R2D2

Hi!

With all the OT-Preservation-Projects going on in the world, how about splitting up the work into smaller parts and release those parts to the community for others to work with?

Why? I will explain.

I figured out, that several projects don’t feature a pcm-digital transfer of audio, although it would be possible with most laserdisc releases. In many cases the audio gets converted from digital (pcm) to analog back to digital (pcm or dd2.0).

Although a digital (lossless) transmission is technically possible, often the laserdisc player or the soundcard lacks in an digital audio-plug.

If someone with the necessary equipement creates a pcm-audiotrack, digitally transferred from laserdisc and releases it on its own (would be approx. 1.3 GByte), others could bypass the audio-ripping step completely and therefore safe some time to concentrate more on getting the best picture out of the laserdiscs.

I am not talking about only releasing the audio from the US NTSC Faces LD Set but releasing the several other mixes, that have been released for the original trilogy on some official media. You can think off the “Digital Remastered 1985 soundmix”, the “Commentary Track” and other rare soundtracks. I am personally interested in getting all the non-english soundtracks to show up (French, German, Spain, …), so that they can be used and integrated in several projects.

We don’t have to limit this to laserdisc-releases, that feature an pcm-audiotrack but we could collect several rare (analog) soundtracks of starwars, released on laserdisc, vhs, betamax, ced and what else you can think of.

There could be some kind of database that features all released soundtracks (PAL, NTSC) and anyone can be easily updated with a better release.

There are more advantages to it than you might think. People, who are working on doing their own capture, sometimes fail to get an specific laserdisc, and therefore stop the project. “grisan” stopped his project because of that for example. The released PCM-Tracks will be useful, not only for Duallayer-Projects but even when some HD-DVD (BlueRay) Fan-Preservation releases show up in the future.

Now is the right time to collect them.

I am looking forward to capture and release the Audio only from my german VHS of “Krieg der Sterne” (Starwars Ep4) from 1990. It features Hifi-Stereo Sound and is Dolby Surround encoded. Hopefully the Moth3r PAL DVD can be merged afterwards.

If this idea is a welcome one we should build up some kind of standard for all the releases (Format, Minimum Release Infos). What do you think?

So long, R2D2
(sorry for the bad english)