Futurama Seasons 1-4 in HD

I’m finding conflicting information as to whether the original FOX seasons of Futurama have been released in HD at any point. (Some people say they were released on the Microsoft store in 720p, but I have no confirmation.) I know the US iTunes Store and Amazon do not have HD versions – in fact the versions both retailers have for those first few seasons look very poor.

Could someone please point me int the right direction to obtain/purchase these episodes in HD? A well-done 1080p upscale is 100% acceptable as well, if someone has already put in the work. If not, I will likely get started on it myself…

I have some 720p web-dls from Hulu. Not sure if they are native or just upscales of the SD master

I’d love to get a look at them. Would you mind sharing? If they look better than the DVD rips, I can upscale what you have instead.

Hey mate, I managed to get these ripped HD versions of the first 4 seasons if you would like them?Futurama.S01.1080p.WEB.h264-NiXON.
Futurama.S02.1080p.WEB.h264-NiXON
Futurama.S03.1080p.WEB.h264-NiXON
Futurama.S04.1080p.WEB.h264-NiXON

deadakaalive said:

Hey mate, I managed to get these ripped HD versions of the first 4 seasons if you would like them?Futurama.S01.1080p.WEB.h264-NiXON.
Futurama.S02.1080p.WEB.h264-NiXON
Futurama.S03.1080p.WEB.h264-NiXON
Futurama.S04.1080p.WEB.h264-NiXON

To get all 72 epiosdes of the original 4 seasons you will need to download
Season 5 from these “NIXON” downloads.

Update: The NiXON 1080p episodes are not true HD, and appear to have been scaled up without the use of AI. Essentially just enlarged versions of the SD episodes with blurry lines and halos. If I use AI to upscale the DVDs, that ends up looking much better, but I have one issue: occasional jaggy interlacing lines.

The NiXON versions do not have the jaggy interlacing lines, but the overall image quality isn’t as high as the DVD upscales. I even tried downscaling the NiXON file, the using AI to re-upscale, but the upscaled DVD still had crisper lines.

Here are screenshots of the same frame from each attempt…

DVD Upscale (with occasional interlacing issues):
https://ibb.co/s2bp4hZ

1080p (non-AI upscale):
https://ibb.co/7Xypz7B

1080p (Downscale & AI Upscale):
https://ibb.co/tL541Cn

Unless I can get a better source than the DVDs, can anyone direct me to the best tool to use for the deinterlace/detelecine process so that I can avoid the jaggies? I’m using a Mac, and the best results I’ve gotten so far have come from Handbrake, but no matter how I adjust the deinterlace/detelecine settings, I always seem to get artifacts in the same parts of the episode.

For anyone who’s interested: I’ve found what I think are the best settings to minimize the interlacing/telecine problem with Futurama. It’s not perfect, and if I had all the time in the world to go in and manually correct each frame, it would certainly look better, but… here’s what I was able to accomplish with automatic settings: https://ibb.co/z5B0fnb

As you can see in the screenshot, for those frames that are affected by the jaggies, this filter combination seems to really minimize the appearance. And of course, the non-jaggy frames look very good. (See here: https://ibb.co/NYLNLWd)

Once I’m finished upscaling all the episodes, I’ll update this thread. In the meantime, if anyone has better versions of the episodes that I can work with, please let me know.