CatBus

Romanian subtitles have been promoted from unverified to verified.  No changes or new release (yet).

NeverarGreat said:

When alien archaeologists discover the ruins of Earth, they will use Project Threepio as the Rosetta Stone to decipher Earth's languages ;)

Oddly, when I was coming up with a logo for this project, my first idea was an image of R2-D2 hiding behind a rock, that was actually the Rosetta Stone. One of those ideas that's better in your mind than it is once you've actually made it.

I think we ought to start talking about how the audio mixes sounded so much better in the 2004 DVD and Blu-ray releases, just so we can watch h_h's head spin around.

No kidding. Actually there is other progress going on. I have Ukrainian, improved Russian and American Spanish, and I will likely have improved Polish and Japanese too. And a longshot at Hindi and finishing those Indonesian subs. Some or all of these will be in the next release.

PM sent.

There was a big discussion in my Holy Grail thread, and the consensus seemed to be that even though the US theatrical AR for the film was 1.85:1, the UK theatrical AR was 1.66:1.  So the Blu-ray release isn't really an alteration from theatrical AR, is was just shown in different AR's in different markets, and they picked a different one than they'd used for some earlier home video releases.

Actually I think there's some third parties that do fanless systems based on the NUC. Worth looking into.

Lev Black Lion is pretty good. Also there's a Slovenian lager named Lasko Temno that I quite enjoyed too.

At the very least, I'd also like to see a screencap or two. You can never have too much Empire.

I think the thing the 85 CAV release has going for it is that if it's a transfer from 1985, then the film elements would have been only five years old when the transfer was made, so theoretically less fading.  But as for all the other crap that can go wrong with color during a transfer, it's just as suspect as everything else, if not moreso.

Imperialscum brings up a good point--unless you're part of the old guard, it's unlikely you've seen a version of the Star Wars trilogy with impressive visuals. Relying on home video releases alone, the deck is stacked in favor of the SE's, even for those who see the originals first, simply because those were given such poor home video transfers compared to the SE's.  For the old guard, we can see the unsatisfactory GOUT transfer and it still brings back pleasant memories of how the film really looked.  For the younger crowd, it just looks unsatisfactory.

Few of the "young guard" have actually seen a single actual Star Wars movie. They've only seen the PT and the SE's, and if they have an opinion on those, yippee for them I guess, but it doesn't actually reflect on the Star Wars trilogy.

The only tragedy is that, for the few who actually do finally see Star Wars, they can't help but see it as just an altered form of Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope: Special Edition: 2011 Edition. Since the latter is a fairly mediocre film at best, it's hard for them not to feel that the whole story, even if told in a different, considerably better film, is still mediocre.

So again, those "young guards" who saw the SE's first had their well poisoned, and I actually understand how they came to not like the OT very much. By the time they saw Star Wars (if they ever saw it), it wasn't the underpinning of the whole Star Wars universe, it was merely an interesting alternate version of a ho-hum film and historical artifact.

That said, even the SE trilogy is better then the PT in my opinion (with the exception of Jedi: SE, which flat-out blows), but since they're both disastrous in so many ways, I'm not sure it's really surprising that there's some difference of opinion.

No, not talking about Him, discussing Him in hushed, reverential tones.

Well, burning is too good for them, so what options does that leave us with? Restorations, I guess. Besides, CPY!

Na zdraví!

Check the first post in this thread for an idea how it spread globally. I think Japan opened in 1978, but I'm not sure.

Somebody pinch me (not you Frink).

Seems like an open invitation to Stinky-Dinkins, if you ask me.

It was a German company called Hush Technologies, but they don't seem to be around anymore. That was way back before HTPC's had quite taken off, so there wasn't much market for silent PCs (if you could even say there's much of one now).  It's well-made--the case itself is an impressive and heavy piece of solid aluminum industrial art.

Well, my tips are just by observing what this outfit did with my server, and I'm not sure I have a lot more I can add.  A power-brick style power supply (similar to those used in laptops), just seems to make a lot of sense for this application, but I'm not sure where you'd get them and how compatible they'd be with various cases and motherboards.

Intel publishes the TDP of their processors on their website--I would not assume that Celerons run cooler just because they're less capable.  The TDP numbers are actually a good way of comparing the different chips to each other (lower TDP is cooler/better), even if they aren't exactly real-world usable numbers in their own right.

I'd really want to caution you about the hard drives, though. If you're really serious about making this thing quiet (and if it was sitting next to my TV, I'd want that too), 3.5" drives, even the quiet 5400 RPM ones, turn out to be obnoxious once the system fans are gone and no longer cover up their noise.  If SSD is out of the question, I'd really go for 2.5" drives, 4200 RPM if possible.  I think Samsung Spinpoints are very quiet, although I'm not so keen on their long-term reliability (just speed up your normal replacement cycle).  The system I've got has an "adapter" for placing 2.5" drives into a 3.5" spot, which is basically two metal plates with a squishy material in between them.  You sandwich the drive between the plates, screw the plates into the chassis (with rubber grommits because you can never use enough squishy material), and then the drive vibrations are pretty well dampened, although it's still the noisiest part of the system.

