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My first iPod

Fri, 13 May 2022 13:50:36 GMT

This is the third generation iPod that I bought for an enormous amount of money back in 2003. It has a "20 GB" (more like 18 and change) harddisk and came with a dock and a wired remote control. It still looks cool although the screen seems so small now. The red LEDs behind the touch buttons are very nice, but the touch buttons are a usability nightmare because you can't feel around for the buttons because then you'll activate them.

My later fifth generation iPod with 30 GB and a color screen that plays video has the click wheel, where the 12, 3, 6 and 9 o'clock positions of the wheel are also buttons, that works much better. Unlike the older one, it also supports podcasts. But it hasn't aged as well, with even less battery life even though I replaced the battery a decade ago, and the screen backlight has issues.

The 3rd gen iPod only syncs over Firewire or USB, but only charges over Firewire. The 5th gen iPod only syncs over USB, but charges over Firewire or USB. However, with the battery being in a very sorry state, USB + the battery combined don't deliver enough power to start the iPod up successfully. So I first have to charge it on Firewire and then it has enough juice to be synced over USB.

Anyway, I was very happy with my iPods from when I got my first one in 2003 until I got my first iPhone in 2008. Apple discontinued the iPod "classic" in 2014 and the iPod Nano in 2017. They kept the iPod Touch around until this week, but that's not really an iPod, it's an iPhone without the phone part.

Optical storage and media in the '20s

Sun, 02 Jan 2022 16:32:00 GMT

Last year I wrote posts about listening to the radio, watching TV and having a landline phone in the 2020s (in Dutch). Today, I want to talk about the place left for optical storage in the 2020s.

Do I actually want or need those shiny optical discs in my life?

The short answer: most people probably don't. Software is now always available online, so you don't need an optical drive to install applications or drivers. For music, you can get pretty much everything through streaming services such as Spotify. And if you bought CDs back in the 1990s, you'll certainly have ripped those by now. I think you can watch pretty much any movie on one online service or another. Current TV shows are also generally available on a streaming service.

Transitioning to the disc-free lifestyle

But what if you bought movies and TV shows on DVD in the past, and used to burn some of your data to CDs and/or DVDs? You really want to go over all your data CDs and DVDs and copy those to a harddrive while you still have a working optical drive. That optical drive will die at some point (or become unreliable to the point of being unusable). You can of course then spend less than $/€ 50 for a DVD drive and handle this chore then, but why wait? Those CD-R and DVD±R organic dye layers aren't getting any better as they age.

Ripping movies: meh

I'm not sold on the option to rip all my movies and TV shows on DVD and blu-ray to my NAS or an external HDD. That's just way too much data. For movies, I don't have too much of an issue with simply using my blu-ray player (the one connected to my TV) to watch them. Yes, finding the right disc and then waiting for the drive to do its thing and having to deal with unskippable warnings and annoying menus isn't great, but that's only a minute or so vs a movie that's at least 90 minutes.

Ripping TV shows the hard way

For TV shows, this is quite different. Especially when I want to watch a 22 minute sitcom episode (and boy, do I love those turn-of-the-millennium sitcoms!), having to wait for the player to do its thing and then the warning and menus and me forgetting which episode was next, it's all quite annoying.

So what I used to do before my the Apple USB Superdrive that I got in 2011 kinda-sorta died recently, was rip TV shows from DVD and then use Handbrake to convert them to H.264 format, put in all the iTunes metadata using Subler, and store those on my NAS. However, that is quite a lot of work and eats up quite a bit of storage.

Ripping TV shows the easier way

Then I found an easier way to handle TV shows on DVD (and, to some degree, blu-ray): MakeMKV. MakeMKV is an app that, well, makes MKV files. You can use it to rip DVDs (easy), regular blu-ray (a bit more difficult) and UHD/4K blu-ray (when the stars align). My new blu-ray burner mentioned below didn't give MakeMKV any trouble when ripping DVDs, even region 1 ones on this region 2 drive.

For DVDs with TV shows, it's relatively straightforward to select the right tracks and turn those into .mkv files. However, MakeMKV doesn't do any transcoding. So the video is still MPEG 2, and the audio is still the same (usually) AC3. This means the files will be unplayable in many places, including iTunes and the iPhone/iPad.

