re: DarkJedi Faces Widescreen DVDr's :
One word : Macroblocking.
I really appreciated the cool menus, the quite good quality interview segments, but the film itself - ARGGH! I appreciate the fact that it is a raw capture, no filtering or anything, but the entire idea of a straight capture is lost when your encoder literally destroys your project. I don't know how many gigs a straight, UNTOUCHED transfer would be, but the compression seems to be a big problem for you Preservation Set creators. I don't know what encoders you all are using, but it looks like a really bad DVDShrink, as seems to be becoming the norm with these transfers. Have you ever heard of a multipass VBR encoder called "Cinema Craft Encoder?" It is the only compression encoder worth having. Clearly TMPGEnc or whatever you guys use is vastly inferior. Professional studios are known to use CCE, and there is a very good reason - it's the best. If you guys are having trouble obtaining this program, I'd be more than happy to see that set creators have access to it (msg me). Maybe you all watch your Star Wars discs on 13" black and white conventional tv's - but I, for one, have 1680x1050 resolution - which really shows the flaws, even in retail DVD's. These are just plain unwatchable. You seriously can't tell me you don't see the shockingly horrible macrblocking and text-aliasing on these discs. From the first words in the scroll, to the last credit in the reel, there are constant square segments of video that are painfully visible - which is a side effect of a low-grade encoder grouping frame areas together and encoding them in blocks; making for a very fast, totally garbage encode. I am sad, angry, and disappointed all in the same bag. And I know if it were my project, I simply wouldn't release it like this.
"Oh sweet Jeebus, let the X0 Project use CCE...."