CatBus

I know they're not what they used to be, but I still went with a Plextor BD-R.  I couldn't find much in the way of genuine compatibility concerns, so I went entirely on features.  In particular I wanted to have Lightscribe (I actually use this for CD/DVD media, maybe BD someday...), and I also wanted the ability to permanently change the book type (bitsetting), for DVD media, which is doable, although Plextor now uses the Lite-On method for doing this.

The ability to change book type does improve DVD compatibility in not-to-common cases, so it's a plus, albeit a very minor one.

As for media, I always burn media at (at most) half the rated speed.  So 12x media I'd burn at no more than 6x, etc.  I've found this improves compatibility too.  BD-R media is so damn expensive I haven't done much comparison shopping.  I just use Verbatim inkjet printable media.

none said:

I've sent an e-mail to a SW fan asking about the Hindi version.  Might as well send your questions over too.  The author wrote several articles around TPM about SW in India: http://www.galaxyfaraway.com/gfa/2006/04/star-wars-in-india-the-newspapers/

Thanks for the tip.  It sounds like subtitling is not popular in Hindi/Urdu/Bengali-speaking areas, and all SW releases to date have been dubbed-only.  So unless some industrious fan-subber comes along, this gap will likely remain.

Fireproof710 said:

On behalf of all of the non-bluray-burner-owners, I would like to humbly request a DVD9 version : )

As long as you're requesting things, you may as well ask for a Blu-ray burner... ;)

Oh yeah, one more thing.  There are now English SRT files for the mono mix, for those who want them.  I did not render them for fear of confusing people with too many versions.

Thanks.  I figured in about a week's time it's going to get a lot harder to get anyone's attention around here, so I'd better post now! ;)

Project files have been updated to version 4.0 (original post has been updated as well).  The new download links are NOT the same as before, so please PM me for the links.

Rough summary of changes:

Added six new languages: Simplified Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, Dutch, and Czech.  All scripts and utilities updated to better support Unicode and RTL languages.  All SRT files changed to UTF-8 encoding.  Minor text/typo changes in many languages, including English, German, and Italian.

This release marks the biggest change yet in Project Threepio.  Now with improved Unicode support, it can theoretically accommodate any language.  Also, after some hand-wringing, I decided that although I still prefer official or otherwise verified subs, I was okay using fan-created subtitles if there were no alternatives.  Dutch is the only language in this group based on the official subs--all others are from essentially unverified Internet sources.

Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and Turkish subs were hand-resynced from SE subtitles, so they've had the extra dialogue removed, but altered dialogue may still be present.  I used Google translate to more-or-less verify where I was in each film, which yielded occasionally hilarious results (my favorite: "The enemy is in your behind!").  There are also dropped lines here and there, but nothing too critical.

I went back to the English subs and changed a few subs that were needlessly taking up two lines to one-liners (i.e. "I find your lack of faith disturbing.")  Since my subs are CIH-safe, covering less vertical area is important.  I also fixed some minor errors in ESB and ROTJ that nobody had caught yet.  Also, ROTJ subs for all languages were adjusted to better match video derived from PAL sources (Harmy and DJ/U2).

A word of warning for those who use my SRT files directly: First, they are now UTF-8 encoded, and that may cause some problems.  If so, it's pretty trivial to change encodings with something like Notepad++.  Secondly, watch out for Arabic.  If your software doesn't handle RTL languages right, this can get really screwed up, with punctuation moving to the wrong side of the text, etc.  I really had to do a lot of work to get this working with my software.  Last, use a real Unicode font for Chinese.  If you try to render it with a typical font, it will find maybe half of the characters in that font, then fall back to another font for the other half, and they will look terribly inconsistent.  I used Arial Unicode and thought the results looked pretty nice.

Project Threepio now covers a very respectable percentage of the planet.  The problem with this is that it makes the gaps even more apparent, and the biggest gaps might not change any time soon.  Hindi/Urdu and Bengali are a complete black hole--I can literally find nothing for these languages.  Japanese and Korean I can't find subtitles for the complete trilogy (someone with a copy of the Japanese GOUT would be my BFF).  And Indonesian appears to have the same issues as Nordic languages--the words are so long that a direct translation would fill up the whole screen with words, so some sort of trimming/summarization is required.  It's certainly the most doable of the bunch, but it's still problematic.  The only languages that seem really feasible are more European languages, and I may get to that--after a long break.

There is a Brazilian GOUT release with official Brazilian Portuguese subs, no Portuguese audio.

johnlocke2342 said:

Really? I didn't know that. In the French version, we just have French subtitles.

In the Portuguese and Czech dubs, he's dubbed in that language.  I don't believe any of the dubs included with the GOUT had this going on.

Well, in many markets, Greedo was simply dubbed over speaking the same language as everyone else, so there would be no need for subtitles at all in those cases.

rabscuttle1 said:

I'm just curious to hear some valid reasons instead of hate bashing, which is what I get when I ask.

Liking and disliking art is subjective.  There is no objective assessment of any art.

The best way I've found to describe why I didn't like the prequels was that I found them tedious.  And also forgettable, so I don't have a whole lot of specifics about why I found them to be tedious.  When people don't like movies, they tend not to see them multiple times and remember details, I'm afraid that's just how it is.

