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2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release. Arguably higher. For example, fans of Star Wars have scann

• greazy 1y ago
  Wow. I thought it was impossible to watch the original release of star wars. I need to hunt this down.
  • nosioptar 1y ago
    There's also a DVD release of the theatrical versions. Usually goes for $50-75 for OG trilogy.
    • LeifCarrotson 1y ago
      DVDs are 480i, the parent comment described far higher quality than DVD.
      • pezezin 1y ago
        DVDs support progressive scan and most movies were encoded in 480p; the player then just sent half the picture on one field and the other half on the other field. Your point still stand though, these modern 4k editions are far higher quality.
        • scheeseman486 1y ago
          The DVD releases of the original theatrical versions of Star Wars were encoded in 480i non-anamorphic, drawn from analog video masters intended for Laserdisc, which employed an early version of DNR that created a bunch of ugly temporal ghosting artifacts. Blown up onto a modern display it looks really bad.
          • pezezin 1y ago
            I watched the PAL edition and I don't remember those artifacts, but it was a million years ago so my memory could be wrong xD
            • scheeseman486 1y ago
              The PAL release was an NTSC>PAL conversion, so throw upscaling artifacts onto the pile as well. e: Actually thinking back on it, it may not even have been PAL at all, but 480i/60hz Region 2/4. There's a good chance you watched it on a CRT given that even on a flat panel LCD fom the late 2000s the low vertical resolution was quite noticeable (effectively ~272p, not counting deinterlacing artifacts from it being sourced from a video master). It looked somewhat acceptable in that context but aged very quickly once CRTs started becoming obsolete.
              • pezezin 1y ago
                I remembered that I borrowed the collection from my uncle and he still has it. I will ask him for pictures of the box, maybe it was the "updated" editions.
                • scheeseman486 1y ago
                  The re-issues used the same masters.
    • Dwedit 1y ago
      Yes, there was the official DVD release that included the original versions as a bonus. But the quality can not compare to 4K77.
  • amgutier 1y ago
    "4k77" should get you to the right places
    • jnaina 1y ago
      Yup. Team Negative One are doing some very important work in terms of film preservation/digital archeology.
    • vizzier 1y ago
      4k80 was finally released last year as well. Some notes on why it took so long: https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k80/ https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k80/
    • greazy 1y ago
      Legend thank you
• deleted 1y ago
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• lz400 1y ago
  That's a bit of an edge case, powered by the absolute, lovely turbo-nerdery of a few dedicated souls. They are called 4K77 / 4K80 versions for people looking for them.
• cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  There’s also a number of movies where the best quality publicly available is a pirated rip of an HDTV broadcast from a Malaysian TV network or something similarly odd because the rights holders never released a BD and the official DVD release was a transfer from a crappy VHS or similar. In cases of TV shows, fans have gone to the lengths of producing the best quality release possible by patching together video, audio, and subtitles from myriad sources, sometimes even splicing individual cuts when their quality varies between sources. It’s so much more effort than you’d see from any official restorations.
  • lyu07282 1y ago
    The criterion collection being the one noteable exception, and they have their own standalone streaming service that is pretty good: https://www.criterionchannel.com/browse https://www.criterionchannel.com/browse
    • JeremyStinson 1y ago
      Ironically, signing-up to Criterion isn't available in Australia: -------- Request Access Sorry. This is currently unavailable in your region. Type in your email below and tell the producers you want it in your country!
      • lyu07282 1y ago
        Try a VPN, I think it was easily circumvented
    • biztos 1y ago
      I'm a subscriber, but the Criterion apps do downloads right some of the time if you're lucky, the choice of subtitles is usually English or English, discovery is Netflix-level bad, they can't be bothered to create any interactive info, and most of the actual Collection is not available for streaming. I still pay them every month because they have the goods but it's so frustrating that the people with the most film-buff oriented catalog and their hearts (presumably) in the right place have so little ability to deliver on UX. (I used to subscribe to MUBI as well, which is stronger for new indie films, but didn't have time for both, and MUBI app was so bad it could have been a fork of the Criterion app.)
• Affric 1y ago
  It’s great but do you know of any others?
  • umbra07 1y ago
    Harmy's Despecialized Edition(s).
  • jaimex2 1y ago
    all of Star Trek Voyager
    • account42 1y ago
      Care to expand? I assume the result is still 480p or have they actually done more than that?
      • NoGravitas 1y ago
        All of the 90s Star Trek series were filmed on 35mm, but all of the post-production work (editing, SFX, etc) were done on tape, at 480p. There's no 35mm copy of the final result to scan and color-grade for a "normal" HD remaster. For the TNG remaster, what they actually did was re-do all of the post-production from the original 35mm negatives. VFX were re-composed, some were re-done in CG. They finished the TNG remaster just as streaming services were ramping up and Blu-Ray disk sales declining, and sales were disappointing given the amount of work that had to go into them. Paramount will never remaster DS9 or VOY because they don't expect to make the money back, because neither was as popular as TNG. And it's worse for DS9 and VOY because they extensively used CGI effects for things like ship battles, which were originally rendered at 480p. If the original assets could be found, they could be re-rendered, but in many cases, they would have to be fully re-created. Fans have created AI upscales which are generally better than watching the horrible 480p releases that were on Netflix and are now on Paramount+. But they are also sometimes uncannily smooth and unpleasant.
        • nerdjon 1y ago
          Is there a name that these upscaled releases fall under to easily find them? Star Trek in particular (I was watching voyager yesterday) the quality is always pretty depressing when shown on a larger TV. Been recently thinking about trying to find the best quality I can find but it is always a lot of trial and error. But if there is a common name and tag I could look for that would be great.
