Nice to see I'm not the only anal person around! Despite the copious hints being dropped at the site itself, I still see a lot of 'XO' rather than 'X0' here on OT.com.
Maybe I'm an extreme goofball, but I like to take care to get stuff like 'Moth3r' and 'X0' right, if for no other reason that it makes the 'Search' function return a lot more relevant hits...
Oh you mean minor colour tweaking not some major overhaul, I already use chroma smoother and the chroma shift ability of Flaxen's VHS filter to align the colour correctly and can adjust the hue slightly to fix things if needed, it's the checking scene-by-scene that I probably won't be doing because of the amount of time it'll take. ***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
I tried to download Moth3r's Star Wars form myspleen.com and then I read one of the posts, where one guy says that if I have Windows98, I CAN'T download this file, cause it goes as one big file, which is more than 4 Gb. As I'm pretty dumb about this stuff, can you clear this for me: I actually CAN'T download or I CAN, but I will not be able to play it? And if so, what should I do, as I already started to download it to my second non-system disc?
One guy says I can format my drive with NTFS, but does this mean I lose all the information on it?
You may be able to create an NTFS partition on your existing drive without losing any data, and use a third party tool for Win98 to allow you to write to this partition, but you'll have to take advice from someone else more knowledgable than me.
I see Metallaxis has been getting some stick for uploading the DVD in this format - but it was me who suggested he do it this way. The usual convention for uploading DVDs is an IMG file packaged as a number of RAR files, a sample VOB to download first to check quality, an NFO file and an SFV file to check integrity of the RAR archive. Metallaxis had deleted his RAR files, but still had the original disc image as an IMG file.
IMG files in my opinion are much more suitable than a VIDEO_TS folder (as long as you are not running an outdated OS, that is). With DVDDecrypter installed, burning an IMG file is a simple 1-click process. You don't get jokers who burn the VIDEO_TS folder as a data DVD then wonder why the disc doesn't work in some standalone players. The disc you get is exactly the same as the disc I have here. It also means it's more difficult (not much) for someone to remove the "Not For Sale" warning I tacked on to the beginning of the disc.
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Your best bet might be to request a disc from some helpful soul on the forums. There are plenty of them around. This will be a lot easier if you have your PMs turned on.
Originally posted by: bwlag Your best bet might be to request a disc from some helpful soul on the forums. There are plenty of them around. This will be a lot easier if you have your PMs turned on.
PM has been turned on! And now, as I'm not actually too skillful (to say the least) in partitions, FAT32 and stuff, please, could someone help me with getting Mother's disc? Happy I'll be!!!!!
I was chatting with Garrett, and he made me aware that your ANH disc plays as Pan&Scan in 4:3 mode. It was news to me - living with the joys of 16:9 widescreen tv, never thought to try it in 4:3 - and I was suprised no one picked up on this before. I just wondered if this was intentional, or something that's going to be addressed on your future releases.
Well spotted Garrett! I've just confirmed this is an issue with my disc. In answer to your questions s7en, no it wasn't intentional, and I would address it if I knew why it happened...
Let me explain for those you are wondering what we're talking about. In the picture setup menu of your DVD player, there are three picture options: 4:3 P&S, 4:3 L/B and 16:9.
The 16:9 option is for people who have widescreen TVs (or standard TVs with a 16:9 mode). With this setting, an anamorphic picture is sent to the TV unaltered.
In 4:3 L/B mode, when playing a DVD that contains video flagged as 16:9 anamorphic (which my DVD is, correctly AFAIK) then the player downsamples the picture and adds black bars top and bottom. You see the full widescreen image in a letterboxed format.
4:3 P&S mode is for those people who don't like black bars. The theory is, the video stream should contain vectors which tell the player which area of the full 16:9 image should be displayed; the image parts to the left and right of this area are not displayed and you end up with a fullscreen image. (Eugh!) However, this theory is rarely implemented, if at all, on retail DVDs, because it's extra work to generate the P&S vectors, and because there are doubts over player compatibility. Normally if your player is set to 4:3 P&S, you get a 4:3 L/B image regardless.