However, my LG TV is more than happy to play these files. And, being a TV, it handles the intricacies of framerates and deinterlacing well automatically. fSo I just rip one DVD at a time, put the MKV files on a USB flash drive, and stick that in one of the USB ports of my TV. Yes, the files are three times as large as compared to the handcrafted H.264 versions, but I don't have to think about any settings and just delete the files after watching. Should I want to rewatch the same show a few years from now, I can always rip the same DVDs again.

My new optical drive

Like I said, my Apple USB Superdrive is no longer working properly, and the idea of having a big box full of music CDs and a smaller box full of data CDs and DVDs that I can no longer read bothers me.

So I decided to get a new external USB optical drive. One that can read and write blu-ray discs in addition to CDs and DVDs, of course. I also had a look at UHD blu-ray, which is used for 4K content on blu-ray. However, reading those requires firmware modifications, if possible at all. Dive into the MakeMKV forums to figure that out.

So I ended up ordering a Hitachi-LG BP55EB40 "Slim Portable Blu-ray WRITER" for a little under € 100. Optical drives used to have some issues with the amount of power provided by the USB2 bus in some cases, but that doesn't seem to be a problem anymore. You'd think USB3 would solve that, but no, as the datarates required for 6x speed BD, 4x speed BDXL (100/128 GB blu-ray), 8 x DVD and 24 x CD reading and writing fall well below what USB 2.0 can handle, that's what we get. The drive pretty much handles all the formats:

It will also write M-DISC discs. Those are recordable DVDs or BDs that use a special material for the recordable data layer(s) that should make them last for a thousand years.

Blu-ray for archiving

I'm not sure if my data still needs to be available in the year 3022, and it probably won't be, even on an M-DISC, but given that my failure rate from the DVD-Rs that I burned between about 2003 and 2013 is quite low (maybe 1 in 25 is no longer readable), an improved type of recordable disc seems like a good bet for things that need to last a few decades.

The advantage of an optical disc as an archival medium is that it only includes the data, not any electronics or logic. It's also fairly small and especially flat, so you can mail them or store them in a folder or safe deposit box and not worry about shocks or drops. A couple of years ago, I wrote about using flash for archiving, purely based on price. However, as flash capacities have gotten larger, especially for USB thumb drives and SD cards, their reliability has dropped. This is not a technology appropriate for long time archival storage.

Also, unlike storing data on a (possibly archival) hard disk drive (HDD), burning a disc is a one-time thing, so it encourages careful consideration of what needs to be archived in what format.

Conclusions

Although I think it's possible to leave the optical past behind, I do think keeping an optical drive around to rip TV shows and burn archival copies of my data is a good idea.

Review: Indivision AGA MK3 for the Amiga 1200

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 23:20:08 GMT

This is a review of the recently released Indivision AGA MK3, which is basically what Amiga people know as a "flicker fixer". More specifically, the Indivision MK3 lets you use pretty much any VGA or HDMI monitor or TV as a display for your Amiga 1200. (It's also available for the A4000T.)

This works by clamping a small circuit board on top of your A1200's Lisa chip and an even smaller one on the CIA chip that reads the keyboard input. The new video signal is then led out of the computer through space available for additional I/O ports on the back right of the machine. This is done through a little daughter card that has both HDMI and VGA. However, the two ports face opposite directions, so you need to decide which one you want to be able to use when you install the MK3.

Amazingly, the Indivision AGA MK3 is a new product for a computer that hasn't been sold new for 25 years. I bought the MK3 directly from Individual Computers in Germany for € 170.

Do you need one?

Before I talk about my experiences with the Indivision AGA MK3, I think it's important to discuss what the advantages of the MK3 are over other ways to connect a display to your Amiga 1200. Basically, there's two types of programs you can run on a 1200: ones where you can select the screenmode and ones that hardcode a certain screenmode. Most games fall into the latter category. So for those, you need to be able to display the old PAL and/or NTSC modes. However, those modes are not great for running non-game software. For that, you'll want to use a higher resolution, which causes interlace flicker on PAL/NTSC compatible displays, hence the need for a flicker fixer.

The MK3 is a pretty good solution for running those games in PAL and NTSC. However, there are other good solutions for that, too, such as using an older monitor that can support PAL and NTSC timings, or an external scan converter such as the Open Source Scan Converter (OSSC).

The big advantage of the Indivision is that it completely skips the analog part. This means each pixel is pristine and shows exactly the right color, and unwanted overscan can be removed with pixel perfect precision. (Overscan is the part of the image at the edges of that may or may not be visible on a CRT TV or monitor.)

