DVD Ripping Q's from a dinosaur

Hello again, and thanks for your assistance. :slight_smile:

I have used MakeMKV to extract the contents of a test DVD - Doctor Who, Spearhead from Space - a 4 part adventure. The result was 4x 1.23GB files - 1 for each part - plus a 5GB file containing all 4 in sequence, and then 4 more files containing some of the DVDs “Special Features”. (About 2 of the features were missing.)

Looking at the main feature material (both the individuals and omnibus version), I’d say it is not interlaced after all - it’s pretty good considering it was from 1970:

With the specials, some were widescreen modern material, which all looks fine, but there was 1 “archival” piece which Does have interlace issues:

(Have just found how to turn subtitles off, btw… but am going to have to look at commentary tracks, which every DVD has, cos my HTPC always seems to play the commentary versions if they exist…)

I’ll have a look at l33tmeatwad/AMVtool next… I could potentially be happy with 5GB per story… That’s less than 1TB for every Doctor Who… although once you add the special features…

Yeah, that looks relatively decent. It’s progressive, but it looks like it was probably transferred from a 480p or even blended 480i source and not the original film. For a lot of late 2000s or early 2010s DVD releases, transfers were made from the original film. If you recall, feature film, due to its intended projection nature, has a significantly higher resolution than the old tape masters. DVDs made from tape masters were usually poor, even with more modern transfer technology. Going back to the original film was better. To get really clear episodes, we’d have to go back to the film reels of the Who episodes and record those to new lossless digital files. You said the team went back to the 16mm prints, but it still looks massively blurry to me for going back to the film.

Of course, that only goes so far. Consider the case of the 1990s anime Card Captor Sakura, where for the Blu-Rays a couple of years ago, the remaster production went back to the original animation cels, and you can actually see the ink line errors between cel layers on the BD footage. It’s too good, because it’s a higher resolution than the human hand that created the original cels. 1080p, if printed, would actually be significantly larger than the actual size of the animation cel. Fun times.

Oh, and l33tmeatwad is a nickname (like mine is Kionon or yours is cosmichobo). His real name is Scott. AMVtool is his GUI frontend for encoder FFMPEG.

Playing around a bit more with MakeMKV, as I want to make sure whatever I do this time is “right”!

MakeMKV did identify the 2 “missing” video tracks - but they were under 2 minutes duration, so were ignored… Can that be rectified?

When playing the files in Quicktime/Frontrow (with Perian), the subtitles automatically came on. It is GREAT that the subtitles (and as it turns out, commentary tracks) are all included in the file… but not sure how to control them in Frontrow…

Wow. Front Row. I haven’t played around with that in quite some time… I have no idea, honestly.

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