B5: And the Sky Full of Stars PAL mastering error

When the first season box set of Babylon 5 was first released end of 2002, the PAL master for the episode "And the Sky Full of Stars" (episode 8, on dvd 2) contained a mastering error (details at the end of the page). The episode has been remastered and at the end of March 2003, Warner UK was the first to offer a way for customers to get their faulty discs replaced, thanks also to the work of a few insistent people at this forum. WHV Germany is now following suit. Hopefully Warner Home Video will do the same in other R2/R4 countries as well now that corrected discs are available.

Getting your disc exchanged

UK:

The temporary address for the replacement is:

  Steven Hill
  Warner Home Video
  Warner House
  98 Theobald's Road
  London
  WC1X 8WB

Return ONLY Disc 2 (not the full box) together with full name and address. A covering letter explaining that you wish to replace the disc is a good idea. More details can be found at the forum mentioned earlier.

Germany:

Others:

WHV Netherlands is reportedly looking into the problem so hopefuly they will offer a replacement soon (The dutch WHV can be contacted at telephone number 020-5411211).

If you have any more details that I can put here, let me know and I'll include them here.

The table below shows images resulting from the following experiment: A few stills were captured of the same frames (from the first fifteen minutes of the episode) from both the region 2 dvd (the januari 9th release at amazon.de), and from the region 1 dvd. These images were then scaled down to 384x216 resolution for display on this webpage. These 16:9 images show a small version of what you see on a widescreen tv watching those dvds. As you can see, the region 2 image on the left appears horizontally stretched (because it is a 4:3 image stretched to 16:9), whereas the region 1 image (in the middle) shows a proper aspect ratio (no flattened faces).

As an extra check, I've cropped the captured 576-line region 2 image to 432 lines (to select a 16:9 area from the 4:3 source material). I tried to crop to the same region as used for the region 1 dvd. I then again scaled the resulting 16:9 sub-picture to 384x216 pixels. This is the column on the right. As you can see: it very closely matches the image as available on the region 1 dvd. This shows that indeed the region 1 (ntsc) mastering was done by selecting a 16:9 portion of the available 4:3 image, and scaling that to proper anamorphic dvd resolution.

R2 DVD	R1 DVD	R2 DVD 16:9 crop

Remarks:

• The right-most image on the second row (taken from the intro sequence) is not generated by cropping the original for the left image and scaling, but it is captured from another episode on the region 2 disc (and giving it the same treatment as the images in the left column). This shows that for the other episodes, the intro sequence is ok, without need for stretching.
• The shot that the still on the third row has been taken from is stock footage also used in other episodes. It can for example also be seen (at its correct aspect ratio) at the start of the last chapter of the episode "Mind War" on the same disc. Another example that shows that the source footage is not at fault, just the way it was mastered for the PAL release.
• The vagueness in the region 2 images on the one-but-last row (the shot of Garibaldi) is caused by the frame rate conversion applied to get to 25 frames per second PAL rate. This is not a mastering error per se.