xandermac05

adywan said:
I was really hoping that these bonus features ported over from the old DVDs would be slightly better quality due to compression. I never expected them to be worse. Waste of bloody money. I only purchased the UHD box set for the features and EP 9, as i will never watch the prequels. I wish i’d gone with my original plan and cancelled the box set when i ordered months ago and waited for the individual episodes to be released on UHD over here.

EDIT: Just checked “Anatomy of a Dewback” & ROTS’s “Within a Minute” features and both are 4:3 , jaggedy mess letterbox, the same as “The Beginning” . But ROTS’s “The journey” is 16:9 anamorphic but still suffers with the interlacing jaggedy mess issues

I had a look at the old and new versions of ANATOMY OF A DEWBACK and THE BEGINNING. The former is on the 2011 box set and the latter is on the 2001 TPM DVD.

ANATOMY OF A DEWBACK:

Aspect ratios are both wrong, 4:3 with silly wee widescreen box in the middle, though the 2011 one has the frame more squished horizontally than the 2020 one does. The two encodes have different scanline arrangements (2011 is interlaced, 2020 uses interleaved fields); I’m wondering if that’s something to do with why 2020 one has significant interlacing artefacts, but 2011 doesn’t. They both have artefacts, I mean, but the 2020 one is much worse in places. There’s a bit around the 12 second mark where a rope is swinging about, bobbing up and down, and in the 2011 it seems VLC can de-interlaced it reasonably acceptably but the 2020 one just seems not to improve regardless of interlacing being on or off, which makes me think it’s the interleaved rather than interlaced video causing the issue to at least some extent.

THE BEGINNING:

Old NTSC DVD from 2001 is not exactly amazing but is 16:9 full widescreen (1.78:1) and can be deinterlaced reasonably well.

New Blu-ray from 2020 is an absolute jaggy nightmare, much worse than either version of Anatomy of a Dewback and worse than it appears even on YouTube. It’s also got the same stupid 4:3-with-16:9-inside-that aspect ratio like both versions of AoaD. Again, this has interleaved fields instead of standard interlaced field layout.

Notice the incredibly bad aliasing on the nose in the bottom screenshot here, for example:

schorman13 said:

No, it does not. “The Beginning” is not on the 2011 Blu Ray set at all. Keep your 2001.

Also, I wanted to mention to any collectors out there, the UK 9 DVD set is PAL, rather than NTSC. I was under the impression that even European DVDs were being made NTSC at this point. Certainly, nearly every one I’ve bought in the last 9-10 years has been NTSC. Granted, these have typically been music releases, but still.

I guess they just assume anyone that still wants a DVD must have an old analogue PAL tv.

Do you happen to know if Anatomy Of A Dewback has this dumb letter-and-pillar-boxing issue on the 2011 set as it does on the 2020 set? It was one of the main things I wanted to watch in at least semi-respectable quality since I only ever knew it as a crappy web stream from a time before the internet actually worked for video…

EDIT: Screw it, I’ll grab one on eBay and find out. Half the documentaries aren’t in the new set anyway.

schorman13 said:

No, it does not. “The Beginning” is not on the 2011 Blu Ray set at all. Keep your 2001 DVD.

Oh jeez. Thanks! The DVD is PAL so I’m thinking I’ll grab an NTSC copy (hate pitch shift etc.)

adywan said:

Just got the 4k box set delivered. My god is this release seriously f**ked up. Why the hell is the HDR so damn dark, especially when you compare it to the Blu-Ray? But that’s not the thing thats really pissing me off with this release. No, it’s the special features that they class as “legacy features”. Who the hell was given the task of compiling these? An idiot? For a start features like TPM’s " The Beginning" , instead of using the 16:9 anamorphic master, they present this as 4:3 letterbox. So a small bloody picture surrounded by huge black bars all around the TV screen . And its a jaggedy mess . The version on the original DVD is better quality. (view the pictures full size because you can’t really see the difference in the shrunk preview here).

(Pictures are taken on my phone direct from the TV)

The TPM deleted scenes seem to be 16:9 anamorphic ( only checked 2 so far)

I then checked the ROTJ bonus features. First one i checked was the "revenge " teaser. Correct ratio but still DVD quality. Then onto the Revenge release trailer. WTF? Morons at work once again. Some idiot forgot to encode this with the 16:9 flag, so now its presented in 4:3 with all its squashed glory

And that’s just the features i have checked so far

I was really hoping that these bonus features ported over from the old DVDs would be slightly better quality due to compression. I never expected them to be worse. Waste of bloody money. I only purchased the UHD box set for the features and EP 9, as i will never watch the prequels. I wish i’d gone with my original plan and cancelled the box set when i ordered months ago and waited for the individual episodes to be released on UHD over here.

