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Motorsport on DVD


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#1 garyfrogeye

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Posted 27 December 2012 - 09:35

Apologies if this has already been discussed here. I searched the archives but came across the Mortorsport magazine thread, but at 64 pages long its' too much to search through.

I received the the motorsport 1960s DVD for Christmas and while I appreciate that they don't want people reproducing the magazine. The quality of the scanning is so poor that I'm having trouble even reading much of it. Has this already been discussed or am I alone here?

Happy Christmas

Gary

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#2 Emery0323

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Posted 27 December 2012 - 09:55

Somebody might have been mentioned this in the other thread, but I definitely have the same complaint.

The scans are virtually unreadable! ): :down:

I don't know that it's necessarily a copy-protection issue so much as a basic technical problem with the fonts they used and the scan settings.

#3 Wirra

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Posted 27 December 2012 - 10:19

Does the DVD 'region' match the region capabilities of the DVD player you are using?

#4 garyfrogeye

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Posted 27 December 2012 - 10:32

Does the DVD 'region' match the region capabilities of the DVD player you are using?


Yes, Wirra.
I've subsequently been reading opinions on other web forums, and it seems that the general concensus is that it's just poor quility scans.

Here is part of one partucular reply

"I have contacted Motorsport magazine to air my opinion & they tell me : "There is an element of compromise with the Digital Archive. The pages are scanned from the original magazines, so the print quality is only as good as the print at the time, and this is not as good as we expect now. Also the magazines have suffered a little in 40 or 50 years reducing the quality further. We have also scanned these at a quality that we believe is readable, but this is not very high quality as this could be a security problem. Your question about the speed is linked to the quality. The higher the quality, the larger the size of the files and the slower it will run. Again this is a balance that we have to make, we could end up with more discs per decade at a higher cost. I guess the speed also depends on your computer"

I'm still undecided whether to send the DVD back for a refund. While I couldn't cope with the volume, I really could scan the magagazines (at the same resolution on my cheap home scanner/printer) and get a far better result.

#5 Roger Clark

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Posted 27 December 2012 - 10:57

I find that reading the jpeg files directly gives a much better quality image than going through the app. I have no idea why this is so, and it makes navigation more difficult. You can search the text files.

#6 garyfrogeye

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Posted 27 December 2012 - 11:08

Hi Roger
Wow, you're right. On Adobe Flash Player 9 they are almost illegible but by opening the jpgs they are much better, but what a pain that is.
I wonder why they are ok-ish as jpgs but the quality reduces so greatly in flash. I even tried playing the disc on my home tv (all singing all dancing DVD/blueray player on a HDV TV and it was still unreadable!

#7 David Lawson

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Posted 27 December 2012 - 12:06

I find that reading the jpeg files directly gives a much better quality image than going through the app. I have no idea why this is so, and it makes navigation more difficult. You can search the text files.


Thanks very much for this tip, I have the run from 1924 - 1989 but found I wasn't using them as much as I wanted due to the poor quality. I've just tried your suggestion and the improvement viewing the jpegs is so much kinder on my old eyes. In future I will browse using the software for speed and when I want to read or print I will switch to the jpegs.

David

#8 alansart

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Posted 27 December 2012 - 12:16

It doesn't look to bad on my Mac using the Flash app provided. Very similar to the jpg's.

The biggest problem is the compression used when creating the jpg's which has created a grey pixelated shadow around the text....

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...adjusting the brightness and contrast helps reduce that.

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Catch 22 really. The pages need compressing to keep the file size small enough so that they don't operate slowly....Too much compression and the quality suffers.

Edited by alansart, 27 December 2012 - 12:17.