Hello!

So, about a year ago, I sought out help to restore the original Swedish narration to Disney's "Beauty And The Beast", to no avail. But recently, I decided to capture the Hi-Fi audio track from the official Swedish VHS release and now, I'm making my capture available to everybody. Behold! Here's the linage:
VHS->Scantic VC 300 Long Play 6 Head NICAM Hi-Fi VCR->TV->3,5 mm audio output->König USB 3D Sound Controller 5.1->Audacity recorded at 16 bit, 48 kHz.
Please be aware that NO noise reduction has made to the audio track, nor has it been speed up to NTSC speed. This is audio straight from the VHS. For what it's worth, enjoy!

Edit: in honor of this discussion reaching 300 views, I've decided to list the major changes between the VHS audio and DVD/Blu-ray audio.

Aside from the narration, there are actually two major differences I've managed to find. The first difference can be heard during the performance of the title track. On the VHS, Ms. Pots' voice echoes, but on the Blu-ray, the echo effect is gone. The second difference is found in the ending. The VHS has a completely different choir compared to the Blu-ray because they used the soundtrack version on the DVD/Blu-ray.

Edit 2: Better late than never, here's the true stereo capture.
Lineage: 2nd VHS tape->Scantic VC 300 Long Play 6 Head NICAM Hi-Fi VCR->Plexgear Moviesaver 600->Virtualdub->Audio declipped in Audacity.

I just came across this

Quote:Left video and audio: 1998 DVD.
Right video and audio: 2014 DVD (double feature w/The Taking of Pelham One Two Three)

Bitrate is a difficult "animal" to tame... in a perfect world, we just don't need compression for video and audio, and everything would be uncompressed (or, wisely, losslessly compressed); maybe one day it will happen, but, until then, we should rely on lossy compression to get or audio and video contents.

So, which is the "right" bitrate to use? The best answer is "it depends"! Really, there are variables that influence this data; resolution, codec, codec settings, media size (physical memory, or internet bandwidth), and final user quality expectations... I mean, I'm "expecting" higher quality from BD than from Netflix, right?

While it's normal than higher bitrate = higher quality, someone still can't believe that, given sufficient bitrate, encoders would get similar results... 

Just for fun, I made three test clips using three different encoders; I took a difficult scene, full of movement, fog, fire, to stress them; a fair figure of 20mbps bitrate average, 50mbps max; 1920x1080 23.976fps; encoders used were:

h264 - Simple X264 Launcher
Mpeg-2 - HCenc
Mpeg-1 - TMPGenc

clips are here: https://mega.nz/#F!kjo3wKJC!jxoZnkzveaP2f2zZilaXdA

Well, in motion, at the right (read: not too far, but not too close either) distance, they look really similar, and do their job; of course, frame by frame, magnified, the differences are evident, in particular with Mpeg-1; but if you think how old this codec is, result is outstanding!

Of course, nobody would use Mpeg-1 anymore - there are much better and efficient codec out there - but this little test is useful at least to understand that HDTV broadcasts and streaming services, albeit far from perfect, if well encoded could have a really high quality, and eventually be used as source for any project.

So, do not discard a video due only to its bitrate and/or codec used...

Everyone knows THX has been the go-to standard for top-quality home theater product for over 25 years. However, a glut of inferior product with THX branding is also out there, if reviews are anything to go by. My question is, which speakers should I swear by when selecting THX-certified speakers and such?

Never watched a trailer of this film before actually watching it, so I didn't know what to expect; my daughter insisted to watch it - she's a teenager, but she likes CGI cartoons - so do I, but don't tell anybody

While I was watching at the cover, I thought it was another cartoon, so I was surprised to actually discover it was a live action film indeed.

I won't tell anything about the story because I don't want to spoil it, but I can say it's a very nice movie, refreshing, fun - even if it's a bit exagerated sometimes, nothing in comparison to superheroes movies by the way... very good FX, music, acting... great show for any creature lovers as we are here!

Last thing: if Rogue One used the same CGI, we would not hate Bor Gullet so much, I think...

On BronzeTitan's recommendation, I decided to give my planned PC hunt its own thread, since it involves a certain something called Black Magic Design, or BMD for short.

Right now, I'm looking for the following specs in my next PC:

• An Intel i7 Kaby Lake processor (if I'm to future-proof for 4K Ultra HD, of course)
  
• An NVIDIA 1070 or 1080 processor
  
• At least 16 GB RAM
  
• At least 1 or 2 TB hard drive space
  

There seems to be a bug in the "thanks" system; I see some posts "thanked" twice of three times by the same user...

Feallan, may you check this? I saw the plugin has not any settings, so maybe it doesn't like the latest mybb version.

I'm also going to tackle two of the Hitchcock greats. I want to try regrade Vertigo to the information that Falcon has, posted here:

https://fanrestore.com/thread-223.html?h...=hitchcock

and regrade North By Northwest to the two laserdiscs (Criterion and MGM) which seem to match pics from an IB tech print I saw (like the crop duster scene being very brown). And of course add the mono for both.