I would have to disagree with the other reviewer's glowing remarks about the video quality being better than VHS or laserdisc. To me the artifacts of MPEG encoding are clearly visible (blocky artifacts) in the rendering of this DVD, at least on my once state-of-the-art Philips DVD player.
Since DVDs are MPEG encoded, the video is compressed. The amount of compression is a variable that is left as a choice for the person doing the video encoding and mastering of the DVD. It seems to me as though, in order to fit the high resolution DTS audio tracks onto the limited space available in a 2-layer commercial DVD format, they had to sacrifice the video quality.
In fact, the pictures look decidedly worse than their VHS counterpart, but it doesn't matter, because the real reason for buying this disc is for the high resolution audio, and for that alone it's worth the price. The pretty and brilliant pictures are just frosting on the cake, so to speak.
Since DVDs are MPEG encoded, the video is compressed. The amount of compression is a variable that is left as a choice for the person doing the video encoding and mastering of the DVD. It seems to me as though, in order to fit the high resolution DTS audio tracks onto the limited space available in a 2-layer commercial DVD format, they had to sacrifice the video quality.
In fact, the pictures look decidedly worse than their VHS counterpart, but it doesn't matter, because the real reason for buying this disc is for the high resolution audio, and for that alone it's worth the price. The pretty and brilliant pictures are just frosting on the cake, so to speak.