Harmy's THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK Despecialized Edition HD - V2.0 - MKV & AVCHD (Released) — Page 148

Less than 1gb??? I may need to download this just to see how bad the picture quality looks

timdiggerm said:

Less than 1gb??? I may need to download this just to see how bad the picture quality looks

That’s how big the mp4 versions of Star Wars and Return of the Jedi were when I got them off archive; former was 704mb and the latter was 774mb iirc.

FWIW there were never any official MP4 encodes, but there are re-encodes made by random internet people all over the place, mostly because people really were put off by the file sizes of the official downloads. i.e. if you’re going into this from a film preservation/I want something with better quality than the official releases that I can keep forever, big file sizes aren’t a concern. But if all you want to do it watch a movie once on your phone and be done with it, well, something smaller is probably good enough. Different strokes and all that.

But those MP4s you found might not be a “matched set”, they may be re-encodes made by three entirely different people using entirely different quality/speed trade-offs, they may have made different and possibly bad audio choices, etc. Heck, someone could have spliced Jedi Rocks back into ROTJ for all we know, people do all sorts of weird things. That’s the downside of unofficial sources.

I did get some of the raw scans used for 4K80, plus scans of some other prints from TN1 but I don’t want to go into details, as I’m not sure what they may want to keep under wraps.

I will likely now switch to 4K80 v1.0 as my primary source anyway, as most of the cleanup work has been done, which will make my work easier.