That said, lots of people say they can't even hear the "quiet" PC fans that are out there, and you might be lucky enough to be among them. Determine exactly how quiet you can tolerate FIRST, because targetting absolute silence is a path to craziness.

EDIT: I also wouldn't worry about RAM, except that it will need to fit under whatever monster heatsink/cooling system you end up using for the CPU.

Not sure.  I know theatrically, SW and ESB were both shown dubbed for some showings and subbed for others.  ROTJ, interestingly, had no theatrical dub, so it was subbed-only (so another reason people may prefer the home video dubs is for consistent voice acting throughout the trilogy).

Given that, I'd assume the Japanese audience has always had a choice of subs & dubs on home video, since apparently they went through some trouble to make sure subtitled options existed theatrically. On VHS, they'd be two separate releases, of course.

But that's pretty much just guesswork based on what I know about the dubs.  I could be wrong.

EDIT: Actually, our latest & best capture of the '77 stereo audio comes from a Japanese laserdisc, so there were definitely some options for hearing it in English (actually better than the options available to English-speaking audiences, it turned out...)

You_Too said:

Life of Pi had different aspect ratios, and on top of that it had some stuff move out over the black borders sometimes!

I'm kinda torn on if this qualifies, personally. If there's content outside the frame, then it's not really fair to call that the frame, is it? Yeah, it's a bit of a pedantic distinction, but still...

Not that it wasn't a neat effect (and a reminder that 2D depth effect tricks can still be more effective than stereoscopic ones). Ang Lee has tried before to bring comic book inspired visual tricks to the big screen, and this effect worked out much better than most of the things he did for Hulk IMO.

pittrek said:

Does anybody have any experiences with passively cooled (fan-less) PCs? I'm trying to build for myself a HTPC, criteria are

- silence (that's why I want to try passive cooling)

- dimensions (the smaller the better)

- powerful enough for playback of 1080p MKVs

Unfortunately I have no experiences with passive cooling and google isn't very helpful :-) I'd like to hear some tips for the components

I have a fanless home server, but I didn't build it, I bought it. I don't envy the task of trying to build one of these--not that it can't be done, but heat kills PCs, so one mistake and it's fried.

What I know from my home server that may help you:

- If it's a possibility, use an external power brick for your fanless power supply. Moving the AC/DC converter outside the case removes one more heat source.

- Use a mobile CPU. They run cooler than their desktop counterparts, and are often powerful enough for the job.

- Use heat pipes or some such thing. Heat just radiating on its own without fans doesn't follow a very helpful path out of the case.  Heat pipes help direct it a bit.

- Metal case. The case itself should help conduct heat outwards. You wouldn't make your case out of wool, so why would you make it out of plastic?  It helps if the case has cooling fins, allows natural convection ventilation, etc.

- Surprise! It's still noisy! The trick of silent PCs is that once you get rid of the noisiest components (the fans), you can now more clearly hear the noises made by the quieter ones.  Hard drives should be solid state, or if they're mechanical, use quieter low-RPM 2.5" laptop drives, using a cushion to absorb vibration (but not so much to enclose the drive and not let the heat out).  And some capacitors can still hum more than others (change your motherboard!), etc, etc.

...and that's why I bought a pre-made one ;)

yoda-sama said:

I'm truly impressed with the effort of this early dub

Actually FWIW, the Japanese dub included with the DeEd is NOT the original Japanese theatrical dub (it's mislabeled), but one done much later for home video release with big-name voice actors, etc (not sure of the date).  The original dub is included in a collection of Japanese SW audio on the newsgroups if you're interested.

But your impressions do match up with what I've heard, that the home video dub is strongly preferred over the original theatrical dub in Japan, probably for those very reasons.

Harmy said:

And as to beer, I have every intention of spending all the money on the computer, because it's something I'll get much more use from :-)

I used to be pretty sure you had your priorities straight. I just don't know, man. Screw the computer and spend it ALL on beer, I say.

PM sent.

Mavericks said:

Ok, but still any interrogation is the duty of army, its intelligence, not the President of even the Defense Minister (who equivalent Vader used to be to). He ordered to bring them to him personally.

The record shows that for the one interrogation shown in the entire trilogy, Vader was not only involved but central.  Different armies are organized differently, especially when you've got force users who may have special abilities regarding interrogation (sensing conflict in others, thinking about sisters, etc).  There's no doubt at all that whatever Vader's official rank, he's involved in interrogations.

Actually I was wondering about GPU, and I think forgoing that could help protect you against overheating issues leading to rendering glitches (discrete graphics cards can add to system heat and also mess up case airflow).  I think it's a workhorse machine.  You may want to add a dedicated GPU later for other purposes of course and that would be fine.

Oh yeah: RAID would be nice for render speeds, and so nice in fact that if I were strapped for cash, I'd personally trade out half the RAM rather than sacrifice RAID. I'm sure you'll get other opinions ;)