althor1138

I dunno about that one. I think you need one with an s-video port.  I think Happycube will chime in with a definitive answer when he sees this.

The ac3-rf output was thought to be a possibility but nobody has had any success on any machines yet that I know of so it seems that maybe a filter is attenuating the rf signal before leaving the machine. Drilling a hole and mounting a bnc chassis connector and hooking up a coaxial cable to the test point actually turned out to be pretty easy.  I've now tapped all 3 of my machines this way.

You would still have to make a custom cable anyway because the luma pin of the s-video input of the capture card is the pin you need to feed the raw rf signal into.

Here is the card that Happycube and I are currently using. I think just about any card with the cx23880 will probably work with the custom cxadc driver according to happycube though.

Hauppauge WinTV 34132 NTSC/NTSC-J PCI

Yeah I think once he gets a working pal TBC and comb filter implemented it'll be way better than any market player available. 

I don't think it'll every be available on windows or even have a gui but it didn't take me too long to install ubuntu and figure it out. There is a WIP document that is sort of a help document for using the software.

The hardware requirements are a capture card with the cx23880 chipset.  You will also need to tap the raw rf signal on your player and make a custom cable to run to the capture card.

Thanks for the information Andrea. I've found the THX PAL to be pretty "acceptable" compared to the ntsc versions too.  There is only 1 or 2 scenes where I have noticed it's effects.  The stormtroopers breaking through the blown up door on the tantive is one.  The laser bolts here show dvnr effects but not as bad as the ntsc versions.  They are rather good pressings as well with not very much rot or dropouts. I have the 97SE pal now too.  Someday I'd like to compare it's dvnr vs the other sources to see if it's any better.

If I capture using my s315 and the ati theater750pcie it gives a really decent picture actually.  It looks about as good as capturing ntsc except at scene changes where it will blend a bit if the luma is similar. The extra resolution really helps alleviate rainbowing and twinkling star fields. I'll probably end up using software decoding for these though once it's fully developed since I can fully tweak every setting instead of letting the capture card decide.

To my eyes, everything looks much more natural with the grain still intact plus it hides some of the ringing. I look forward to your video samples

NeverarGreat said:

althor1138 said:

He is right though. While there has been some detail recovered, everything looks plasticized and speckled throughout are oversharpening artifacts.  Imo, this would look better if the grain was not removed(or at least added back in during the last steps of processing) and any sharpening involved was toned down to the point where ringing is not visible.

EDIT: Also, the aliasing is actually worse in some shots than before.

This is why a laserdisc source should be added to the mix, one that is free of these problems in the first place. That way we can have the best of both worlds.

 That is a tall order but one of us might pull it off some day:).

Laserdiscs often have ringing due to the analog nature of decoding the signal before digitization so the gout is probably a better candidate for sharpening than most any laserdisc preservation that I've ever seen. I have a feeling that the aliasing problem would still be somehwhat present as well because this super-resolution is probably using motion compensation that breaks things down into blocks and then copies those blocks within the thresholds over onto the frame and things don't always line up perfectly.

EDIT: Btw, I'm not saying the idea of super-resolution is crap. I think that more moderate settings would probably produce better results.

He is right though. While there has been some detail recovered, everything looks plasticized and speckled throughout are oversharpening artifacts.  Imo, this would look better if the grain was not removed(or at least added back in during the last steps of processing) and any sharpening involved was toned down to the point where ringing is not visible.

EDIT: Also, the aliasing is actually worse in some shots than before.

I like SABNZBD. It has a lot of features but is pretty easy to setup and start using.

I've snatched 1,2,&4 thus far.  So far they are fantastic! Gate weave, grain, and dirt are all present and accounted for. Well worth the HDD space imo.

@ Dlblyst.  Can I get the info needed to snatch these off of usenet? Are they passworded? I'm going to grab a 3 day pass to uns and see how much I can grab. I have no way to search back that far so I'm hoping the uns search engine will allow me to do that.

I'd have pm'ed you but your inbox is full.

I've never heard of an HD version of the 97se. If it exists please let me know where to find it.

It's great to be able to watch this in it's entirety.  Thanks for sharing!  

I've noticed there are duplicate frames?  Also, Reel 1 is missing some footage at the end.

EDIT: so far it seems like reel1 is the only one with duplicate frames.  I still have to check 3 and 4 though.

Looks great!  Do you think that a new scan will make things better?

Can't wait to see it!

Isn't this prosecutable?

EDIT: I didn't realize this was a star wars only thread and I doubly didn't realize batshit crazy meant only high prices.

I'm sure others will chime in but it seems to me that the best way to do this would be to download DGindex and Avisynth. Run the vob files through dgindex with force film checked and let it create a d2v file.  Open the d2v file with avisynth using mpeg2source("myfile.d2v") and then save the file as a raw avi which can be imported into final cut if I understand correctly. You'll have to do some more reading before you can figure it all out but that's probably the best way and it's free. It is a windows only solution though.

