Well that just depends on the way you define "fan edit". But as I said, AFAICT he's done a nice job. Definitely gonna check em out. I'm just curious what's available. Are we still allowed to discuss download loacations here?
Thanks for the heads up ChainsawAsh. Though I'm really NOT in favour of the whole fan-edit business, Adywan seems to have done a good job. Leaving changes to a minimum. I mean, nobody wants to see the Jabba scene ever again, and the color correction looks good from what I've seen. Still, I was talking about the not-tampered-with HD broadcasts. Do you know what the source was?
As trivial pursuit champion you surely know that Rowan Atkinson acted as a stunt-double for Leia in the swing to freedom scene. For the SE this clearly visible goof was fixed, and Carrie's face was artificially patched into the scene.
I’m very bad at looking stuff up in the forums, can’t find anything about the HD releases floating around. I recently got all episodes in full-HD at PAL speed, recorded from the BBC by someone. The sound on ANH was pretty crappy, with a lot of hiss on 3POs dialogue and a few blips. Can anyone elaborate of the different versions, there surely must have been NTSC broadcasts aswell.
I still am an OT-buff though, it hurts me a bit to be watching the SE verions volutarily, but man there’s so much detail! I noticed several continuity errors I had never seen before.
Mielr said:Quite frankly, unless you're planning on collecting a bunch of laserdiscs, I wouldn't go to the expense of buying a LD player just to play the OOT LDs on. I did that about 5 years ago, and had I known that the GOUT DVDs were coming out, I wouldn't have because it would have saved me several hundred dollars. :-/
Sounds familiar :o) and if it's just about SW you're right. The GOUT DVDs are better than any LD playback, X0 included. But media fanatic as I am, SW led me to the world laserdisc and I now have 3 players and over 300 discs.
A couple of posts back I read something about closed caption decoders. I still don't have one for my player, and in Europe no-one has ever heard of closed captioning. I see the occasional decoder passing by on ebay, can anyone tell me if all those decoders are suitable for laserdisc cc decoding, or do you need a special breed?
It's just that if it turns out the NTSC release won't give me more picture information, I won't bother getting it. Then I could just as easy zoom in on my PAL DVD. But it's also the first time I've heard of this thing, matting off a full-screen film to make it widescreen. Ridiculous if you ask me. Or the director must have intended it to be shown in widescreen in the first place, it was probably shown in theatres that way. Thanks. 
I finally got around to transfering this unique LD set. I’ve never seen a transfer of it, and it certainly deserves it to be preserved. The ANH LD is from '82, TESB from '85 and ROTJ from '86. The image is so clear, sharp, and has such an authentic look to it, it’s my favorite SW LD set. It looks very “unprocessed”, probably because it is just that. And on top of that they rival the official (widescreen) DVD release in detail. Certainly the detail in near-dark sequences. The only drawback: it’s P&S. Except for the entire crawl-shots of ANH and ROTJ, which are enhanced anamorphic widescreen. I say enhanced, because there are no black bars present, so you’d actually have to scale it down to fit it in the normal aspect ratio if you were making a widescreen SW DVD.
ANH has got some noticeable laserrot though. So when I got that disc, and was stunned by its appearance, I started looking for two additional discs so I could use TooT. I would have done that, but on one of the discs the rot is so bad that a particular 5 minute sequence can’t actually be read anymore by both of my players! The only way I could get around that would be to accept the rot in that sequence, and let TooT filter out all the other rot. I may still do that, but not for now, with the september release coming up and the faded interest in preservation efforts. Though I expect these transfers to even have advantage over the official OT releases. But let’s cut all the speculations on that, and hope to be pleasantly surprised on that 11th of september. TESB and ROTJ are rot free by the way.
I am doing a complete preservation, capturing all the footage on the LD, including copyright warnings and such. ROTJ even has a trailer for another movie before the feature starts! I was thinking about leaving the side breaks too, because of the “side 2” screen, but I decided to leave that out. Apart from that I’m doing nothing more than encoding to MPEG-2 and AC3 to fot on a DVD5. I will be using the Pioneer DVL-909 again: still haven’t got that 2950 looked at. It gives a slightly sharper and cleaner image, except for the extensive amount of chroma noise. Does anyone know what causes that by the way? Anyway, the 909 is one of the best PAL machines too, so you’re talking about 1% differences here.
ANH will be up on a.b.starwars by the end of the week, it will include English and Dutch subtitles, as with my previous transfers.
You CAN browse newsgroups with binsearch.info and yabse.com, works a lot better. I've heard Grabit is a fine program, I'm a very happy Newsleecher user myself (version 1.0). 
