Who owns the DVDs?

[perfectlykevin]

Pleased to report that the download was a success and the quality of the episodes is much better than the DVD's I have. I stayed up last night to see and ended up watching the first part of Don't Eat the Snow In Hawaii. I can't be completely sure but I think they might have edited out some content as I think there was a scene missing

[K Hale]

Excellent! What was the missing scene?

[perfectlykevin]

Excellent! What was the missing scene?

I'm trying to remember, admittedly it was date night and I had a couple of beers with dinner It might have been me thinking of the second part and misremembering it

[Laohu]

For the last couple of years I have volunteered some time and made donations to Blue Star Moms . They take Old Books , Magizines and also things like tooth paste and baby wipes to deliver to are troops at Bases near the front . Some of you guys with multiple copies of the DVDs might want to consider getting in touch with your local Blue Star moms chapter and see if they had a need for your extra copies . Be a great way to share the show with people who might appreciate it .

[Higgins (aka Bondtoys)]

Great idea, Laohu!

[Old Düsseldorf]

With all this info, I want to make sure I understand, it sounds like the DVDs have issues with quality as well as not being the broadcast versions. I assume the broadcast version is more complete or otherwise preferable?

Does the bluray set contain the broadcast versions?

How about the iTunes set? And with iTunes, if you download do they still have to be played in iTunes? Or could you save it outside of iTunes and use something like MediaMonkey?

Thanks!

[eagle]

With all this info, I want to make sure I understand, it sounds like the DVDs have issues with quality as well as not being the broadcast versions. I assume the broadcast version is more complete or otherwise preferable?

The DVDs are okay, but some of the transfers are lacking: some are very grainy. I find them watchable, but some are definitely lacking in quality.

With the exception of the Simon & Simon crossover (s03e03, "Ki'i's Don't Lie"), the DVDs should be the broadcast version. With "Ki'i's Don't Lie," the season 3 DVD set contains the syndicated version, but earlier season 1 sets (the double-sided discs) contain both parts of the Simon & Simon crossover (the Magnum part and the S&S part).

Does the bluray set contain the broadcast versions?

I'll let someone else answer this - I don't have the BRs and don't know about them.

How about the iTunes set? And with iTunes, if you download do they still have to be played in iTunes? Or could you save it outside of iTunes and use something like MediaMonkey?

iTunes videos will only play on Apple equipment. That is, in iTunes on a Mac, or on an iPad/iPhone, or on an Apple TV.

[K Hale]

There is a lot of info on this subject here: http://magnum-mania.com/Forum/viewtopic ... s&start=45

[Old Düsseldorf]

Thanks for these responses, helpful info!

[K Hale]

The spam guy is back again!

[MaximRecoil]

Getting the entire series on DVDs that I'm happy with has been a real pain.

I've always wanted the whole series on video. We got a VCR for Christmas, 1988, when I was almost 14, and around that time the local CBS affiliate starting running them in syndication five days a week at 9 AM. Of course, I was at school, so I recorded it each day and watched when I got home from school. I wanted to save them all then but I didn't have money to keep buying tapes, so I had to use the same tape over and over.

Around that same I was in a video store in the mall and I saw a shelf that had every episode of Star Trek on VHS. It was the first time I'd ever seen or even heard of an entire TV series being released on home video (and indeed, Star Trek was the first TV series they did that for). I thought, if they can do it for Star Trek, why not MPI too? So I asked the guy at the counter about it, but he didn't know anything about it. I figured it was just a matter of time.

It was also around that time that "Don't Eat the Snow in Hawaii" showed up at my local video rental store and I thought that was the start of a complete series release. Of course, there was no internet as we know it today, and employees of video stores never knew anything, so I could only speculate.

Some 15 years later I found out on the internet about the first season being released on DVD (TV series being released on home video was commonplace by that point in time), so I jumped in my car and drove 20 miles to the nearest Walmart to buy it. When I got it home, the DVDs didn't work right, which was a huge disappointment. Most of the episodes either glitched or completely froze. I checked on the internet and found out that lots of people were having the same problem, so I went back to Walmart. They had a policy against issuing refunds for DVDs that had been opened; they would only exchange it for the same DVD(s). I told them that if they could bring out a TV and DVD player and prove to me that another copy off the shelf worked fine then I'd be more than happy with an exchange; otherwise I wanted a refund. They didn't want to do that so they went against their policy and gave me a refund.

After some more searching on the internet I discovered that the DVDs that Netflix was sending out were single-sided and didn't have the issues that the retail ones had, so I signed up and had them send me the whole series (as many at a time as they allowed, until I got them all), and I made 1:1 lossless copies of them, which I still have.

Over the years I bought a couple seasons (3 and 7) when I came across a good deal, and had no problems with those. Then I came across the complete series set that was released in 2013, and it was only around $50 new, so I jumped on that. All those discs worked perfectly, but they'd screwed me over in a different way, i.e., the bitrate was much lower than with the individual season releases, by about half, so there were visible compression artifacts (especially during high-motion scenes, like shots of the ocean with all the waves), as well as much of the film grain being lost. They did that to save money on discs of course.

Last night I found the complete series on eBay, used but like new, and in individual season form, for $50 so I bought it. They are the 2013 re-releases of the individual seasons (like the season 3 and 7 sets that I already have), so hopefully they don't have the same issues that the original mid-2000s releases had. So once those arrive I'll have two complete series sets, with one of them being garbage due to the low bitrate, plus I'll have an extra copy of seasons 3 and 7, plus an extra copy of season 1 in the form of those DVD-Rs I burned from the Netflix DVD rentals in 2004.

As for the HD versions (from streaming sites and Blu-ray), I don't need them. When it comes to theatrical movies, I consider DVDs to be long-since obsolete; I only want Blu-ray or equivalent (I watch them on a 1080p projector and a 100" screen), but for old TV shows, DVDs are what I want, because I only want to watch them on a standard-definition (15 kHz) CRT TV, the same as I did when they originally aired. True DVD quality is more than enough to max out the potential of a 15 kHz CRT. If I had the Blu-rays they would just get reduced to 480i anyway, which is what DVDs are to begin with (because that's what the Blu-ray player that's connected to my CRT is set to output over YPbPr, because 240p / 480i is the highest frequency that a 15 kHz CRT can sync to).

[charybdis1966]

I have seasons 1-4 which is 84 episodes. It’ll take a while to work through them but I’m looking forward to it.

[eagle]

I have seasons 1-4 which is 84 episodes. It’ll take a while to work through them but I’m looking forward to it.

It does take a while to get through the series. I've gone through it several times, and am in season 6 right now -- but also watching season 2 along with the 40th anniversary viewing.

[Styles Bitchley]

Love that detailed post, Max. For what it’s worth, I bought the original run of double sided DVDs as they were released and I never had any problems with playback. I realize I may be in a minority. My biggest annoyance was not being able to figure out which disk was which without a magnifying glass!

[charybdis1966]

I have seasons 1-4 which is 84 episodes. It’ll take a while to work through them but I’m looking forward to it.

It does take a while to get through the series. I've gone through it several times, and am in season 6 right now -- but also watching season 2 along with the 40th anniversary viewing.

Something to look forward to ha ha.