If dgindex indexes the film with force film checked and you still have problems you'll probably have to manually ivtc but that's a whole other ball of wax.

Perhaps I should have said squeezed? I think they literally just took the whole frame and transferred it to video as a 4:3 ratio. I will try to get some screenshots sometime soonish.

Not sure if this has been mentioned but I have a Mad Max laserdisc that appears to be an open-matte version.

2001: A Space Odyssey (Criterion-3M pressing) (CC1160L) contains color bars on chapter 40 starting at frame #44669.

Looks good imo. What software do you use to achieve this?

Well it's on it's way to me now.  If anybody sees a copy of the 94 version feel free to let me know.  

g-force said:

althor,

So LD decode is the software decode? I don't see any artifacts, but I do see much more detail, and reduced ringing as you said! There are looking great! Can't wait to see how far you take this.

-G

I guess the screenshots don't show it but when watching the video there's a lot of dot crawl and rainbowing happening but that's to be expected when you basically disable the comb filter :). Yes, Ld-decode is the software version. You basically capture the full RF stream with an sdr. This means the raw file contains all of the video,audio,CC,LD-G and whatever else information is on the laserdisc. The software then decodes this raw file entirely in the digital domain. I think right now video and analog audio is implemented with digital audio decoding soon to follow.  I'm not sure about ld-g and cc support but I guess anything is possible. PAL might be implemented soon as well. The guy doing the coding seems to really know his stuff and he's been very helpful with getting me setup to use the software.

msycamore said:

Impressive result. The software decode seems very promising. A clear improvement! There is obviously less video noise and dot crawl in the R7G screenshots due to the steps it went through (3d comb & 5x average) but it also looks like the noise reduction did more harm than good.

So does your R7G work again? Sorry to hear the SWE LD was just another ISR LD. They are not completely useless though, they contain a lot of frames which the JSC LD lack so they can be used for patching holes in the JSC print to some extent if that is desirable.

 The R7G also had 30% YNR strength from the player I believe. The 5xaverage is quite beneficial normally I believe. The R7G denoiser does tend to bring forth a digitized look and as always a loss of detail. I will probably not do a 5xaverage with the LD-Decode versions because the filesizes are huge and decoding takes a seriously long time.  For example 1 side of a CAV disc is about 50GB in RF data. You decode that to rawvideo with RGB48 colorspace and the filesize is about the same or bigger and the decoding takes something like 5 hours. Anyway, the LD-Decode method introduces far less noise since digitization takes place way earlier in the chain and it never strays back into the analog domain. 

The R7G is still not working.  I'm maybe going to let it collect dust for awhile since I just got a cld-s315 that works great and since I'm tapping the RF it doesn't matter how crappy the player is since you are nabbing the signal right after it leaves the optical pickup. I will probably buy a cheap oscilloscope and try to do a full service adjustment on it but that's going to have to wait until I have some money. The LD-D screenshots were captured with the cld-s315 btw :).

EDIT: Speaking of pal is there anybody that can confirm these are the same as the coffret trilogie that Antcufaalb recommended to me here?

Yeah don't use tdecimate for this purpose. It's really for removing pulldown and you just need to do a pal->ntsc conversion.  Why 24p?  Even most 24p blu-rays are actually 23.976fps. If you want 24p it would be like this:

mpeg2source(palgout.d2v).assumefps("film",sync_audio=true)

A few screenshots. Ld-decode vs the R7G(5x average). Ld-decode has the 3d comb and noise reduction turned off.  The R7G has comb filter set at 50%.

Obviously there’s going to be a lot of artifacting with the ld-decode picture because the 3d comb filter is turned off but notice that the ringing is always better than the R7G. The JSC has terrible ringing in some scenes on the death star. This can be tweaked to further reduce the ringing but this was the default settings with ld-decode.

LD-D

R7G

LD-D

R7G

LD-D

R7G

LD-D

R7G

AssumeFPS(clip,"ntsc_film",sync_audio=true)

this will change the fps from 25 to 23.976 and sync the audio with the new frame rate. I did this with 9 seasons of seinfeld and it works pretty decent. It sounds like you want to use the ntsc audio though so you could just add killaudio() after this and then use audiodub to mix the ntsc audio with the pal footage. Of course it would be better to encode the video and then mux in the audio later so as to avoid re-encoding but anyway here's how to do it in avisynth:

PAL=mpeg2source(palgout.d2v).assumefps("ntsc_film",sync_audio=true).killaudio()

NTSC=mpeg2source(ntscgout.d2v)

audiodub(PAL,NTSC)