With standard Amiga monitor drivers, the Indivision can deliver resolutions of up to 800x600 and 960x540. And with the HighGFX monitor drivers even 1024x768 and 1280x720.

As such, in my opinion, the Indivision AGA MK3 is an especially good fit for those of us who do want to be able to play games but spend a large fraction of their Amiga time using the Workbench or non-game software.

Installation

The MK3 main board is pretty small, smaller than it looks in photos. You have to place it on top of the Lisa chip and then push down pretty forcefully for it to seat properly. And then the same with the smaller daughter card. Routing the output to the other side of the machine is a bit of a challenge if you want to put back the RF shielding. I'm not sure what I did wrong, but whenever I put back the shielding, some part of my Amiga no longer worked. Eventually I decided to get rid of the shielding. After that, I has some issues with the keyboard, which I later found out came from reconnecting the keyboard ribbon cable incorrectly. At one point, I thought I had killed my 1200.

Moral of the story: although the only tool you need is a screw driver for opening and closing the computer, and if you make sure you avoid static the chances of killing your machine are small, you should make sure you're comfortable doing the installation yourself. It's not like they're building any new Amigas anymore.

My Amiga 1200 is an unmodified PAL model running AmigaOS 3.0. It has a Blizzard A1260 card with a 50 MHz 68060 CPU and 64 MB RAM and I normally use an I-Card PCMCIA Ethernet adapter. And I use a 4 GB CF card as the harddrive. With the shielding removed and the little metal riser that the harddrive sits on being incompatible with the MK3, I ended up duct taping the CF card adapter to the bottom of the keyboard. I ordered a new one that puts the CF card above the PCMCIA port out of the way of the Indivision.

The Indivision doesn't require any drivers, but in order to change its settings, you'll want to download the configuration software and read the software manual at the support site.

First impressions

Obviously, given the choice I'll take HDMI over VGA any day, so I installed the device such that I can use the HDMI port. The HDMI port is much smaller than the opening and it's also a bit recessed, so no points for esthetics. However, if you want to make the back side of your 1200 look good, you can just put the little lid back over the slot and cover up the Amiga's new HDMI port. And I'm thinking it won't be long before people will remove the RF modulator and put the HDMI out in its place.

With all the panic over non-working disk drives and keyboards, I'm not entirely sure anymore in which mode the MK3 boots up originally. But it seems that almost all the pre-configured modes are VESA or common VGA modes, which are widely supported, even on new monitors that don't have a VGA port.

These are the displays I tested with, which all worked with the Indivision:

Philips Brilliance 170P 1280x1024 LCD monitor with VGA and DVI
Dell H2312UM 1920x1080 LCD monitor with VGA, DVI and DisplayPort
Dell P2415Q 3840x2160 LCD monitor with HDMI and (mini)DisplayPort
HP Z27 3840x2160 LCD monitor with HDMI, (mini)DisplayPort and USB-C
LG 65C8PLA 3840x2160 OLED TV with HDMI

Although not advertised because it's not quite ready to be supported officially, the Indivision can route the Amiga's audio over HDMI. However, this is turned off by default in order to be more compatible with DVI monitors. You can connect those to the Indivision with a simple HDMI-to-DVI cable. And if you do that, it's a good thing that the Indivision doesn't send any audio: my DVI monitors wouldn't work with sound enabled. (However, my Macs have always automatically detected whether a display can handle audio over HDMI/DVI.) I encountered a few audio glitches here and there at first, but it looks like setting the sampling rate to 96 kHz rather than 48 kHz fixed that.

Standard resolutions

It's important to understand that the Indivision is not a video card. It needs to see the Amiga's native video signal digitally pass through the Lisa chip in order to do its job. This means that a lot depends on the mapping of the Amiga's current screenmode to the HDMI or VGA resolution that the Indivision is using. A good mapping results in a very nice picture. But there are also mappings that don't look so good.

The MK3 has 18 resolution mappings set up out of the box. There are several mappings for both PAL and NTSC, as well as a few for the less common AGA resolutions such as DblPAL/DblNTSC, Multiscan Productivity and 800x600 Super72. And the HighGFX 1024x768 and 1280x720 modes.

"Pre 720x450 NTSC" is pretty good, and "Pre 640x512 PAL" is reasonable. When using lower resolutions (200 lines in NTSC or 256 in PAL), everything looks a lot nicer if you set Darken to 25% or 50% in Test/Adjust through the setup tool. I like to make a copy of the Pre setups and then change the copy rather than change the original.