On my DVD it's a different story. In 4:3 P&S mode, the player dutifully slices off the sides of the screen, and displays a sort-of fullscreen picture (there are still black bars because of the difference between 2.35:1 and 16:9). Since I never set any P&S vectors, the displayed area just constantly sits in the centre of the picture, which means that any important action near the edge of the screen is missed.
I don't think it's worth patching the current DVD; although what's being observed is unusual (and unintentional), it is really the correct behaviour. And if you have your player set to 4:3 P&S mode, then well, you deserve everything you get...
But for future releases, how do I get the behaviour observed on retail DVDs, that is, the picture is always presented as letterboxed?
There's a checkbox to create a pan&scan video stream in CCE, but I'm pretty sure I left it unchecked when I did the encoding. Maybe it has something to do with the authoring.
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But for future releases, how do I get the behaviour observed on retail DVDs, that is, the picture is always presented as letterboxed?
I haven't had a chance to put this to the test, but I'm going to stick my neck out and say I reckon this is something that's correctable with ifoedit. Comparing the video attributes of your .ifo's with retail discs, the commercial discs seem to be only set for Automatic Letterboxed, whereas yours are also set to Automatic Pan&Scan. So hopefully its just a question of unchecking that Automatic Pan&Scan box.
Can anyone more knowledgeable tell me if I'm on the right track?
Moth3r, I finally finished the download of your PAL ANH and something's got me curious about the clarity of your version, what sharpening/resizing/smoothing filters have you used?
Apart from the clarity of image on your version, something else struck me as I skimmed through the disc, the amount of temporal blurring it has (loss of detail in faces when heads turn, detail in clothes blurring when people walk etc.), is that a side effect of whatever sharpening filter(s) you use? the 5x digitising & averaging I've been doing practically eliminates the need for any temporal smoothing but it also means I can't get the image as pinsharp as yours, any sharpening I do also sharpens grain and to remove the grain means adding temporal smoothing which has the side effect of taking away detail, I prefer a slightly grainier picture than a motion blurred one because the grainier picture seems more natural to me. ***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
The main part of my filter chain looks like this: 1. DeScratch - to detect and blur out the occasional "line drop". 2. PixieDust - a combined spatial/temporal noise reduction filter with motion tracking. 3. LimitedSharpern - sharpens and resizes to anamorpic in one function.
Citizen, I'm interested in this loss of detail you are seeing. The motion tracking in the filter should be reducing the amount of temporal filtering on areas of the screen in motion. Obviously there will always be some motion blur, as that is the nature of film. Could you perhaps post a shot of your 5x averaged video for comparison?
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I've just done a comparison clip between your version and my currently-working-on version, I've had to RAR it up into separate files to upload because I always have trouble FTP'ing large files (connection usually dies when it gets far into the transfer, needed to re-upload 6 of the pieces) It's a 20mb anamorphic PAL mpeg2 clip spread across 15 RAR files, encoded 9-pass at 2000kbps because any higher and the filesize would be massive and this level of compression is enough to show the difference between the clips.
The first clip is mine and the 2nd is yours, looking at the same clip back to back from our two sources/cleanup methods, each has temporal smoothing because the source laserdiscs do, but on top of that it seems like mine has a near constant level of picture noise throughout the clip whilst yours lessens during static moments and gets worse during motion. I'm trying to avoid using filters that do any temporal smoothing at all with the intention that the picture grain stays level throughout the film(s), because I prefer a slightly grainy 'natural' image to one that looks like it's been squeezed through a bunch of filters trying to make the picture look good at the expense of detail during motion. ***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
Aha, thanks for putting that up, I've now altered my filters slightly to fix the brightness level so it doesn't white-out and included the warpsharp filter (never thought I'd actually need it) and my snapshot results now are virtually identical to yours except I'm not adding any temporal smoothing. ***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
Can we get more people seeding the torrent for this Moth3r release as I'm only getting speeds of 5KB/sec at the moment with not many people online to connect to.
Originally posted by: RATLSNAKE Can we get more people seeding the torrent for this Moth3r release as I'm only getting speeds of 5KB/sec at the moment with not many people online to connect to.
