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solkap

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Join date
21-Jan-2016
Last activity
23-Feb-2019
Posts
390

Post History

Post
#1260813
Topic
NJVC Custom Blu-ray Set of Harmy’s Despecialized Editions now available on Mega
Time

A note to everybody else:

I hope the rars stop failing after this. But please continue to post here if you run into one with a “Temporary Error” message that isn’t due to data limits.

They are hard for me to detect. I periodically use urlchecker.org to scan the rars to look for broken ones. But each of the links I’ve recently had to replace has showed up as working on that site, despite being nonfunctional on mega.

Post
#1260738
Topic
NJVC Custom Blu-ray Set of Harmy’s Despecialized Editions now available on Mega
Time

AmMiRo, SnooPac, and zman,

I’ve re-uploaded the ROTJ Special Features (BD 25) part 17 rar file. I’ve also updated the the main downloadable list, updated the running log in the first post, and sent the three of you the new link directly via pm.

Valheru_84,

Thank you for the kind words! It’s really great to have you and others recognize my efforts!

Post
#1258567
Topic
NJVC Custom Blu-ray Set of Harmy’s Despecialized Editions now available on Mega
Time

I still think you may be running into data caps. I’ve checked the file and it’s working on my end.

Take a look at this screenshot I took on Wednesday December 5 at 1:42 pm Central Standard Time.

(Note the link is redacted so as to avoid posting a direct link on the main thread, but I’m assuming you already have the correct necessary url.)

You can also check it yourself, if you wish, by using http://urlchecker.org/.

Have you tried waiting a few days in between attempts to make sure that your data allotment has ample time to refresh? Or using a flash drive to manually download just that file from another computer, say a friend’s, or one at a college or public library lab?

Post
#1258428
Topic
Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released)
Time

Very possibly. If that is the case, waiting six hours (or even a day or two to be sure) would fix the issue.

Incidentally, If you have a decent size flash drive, and access to other computers, say at a library computer lab for example, you can download ten rars manually then switch to a different computer and repeat.

It’s tedious, but sometimes it can end up being quicker than waiting six hours for your data allotment to reset.

Post
#1257767
Topic
Star Wars Despecialized Editions - Custom Bluray Set (Released)
Time

LordZerome1080 said:

Solkap seems to be in charge of this now.

LOL! I’m flattered!

ThiefCobbler4ever, I seem to remember NJVC posting somewhere that it was his intention to update the ISOs when 3.0 came around. I could be mistaken, though, since I’m not finding that post, but I did find this one. So I can’t say for sure.

If the set is updated, and if members here can help me with temporary file-locker links so I can bypass myspleen again, it is at least my intention to post the 3.0 versions.

But LordZerome1080, I’m really not in charge of anything. I’m nothing more than a humble distributor who wants to help out other fans such as myself. I’ve had zero contribution to actually producing anything Despecialized.

Post
#1256956
Topic
Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released)
Time

StarkillerAG, my guess is that you’re running into download limits. If that’s the case, stopping downloading for about six hours and then downloading another ten rars before stopping again and repeating until done should fix the problem. But I can’t be sure without a little more information.

Are you trying to download all the parts at once? And either way, precisely what does the error say? Perhaps you could post a screenshot of the issue?

Post
#1256527
Topic
"Batman: The Killing Joke" - Fan Editing Tips & Help Wanted
Time

I’m thinking of attempting to make a fairly simple fan edit of “Batman: The Killing Joke”

Despite its problems, I’ve long been a fan of Alan Moore’s character defining graphic novel. So I was hesitantly excited when they announced they were making it into a DC Universe Animated Movie.

While there are parts that I feel are well done, the film’s prologue is horrendous and there are also some other very sour notes along the way.

It was noble to try to give Barbara more depth than the simple Disposable Woman character she is in the original story. But they went about it all wrong and only made the sexist narrative problems even worse. And since the first 28 minute section has absolutely no bearing on the rest of the movie, it lifts right out. When the prologue is eliminated, along with three other short snippets, IMHO, the film is greatly improved, even if still flawed.

But looking at what I’ve been able to make so far, my lack of video editing skills is still pretty apparent.

In the interest of not making a long post even longer, I’ll refrain from going into the specifics of what clips I’m cutting for now. I can talk about that later if need be. At this time, I’ll just detail the editing tasks that are giving me trouble.

MakeMKV seems to do a pretty good job of ripping, I don’t think the rips are of lossless quality though and I’d like them to be. But then the quality really drops when I try to do any of the following three things:

  1. Cut the ripped file into pieces with various free file cutters.
  2. Add brief audio fade outs at the very end of two of the clips to help make the cuts stand out less.
  3. Try to rejoin the spliced pieces back together.