I remember I didn't find any of the characters to be engaging or relatable, but whether that was a fault of the writing, the acting, the plot, or some combination thereof I just don't know or care.  I also felt that the environments felt very sterile and uninteresting, but whether that was the fault of the CGI, the designers, the score, or some combination, again, I don't know.  The main problem in my mind is that they didn't become "so bad they're good".  Very little was so over-the-top bad it seemed intentional--I think the podrace in TPM and the giant lizard thing in AOTC were the only scenes that were so annoying they were memorable--everything else, including the entire ROTS film, faded almost entirely from my memory within days of seeing them.  I actually got up to PRETEND TO GO to the bathroom during one of these movies (I think AOTC) just to have something to keep myself entertained.

Now I know it's bad to hear someone didn't like a movie you liked, but there it is.  I didn't like them.  They were not the worst movies I've seen, they were just run-of-the-mill bad movies.  But they were the most disappointing movies I've ever seen (well, TPM was, my expectations were lowered by the time the others rolled around).

I do, however, like Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and, to a lesser extent, Return of the Jedi.  I enjoy one of the special edition changes (credit for James Earl Jones), and either dislike the rest or don't see the changes as improvements.

EDIT: Full disclosure, I was one of those who camped out in front of the theatre to see TPM opening night.  To me, that experience was much like Woodstock for Star Wars fans.  But by the same token, if you ask someone who was at Woodstock if the music was any good, you're missing the point.

none said:

^ Can I vote for the estimated photo chemical blurry accurate direct view?  Either way you are dealing with an interpretation of the original light, so let me know when the thread title changes to 'Making our own time machine to travel to the 76 set--a crazy proposal'

BS. Tachyon fields totally skew white balance.

Coov said:

It may get a little old 10 minutes into TPM.

That's alright, TPM gets a little long on its own before that.

Yeah, the combo essentially got me single-pass constant bitrate, which is what I was aiming for.

FWIW Harmy, these are the x264 encoding parameters I used to create a good BD-compatible file:

--preset=veryslow --tune=grain --bluray-compat --fps=23.976 --force-cfr --vbv-maxrate=25000 --vbv-bufsize=30000 --crf=1 --level=4.1 --open-gop --slices=4

The vbv-maxrate parameter can be adjusted up or down to change the bitrate.

Cobra Kai said:

Although after testing the program, I'm currently getting an error message when I try to import an mkv file.  I did some research on this and its a common problem.

Whenever tsmuxer can't handle demuxing an MKV, YAMB usually will do the trick for me.

johnlocke2342 said:

If it can help Mac users out there, I own both a 13 inch MacBook Pro running the latest build of Lion and a Hackintosh PC with a BD burner. Never tried burning a Blu Ray, all I know is they play fine in Mac Blu Ray player. While my MBP fails at burning all kinds of discs, my PC's burning all kinds of DVDs just fine on OS X. Why? I have no idea.

@Harmy: I wanted to extract the GOUT French audio tracks to add them to your mkvs but running times don't match by almost 5 minutes. Is that normal? I'll wait for the SW 2.0 mkv to try again.

PAL audio is time-compressed and higher-pitched.  Stretch it out by 4% and lower the pitch (there are utilities that do this for you, eac3to is one) and it will sync fine and be the correct pitch too.

Harmy said:

Laserschwert said:

In that case I'll add this shot to your to-do list ;-)

No way in hell :-) Also, I don't really see that much of a flicker in that shot, it seems more like the compression having a hard time dealing with the grain.

Works for me, maybe less compression will take care of it.

Harmy said:

Yeah, there's more of that going on. I think it's already in the source but it gets more visible due to the brightening I did.

Is it possible the HDTV capture doesn't have this issue?  i.e. maybe it's a problem with the Blu-ray encode, rather than the HD source?  I sure don't remember seeing any sign of this in v1.

OK I'll keep working on it and will release it either when it's done or when you ask.

Also, Harmy, I don't know if you're planning on including subs in the initial release or if that's more for the Blu-Ray, but I'm pretty much done with 5 more languages for my project--but only for Star Wars.  I don't plan on actually releasing them until I finish all 3 movies, but I would make an exception for you.

It looms like a shadow over everything we've built here.

bilditup1 said:

The harm's already done...

What?!?  Where's the link?  Oh, nevermind...

I'm working on another big "language pack" update (also includes some misc fixes), but it may take a while.  If you are a maintainer of a major preservation, you can let me know if you want me to make a special point release of what I've got now (one more language plus misc fixes at the moment), if that would be useful for your next release.  The longer you wait, the more languages will be included, potentially looking like four at the moment if I can get them done before the next round of preservation releases.

If you are not a maintainer of a major preservation, I guess you will have to wait ;)

bilditup1 said:

 

And please, play nice, and don't try anything stupid.

Probably not the best thing to post on a forum that's indexed by Google and then available to the whole nothing-to-do-with-Star-Wars world, then... just sayin'...

I'm asking just on the off-chance someone has already done this.  Has anyone put together a list of how many seconds were added and deleted at various places in the films, when comparing the GOUT against the special editions?

i.e. at 00:15:37.000, 1.214 seconds were inserted, and so on.

The result would come in handy for me, for syncing subtitles that are only available for the SE's.