Why do so many OVA releases have low res only?

[Megidolaon]

DVDs and then Blue Ray had HD even before TV had it (at least over here), so how come there are so many OVA releases with lower res than HD for animes with HD TV shows?

Whoever provides the raws for these must either have the disc and thus access to the highest resolution or recorded it from TV like the TV series and I can't imagine they run some anime's TV series at natural 1080p on a TV station just to run that anime's OVAs at low res.

I am extremely confused (and just as disappointed ).

[relentlessflame]

It really depends on the case. DVDs are inherently SD, so you can't get HD quality from that (unless you upscale it, but there's no point to do that on the capture side). If you're talking about the sort of OVAs (or OADs) that come bundled with manga or LNs, most of the time those are actually just DVDs. So in those cases, an HD quality version has not actually been released yet (unless it also aired on TV or somewhere else). In some cases, those OADs might be collected and released on Blu-Ray later, but usually doesn't happen for a while.

OVAs that are released as standalone discs, on the other hand, usually do have Blu-Ray releases, so typically those will be available in HD.

[0cean]

DVDs ain't inherently SD. You can put HD content on a DVD. Problem is that DVD players won't be able to play it so nobody puts HD content on DVDs.

[relentlessflame]

Originally Posted by 0cean

DVDs ain't inherently SD. You can put HD content on a DVD. Problem is that DVD players won't be able to play it so nobody puts HD content on DVDs.

Well, of course we're talking about DVD Video (as you can play in a DVD player). It doesn't mean anything if you put some .mp4/.mkv or whatever on the file system of the disc that a DVD Player (or DVD Player Software) won't recognize. No OVAs are distributed as DVD-ROMs, just DVD Video.