Hey Funcha, yeah my plan from the outset was to encode these with as high quality as possible and write each of the three films onto single dual layer blu-rays, so all my encodes have been at full 1080p resolution and pretty much identical in terms of grain/PQ to the blu-rays themselves. You could definately call that going the 'ultra-high bitrate for maximum quality' route as you suggested. :)

Of course, I have all the sources still perfectly intact so I can also create 720p and 1080p encodes that can fit a dual layer dvd no problem for those that aren't interested in downloading something so large.

As for audio, i've read comments by Adywan and others that the DTS-HD audio of the blu-rays are a little sound effects centric to the detriment of the fantastic musical score by John Williams, particularly during the space battles, so I was planning to use Hairy_Hen's awesome 70mm sound mix recreations that bring the music back to front stage and take any specialised audio changes that I want to keep from either the DTS-HD Master Audio Track from the blu-ray or as a last resort, the 5.1 tracks from the 2004 dvds. Having put the audio track together, I planned to encode it to uncompressed pcm to maintain as high quality audio as possible.

One problem that i've run into is that the program i'm using cannot recognise dts-hd audio, so I was wondering whether you know how to convert the dts-hd audio of the blu-rays to pcm without any audio quality loss, because my program can recognise and manipulate pcm and that would be incredibly useful.