I'm fairly certain I have NEVER gotten an email notification for new posts for threads I subscribe to with instant email notifications.

I've checked my settings here and my spam folder and I see nothing.

Anyone else run into this?

I was taking a look at the releases of Peter Pan again today. It struck me that while the Special Edition DVD is slightly better than most other versions, it is far from perfect.

Here are some SBS screenshots showing a simple dehalo.

I also tested adjusting the white balance since this transfer skews blue, but everything I tried made things look more yellow, not more white. Maybe someone has a suggestion for that.

The only version of Daredevil released so far on home media in HD is the Director's Cut (DC). This is a reconstruction of the Theatrical Cut (TC) using the Blu Ray as the main source, a high quality HDTV cap of the TC and the original TC DVD for the audio. 
5 frames were sourced from the R1 DVD to fill a gap caused by missing frames at a commercial break during the HDTV broadcast.

Video Sources: DC Blu Ray, HDTV TC cap, R1 TC DVD.
Video Synced To: R1 DVD
Audio Sources: DVD (various)

Release Format: MKV 1080p 15.4GB, Blu Ray compliant, Average Bitrate 18.9 Mb/s
Audio Tracks (1-5, Source Original R1 DVD):
1: English Dolby Digital 5.1 448kb/s 
2: English DTS 5.1 768kb/s
3: French Dolby Digital 2.0 192kb/s
4: Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 192kb/s
5: Director/Producer's Commentary, Dolby Digital 2.0 192kb/s 
6: Italian 5.1 (Source: Italian R2 DVD DTS, re-encoded to Dolby Digital 640kb/s)

'Bonus Track': English Cinema DTS 5.1 1536kb/s (Separate file to be muxed into MKV)

There is also a text 'Trivia Track' included from the DVD, please note that while this subtitle track is MKV compliant it is not Blu Ray compliant and tsMuxer will discard it.

Thanks: spoRv for the Italian Audio, Jetrell Fo for Cinema DTS files

Uploaded to MEGA. PM for links. As always, active members of the forum only.

(Edit: Added Cinema DTS)

This series of five PBS specials, broadcast between 1983 and 2001, tells fictional stories of the construction of fictional structures as grandiose as the real deals. The pentalogy is as follows:

• Castle (1983)
  
• Cathedral (1986)
  
• Pyramid (1989)
  
• Roman City (1994)
  
• Mill Times (2001)
  

Hello.

Might be a long shot, but would anyone happen to have access to a Cantonese track from a laserdisc of this title? Or does anyone know if it would sound better than the mono track from the Mei Ah Hong Kong-released DVD?

Cheers.

I remembered this older French movie yesterday. Dobermann from 1997. Never even got an English track.

Pretty stylish movie. Though, the Blu Ray colors look like crap. Just look at this mess:
http://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&a=0&d...33&i=1&l=0

I fantasized about regrading the Blu Ray to the DVD colors for a moment before I noticed that the highlights are hopelessly clipped on the Blu Ray.

Is anyone aware of an HDTV or something of that old master?

Thus far, every open matte release of the Sailor Moon movies I know of, even on DVD, has a rather distinct problem: ghosting. Same problem seen on many high-definition versions of Ghost in the Shell. What I want to see is a top-quality open matte version of each of the three movies, at the original 4:3 aspect ratio and without that damn ghosting, and if that means taking each frame from the HD releases and manually readding the image info at the top and bottom of the screen, so be it. Even if Andrea isn't the biggest fan of Sailor Moon (to put it lightly), I believe even he'd agree that it's a travesty to the Moonies in the videophile community that there's not yet a good open matte version of any of the movies out there, a travesty I, especially, believe can and should be fixed no matter how difficult and time-consuming it may appear.

At long last, restoration efforts are underway for Fistful of Dollars, the first of Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns. At present, audio tracks are being restored as best as possible; Italian, German (1965 and 1979 dubs), Castilian Spanish, and Japanese (1976 dub AFAICT) audio tracks now have a base mono FLAC master at 192 kHz/24-bit which I might refer to should any additional changes (such as anti-censorship) be made. Restoration of the French audio track is currently in progress; I've just finished the anti-censorship process and only have yet to sync the audio to the restored mono track included as part of a repack and restore the music cues at the start and at the end. English, Turkish, Hungarian, Mexican Spanish, and Portuguese track restorations are pending. My aim for the audio track restorations is to have as much consistency across audio elements as possible.

Preview links to the restored FLAC masters, screenshots, and cover art to come at a date to be determined.

