Dear Böbe is one of the few other films from the first half of the 1990s with any kind of international profile that also tackles this era.)

It's also a welcome reminder of Kieślowski's sardonic sense of humour, something that he tended to suppress in many of his other films (perhaps not coincidentally, his favourite actor Jerzy Stuhr tends to prominently feature in exceptions like Camera Buff and Dekalog Ten, and he plays a significant supporting role here), but which was all too apparent from interviews with the man himself.

Count me among the big admirers of this one as well. I love the humor and surreality that Kieslowski mined from the start of the post-Cold War
era. This film, along with Voyager/Homo Faber, really cemented Julie Delpy's status as an actor of immense gifts, too.


Without getting in-depth with the rest of the trilogy, which I love as well, I think Kieslowski kind of screwed the pooch with the final
minutes of Red, and it's always struck me as being false and hackneyed.

I initially had a hard time with White. A few years ago I thought Blue would be a film a film someone I know would like, and she did, and asked to see the two other films. I was kind of hesitant to recommend White, and we somehow ended up watching it together and while she liked it I ended up loving it (it was my third watch). I think that, I don't know how, I missed all the comedy the first two time, but we were laughing together (that first POV shot of Poland!). I'm pretty sure that being a teenager when watching the trilogy first made me unable to understand much of this one, I felt closer to the experiences of the characters in Blue and Red, and also they're "prettier" films, with more obvious color staging than White ever does. I was way more into formalism as a teenager (as most do?) and I'm sure this bothered me that there was no blue plastic jewels or big bright red posters to color the scenes.
We both were disapointed by Red though!

I really liked the rather ferocious (poker-faced) black humor in this. And I thought the performances were just about perfect.