EDIT: Just checked “Anatomy of a Dewback” & ROTS’s “Within a Minute” features and both are 4:3 , jaggedy mess letterbox, the same as “The Beginning” . But ROTS’s “The journey” is 16:9 anamorphic but still suffers with the interlacing jaggedy mess issues

EDIT #2: Ripped the TPM bonus disc to the hard drive to see if it was an issue with my Sony UHD Bluray player but, no, the problems lie within the way they have been encoded. Even deinterlacing/ pulldown removal, the jaggies are still present. One interesting thing i didn’t spot before though is that it has the complete Theatrical version of the Pod Race in 1080p. I don’t remember this being available before

I’m absolutely fizzing about this because this was honestly the main reason I bought the set: the bonus content. If I’d known they’d balls it up this badly I would have just bought the old 2011 set.

Does anybody know for sure if the 2011 Blu-ray set (the one with the bonus discs) has The Beginning etc. in better quality than the new set and - hopefully - slightly better than the old DVDs?

This looks really promising overall. I agree that there’s rather a lot of magenta in some of those frames (faces aside, that wall should surely be white rather than pink) but it may well be that the film did indeed look rather pinkish in theatres pre-1997.

There is an ongoing set of screenings of Empire (from what I think must be the 2K master use to render the 1080p Blu-rays) currently touring with a live orchestral performance of the score, which was an excellent experience from a musical standpoint but a pretty frustrating one visually. I agree that it was likely done shot for shot because some scenes were surprisingly naturalistic (a lot of Hoth was very white and really not blue at all) but I could hardly believe how much green and orange there was throughout most of the rest of the film. This is pretty obvious in that shot of Admiral Piett, for example: in the Blu-ray the back wall is a weird green, but in this regrade it’s actually grey as it appears that it should be.

I’m dying to see how 4K80 turns out!

Torch5013 said:

ImgBurn and VLC seem to think that my BD 50 iso is a DVD. ImgBurn reads it as a DVD ROM, and when I use my PC’s default mounting, VLC says “VLC is unable to open the MRL ‘dvd:///E:’. Check the log for details.” Is this normal?

Well, yes and no. It’s normal behaviour in the sense that VLC, seeing it mounted as a “DVD”, tries to open it as a DVD and fails because it’s not a DVD. It’s not normal in the sense that it should not be interpreted as a DVD in any sense; I don’t know enough about that to understand why this is, but my guess is that it’s to do with how it was authored (maybe a quirk of the particular software used or something).

However, it’s easy to work around: instead of launching VLC from the file (e.g. “play with VLC” from Windows context menu), open VLC first then go to the Media menu and choose “Open Disc…” then manually select the Blu-ray option and correct virtual drive letter before proceeding. That works. Except that for me it doesn’t, apparently due to the file having too many audio tracks (as I discussed in the post above).

Of course, you posted this two months ago, so you’ve probably figured that out by now.

Similar to the above, the ISO for SW DE 2.7 (the MD5s of which all check out 100%) mounts as a DVD in Windows 10. If I try to play the actual film itself from the menu, it fails. When I manually mount it as a Blu-ray specifically in software, it still fails to play the film. Manually playing the relevant .m2ts fails. Copy the .m2ts out of the ISO and playing it from another location fails.

Apologies for the necropost, but does anybody out here have any ideas?

EDIT: It doesn’t work at all in VLC but it does play (from the beginning anyway) in Leawo… but trying to navigate through the file at all crashes the player so only audio works.

I’m wondering if it has something to do with the sheer number of audio tracks muxed into the film’s .m2ts. I’ll try muxing out some of the audio tracks (languages that aren’t English, for example) and see if that improves compatibility…

EDIT 2: Yep, that was it. If I mux some audio tracks out, it plays fine in VLC (both from .m2ts and after recreating ISO from the smaller .m2ts with fewer tracks). Guess that could be handy if anyone else is having the same problem.

If for any reason somebody’s after a non-Google link for this, I’ve just repackaged it for MySpleen and I’m seeding it now. Included both versions (blurred border and Purist Edition) alongside Harmy’s now-deleted YouTube video, with playlists to put the YouTube video before each version as a nice wee intro.

Harmy said:

Oh, it will most certainly be 100% GOUT free.

 Impressive. Most impressive.

Check yer PMs, deadman!

I beg your pardon, but I distinctly remember Hoth being a rich mauve. Also, I had a spicy vegetable burger with sweetcorn relish yesterday. On the 15th of July 1998, I had Scotch broth with a freshly baked, buttered baguette.

But well done Harmy, or whatever, I suppose.

I have 2 going as well, so... yeah. PM as desired.

pushad said:

I did PM one of the 2 mentioned members for a myspleen account yesterday. So waiting. Re-downloading file #18 Cross fingers

Ah, good stuff. It's worth the hassle. :D

pushad said:

CRAP! Corrupt file! so many hours of download :'(

Hmm. I had that happen with the hosted archives too. If you want a MySpleen invite so you can get it from there (that definitely does work) gies a PM.