Thanks very much for the shots, Anurag. I'll reserve full judgment until I see the uncompressed 2-disc release, but if that ends up with little improvement then this is a disappointing transfer. Doesn't look HD sourced at all. And even if Aamir Khan supervised the colour grading, I still prefer the look of the Columbia video - much less yellow-ish.

Anyways, here are comparison shots from the CT disc...





















By the way, Anurag - is the audio pitch-corrected on the Excel disc?

Pl clarify further what do you mean by "Pich Correction" and why is it better to leave it uncorrected for 4% speed up PAL transfers ??

At 25fps, pitch correction lowers the audio pitch by 0.7 semitones (4%) to try and retain the original pitch of the 24fps audio. This often only creates more problems than it solves however - it can leave the audio sounding garbled or with sound drop-outs.

Some recently pitch-corrected Indian DVDs were Guru and the REM releases of KANK, Don and Krrish. They all sounded dreadful.

Then the Indians/Germans use crap converters. It can be done transparently with high quality digital equipment (as on Swiss Lakhsya DVD).

Stephen, did you take those shots from the R2 disc? The R1 version has yellow subtitles.

Yes, the shots are from the R2 PAL version.

No. As far as my ears cud conclude, The audio is thankfully NOT pitch corrected. No sign of garbled sound.

Remember, R2 is a double-disc edition.

The low bit rate for video on the single Excel disc was expected -- looong movie -- all on one disc -- dolby digital 5.1 sound at 448, so...

See here -- http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare2/lagaan.htm
CTS R1 single disc and CTS R2 double disc have been compared.

I also have CTS R3 single disc from Korea and can post shots from that.

I just got my hands on the wooden box -- magnificent -- and yes, the movie split onto two discs should be a treat for the eyes and the ears -- bit rate is about 5.5 for video

I am wary of using my laptop for screenshots because they go wrong -- so I will post shots from my PC later -- but till then here's a shot from the laptop (from the 2-disc edition)

That's still quite unspectacular. High quality discs should use 7 Mbit/s average and more.

True... but remember there's dts 5.1 too to accomodate as well as dolby digital 5.1... let me check this out on my PC, my home theatre, etc.
(Anyone knows so far if dts is HBR or FBR? Can't be FBR -- that would be "too" much.)

Just came to know this...

I'd suggest the forum to play the DVDs of Lagaan directly on a DVD player and check on their TV screens... to arrive at a more balanced opinion.
Cheers!

Couldn't find this online yet -- but expected to be in stores soon (VCDs are already available).

BTW, the English version -- Madness In The Desert -- can be expected from Excel soon too.

Newdeep thanx for asking. I am no expert on this stuff but whatever I know and believe i ll tel u ....... The answer to ur first Q is a simple 'No'. U r not reading it correctly ...(not because u need glasses ).... but only because DVD playing SWs like WinDVD and Power DVD never show the correct avg Bit Rate. Its always displayed overrated or say over-calculated.

Now to answer ur second Q , there are very small and freely available but specialised SWs made to do exclusively this function i.e. calculating the Bit rate of DVDs. I see here that that u r quite familiar with DVDbeaver. U must have seen that in most comparisons at dvdbeaver, they show a graphical rep of bit rate on both dvds that are being compared. This is no hi-fundoo-stuff but only a half a second job done by these miniscule softwares.

O... and Btw, I Used 'DVD Bit Rate viewer'.

Just to add to that, if u wanna play the movie normally and watch the bit rate simultaneously for each second of display, play the movie in Nero Showtime with OSD on. .... simple .

Thnx a lot to Stephen for the comparison shots. I really appreciate how precisely u were able to capture the motion shots at the same exact moment as on excel shots. ..Cool.

Hi again Anurag,
I checked DVD Bit Rate Viewer -- here's what the product description says -- "Basic DVD BitRate Viewer, select DVD Source and see the total bitrate including video and audio". If this is true then is 3.82 the average of both audio and video? Would appreciate if you or someone else confirms...
PowerDVD displays video and audio bit rates separately. And even in PowerDVD you can display audio and video bit rate per scene by switching on "Show Info" or "OSD on".