Doctor Who: The Complete Fifth Series (DVD & Blu-Ray) Specs/Cover Art (1 Viewer)

[Darren Gross]

Bad news- not only is the US Blu-Ray also 1080/50i, which causes problems on my Panasonic DMP-BD55 as well as rafts of other players, but the in-vision commentaries play without the commentaries! You can see the window with the commentators, but the audio remains the standard episode audio. You can't surf the audio on, nothing. This is the first I've heard of this issue as an issue on my Panasonic.


Does anyone bother to qc and check the compatability for discs any longer at the studios? It's ridiculous at this point with Blu-ray to have features that won't play on certain later generation players. And BBC Video needs to get their thumbs out and stop releasing these 1080i discs that are incompatible.

 

[RickER]

Originally Posted by Darren Gross

Bad news- not only is the US Blu-Ray also 1080/50i, which causes problems on my Panasonic DMP-BD55 as well as rafts of other players, but the in-vision commentaries play without the commentaries! You can see the window with the commentators, but the audio remains the standard episode audio. You can't surf the audio on, nothing. This is the first I've heard of this issue as an issue on my Panasonic.


Does anyone bother to qc and check the compatability for discs any longer at the studios? It's ridiculous at this point with Blu-ray to have features that won't play on certain later generation players. And BBC Video needs to get their thumbs out and stop releasing these 1080i discs that are incompatible.

Looks beautiful on my Sony setup. But let me ask a question. I have not watched the video commentaries. HOWEVER, often you need to change the audio option on the Blu-ray player to hear them. From Direct, to Mix. I forget what the option is, cause honestly i stopped listening to commentaries years ago, so i have not changed the audio in a long time. Usually its the PIP commentaries that this is an issue with.


Anyway, try it, see what happens.

 

[ChadMcCallum]

Originally Posted by Darren Gross

Bad news- not only is the US Blu-Ray also 1080/50i, which causes problems on my Panasonic DMP-BD55 as well as rafts of other players, but the in-vision commentaries play without the commentaries! You can see the window with the commentators, but the audio remains the standard episode audio. You can't surf the audio on, nothing. This is the first I've heard of this issue as an issue on my Panasonic.


Does anyone bother to qc and check the compatability for discs any longer at the studios? It's ridiculous at this point with Blu-ray to have features that won't play on certain later generation players. And BBC Video needs to get their thumbs out and stop releasing these 1080i discs that are incompatible.

Your player's audio is set to bitstream, if you set it to PCM or Re-Encode or something like the audio will work fine.

 

[AndyMcKinney]

Originally Posted by Darren Gross with 1080/50, so if that's indeed correct, you shouldn't even be able to see video for the episodes themselves, let alone in-vision commentaries. About all you should be able to see is menus.


If you're right, that would be a major cock-up, in a way far worse than them releasing The Specials and Torchwood as 60i worldwide, because UK viewers can at least play those titles universally (despite being inferior to the 1080/50 standard), but I have a hard time believing these are 1080/50, or we'd have heard a lot more complaints before now (and probably in this very thread).

 

[ChadMcCallum]

I frequent Gallifrey Base, the biggest Doctor Who forum around, and I've yet to see anyone say anything about the Region A set being 50i, and one would think with hundreds of North American fans visiting the dvd section of the forum everyday someone who have mentioned this. The only problem I've heard about is the missing audio in the commentaries and people on both sides of the pond have had that problem but I've already posted the solution for that above. I think you're mistaken about the video Darren, but hopefully you can the commentaries working.

 

[Darren Gross]

Thanks folks for the tip on the in-vision commentaries! Worked like a charm. That issue is resolved.


It's possibly that the BD is 1080/60i, not 1080/50i. My player doesn't indicate what the disc format is, only what the player setting is output to. It's the identical issue with the Torchwood Children of Earth discs, so it's probably 1080/60i then.

 

[AndyMcKinney]

Originally Posted by Darren Gross

Thanks folks for the tip on the in-vision commentaries! Worked like a charm. That issue is resolved.


It's possibly that the BD is 1080/60i, not 1080/50i. My player doesn't indicate what the disc format is, only what the player setting is output to. It's the identical issue with the Torchwood Children of Earth discs, so it's probably 1080/60i then.

All three series of Torchwood were released in 1080/60 worldwide (even in the UK), so I guess that definitely says the US release of Doctor Who: Series 5 is indeed 1080/60, not 50hz.

 

[ChadMcCallum]

Some people are reporting audio problems with Vincent and The Doctor in this set. They claim the music sounds muffled throughout the entire episode, though the dialogue and sound effects are fine. This is supposed to be most evident during the opening theme and closing credits. This seems to be a problem with both the UK and US releases of the dvd and blu-ray. It doesn't seem to be a problems on all copies though, some people are saying its sounds fine on their set.


Some fans have emailed their problems to the BBC ([email protected]) and so far have only been told to try their disc in a different player or adjust their settings but it seems more likely its a disc problem, given the number of complaints and the fact that the other episodes on the disc sound fine. I would suggest emailing them if you're having this problem. If they get enough complaints they may decide to replace the faulty discs.

 

[mark1 I]

hello. the audio on my season 5 is driving me nuts. the background noise is drowning out the dialog. help

 

[AndyMcKinney]

Some people are reporting audio problems with Vincent and The Doctor in this set.

Far more troubling is the video problems that have been reported with the Complete Series 6 Blu-Ray sets, at least the ones released in the UK. In some scenes of some episodes, the bottom half of the picture (well, bottom 40%) of the picture looks much more "grainy" than the upper portion of the picture. No idea if this problem affected the US sets**, but the BBC finally re-issued a corrected set for the UK). **The reason I say this is that the UK sets were released 1080i/50 and the US ones 1080i/60, so they're not the exact same encode, unlike the US/UK sets of Torchwood series 1-3. I've not heard anyone say for sure whether the US sets have the same problem or not.