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Update: Someone on BD.com has offered me assistance with this, but they don't have ways of getting or have an Australian or NZ account.
If anyone wants to help, PM me.
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2020-02-22, 07:37 AM
(This post was last modified: 2020-02-22, 07:44 AM by SpaceBlackKnight.)
Update, a user named brettd92 was extremely generous and tried to help. He rented it from the NZ store and tried downloading it via a YT downloader, but the files wouldn't play due to some wacky DRM.
He then capped it using an Xbox one fed to his Elgato. The cap was very nice looking (a bit bloated at large file size), but was encoded at 59.94fps and wouldn't properly detelecine back to 25fps (the PAL frame rate the movie was mastered in) as it had frame rate lag issues every minute. I was able to salvage the first min or so as that part was fine converted to 25fps, so at least it wasn't a total loss and I finally got usable quality sources for the rare Village Roadshow and Warner Bros logos!
Good news is an Australian Fanres user has offered to help us out too. We worked something out with him and will purchase us an Australian Google Play Gift Card that can finally allow us rent the movie on the AUS Google account. Once there, I can try to attempt a 25fps cap with my Apple TV 4k fed to my AGPTek HDMI Game Capture device (which records to an external USB drive, but ignores HDCP and can accept+record 23.97, 24, and 25fps signals at a fairly good 11-18mbs bitrate), or find the recent version of RTMPDumpHelper and hope it can download an working MP4.
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Yeah, still a shame that had to happen, but at least there was still something of use from that capture. Wish I was able to force the Xbox One in 50fps (did have it but no way to use it for apps) in case it would have it easier to half the frame rate.
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2020-02-28, 04:04 AM
(This post was last modified: 2020-02-28, 04:06 AM by SpaceBlackKnight.)
Update:
Ginormous thanks to TheGriff for all his input and obtaining the Google Play AU gift card!! I was able to successfully to cap the movie at 1080p 25fps! But good Bruce Almighty, the process to do so was ultra frustrating and maybe the most difficult thing I've done in my life!!
Long story short, region locked rental up the wazoo and needed different VPN to redeem, purchase, & watch! VPN wouldn't support devices like Apple TV, so I almost gave up and nearly threw my mouse outside the window!!
But then I played the movie a bit on the PC that had the VPN set on Chrome browser, and it was surprisingly running very smooth with no drops. I then went into my Intel graphics card settings and changed the HDMI output to 25hz to see if that changed anything, playback was still smooth and no drops as far as I could tell!
I decided to do the capture using my PCs HDMI 25hz output to my trustworthy AGPTek HD Game Capture, which is capable of 25fps captures without any messy re-sampling. Believe it or not, it worked!! I started the recording while playing a little bit of it to avoid cut off, and did a trick where the mouse and icons disappeared before the logos so I at least got a clean shot for those. I had left it recording for an hour or so while occasionally checking on it, and I didn't see any connection drops or loading/play icons mysteriously popping up THANK GOD!
My AGPtek card splits up recordings every 2-4GBs on the external hard drive it recorded on, but it does it in a way where it can be seamlessly pieced back together in something like MKVMerge. The files it produced are 1080p 25fps (consistent rate) MP4s at 8-16MBs VBR, which is serviceable and looks very good considering YouTube's mushy compression.
I have pieced the files together in MKVMerge, resulting size is roughly 13GBs before audio. Only flaw was that I forgot to record audio!! Apparently I had the PC going through my Harmon Kardon receiver in the chain before heading to the AGPTek box, and the audio was coming through the receivers speakers only and not HDMI to the TV.
I give a humongous thanks again to Brettd92 for supplying the audio from his rip! I'm in the final stages of syncing it up and muxing things together.
Man was this a massive PTA to get, but I feel the result and agony somehow made it worth it in the end.
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Good job! Happy to have been able to help out.