In the meantime, here's a preliminary spec list for my restoration:

VIDEO
Resolution: 1080p (BD), 480p (NTSC DVD), 576p (PAL DVD)
Aspect ratios: 2.35:1, 1.33:1, and 1.78:1 (each on separate masters)

AUDIO
Italian (mono)
German (1965 dub) (mono)
German (1979 dub) (mono)
German (1979 dub) (Dolby Stereo 4.0: left, center, right, and surround)
Castilian Spanish (mono)
Japanese (1976 dub) (mono)
French (mono)
English (mono)
English (6-track: left, left-center, center, right-center, right, and surround)
English (Dolby Stereo SR 4.0: left, center, right, and surround)
Turkish (mono)
Hungarian (mono)
Mexican Spanish (mono)
Mexican Spanish (Dolby Stereo SR 4.0: left, center, right, and surround)
Brazilian Portuguese (mono)

SUBTITLES
English
English SDH
French
French SDH
German
German SDH
Spanish
Spanish SDH (Castellano)
Spanish SDH (Latino)
Italian
Cantonese
Danish
Dutch
Finnish
Greek
Hungarian
Japanese
Mandarin
Norwegian
Portuguese
Swedish
Turkish

The above spec list is not final, which is most true for the subtitles; I might have to drop some of the subtitle options, ultimately, and I have no illusions that I'll be able to get everything I want for this project. But I'll do my darnedest with what I do have.

Thought it might be nice to have a list/thread of these, after having stumbled over two. Quick search didn't turn up an existing thread, so here I go.

Here are the ones I stumbled over:
- Burbs (1989), Arrow Films release, 2.0 LPCM, music and SFX
- Angry Birds (2016), German Blu Ray, 2.0 AC-3 192kbps (Dolby Surround according to BDInfo), music

Here it is: https://www.ebay.de/itm/Dolby-Surround-D...2968402357

A little background: I've been trying to find a good way to transform the stereo surround track on the Brazil Criterion Collection back into its original 4 channels, as is intended. Turns out it's a little more tricky than expected. 

For one, the "Dolby Stereo" matrix is always the same. In other words, the encoding is always the same. BUT, there is a vast variety of different decoders. 

The most "faithful" ones seem to be actual Cinema Processors, like the Dolby CN65. Way too expensive for me sadly. There is the CN45, but it has a bad reputation and supposedly doesn't come with the surround decoder by standard.

This unit here apparently is/was used for monitoring Dolby Stereo matrix mixes in actual studios. So, chances are, this unit is something like audio engineers use to monitor their Dolby Stereo/Surround mix. It has symmetrical (XLR) inputs and outputs, perfect for a studio environment where you want to minimize electrical noise and stuff like that. This is perfect for me because I have a nice RME Fireface audio interface that I connect this to and create a high quality decoded 4-track from any stereo mix.

It actually outputs 4 channels. L, C, R and S (Surround). Many decoders I found somehow split the surround channel up further, which is of course not really faithful to the original. The Pro Logic II decoder is an example of this. Also, original Dolby Stereo mixes only had a 7kHz limited surround channel, so it's kind of pointless to get any kind of high frequency content in the surround channel, as its guaranteed to be just bleeding from the L,R channels. This one should get me as close as possible to how it was originally "meant". 

Now, it's apparently still built on a Pro Logic integrated circuit, so it's still basically the consumer variant and basically a later "fancy" thing that introduced steering (detecting which channels are dominant and pronouncing them, vaguely said). That's not totally faithful I think, because steering wasn't used at the time when Brazil was produced afaik. So ... meh. It won't be perfectly faithful.

On the positive side, from what I read on Wikipedia, the standard consumer Dolby Pro Logic decoders lack the surround delay that is typical for cinema processors. Basically, this is used to improve the localization. Since bleeding of the Front channels into Surround cannot be completely avoided, a delay is introduced to make sure that the sound always appears first in the front, improving the localization of the sound source in the front. This decoder here does have that delay adjustment (which apparently can be changed between 10ms and 150ms, depending on the size of the room, not quite sure how this all works together yet).

So, to summarize:

- Has 4-channel Pro Logic decoding plus surround delay, like cinema processors. So, no unfaithful splitting of the rear channel through weird frequency modulating stuff. Also likely has the 7kHz cap on the surround channel, making it more faithful again.

- Sadly, it's Pro Logic based, so a certain form of artificial channel separation is introduced.

- Should be on par with very good early home theater surround decoders. So while it won't allow me to hear what you would have heard in cinema (that would require a much more expensive cinema processor), I will hear what good early surround consumer hardware would have produced. Plus the delay. Plus the symmetrical outputs for perfectly recording the output and creating surround tracks out of it.

- No fancy Dolby Pro Logic II type stuff with all the advanced steering etc. that was never really intended back then.

- Afaik it's analogue.

I just hope this thing works. If so, I'll be trying it with other movies too. Should work with any movie that was done in "Dolby Stereo". In theory it should work very fine on the optical Dolby Stereo tracks, for example in the captured Ghostbusters 35mm. It's not technically meant for decoding the optical tracks, but I think it's as close as possible without an actual Cinema Processor unit. Might work on some Laserdisc PCM tracks maybe? Don't really know anything about them, but I imagine they will have put the matrix-encoded audio in there too?

Either way, if it works, you're all welcome to send me some audio to run through it. I'll capture it at 48kHz, 24bit. I could theoretically capture up to 192 kHz 24 bit, but most tracks out there are only 48kHz anyway, so there seems to be little use for that.

Also, for my own releases, I might use the converted output further to create a 5.1 set; The L C R I can keep. The rear surround I can split up into two identical Ls and Rs channels, attenuated by -3 dB to create the "phantom center" in the back. LFE I can simply use a lowpass around 125 Hz on all the channels. Should be fair enough I think.