I have been able to get a single video file back together with various free editing programs. However the degraded picture quality and less than seamless cuts are still far from being passable.

So, does anyone have advice on ways to:

    a. Make rips of both the DVD and Blu-ray
    b. Create cuts from the original rips that are more precise than by the second.
    c. Create gradual audio fade outs to zero volume over the course of a second or two at the very end of a clip.
    d. Seamlessly rejoin the finished video files into one.

And do all of the above losslessly and with software that’s either free or much less expensive than, say, Adobe After Effects or Final Cut Pro?

Thanks for any help!

Post
#1253963
Topic
Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released)
Time

dariwonka said:

That’s not right.
You can check the MD5 of the downloaded file wherever it is from

Oh, yes, dariwonka, you are are correct that you can verify the files from any source after downloading using checksum information. There are certainly good copies out there on torrents and in unofficial file lockers.

I meant that one can’t be certain of file quality before downloading if they are choosing an unofficial source. 😃

Post
#1247760
Topic
Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released)
Time

LordZerome1080 said:

I have found a far better method which is to look for a pre-combined version and download it via Jdownlader. I got the best results doing this.

That is certainly an option as well. However, if one does that, there is no way to know for sure if the results are unaltered. If one uses one of the methods outlined in The Ultimate Introductory Guide, one knows the material is coming straight from the source.

Post
#1247712
Topic
Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released)
Time

Bantha_Tracker, good eye! Yes, that link is incorrect. However, I seem to find that eliminating the “www.” works better than adding the “s”.

I have contacted HanDuet directly about this mistake and hopefully he will soon correct the error.

To FN-2199, and anyone else who might have stumbled on this, sorry for the confusion. Give it another shot, either using http://ulozto.net/ as your link for the manual download method, or try using the multi-rar method (which is my prefered way).

Either way should work just fine.

Post
#1247508
Topic
<em>Solo: A Star Wars Story</em> — Official Review and Opinions Thread — <strong>SPOILERS</strong>
Time

Hardcore Legend said:

The planet is literally a mudhole bc of all the rain. It is brought up numerous times. They are in an open hole in this place, while it is raining. The poor conditions are to show that Han was sent to one of the worst places he could go (a pointless battlefront full of slaughter that is just an awful place to be) and that the wookiee prisoner is being imprisoned in unliveable conditions and is being fed other prisoners.

Hope that helps.

My objection to the aesthetics of the muddy scene weren’t because I thought it didn’t fit or didn’t make sense. I just really disliked it. Although I hope my rational is relatable, my previous post was meant to be more of a “fan-boy rant” than a “coherent review”. I promise I’m not attempting to change anyone’s minds. 😉

Post
#1246926
Topic
Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released)
Time

FN-2199 said:

Wow, way to go making this damn near impossible to download. I think if I walked around the world once barefoot it would be easier. I’ve tried the instructions before to no avail and just want to download this for my personal use. I own so many versions of SW already. I’m not very computer literate. I’m just an old school fan who can’t do new computer tricks.

Is there a simple way to download these like a link or a bittorrent link?

FN-2199, are you calling us traitors?      (rimshot)

But seriously, we’d like to help. You say you’ve tried the instructions before.
I assume you mean the ones posted on
The Ultimate Introductory Guide.

So precisely how far did you get before something went wrong and what exactly happened when it did?

Post
#1246918
Topic
<em>Solo: A Star Wars Story</em> — Official Review and Opinions Thread — <strong>SPOILERS</strong>
Time

I know I’m late to the discussion, and that this post is probably too long, but after waiting for the Redbox release, I wanted to share my thoughts (with spoilers) on the this film.

To be clear, these are just my personal feelings on the film and should have no bearing on your opinion of it. I’m saying what I’m saying merely to express, not to convince.

In my humble opinion, this was just a badly written picture. It’s the first Star Wars film in almost 20 years I have almost completely disliked. Because it’s not just a bad Star Wars movie. It’s a bad movie all the way around. I’m so disappointed, because I have tons of admiration for Ron Howard.

First of all, Han had no character arch. When the character’s survival is guaranteed in an origin story, it leaves nothing interesting about him if he doesn’t change over the course of the plot, since none of the other stakes of that plot will matter in the long run. It would have been far more engaging if he’d started as a straight-laced guy, joining the Empire for misplaced ideological reasons, only to become disillusioned and disaffected, developing into the Han we meet in Ep IV. By contrast, whether or not you enjoyed the prequels, there’s no denying Anakin changes over the course of those three episodes. Han is pretty much the same guy at the beginning of Solo that he is at the beginning of Episode IV, just younger.

