CatBus

Project Threepio is based on the original stereo/surround mixes.  It does not make any attempt to accommodate later audio revisions (85 mix, 93 mix), it does not attempt to match the dialogue on foreign dubs (i.e. the translations can be different), nor does it include alternate crawl translations for the 81 video revision.

The mono mixes are a bit special, since they are original, so Project Threepio includes subtitles for the mono mixes of Star Wars and Empire (16mm), but only in English, and only in SRT format.  I don't plan to do subtitles for the 70mm/8mm audio for Empire, even though that's also a unique original mix.

Future versions of Project Threepio will include a way to align foreign subtitles to the timing of the mono mixes, although it still will not include translations of the different lines.

Anyone who wants to use Project Threepio with a mono mix can do it, but there's some manual work involved.  It's doable, but it doesn't work out of the box.

Direct other questions to the Project Threepio thread.  This little question can go way down the rabbit hole in so many directions.

True.  I suppose "it's not really watchable in its current state, but just wait until the fan editors fix all of the major issues" is a quality tier that usually means crap for other films, but it's the gold standard for official Star Wars releases... sigh.

Leonardo said:

TV's Frink said:

Nocturnaloner said:

On the blu-ray.com forum, someone posted that the UOT will be released on blu-ray on 9/21/15.  Seems legit, right? 

 I have some legit property I'd like to sell you.

 is it the Brooklyn Bridge? I bought that already from a rabbit years ago.

It should also be mentioned that the person on the Blu-ray forum didn't actually say anything at all about a UOT Blu-ray release.  Just another OT Blu-ray re-release, which falls neatly into the "who the hell cares" bucket.  In addition to that, they're also talking out their ass, but that's really beside the point.

Funcha--if it helps, the community does benefit from this.  Not as directly as you'd certainly prefer, but the existence of this project makes all of the projects that you CAN download better.  Far better.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inq-- er, yeah, the FBI, I guess you can expect them.

Even if VBR would work, I wouldn't do it for this particular purpose.  It'd just make it harder to find out where the bitrate peaks are across all tracks, and you'd have to test the whole movie, rather than just a little bit.  At least with CBR you know every second is getting the same bits from each track, and you only have to worry about bitrate spikes coming from the subtitles.

Video bitrate won't change anything--the 8Mbps is reserved for non-video streams, so it can only be adjusted via audio and subtitle changes.

192k audio streams (most dubs and alternate tracks) are already pretty dang tiny--if audio is where we want to make cuts, we need to cut down the big ones, the lossless tracks.  Even encoding with a slightly smaller lossy core isn't going to save much space--switching from lossless to lossy on one or two tracks will free up a world of space.  The question is: which tracks?  I think hairy_hen's 5.1 track should be sacred, but that's about it.

Yeah, have it handled in the audio selection logic.  You choose Thai audio, you get Thai forced subs whether you like it or not.  The trick is that they should also be UN-selected when you select any other audio option.

Regarding which subtitles to drop, here's my advice:

Drop the matching subs.  I'll admit it--it's a gimmick, just use the regular English subs.  But in answer to your question, the v2 subs match the whole v2.x series, including 2.5.

Drop dialects.  Drop Castilian Spanish (keeping American Spanish), drop European Portuguese (keeping Brazilian Portuguese), and drop Malay (keeping Indonesian).  I'd also say for combined quality/language overlap reasons you could drop Ukrainian.

Keep in mind that by including a dub (i.e. the Thai dub), you'll also need to include the forced subs that go with it.  Did I mention we have some dub updates too? ;)

For the rest, just follow the order listed in the Project Threepio README, which roughly follows number of speakers.  Get as far down the list as you can and cut the rest.  Yes, that will mean you will cut high-quality awesome subtitles like our Icelandic subtitles, and it kinda pains me to see that, but the cut has to be somewhere, and that seems a reasonable way to do it.

Also, when you get ready for a final run, PM me for a more current link.  There are some minor fixes that the most recent version doesn't have, and I'd like the Blu-ray to have them.

Nanner Split said:

I deleted all subtitle tracks that are listed as "unverified" in the OP of this thread (and ONLY those) and recompiled the disc and it was a success, so unless there are some specific ones you would like me to try to add back in, we are now good to go.

