After a lot of fucking around and messing about, and buying another copy of the eBook through iTunes, at the moment I can somewhat say that the Apple Books version of Empire Strikes Back is extremely similar, with a very minimal difference in bitrate, but basically identical.

The 10 clips from the eBook, only those with raw/deleted footage, in my existing rip, in total are 85mb, with each file having a bitrate of 1.1mb/s.

The Apple Books versions add up to 109mb, with the average bitrate being 1.5mb/s.

These are both pretty rubbish bitrates, considering the film on the 2011 Blu-Ray is roughly 32mb/s, however the Apple version of the eBook footage is definitely a little better.

The resolution for my version is 640x308, and the Apple one being 640x480. Which doesn’t mean much, as it’s just the black matte that is cut out in my version.

And also, the Apple version is locked up with DRM, with no current way I can find to unlock it. The videos don’t play, the images don’t open and the text doesn’t load, if you take it outside of the Apple Books app on a Mac computer. This was a waking fucking nightmare to work out. If anyone could figure out how to strip the DRM from the individual files, they still could be useful potentially since the bitrate is still slightly higher.

Every video file is also tagged with “SD for Apple Devices”, so it seems unlikely that there are any HD versions out there, unless anyone wants to test the Google Play versions, but I will not be sadly.

Unless there is some sort of alternate release of all this footage (another Blu-Ray or digital bonus or something), all of this stuff will be locked in barely 480p quality. Some of the SW Gag Reel made it into the TROS Doco, and there was a re-edit made of it on the ROTS Blu-Ray, but it suffered from being cropped to 16:9 and some horrid ghosting effects. In the end, some upscales we make will likely be the best we’ll ever have.

Here is a smiley Mark for your troubles!