This image is from the game Hybris, the first one using the Amiga's regular video out to VGA, on the second the Indivision's output to HDMI with the darken setting to produce the scanline effect (click for the full image):

My own custom resolution: 960x540

A resolution that I really wanted to try was 960x540. That's half of the standard HDTV 1920x1080 resolution, which means that every Amiga pixel exactly maps to 2x2 monitor pixels. 960x540 uses the entire screen and provides some additional space over traditional modes without becoming un-Amiga-like.

At first I was thinking I'd need a special Amiga monitor driver for this, but then I realized I could just run the Amiga in the standard PAL 1280x512 super-hires interlace mode. So I used the Screenmode prefs to select this mode and unchecked the default button for the screen width and changed this to 960. Then in the Overscan prefs I set the text overscan for PAL to 270 (that will double to 540 in interlaced modes).

So at this point my Amiga was generating a 960x540 image. With the Indivision setup tool I made a new screenmode with an appropriate name and the following settings:

Select: on SHires
Min. Lines: 313
Max. Lines: 313

This way, the settings that follow will only take effect when the Amiga's screenmode has 313 lines and is super hires. PAL uses 625 lines for a full interlace frame, but the Indivision disregards interlace for these purposes, so it sees 312.5 = 313 lines when the Amiga is in PAL mode.

Then, I selected "EDID 1920x1080@60" as the VGA/HDMI mode and clicked on Test/Adjust to enter the following settings:

Left: 345
Top: 13
Width: 960
Height: 540

Then Save & Apply and I was looking at a glorious super sharp 960x540 Workbench filling my screen edge-to-edge.

I initially selected selected 1920x1080 at 60 Hz as 60 Hz is the most widely supported framerate. However, PAL is 50 frames per second, not 60. And we need to use PAL because PAL can handle 540 lines in overscan; NTSC can't. So I went back in to edit the VGA/HDMI mode. I first made a copy of the EDID 1920x1080@60 mode and renamed it. Then I changed the pixel clock from 150 million (150 MHz) to 125 million, without changing anything else. With pixels now generated 16.7% slower, the framerate is also 16.7% slower = 50 Hz. My monitor had no issues with this, so I saved this setting. The movie below shows what the result looks like.

When things on the screen move, you can still see some artifacting that is the result from the Amiga running in interlace mode, where it only draws half of the lines on screen every 1/50th second, while the Indivision sends an entire frame to the monitor 50 times per second. So half of the lines that the Indivision sends to the monitor are actually from 1/50th of a second ago, while the other half are current. That's just an unavoidable result from the Amiga generating and interlaced video signal. But at least there's no flicker, like there is on CRTs.

This is an HDMI capture of the Indivision's output in my 960x540 mode. (My mousing is a bit clumsy because of the lag caused by Quicktime and the Cam Link 4K that I used for capturing the video.)

Looks like your browser can't handle the video!

The 960x540 resolution doesn't quite push the Amiga's limits, but unfortunately there's not enough headroom to do away with the interlace and build 50 full frames per second, like the AGA DblPAL, DblNTSC and Multiscan Productivity modes do. The good thing is that there is a reasonable amount of time left for the CPU to access chip RAM where the video info is stored, so unlike with the Dbl and Multiscan modes, it's possible to run the 960x540 mode in 256 colors without slowing everything down excessively.

Even more custom resolutions

One very annoying limitation of the Indivision is that the Amiga's screen is stretched to fill all the pixels in the selected VGA/HDMI resolution. And the trouble is that the normal Amiga resolutions come from the 4:3 aspect ratio era, while all my current monitors are 16:9 widescreen. As we've seen earlier, we can use PAL with 540 visible lines and double that to 1080 lines on a 1920x1080 monitor. So in the vertical direction, we're doubling the size of the image. However, a normal PAL image maxes out at 720 horizontal pixels. The Indivision will stretch those 720 pixels to fill 1920 on the monitor so the image looks stretched horizontally.

I solved this by making a copy of the 1920x1080@50 VGA/HDMI resolution and then under Horizontal Timing changing Visible to 1408 and changing the pixel clock to 95,850,000 Hz to bring back the frame rate to 50 Hz. Then I set up a mapping from the Amiga's PAL resolution to my new 1408x1080@50 resolution with width 704, height 540, left 406 and top 13. This works very well on my Dell monitors, but it's a completely non-standard resolution. It would be great if the MK3 would simply add black bars on the left and the right so it's possible to use a standard 16:9 resolution without stretching the image.