The scene where Han meets Chewbacca was covered in crap. Literally. Or at least some aggressively unpleasant looking mud. The whole visual aesthetic seemed to be to cover everything with filth because … well … I guess because they could. And because that seems to be their current approach to reinvention. In essence, take a product, cover it with extraneous junk, then falsely call it something new.

I was very annoyed by Darth Maul’s cameo. Though he was about the best thing in Phantom Menace, and it was a shame that they killed him off, they did kill him off! Any other scenario of him surviving in the TV shows or comics felt like sloppy writing that was trying to have its cake and eat it too. Maul felt pretty pointless in this film anyway, so why have him there? Besides, (again, for me personally) if it isn’t in the feature films, it isn’t part of the “true” story, so for me, Darth Maul should have still been dead.

Another problem is Qi’ra’s re-appearance. Han has no idea where Dryden Vos might be keeping her. Then, without anyone having to figure anything out, poof, there she is on Vos’s yacht. Deux ex machina for sure.

Four words: L…3…3…7.

Uuuggghhh. Where do I start? To the same degree that I liked BB8 in VII or VIII, or K2SO in R1, I disliked L3-37 in Solo. She was such an annoying caricature of everything obnoxious about people concerned with social issues. The well being of an exploited group (droids, in this instance) could have made for an an compelling vignette. Instead, we got a cartoonishly one dimensional social justice warrior. It isn’t that I wouldn’t side with her in the effort to liberate those without voices. It’s that she’s so single mindedly self-righteous. She makes those ideas which could have been compelling laughable, with shallow blither that she attempts to be iconoclastic, but amounts to nothing but cliches.

The alluded Lando / L3-37 thing was also really weird and gross. And then the “Don’t look at me. I can’t perform when you look at me.” robot phallic joke while she was cutting the fence? Unbelievably…STUPENDOUSLY…awful!.

Even if all these problems hadn’t been issues, the script still would have been filled with characters you don’t care about, and thus make the stakes that didn’t matter before end up mattering even less.

Lastly, a minor personal gripe: Han pronouncing the Wookie language (Shyriiwook?). In my own conceptualization of Star Wars, there was reason you never heard Han or Chewbacca speak to the other in the other’s language. It was because though each understood both languages, each was only physiologically capable of pronouncing their own. Having Han vocalize some guttural Wookie utterances undercuts that idea, and it makes me kinda sad.

This just about ties “Phantom Menace” for me for the worst Star Wars film to date among the Numbered Episodes and the Anthology Films. I think it will be the first Star Wars film of which I decline to purchase any physical or digital copy altogether, only spending that little bit of money on the Redbox rental.

Oh, well. At least they got one thing right. Han definitely shoots first. 😄

PS- I thought the visual effects were great. And so on the very, very, very off chance Harmy did any effects work on Solo, I’d also like to make it clear that I had no problems there and that I only took issue with the story concepts and their narrative execution. 😉

Post
#1243337
Topic
Covers &amp; Fan Art projects etc - a thread for feedback, advice, suggestions, input, or help
Time

I have been working on a DVD box set design for my six favorite Alfred Hitchcock films:

Dial M For Murder
Rear Window
Vertigo
North By Northwest
Psycho
The Birds

I’d like to share my work in progress and get feedback and/or ideas from those here who might have a better eye for graphic design than I do.

I have measured pretty meticulously, using the editions of the DVDs that I own, while also accounting for the width of the bookbinding chipboard I am using for the box. And since this isn’t the first time I’ve made a box set, I’m pretty sure I don’t need any help on the mechanics of putting one together.

However, when I have put sets together before, I always either just used a project someone shared online, or altered a good completed design I found to my liking.

But this time, though I am still using elements I found from the internet, as far as the overall box design goes, I’m starting from scratch. And methods of using principles of graphic design to make a composition better are ideas with which I have only a beginners level of familiarity. My project is fairly primitive. I just used MS Word for the most part, with the exception of using GIMP for the necktie coloration. So I’d like to share what I’ve done so far and get feedback.

To see what I have put together so far, use this link to view the PDF.

Are there any obvious design gaffes that stand out? How about choice of fonts? What do you think of the fan-art silhouette images on the back? Do you think the black-and-white-with-a-splotch-of-red motif is effective? Is the speckle of blood spatter on the spine too macabre, or just the right level of it? How’s blurb of text on the back sound? And if anything is sub-par, do you have alternative ideas?

Thanks in advance to anyone who responds!