I just skimmed through v1.0 after not having seen it for some time and the quality is laughably bad compared to v2.0, seriously, even I was surprised :-)

It's already uploading...

Also, Harmy, when you have the time (months away, I know) I'm interested in what you did for merging the commentary track with the 93 audio, but for the other two films.

I wouldn't say hell of a lot, What is 2GB nowadays? Anyway, the upload is already under way.

I thought V1.0 was excellent apart from some minor issues in one or two locations.

Looking forward to V2.0.

Yeah I'd have to say Han's head jerk in the Falcon was my only major gripe with 1.0, and only because it reminded me so much of the Han's Special Edition head maneuver.  Everything else is just gravy... delicious, delicious gravy...

@CatBus: Well, since it took about ten minutes to do it, it's no problem. I'm not sure I have the 93 tracks for ESB and ROTJ though. I also noticed that the one I did could do with increasing the volume of the commentary to be level with the 93 track, so I'll probably be redoing that for the BD.

@Moth3r: I actually meant the over-all picture quality (mainly less to no compression artefacts - and I already have a sample of what the AVCHD encode will look like and even that is loads better - and the lack of crushed blacks makes it all look a lot better too). The unfortunate side effect of this increase in quality is that although most of the Despecialized shot were improved, it actually makes those that couldn't be further improved (mainly some of the not so great looking GOUT shots) to stand out a little more.

I'm really really happy with the way the lightsabres turned out in the end too.

Finally a decent connection. I'm staying at my uncle's in Pilsen tonight and I'm currently uploading at over 1MB/s. The only problem is that the connection is a bit unstable, so I'm not sure it will get done overnight.

Rox64 said:

Hi, I just registered here to say thank you, Harmy, you were our only hope to see the theatrical, truly unaltered Star Wars, and now you're uploading a better release! You have said the old v1 release is laughably bad compared with this new release. Can you please take some screenshots of the film frames with the biggest difference in quality and reconstruction? My only problem with v1 was the GOUT shot you used on Mos Eisley right after the encounter between the heroes and four Stormtroopers, but you said you couldn't do anything better...

Sorry if this has been asked before, but how will we able to download this new release? By PM?

Harmy is using a completely different source for that shot, and it looks a lot better! Instead of using the GOUT which used an antiquidated noise reducing process to reduce grain - which subsequently blurs the image, he is using a clip taken from a Japanese Laserdisc that predates the process.

Also: keep in mind that shot always looked like crap, due to the generation loss of the optical effects.

I don't currently have v1.0 here, so I can't take screenshots from it but I'll post some when I get home.

Info about download will be posted on tehparadox. 

Me too, but I've found it next to impossible to use of late, so I'll be trolling some of the more usual suspects looking for it.

Harmy said:

Yeah, I know that would be best for such comparison course. The problem is that within the DeEd, I dare say there isn't a single frame that has the same or even similar colours, brightness and contrast as the BD. And all this adds to the perception of detail, so simply sizing a BD image down to 720p and then back to 1080p up wouldn't give you the right idea on the amount of detail in DeEd v2.0. But still, here it is; left untouched BD 1080p, right the same screenshot downscaled to 720p and then saved, closed, opened again and upscaled back to 1080p:

  To me the 720p upscale has more detail than the official Blu-ray, maybe it's just me. 

Harmy said:

We'll see :-)

Anyway, to give you an idea of the amount of detail, here's a screenshot comparison between the DeEd v2.0 mkv encode and the actual Blu-Ray, the BD is at it's native resolution, the 720p DeEd screenshot has been simply resized to 1080p in photoshop:

  The colors look Great.

Current upload speed fluctuating between 1.5 and 2.9MB/s. God bless uloz.to.

We may yet make the 28th August release date. Well for US residents anyway :-)

Sweet! Really, really looking forward to this. Congrats on all the progress/success, Harmy.

Dying from the antici.... *THUD*