Conclusions

As someone who likes to tinker with video stuff, I think the Indivision AGA MK3 is absolutely fantastic. If you want the best possible picture quality out of an Amiga 1200 or 4000, you'll like the MK3 a lot too, but you may not like having to customize complex settings to get the best results. Another strength of the Indivision is that it'll let you hook up your Amiga to all current monitors and TVs and use all possible screenmodes. Then again, if you mainly play games and already have a good setup that displays PAL and/or NTSC low res without interlace well, there's probably not much reason to upgrade to the MK3.

Update:

You can bring up a display that tells you some info on the current settings with control / left shift `

You can then use the mouse to reposition the image on screen, and use the x key to cycle through available resolutions and then type ` (tilde ~ key with or without shift) to dismiss the info / mode control screen.

Airpods Pro

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 23:00:00 GMT

It's insane. I already spent nearly 800 euros on bluetooth headphones this year. And then Apple released the Airpods Pro, costing € 279 here in the Netherlands. And I couldn't help myself and bought a pair. So let's see how they compare.

My current bluetooth headphones / earbuds lineup is as follows:

Master & Dynamic MW60. These are big over-ear headphones that are bluetooth and wired.

Plantronics Backbeat Go 410. These are in-ear earbuds that connect to kind of a plastic horse shoe around your neck. This has the advantage that you can take them out and not lose them. (Which I actually had happen with some Jaybirds once.) They can take a wire, but that's pretty messy. And they have noise cancelation.

Jabra Elite 65t. These are "true wireless earbuds": one for each ear. As is usual for this type, they come in a charging case.

Now obviously these three are all very different in obvious ways. But they're also very alike in how the bluetooth works. You can pair them with a bunch of devices, and they'll stay connected to the last two devices. You can then play audio from either of those devices, and you'll hear it. When you stop playback and then start it on the other device, you'll hear audio from the other device. So you don't have to do anything to switch between those devices. However, using them with more than two devices means you have to go into bluetooth settings to reconnect to the headphones/earbuds, which gets old fast. (Although I think on iOS devices you can use a Shortcuts shortcut to make this easier.)

The MW60 has an actual switch to turn them on and off, which is great because it's fast. The others require a long press on one of the buttons. Speaking of buttons, they all have a play/pause/Siri button and volume up/down buttons. You can skip forward and backwards with a long press on the respective volume button.

With the earbuds there can be audio dropouts when I'm using them outside with the iPhone in my pocket, especially if there are no buildings close by.

The Airpods Pro

(Or Airpod Pros or simply APs.) What's really nice about these is that they're easy to put in and take out. You don't have to push them in as much as the other earbuds, I think they get a lot of support from your outer ear. Then again, if you take them out you pretty much have to put them in the charging case, because you can't turn them off. What?? When you do that, they are charged extremely rapidly, which just can't be good for those tiny little batteries.

When you press the button on the back of the charging case you can use the batteries widget in the today view of your iPhone or iPad to see the charge of the APs and the charge case. (When the charge of the left and right Airpods differs by more than 10% they show up separately.) Strangely, the little battery icon next to the headphones icon in the iOS status bar that you get for other bluetooth headphones/earbuds isn't there with the Airpod Pros.

The charge case hooks up to a lightning cable for charging, or you can use a wireless Qi charging pad. Unfortunately, that means you can't press the button to see how far along the charging is, but there's a motion sensor that lights up the LED on the front in you tap the case, which lights up amber when the charge is below 80%, green when above.

Apple has come up with a very nice way of pairing the APs: you simply open the case close to an iPhone (or iPad, I assume) and the iPhone will take it from there. The pairing is then synced to your other devices, including Macs and Apple TVs, using iCloud. Although Apple says you need the latest software to be compatible, all of this worked without trouble on my Macs that still run last year's Mojave. I guess under Catalina you get to turn on/off noise cancelation and transparency mode. You can also pair with non-Apple devices manually. On my iPhone 6 that runs iOS 12, I did that, and interestingly, the iPhone 6 can actually turn on and off noise cancelation through the bluetooth settings. Noise cancelation

I think especially people who are used to Apple's regular or "amateur" Airpods or similar earbuds that don't create a seal will be blown away by the noise cancelation, as they're used to hearing everything around them. Yes, the active noise cancelation is pretty good, but that only works on lower frequencies. For the high frequencies you need passive noise isolation. And that's something that the half a millimeter of silicone that the tips consist of just don't do very well. Same thing with the Plantronics. So basically all cars turn electric: you don't hear the engine anymore, but the road and wind sounds are still very prominent. Maybe that will get better if/when ComplyFoam comes up with foam tips for the APs.

