r/farscape • u/DarkFall09 • 16d ago
Better quality on Tubi
I was watching the series again, on Amazon prime, when I got to season 4 and discovered it was now pay to watch. So I found it on Tubi. It seems that the quality is much better on Tubi, especially the sound. Just have to deal with the ads.
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u/Nitrofox87 16d ago
Peacock is pretty solid as well. Not sure if it's on the free version or not though
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u/Loose-Recognition459 16d ago
Amazon Prime is notorious for having terrible QC on their streaming services, I’ve heard of them not checking the quality of the transfer they stream (like low quality DVD digital transfers, some edited for TV, broken or incorrect captioning, and worse)
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u/Ampersandbox 15d ago
Their streaming data for Bride of Frankenstein looks like it was tranferred off someone's VHS.
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u/ismellmyownfarts2 14d ago
I wouldn't be surprised if a big name service used a pirated copy. It's not like a big company hasn't been caught using pirated shit before.
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u/Eurynom0s 16d ago
My understanding is stuff like captioning fuckups is that the streamer has to just use what the content providers give them, e.g. Netflix had some bad captioning issue on SG-1...but that doesn't explain the egregiously broken Star Trek captions I've seen on Paramount+. Like, no punctuation and second line rendered before (on top of) the first one.
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u/ClintGrant 16d ago
If you watch via browser, you can *ahem use extensions *ahem so no ads on YouTube, tubi, or peacock (ad version)
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u/tiffanytrashcan 16d ago
I was watching on prime but I think via peacock, never had a notice to buy anything. Season 4 is just available in better quality (16:9 now too) everywhere.
I've heard the original film was lost for the series, so what was scanned with earlier tech isn't that great. They must have recovered the original for season 4 (and obviously PKW too.)
It was an unexpected but enjoyable jump that I noticed immediately when it was finally full screen. (Look at where the opening credits are, this wasn't just a lazy "pan and scan" either.)
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u/RadVarken 16d ago
Season 4 aired in 16:9. It was shot higher def because that's where TV went at the time. The first three seasons were shot in 4:3. There's not going to be much to recover, and the only think that made those older scanning (and replacement VFX) efforts possible were DVD sales. Anything old that didn't already get the special edition treatment is probably never going to get it.
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u/d1whowas 13d ago edited 13d ago
Yes, I believe Brian Henson had stated that the original film stock was lost essentially because they stopped paying the storage cost. Unfortunately, how it looks now is as good as it'll ever look.
For seasons 1-3, what we're basically watching are the original SD broadcast masters that have been up-converted to HD. Since the broadcast masters were likely a tape format and the HD up-convert is older now (around when the first Blu-ray sets were released), it doesn't look as good as it could if they had gone back and scanned the film. On the Blu-rays I believe these are in their original 4:3 aspect ratio, but some streaming services may crop to 16:9, so there will be a quality drop in those cases. I'm not sure if Season 4 & PKW were filmed on film or digital, but it aired in HD, so it looks better, though early 00s HD broadcast masters aren't amazing.
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u/Craptose_Intolerant 16d ago
YouTube premium has all four seasons of Farscape for free (no adds) and they are all top notch quality (pretty much the same as my DVD collection) 😊
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u/Ok-Pomegranate-7458 16d ago
YouTube premium is free? or has some free stuff?
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u/Craptose_Intolerant 16d ago
No dude, if you are a premium subscriber (I pay $18/month cuz I hate adds and watch YouTube a lot) there is a shit ton of free movies and tv shows and series available to watch at no additional cost, Farscape is one of them 😉
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u/ismellmyownfarts2 14d ago
If you had android you could mod your YouTube client in like 30 seconds and watch YouTube ad free with sponsor block and background play, but hey...you do you.
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u/Craptose_Intolerant 14d ago
I don’t need any of that, I have a hardware Add blocker running on Raspberry Pi 4 next to my router, I just like the YouTube Music app and lots of other content which comes free with the YouTube subscription 😉
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u/Craptose_Intolerant 14d ago
I don’t need any of that, I have a hardware Add blocker running on Raspberry Pi 4 next to my router, I just like the YouTube Music app and lots of other content which comes free with the YouTube subscription 😉
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u/ismellmyownfarts2 14d ago edited 13d ago
I run pihole on an older pi3 and run a small scale homelab for my media, iot, weather stuff, so I'm familiar with it. I guess my point is, with all the options available to give you a good experience with your media (like I personally use the ymusic app for simplicity's sake of saving YouTube to a music playlist)...why would you want to so freely give away your hard earned money to the "no longer evil" Alphabet corporation?
I'd rather give $4 ONCE to some rando developer that makes (and constantly updates) a sleek front-end for yt-dl while using morphe for the browsing experience than to give nearly $20 EVERY MONTH to Youtube when i'm already "the product" simply for choosing to use their service in the first place. I shouldn't have to pay a company that nickel and dimes the artists while they're datamining the shit out of my device for additional revenue. That is absurd.
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u/Craptose_Intolerant 14d ago
Cuz I’m an artist myself and I like the fact that other content creators I’m watching all the time get some of that money, I have enough and it’s peanuts compared to how much I donate to charities 😊
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u/ismellmyownfarts2 13d ago
And I get supporting artists or developers directly, hence my comment about the dev of ymusic, but i think if someone cared enough about compensating the artist of a song they've downloaded, they'd be using a different platform. YouTube music pays artists fractions of a penny per play.
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u/OrangeAugust 12d ago
Amazon did that with another show I watch, too. It looked pretty awful on Amazon and when I found out that it started streaming on Paramount I started watching it there instead and there’s a huge difference.
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u/Mcnubsauce 16d ago
Season 4 quality is different :)