SilverWook said:

What make/model of DVD recorder was used? Of course, the discs themselves might be the culprit.

Is there any weird jerkiness to the video? Like frames are being dropped? It's probably my crappy cable system, but I only see this on the SD subchannels.

If you can get your friend to capture the next broadcast on the 25th, maybe just use single layer discs this time?

That would require switching the disc twice to get it in 1-hour mode, and the showing is at 9:30 at night.

I'd rather try to make this one work.

On another set-top I have, it runs, but only after almost 60 seconds of whirring and clicking.

And yes, I do see compression with fast motion. A fair amount of smearing and artifacting - I think a good amount of it might have been on the tape and/or broadcast signal themselves.

And as to jerking, it's not just you - there is definitely jerking whenever the camera pans. I think this may suffer from "time-compression stutter" like I used to see on TBS (where instead of just blur from frame-blending, there would be almost regular "skips" due to frames/fields seemingly being dropped by the compression process) - I'm trying to run it in sync from the beginning to see if there's any drift. The music's in sync...

....aaaand as soon as we get to Saavik's Captain's Log, it suddenly drifts completely out of sync. Yup, I guess it's f***ing time-compressed. I should have known it would be, this is commercial TV after all. (And actually, the ABC airing may have also been time-compressed - explaining the blending and the inability to get a clean IVTC. I believe ABC was already time-compressing movies in the late 80s?)

So on top of everything looking compressed, if it's time-compressed it won't yield any better of an IVTC.

I found a crappy Emprex USB drive that actually detects the disc, so I'm going to attempt a rip. If successful, I will analyze how it looks.