Yeah, I am in PAL region and yeah (again, just like the GOUT) it's a quite obvious NTSC to PAL conversion, there are even some IVCT glitches that I noticed skimming through it.

That HDTV version does look pretty horrible, although it still seems to look better than the DVD (so does DJ's project Blu of course, so it's quite possible that it's sourced from the DVD but it does seem to look better) but I can't find any decent way to DL it.

It appears that an anamorphic version came out in China buit judging by these screenshots, it's just a conversion from the same master, kind of like DJ's V3 but official:

Looks great! When can I DL the MKV? ;-)

OK, I guess I'll have to keep trying to find that one then :-)

Yeah, it's already been discussed here and it seems that it's a fake anamorphic enhancement of the same old LD transfer.

I don't think DVD even supports discrete 6.1 but I could be wrong. Anyway, I finally managed to get the HDTV version and it's definitely better than the DVD, although it looks more like a very decent anamorphic DVD in terms of resolution. The Japanese subs aren't much of a problem, because it seems they were partially in the black boarder and were cropped off, so they only appear at the very bottom of the picture from time to time (only when there was a two line subtitle). They also don't bother me much, since to me they're just meaningless scribbles, so I find them much less distracting then I would say Spanish or French or even Czech subtitles. The AR doesn't seem quite right (slight vertical stretch) but that's easily fixed when watching on a computer.

OK, here's a screenshot which shows the resolution increase beautifully (it's not a whole frame, just a cut out):

You_Too said:

I don't know why I thought it was a DVD upscale... haha

That's easy, because due to the amount of compression in it, it looks no better than an anamorphic DVD lot of the time (it definitely looks better than the non anamorphic abomination that is the only commercially available version though). I could upload it to uloz.to in the evening, if anyone's intersested - the DL speed is limited to 300kbps but if you use JDownloader, you can still have it in a few hours.

It's 2 hours 50 minutes long, so I think it's the SE.

OK, I'm watching it now and it seems like the HDTV broadcast was the 1989 version and whoever made this release spliced in the SE scenes from the DVD (at a cut between scenes, the quality suddenly got lower and the logo from the upper right corner disappeared). Otherwise, the broadcast sourced scenes look like they're from a decent HD telecine but without any major restoration work (it sports a lot of specs and dirt). There isn't much grain to be seen and faces are kind of waxy but I think that's due to the compression rather than DVNR.

Anyway, it's up on uloz.to, if anybody wants it. It shows up on their search engine, so no need to PM me. Just a reminder: you should own the DVD!

OK, I checked the differences between the theatrical and SE versions and it seems that the broadcast was the SE version after all and the DVD upscale shots were probably used to replace some scenes damaged or missing in the HDTV capture - there are some glitches here and there, the kind you get when you have a bad signal on a digital broadcast, so I can imagine that if some scenes were riddled much more with those, the creator of this encode decided to replace them with the DVD, although the DVD upscales look pretty horrible (though still better than the PAL DVD, so I assume that the NTSC DVD does indeed look better).

As to the movie itself, I found the first half pretty boring but then it picked up. Maybe I'd actually like the theatrical version better, but then I liked the scene where he's aboard the Alien ship at the end and most of that is apparently an SE addition.