Basically, the German HDTV rip has the best picture quality, however, there are many instances of missing frames, damaged frames, encoding/decoding errors. In v.1, I patched these using the "hV" versions found on torrent sites. The "hV" versions are re-encoded from different UK Sky TV Broadcasts. In some cases, the Blu Ray was utilized to help fix errors as well, though very rarely was it used as is. Due to the re-encoding and different bit-rates, the German and hV versions didn't exactly match-up perfectly, and some sharpening /color, contrast, or brightness tweaking/grain addition was necessary to match the different sources.
Errors in the German rip were initially spotted by resizing, inverting, and merging the HDTV rip with the 2004 DVD versions. This made most errors in the HDTV rip relatively obvious, and the patches were put in to fix these errors. AOTC is by far the most complicated film in this regard, as there are encoding errors roughly every 10-15 seconds during the film (This might be an exaggeration, but not by much!). Other films, like ROTS, had only a couple of errors (I think it only has three or four patches in total).
Anyway, v.1 looks pretty great as it is, and it's frame accurate with the 2004 DVD's, however looking closely at the video reveals frequent encoding errors on the stream. These errors are not readily apparent using the procedure I used to look for errors in v.1. I can post pictures later, but they appear as blocky frames and frequently display horizontal banding in the image.
I have noticed a few patterns to the errors. Mostly, blockiness is apparent in dark/black portions of the frame and the encoders used seem to have a problem with the color green. Basically, dark scenes and scenes with lots of green/vegetation have the most errors. As such, AOTC and ROTJ have many errors.
About a year ago, I started to work on v.2, and completed new versions of AOTC and ROTJ using the same sources for patching. However, they were extremely tedious and hard to slog through. In addition, the patches were not matching as well as I would have liked, and I just got a little discouraged with the process.
After another thread mentioned some alternate sources for HDTV rips, I was able to download some French-language versions based on the same UK SkyTV rips. However, these were much higher bit-rate, and not re-encodes. As such, they are not quite the quality of the German rips, but close. The colors match almost perfectly and they generally look much better than the "hV" versions.
The snag is that ANH is missing the last 20 minutes or so of the film, and ROTJ is unavailable in this form. I've found torrents for the original SkyTV rips, but they're from 2008 and have no seeders now (If only I could get on the HDBits tracker, I might find them there). I've continued to search for these, but with no success. As an alternative, I've located some alternate rips from Cinemax for ANH and ROTJ, again, in slightly lower quality, but still better than the hV.
The plan is to redo all patches and fix encoding errors using these new sources.
As of now, I'm about 25% done with ANH, 10% done with ROTS, and have the completed versions of ROTJ and AOTC from last year, which need to be redone using the new source material. That leaves TESB and TPM with the most work remaining. I hope to finish ROTS first, and publish both the DVD and Theatrical versions around the end of this month.