• godelski 1y ago
  While that's the best option, there's always AI upscaling and frame gen. These of course won't be as good as native resolution and can sometimes make more errors, but they can make a big difference on low resolutions when you got a big screen.
  • dddgghhbbfblk 1y ago
    To be blunt, upscaling is pretty shit and doesn't belong in a discussion about quality. The quality-obsessed piracy world we're talking about here would shudder at the comparison.
    • godelski 1y ago
      I full agree. I'm not trying to compare high quality naive source to AI upscale. That is a ludicrous comparison. Native will always be better. But truth of the matter is that many times you don't have access to a higher quality source. Sometimes you only have something that's been re-encoded over and over or something that has degraded through the passage of time. I would not suggest overwriting the source, but the truth is that many people will find this a better viewing experience. Truth is that many of those remasters will use similar technologies, though with much more thought and care than your one click and it's done act like it is magic programs. Truth is that people do enjoy it in videogames and existing streaming and movie systems. People do prefer better native high resolution, but when that is just unavailable, what are you left with? But the truth is that most people are happy with lossy encodings and lower bit color schemes (most people don't even have a 10 bit monitor and (real) HDR isn't prolific). If it is a choice between shitty quality and AI upscale, I'll choose AI upscale more times than not (but not 100%). But instead, if it is a choice between shitty quality, AI upscale, and high quality native, I'm choosing high quality naive 100% of the time. It's not even a question! But the point is that there are choices and not all of them require deep knowledge. I'm not arguing replace native with upscale, that's idiotic. But for an at home player where more people are going to have to make choices about storage spaces and won't care if it is lossy, then the option exists. We're also talking about streaming services. Streaming services force the AI upscaling on you. Hell, even in some TV's it is hard or impossible to turn off (mine turns itself back on!). Let's let people decide, because we know that the incentives are too strong on the streaming service for them to hand you raw.
• matheusmoreira 1y ago
  They release better products than trillion dollar corporations. There are piracy groups out there who are known to source frames from multiple different blu-rays in order to create the best version of a work. Imagine caring so much about something you compare different releases frame by frame in order to select the best ones so that you can splice them all together to form the highest quality ultimate version of a work. Meanwhile corporations are perfectly happy shitting out some butchered streaming slop with compression artifacts in 90% black frames.
  • fragmede 1y ago
    Eh Stremio's episode chooser leaves a bit to be desired, when jumping back into the middle of a show.
• dawnerd 1y ago
  People just don't realize just how garbage even 4k streams are from all the services. It's not in their interest to give you real bluray quality.
  • abbycurtis33 1y ago
    Yes! Someone came after me on here because I said there really is no 4k streaming.
    • bombcar 1y ago
      I’m going to develop 8k streaming - it’s just the normal low bitrate shit, but if you pause it sends a full quality 8k frame. Nobody will figure it out!
      • gmueckl 1y ago
        When your source material shows fast sweeping motions you'd certainly get away with that.
    • dawnerd 1y ago
      The marketing of a resolution really won out. People will fight you if you suggest a high bitrate 1080p encode can look better than a low bitrate 4k.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • ProfessorLayton 1y ago
        Bitrate aside, the marketing stopped making sense long ago: - 720p/1080p is counting vertical pixel resolution - 4k/8k is counting horizontal pixel resolution - "4k/8k" is not actually 4,000/8,000 horizontal pixels - Suddenly the "p" becomes irrelevant (Not that most people even knew what it meant to begin with) - 720/1080/4k/8k totally disregards aspect ratio - Consumers already have a way to compare, and they're called "megapixels" - 2.1MP (1080p) and 8.3MP (4k) etc. is a lot more consumer friendly since it's already used for cameras. Marketing really won at making this a mess.
• dddgghhbbfblk 1y ago
  The Star Wars project is a bit of an outlier in terms of the insane work and dedication that's gone into it. However, in the quality-focused corners of online film piracy, it's still pretty routine for people to combine the best features of every retail release available to produce something that's better than what you can get even by just going out and buying a Blu Ray. For example, maybe the best picture quality available anywhere is from a Blu Ray that was released to the German market, but a US Blu Ray release has an extra commentary track, while the best audio track is actually from an old Laserdisc release (crazy but it's happened before). In the live action world it's pretty rare for a video track or an audio track to be spliced together from multiple sources, though it does happen. But in the anime world it's pretty common and they'll do stuff to fix picture quality issues or localize Japanese text to English on signs or whatever (and they can do it slick enough that you wouldn't even notice). The most bizarre part of all of this, though, is that people put in all this work only for the communities themselves to be small and fiercely private, meaning it could be hard for most people to actually access the end results (though the popular stuff tends to trickle out). The best place on the Internet to download movies bar none (better than all the major streaming platforms put together) is an invite only site with under 40k members that's extremely difficult to join these days.
  • Matticus_Rex 1y ago
    What's the name of the Star Wars project? You know, so I can avoid those darn pirates more effectively.
    • dddgghhbbfblk 1y ago
      The one they were talking about (based on scans of original film prints) is called 4K77/4K80/4K83 for the three films. I believe the first project of this type for Star Wars was Harmy's Despecialized Edition but I think these days most people prefer the 4K77 versions, although it varies by film and by person.
      • Matticus_Rex 1y ago
        Thanks!
• perdomon 1y ago
  This is crazy. Going to surprise my wife with a watch night of these soon. Are these film scans pretty easy to find?