Well, assuming you go with the most recent Project Threepio, the unverified languages have dropped to just Estonian, Farsi, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese (and I don't even list them like that anymore, because the quality issues aren't nearly as bad).  If pressed for space, you could also drop dialects (one of the Spanish or Portuguese dialects, for example).

The next version will also have Malay, and for God's sake use the 720p graphical subs instead of trying to render the things yourself.

analog said:

Ok. I thought the limitation was "non video datastream" *while playing back* but perhaps it counts all sub tracks in total?

All audio tracks and subtitles are included simultaneously in the limit, not just the ones playing.  Audio is pretty easy to calculate since it tends to be CBR, but subtitle bitrates spike when subtitles appear onscreen, and they spike higher for bigger subtitles.  It's kindof a mess to figure out any way but just doing it.  I think Harmy tends to only include the 3 original audio tracks in lossless form, so we may be fine.  I just wanted to mention--there's a limit, and it's possible to hit it.

FWIW, regarding the Blu-ray, Project Threepio is big enough that including all of the subtitles, plus multiple lossless tracks, may put you over the 8Mbps Blu-ray limit for non-video data and cause bad player behavior.  Just something to keep your eye out for.  I used to include 5 lossless tracks (and a bunch of lossy tracks) with my personal Blu-rays and that finally sent it over with the most recent versions, so I cut it back to 1 lossless track and lossy versions of the same other tracks--you could also obviously opt to exclude some subtitle languages too.  I never did the calculations to figure out what the actual safe values were.

PM sent.

Ohhhhh, thanks.

Whoah, that works, just AssumeFPS without TDecimate.  Slightly confused WHY this works to produce 23.976fps output, but willing to accept it on faith ;)

EDIT: Er, and thanks!

Okay, it must be my TDecimate call screwing it up then, because the result jerks every few frames and doesn't sync... any suggestions for getting the frames at 24P?

So... what AviSynth script would you use to convert the frames from the PAL DVDs to 23.976 FPS, so that it's in progressive film-speed frames and would (more-or-less) sync to the NTSC audio?

I'm starting to get the hang of DGDecode/MPEG2Source and TFM/TDecimate for NTSC discs, but getting it working for PAL eludes me.

PM sent.

FWIW, after witnessing what a royal fuckup this HD remaster is turning out to be, I'm painstakingly going through my 4:3 DVDs to archive & upconvert them, since it appears likely that, in spite of their shortcomings, they might very well be the end-all-beat-all version of the series, except for OMWF which is windowboxed to shreds, so I'm using the 16:9 discs for that one.

PM sent.

Darth Id said:

"Voiceover" as opposed to dubbed is a bona fide horror of home video phenomena that I've been perfectly content not knowing about until just now, thank you very much!  Are foreigners so incredibly averse to reading that they'd rather suffer that kind of cacophonous aural abuse?

And by "reading," I guess I mean either subtitles or just reading a book instead of watching a movie because this whole voiceover thing sounds entirely prohibitive!

Actually I like voiceovers, even though I admit it's a little weird.  Here's why: You don't have to worry about new voice actors failing to capture the tone/delivery/character of the original performance.  The original performance is all still there for you to hear, and you've just got a translator doing realtime translation as well, like you'd hear on the radio or at a speech at the UN, so it's not as obtrusive as you'd think, once you get used to it.  The focus of the voiceover is entirely on providing a good translation, not on lip-matching or having the appropriately whiny tone when Luke wants to go to Tosche Station, and all the other things that can make a dub go terribly wrong.

Anyway, yeah, I (obviously) like subtitles better too, but I think voiceover dubs can actually be better than "real" dubs in many ways, the very least of which is that they mangle the original film less than a real dub would.

PM sent.

Yeah, check the audio on Harmy's Despecialized Editions.  It's also a Polish voiceover dub, it may very well be exactly the same as yours.

PM sent.

In general, it looks nice, but IMO I'm not sure he got what he was aiming for with the scanlines.  I'd put more of a glow around each scanline, to make the effect less obvious.  As it stands now, it looks a little too much like a digital display trying to be an analogue display (which, I guess, it is, but still...)