YES!! MGM educates buyers of MAD MAX with an option page - Widescreen or P&S (1 Viewer)

[Christina_V]

Oh just tocorrect myself, i made a mistake in another thread about the differnt soundtracks........i thought Knightrider sounded like a girl in the Australian track while he always seemed more craz,menacing & psychotic sounding in the dubbed track.
Of course i'll give them movie a watch in Australian next time i see the movie. I'm just used to the dubbed track and there real voices will take some getting used to as some sound totally different from the dubbed track.
I wonder how Johny the Boy sounds now?

 

[David Lambert]

Jeremy, Dave and patrick, How did you guys do those screen captures? Did you just play the movie on your PC and press PRINT SCREEN? Looks cool anyways...

I do it with the free DVD player that comes with Windows ME; I forget what it's called but I'll edit this later when I can pull it up (might lock the system if I try while surfing). (It's DVDPlay)
Funny thing is, my Compaq here came with this one as part of ME, but it was hidden. Because Compaq wanted you to use their Compaq-logo-customized version of the Mediamatics player. Well, I'm grateful in that I consider the Mediatmatics superior for day-to-day use, but since it won't screen capture and the other one will, I want it available, right?
THEN one of the DVD-ROM PC Friendly discs put the InterActual player on my system, too. I was called The Phantom Menace. So now I've got THREE soft players on this Compaq. Ho boy...

 

[Mike V]

Kudos to MGM!

 

[Matt_Marlow]

David Lambert, I have a Compaq notebook computer which also includes the Windows ME player. When I tried out the screen capture feature on it, I get a message like this: "Screen capture will not work because your decoder doesn't support it." Have you had any luck using the screen capture feature?

Before you mentioned it, I didn't even realize that Windows ME had a DVD player, so I was just using the Compaq version. Anyway, I just want to use some screen captures for the wallpaper on my desktop, but I can't get it to work.

Where would I buy Power DVD at if I wanted it? What features would it have that the ME or Compaq DVD player doesn't have?

 

[Patrick Mirza]

I use WinDVD on my computer.

MickeS: Where do you see sky cut off in the widescreen versions of Mad Max? The screenshots I posted are from the same frames of both the fullscreen and widescreen transfers on the disc. The film was hard-matted widescreen, the only way the P&S could have more vertical information is if they overmatted the WS during transfer - and I just didn't notice that with this transfer.

 

[David Lambert]

Matt_Marlow, I don't know why you get that error message. I will offer this, from Jim Taylor's DVD FAQ:

Most DVD PCs, even those with software decoders, use video overlay hardware to insert the video directly into the VGA signal. This an efficient way to handle the very high bandwidth of full-motion video. Some decoder cards, such as the Creative Labs Encore Dxr series and the Sigma Designs Hollywood series, use a pass-through cable that overlays the video into the analog VGA signal after it comes out of the video display card. Video overlay uses a technique called colorkey to selectively replace a specified pixel color (often magenta or near-black) with video content. Anywhere a colorkey pixel appears in the computer graphics video, it's replaced by video from the DVD decoder. This process occurs "downstream" from the computer's video memory, so if you try to take a screenshot (which grabs pixels from video RAM), all you get is a solid square of the colorkey color.
Hardware acceleration must be turned off before screen capture will work. This makes some decoders write to standard video memory. Utilities such as Creative Softworx, HyperSnap, and SD Capture can then grab still pictures. Some player applications such as PowerDVD and the Windows Me player can take screenshots if hardware acceleration is turned off.

I really don't think I did anything to turn off any hardware acceleration. A) I poked around looking for it, but never found it. As I'm an A+ certified computer repair tech who is employeed at the Laptop Repair Center that fixes computers for IBM, Toshiba, Dell, and NEC (as well as X-Box consoles), I'm certain when I say that I didn't mess with anything I didn't understand, and didn't make any changes "just to see what they did". B) My system plays DVD's as fast as it ever did. C) As soon as I discovered the ME player (called "DVDPlay", by-the-way), it worked for taking snapshots with no other actions necessary.
Maybe the design of my desktop system is such that, as the FAQ says, the card is sending the signal through the video card, whereas your laptop's design is bypassing that video card, forcing you to turn the hardware acceleration off where I had no such need. However, using OTHER screen-cap techniques resulted in the "colorkey" issue the FAQ mentions so I am sure my system is bypassing the video card too, and that the DVDPlay software is simply working around this.
You did find the proper button for screencapture, right? You have to click the arrow to the right of the volume controls in order to expand the control panel area downward, revealing the screencapture control in the middle of the bottom row. I can screen-cap it and circle it, if you're having trouble! (ironic solution, eh?)

 

[Andy Elvers]

There is a fantastic little documentary called "why letterbox" on the 2nd disc of the "Die Hard" special edition release from 2001. This uses one particular scene from the film and shows the sequence OAR/widescreen, 4/3 scanned and then pan and scanned to show what is lost during this process. Its a very convincing arguement for OAR!