I compared the passive noise cancelation of the Airpod Pros against that of the Jabra Elite 65t using the noise generator on mynoise.net. The Jabras blocked all the high treble and most of the mid and low treble, with the ComplyFoam tips doing slightly better than the included silicone tips. I then put a Jabra in one ear and an Airpod Pro in the other (with noise cancelation and transparency mode turned off). They both reduce the white noise significantly, but when I turn up the mid or high treble, it sounds like it only comes through on the Airpod side. For anything lower, the sound seems a bit off-center towards the Airpod Pro ear, but not by much.

Then I tried the active noise cancelation with an Airpod Pro in each ear. For the treble it actually seems to get a bit louder when you turn ANC on. The mids get reduced with ANC on and the low mids and anything below that are filtered out by the ANC increasingly effectively.

For now, cycling with a good headwind with cars zooming by is far from ideal: a lot of noise gets through. But the noise cancelation works very well when walking or riding public transit. The transparency mode where you hear outside sound through the microphones is very nice. But it's not new: the Jabras have it, too.

How the Airpods Pro are different form other bluetooth earbuds

The big difference with other current bluetooth headphones/earbuds is that the Airpod Pros won't connect to two devices in the same way. When you take them out of the case, they'll reconnect to the last used device. However, the good thing is that if you want to use them with a different (Apple) device, you simply select them as an audio target. The difference is that you don't have to set up a bluetooth connection first, so this is nice and easy. If you only use your headphones or earbuds with two devices, the behavior of the competition is better, because you don't have to do anything. But if you want to use them with three or more devices, the Apple way is better: yes, you need to tell each device to start using the APs, but that's pretty easy on all of Apple's OSes. The new device will break the bluetooth connection with the previous device if needed. (On old bluetooth headphones you actually had to disconnect from the previous device on that device first...)

On the iPhone I set up a shortcut that selects the APs as the audio target and then starts playing back the current episode in my favorite podcast app. That shortcut then goes in the today view, so it's only a few taps to go back to playing a podcast over the APs after using them with another device.

The APs have no volume buttons. Not a big deal, as I can just use the volume buttons on my iPhone. This also means that skipping forward/backward isn't done with a long press, which makes skipping part of a podcast really slow and thus annoying. Instead, this works the same as with wired earbuds: two clicks to skip forward, three to skip back. Where "click" means giving the stem of either Airpod Pro a quick squeeze. A long squeeze changes the noise cancelation / transparency setting and/or triggers Siri.

My verdict

They are expensive. I worry about the batteries. But they sound very good for earbuds and for wireless. They're comfortable to wear, and integrate well with the Apple ecosystem. It's also really nice that you can use either Airpod by itself while charging the other. They automatically go into transparency mode when you take one out, a really nice touch. With the Jabras, you can use the right one by itself, but not the left one.

In my experience, bluetooth headsets and earbuds are basically consumables: they last two, maybe three years. Of course not everyone listens to audio (mostly podcasts) as much as I do. But if you want wireless convenience, true wireless earbuds are really nice. And to me, an open design makes no sense: you'll be playing audio way too loud to get over all the background noise. Apple's Airpods Pro are a good choice, but if you don't want to spend that kind of money, the competition is certainly not half bad, either.

4K TV part 2: 4K and Dolby Atmos content

Sun, 25 Aug 2019 22:00:00 GMT

So with all the technical details out of the way in part 1, let's have a look at where to get 4K content and whether it's worth the trouble and the expense. Where I've found 4K content:

Youtube. There's some 4K content on Youtube. A lot of it is regular Youtube stuff, which doesn't really need the extra resolution. However, there are some really nice demos of landscapes and the like. Note that the Apple TV won't play Youtube 4K content in 4K due to disagreements about video codecs between Apple and Google.

Amazon Prime Video. A good number of their originals are in 4K and sometimes HDR, but as far as I can tell not in Dolby Vision. Also, no Dolby Atmos. I haven't seen any 4K catalog content on Amazon Prime Video.

