Screenshots from Skärgårdsdoktorn TV series (scenes with Robyn played by Rebecka Liljeberg):

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All screenshots, slightly higher quality in one file. Just download the file, unpack somewhere and doubleclick on index.html.

Other TV appearances


Video clips in MPEG1/VCD format

  1. Robin greets Wilma (Rebecka factor - high) (9.8MB)
  2. Robin and Wilma prepare for a party (Rebecka factor - high) (16.1MB)
  3. Skål! (Rebecka factor - high) (5.8MB)
  4. Predictions (Rebecka factor - high) (4.4MB)
  5. Evening party (Rebecka factor - high) (24.3MB)
  6. Dance interrupted (10.1MB)
  7. Robin takes a chilly walk (23.0MB)
  8. Wilma to the rescue (almost no Rebecka, just story) (35.6MB)
  9. Robin is flown away (almost no Rebecka, just story) (11.8MB)
  10. Wilma says sorry (Rebecka factor - high) (11.0MB)

Higher quality MPEG2 versions

  1. Robin greets Wilma (21.4MB)
  2. Robin and Wilma prepare for a party (32.8MB)
  3. Skål! (11.7MB)
  4. Predictions (9.1MB)
  5. Conversation in the bedroom during a party (31.9MB)
  6. Dance interrupted (19.3MB)
  7. Robin takes a chilly walk (10.6MB)
  8. Wilma says sorry (23.7MB)

While MPEG1 clips tell the whole story of Robin, MPEG2 clips show only the more appealing parts. :)

P.S. You will need a DVD player software and a powerful enough computer to play the MPEG2 clips. And a bit of patience. And a good internet connection wouldn't hurt. Actually, also my internet connection plays a role, it being a rather lousy one during daytime.


Wow... What can I say. This time we saw quite a different Rebecka. And there was a lot to see. I really expected a small role, nothing to talk about. Fortunately it was all different. :)

At last I am starting to understand what all the Rebecka fans are really talking about. The series itself was (in my humble opinion) a lousy one. It had everything that makes the usual American crap so revolting to me - often stonefaced actors going through the motions, speaking in full sentences, almost as if reading from a book, not as in real life. And it had nothing that made Fucking Åmål so great - you feel as if people are experiencing what is shown on screen.

In this one, her character was a lot more alive than others. It was especially appealing when I watched it in slo-mo when taking snapshots. Her act was constantly filled with small lovely moments that made it alive. That are "impossible to direct" (as Lukas told in his commentary track to FÅ). Movements, expressions... it's difficult to tell. It's especially difficult to capture on a still image. Yet, in a TV/movie they go so fast that most of them pass unnoticed. It really was a joy taking snapshots from this series. Much more so than from Eva & Adam, even though I liked the series itself much less.

I don't know why I am writing this. It seems wrong to dissect something like that, to put something like that in writing. Yet, I am doing this as I just can't let go of what I have heard almost every major FÅ member say: that they don't get what people found in the film. Like it was some kind of stupid mass psychosis. That's why I probably want to formulate it to myself, what were the many things that really made FÅ so great that it still hasn't left my thoughts alone.


Some comments about the technical background:

  1. The MPEG1/VCD clips were captured at 352x288 resolution. MPEG2 clips were captured at 464x576 resolution. Both in uncompressed YUV 4:2:2 format.

  2. Both of these passed through the latest version of my own video filtering software. All screenshots but one were scaled from 464x576 version of uncompressed video, that one exception was scaled from 352x288 uncompressed video. Screensot capture software was developed to the point where I can confidently say that none else except video capture hardware limits the quality. There are absolutely no steps where calculation and rounding errors can creep in. The only point of concern - rounding to truecolour Targa image is very carefully dithered. In lossless .jpg versions, all this glory (or whatever arrived into the computer via that cheapo TV card) is intact.

  3. All MPEG clips were compressed using my own modified version of bbMPEG 1.21 MPEG encoding engine to which I wrote a new front-end. The problem with all Windows based MPEG encoders I know is, that they all convert the original YUV format video (all captured video is ALWAYS in YUV at the moment of capture) to RGB and then back again to YUV (which is the native MPEG colourspace). The process is nastier than it looks because it also involves up- and downsampling of colour resolution. So, all currently available Windows based MPEG compressors spend huge amounts of time to do a lot of senseless conversions and killing off much of the image quality in the process - every conversion distorts image a bit, when care is not taken - in this case, it wasn't. When I removed all the unnecessary steps, the compression became about 2.6x (read: more than two-and-a-half TIMES faster). So, the original version of the program (AVI2MPG2/bbMPEG 1.21) spent more than 60% of time, essentially to muck up the image quality. :) It's still a mystery to me, as I chose this program after many comparisons precisely on a basis of image quality! I.e. the others (including some commercial packages) weren't better (commercial ones) or were worse (other freeware ones). Back then I thought that it isn't possible to do it any better. Fortunately I was wrong.

I guess I'll put these tools up on the net, after I have polished them a bit. Currently they are nowhere near the form that can be made public.

From the list of clips some of you might get the impression that MPEG2 is "better" than "MPEG1". Actually, it isn't true. When the file size i.e. data rate is same, and it isn't very large, they make almost identical results. It's just that with considerably higher data rates i.e. larger files for the same duration of video, MPEG2 is just better equipped to put this larger available bandwidth to good use. But for smaller bandwidths, MPEG1 is actually even slightly better.

Sulo Kallas