AU Madman Beast Wars DVDs w/ Region Free DVD Player, Seasons 1, 2, & 3 Options

[Zathu]

I imported these (Australian) when they came out in 2006 for $150 and watched only them through once. They're known for being better than the American DVDs due to a lot more features. I think it's worth having if you're a big fan of the show.

Here are some of the exclusive features these have over the American Rhino DVDs:

• Commentaries by Ben Yee, writers, and cast
• Interviews with cast & crew
• 3D Test Shots
• 1996 Mainframe ""Making Of"
• Tech Specs and Toy Gallery
• "Soul of Beast Wars" In depth interview with Bob Forward, Larry DiTillio & Ben Yee

If you're interested and don't have a way of playing Australian DVDs, I'll throw in my region free DVD player (pictured). It's just an Insignia NS-DVD1, but it's the hard to find first release that can be hacked (and was) to be region free.

I'm not sure what these are worth, but I'm hoping for around $100 for the set.

(IMG:http://imgur.com/dnLEF.jpg)

This post has been edited by Zathu: May 26 2010, 09:19 PM

[Buster Darkwings]

I imported these (Australian) when they came out in 2006 for $150 and watched only them through once. They're known for being better than the American DVDs due to a lot more features. I think it's worth having if you're a big fan of the show. I've also heard it's better quality than the American DVDs since it's encoded in the show's native PAL rather than NTSC.

Why would Beast Wars be produced in PAL? It was made in Canada, which uses NTSC just like the US.

[Zathu]

Yeah I guess you'd be right about that. Not sure where I heard that.

[Buster Darkwings]

You're actually the second person I've seen mention that. Looking around on google, it seems that a poster on doom9 mistakenly said back in 2006 that BW was made by "some french studio" and that it was made in PAL, so that's probably the source of the rumor.

It would kind of be nice if it were made in PAL since it has a higher resolution, but hardly anyone in the US can play PAL without having to convert the framerate and other deinterlacing stuff which can make the picture look worse.

[Zathu]

Actually, now I remember it was part of some big review. I specifically remember side by side screen caps of Cheetor to show the resolution difference. I think it was at BWTF.com, but in can't find it there now.

[Buster Darkwings]

PAL DVDs based on NTSC signals can sometimes look "better" in some ways since the video is being resized to 720x576 from 720x480. Same deal with upscaled anime Blu-rays.

I really can't think of a reason why Mainframe would want to animate in PAL resolution unless they were based in Europe/Australia/etc. or were making shows for those regions. They'd have to use extra processing power to render at a higher resolution, just to turn around and reduce the renders in size for NTSC. And they'd end up with all kinds of ugly artifacts like aliasing and blended/blurred frames from the different refresh rates.

But if you ever do find that review, LMK.

[Zathu]

Now on eBay!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...1#ht_500wt_1087