Netflix. It looks like most of Netfilx' original content is in 4K these days, and often 4K Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos. Recently, I've encountered a few older catalog titles that were in 4K, but not Dolby Atmos or HDR (Ghostbusters, Christine, District 9). You do have to pay a few euros/dollars a month extra for 4K with Netflix, and you can only tell that a title is 4K, Dolby Vision and/or Dolby Atmos on a device that supports playing back those formats, such as the Apple TV.

Apple iTunes Store. When you buy movies from Apple, you can download the HD versions but if the movie is available in 4K—which doesn't cost extra—you can only stream it in 4K, not download it. Apple supports Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, but those aren't available for every movie. Also, in a few cases the UHD blu-ray has Dolby Atmos, but Apple's version doesn't. Movies on the Apple iTunes Store are relatively cheap: most are 10 euros here in the Netherlands. And they have deals every week. I've set up a wish list on iTunes on my computer so I can quickly check for deals and 4K upgrades of existing titles.

UHD blu-ray. I still like to have physical copies of my favorite movies, and with UHD blu-ray you know you have the best possible video and audio quality.

Older movies in 4K

When everything comes together, 4K content looks amazing. However... there's no room for error. You see all the limitations of the source material and how it was handled. For this reason, I always read the 4K UHD blu-ray reviews on blu-ray.com to make sure that a title looks and sounds good before I buy it.

One of the oldest movies I have in 4K is 2001: A Space Odyssey. On the one hand, this movie was shot on 70 mm, so it should be sharper than movies shot on regular 35 mm film. But, it's also half a century old. Turns out it's not quite as sharp as I'd expected: the upgrade over the regular blu-ray is relatively modest. Also, there's a bit of grain, especially in the space sequences. Not a huge amount, but a little more than I expected. The scenes under colored light benefit from the better color reproduction. The disc contains a 5.1 version of the original audio mix and a new mix that is very close to the original intent, which means some left/right separation, but very little real surround action.

Interestingly, a movie from the 1970s like Close Encounters of the Third Kind has scenes that are quite sharp, but the movie is also quite grainy, with a layer of really fine grain. Ghostbusters—the 1984 version, of course—which I saw in 4K on Netflix, is also sharp, but shockingly grainy.

Many people actually like grain, citing a "filmic look". I can handle a little grain, but I really don't like it, especially when it gets bad enough to be distracting. In my experience, when blu-ray.com reviewers mention grain in any way, that means the amount of grain reaches distracting levels.

Movies like Alien, Jurassic Park, Braveheart, Apollo 13 and Office Space show that a movie shot on 35 mm film doesn't have to be overly grainy to be sharp.

Film actually has better color reproduction and dynamic range than HD, so in many cases, the 4K transfers of movies shot on film have more intense colors and some level of HDR, compared to the HD transfer. However, a lot depends on the lighting.

Newer movies in 4K

Obviously, before 2000 or so, all movies were shot on film. And a good number of movies are still shot on film. Around 2000, the digital era started, but cameras (background: here, here and here) as well as digital intermediates weren't immediately 4K. And many movies are still finished using a 2K digital intermediate. Sigh.

Some examples of movies that make good use of the higher resolution, wider color and/or high dynamic range:

The Revenant was shot in the western wilderness pretty much entirely using ambient light. It's very sharp, but the colors are mostly muted. They originally wanted to shoot the movie on film, but it turned out that that wouldn't work, so they used digital Arri Alexa 3.4K and 6.5K cameras.

Blade Runner 2049, set in a noir future, also looks nice and sharp and has spectacular colors in some scenes.

Passengers, which is set on a spaceship that's taking 90 years to reach another star, was problematic for me for a reason that will be obvious if you've seen it, but it does look very good, and especially the non-effects scenes are very sharp.

Mortal Engines has steam punk roots, with cities roaming the landscape on wheels. The visuals are really stunning but unfortunately you don't get too much time to absorb them.

The Martian is a really entertaining film. The mars outdoors shots, especially the space suits, look really good. But apparently the movie was finished using a 2K digital intermediate, so it could have been sharper.

Pacific Rim has crazy colors, as well as crazy robots-on-giant-monster mayhem. Also finished in 2K, but due to darkness, rain and the fast action, we weren't going to enjoy the full 4K sharpness anyway. One thing I like: this movie is in the 1:1.85 aspect ratio, so it fills the entire screen with no black bars.

