WALLS OF TL;DR

I happen to have seen quite a few DVD’s in my time. Quite a few are pretty good, but then there are the more “interesting” ones that leaves you wondering what the flying fuck the DVD mastering studio crews are smoking (one popular theory from famed ZX encoder Rayek is that they are in fact at least partially crewed by blind, one-handed garden gnomes on crack). Without further failed attempts at being funny, I present Exhibit A (click for bigger):

Azumanga Daioh, US region 1 DVD. This isn’t quite an encoding failure, but it demonstrates ADV’s amazing skill at painting over logos (note the original logo shining through behind).

OK, so what about the real encoding failures? Well, Exhibit B:

Comic Party Revolution, Japanese R2 DVD. Apparently someone thought it would be a good idea to pass the entire OP (but nothing else) through some kind of (analog) composite video cable with really bad separation, leading to horrible DOTS ARE CRAWLING IN MY SKIN effects. Seriously, how the christ do you get a job as a video professional if you can’t figure out that converting digital video to analog and back again is kind of a bad idea? Calling garden gnome moment.

So, that was pretty bad but where’s the real :psyduck: () stuff? No worries, I have that too. Ladies (rolol, as if) and gentlemen, I am ashamed to present Exhibit C:

Gankutsuou, US region 1 DVD. This is… uh, I lack words evil enough but I’ll try anyway. What we see here is the cream of the American DVD industry. I mean, I’ve seen blocking, but what the FUCK! Pretty much every single macroblock boundary in the entire frame is clearly visible. Did someone encode this with DivX3 low-motion at 200kbps while I wasn’t looking? And of all the shitty attempts at overlaying text, this is beyond a doubt the most interesting. If you squint enough to see through all the artifacts, you’ll notice that the text already had interlacing artifacts when it was overlaid on the rest of the frame (and yes, this is the “best” IVTC match possible). Why the christ!? I have a really hard time coming up with a theory that explains how the fuck anyone managed to screw this up so badly. The only thing that seems even remotely likely is that whoever the credits must’ve re-encoded the ED several times while doing the overlaying, and at really low bitrates at that. The MPEG gods must be crying.
And ironically enough, the rest of the DVD looks pretty good, it’s just the ED that is fucked up.
My only hope is that whoever did this promptly got fired. Which he may (or may not) have been because I haven’t ever seen anything like it again. Fortunately for my poor eyes, I might add.