Dunkirk, a movie about what happened in Dunkirk during World War II, was filmed in 70 mm and finished on film, a rarity for a 2017 movie. It's quite sharp with minimal, if any, grain. The colors are a bit off, though. And I didn't like the audio mix: it's too sparse. Stuff that's on screen, such as a breeze moving the grass on the dunes, isn't in the audio mix. I also didn't care for the story and the strange way the timelines of the subplots are handled.

Movies with a great audio mix

Oblivion, a science fiction movie with Tom Cruise, is a bit sharper in 4K than in HD, but with the 2K digital intermediate and the somewhat muted colors, the upgrade isn't super obvious. It does make really good use of the surround and height speakers, though.

A Quiet Place shows a future where blind creatures kill anyone who makes a sound. As such, large parts of the movie are very quiet. Very good Dolby Atmos mix.

Edge of Tomorrow, where Tom Cruise finds himself on the battlefield fighting an alien invasion and keeps waking up on the same day every day after he's been killed. Also isn't super sharp and moves too fast anyway, but it has a very good audio mix, even in in 5.1.

The Maze Runner is a dystopian "young adult" story, and one where both the protagonist and the viewer have no idea what's happening until almost the end of the movie. But it works, in my opinion. There's some nice color and sharpness is fairly good, but I especially like the audio mix, which is in 7.1.

Alien, The Revenant and Blade Runner 2049 have nice audio mixes, in 5.1, 7.1 and Dolby Atmos, respectively.

Disappointing 4K releases

So far, I've only encountered one 4K release that disappointed me across the board: Star Wars The Last Jedi.

The problems start immediately after the opening crawl, as we get to see some huge space ships. The issue: space isn't black here, it's dark gray. In other scenes, black levels are ok, though. Sharpness and colors are a bit stronger than on blu-ray, but I didn't notice any HDR use. The Dolby mix didn't use the height channels very much, if at all. But the worst thing is the grain: there is really no excuse for this level of grain in 2017. Both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi were shot on film, but the former is not nearly as grainy as the latter, although it's a bit hard to compare without a 4K UDH blu-ray release of The Force Awakens.

Movies that I'd love to see in 4K

These are some movies that I'd love to see released in 4K Dolby Vision because of their color use, even though they're finished using a 2K digital intermediate:

TRON: Legacy—this one looks so good even on blu-ray, I can't wait to see it on 4K
Inside Out
Monsters, Inc.
Sin City
Speed Racer
Avatar

I'm interested to see Gravity and Tomorrowland for their HDR use. Gravity was finished in 2K, Tomorrowland in 4K. They used Tomorrowland as a showcase for Dolby Vision in a new movie theater, and the transitions between dark and light were very impressive.

Last but not least: Star Wars The Force Awakens. There's lots of eye candy in this movie and enough time to admire it, so bring on the 4K.

TV content in 4K

Amazon Prime and Netflix release many of their own TV shows in 4K, usually also in HDR or Dolby Vision. (And sometimes Dolby Atmos.) Presumably, the same will be true for new content on Disney+ and Apple TV+ later this year. I believe producing in 4K doesn't really cost any extra for shows or movies that don't contain CGI special effects. I'm not a huge fan of these TV shows, so maybe I've missed some excellent use of 4K. But what I've seen is anything ranging from a negligible to a modest uptick in sharpness. There's some extra color here or there, but again, nothing to get too excited about.

Is it worth it?

First of all, HD is just fine. If you have better uses for your money, don't worry about 4K right now. I'm sure in another few years, everything will be 4K so you'll get it at some point when you need to replace your TV anyway. In the meantime, many UHD blu-ray movie releases also contain a regular blu-ray, so if you buy movies on blu-ray, consider getting the blu-ray/UHD combo, so you'll have some content when the time comes to upgrade.

Of course if money is no object: replace all your stuff. 4K is mature enough to do it now rather than wait.

If you're on the fence: I'd say, have a look at what kind of content you like to watch. Comedies and dramas are of course sharper in 4K, but that doesn't add all that much to the enjoyment of those genres. For instance, I love Groundhog Day and Office Space and I'm glad I have them in 4K. But I wouldn't replace my TV just to see those movies in 4K.

It's a different story for many science fiction and action movies and epics. Those often have the kind of visuals that can benefit from the higher 4K resolution, more colors and more dynamic range, and of course the kind of action that gives surround speakers a workout. Today's blockbusters have huge budgets, with a good amount of that ending up on the screen. So if these are the kinds of movies you like, a 4K TV and a Dolby Atmos setup can be money well-spent.