Babylon 5 (Series 1-5)

[Kemlo]

Sorry to spoi lit for you spud, but Crusade was never anywhere near as good as B5. The budget had been slashed, they messed around with the ordering of the episodes, and then gave the whole show a facelift half-way through it's 13 (approx) episodes.
Legend of the Rangers (another b5 spinoff) showed promise imho, but it wasn't picked up and never made it past a pilot episode.

/Kemlo

[spudthedestroyer]

yeah i know they are both supposed to be crap so you haven't spoilt anything. I've read lots of reviews, and won't be watching it till after S5 anyways.

The thing is there are no encodes of it that are good quality (not even respectable really)... the mpgs I linked to in this thread are awful, so I thought I might cap and share it.

Either way I'm going to cap it so I can watch them later, so i guess if anyone else wants them speak up

[spudthedestroyer]

lol, incidently, I just watched the Spaced episode where Tim gets fired from the sci0fi shop and wants to get fired from the other place.

"Babylon 5 is crap"
"Get out!"

[Kemlo]

Following this thread has been great for me !
Remembering all the good things about B5 has reminded me that JMS also created Jeremiah, which I have been watching for the past couple of weeks. I've just finished watching the first season and I like it.

/Kemlo

[Blade Runner]

/me lets out an annoyed scream

God damn it, I had my capture gear all setup for Crusade (british premiere apparantly) on Sci-fi channel. I tested my setup, ace quality quick cap, and again, ace quality again... then B5: Crusade nearly starts, press capture and.... nothing, the timer doesn't move to show its capping. Check the drive where the avi is supposed to go... zip :rage:

*sigh* it's repeated on sunday, I'll capture it then garanteed

All the copies that are on the network are crap, so I will be looking forward to you capping these

[Blade Runner]

Have you ripped the episode yet Spud

[spudthedestroyer]

captured yes, just cropped the adverts, been working on it bit by bit whilst watching Star Trek 2 and now onto the second episode of sliders (my monitor has pip hooray!)

anyway, here's a raw picture:


What I'm doing is using a avs to get the avi in a comp compatible format:

Code: Select all

# Spud Useful Avi Script
#  PLUGINS
LoadPlugin("D:\Programs\Video\Encoding\GORDIA~1\AviSynthPlugins\dgdecode.dll")

#  SOURCE
avisource("I:\Crusade 1x01.avi")
ConvertToYV12()

Code: Select all

#  PLUGINS
LoadPlugin("D:\Programs\Video\Encoding\GORDIA~1\AviSynthPlugins\dgdecode.dll")
LoadPlugin("D:\Programs\Video\Encoding\GORDIA~1\AviSynthPlugins\UnDot.dll")

#  SOURCE
avisource("I:\encode.avs")

# DEINTERLACE
SeparateFields()
Bob()
SelectEven()

#  CROPPING
crop(16,6,688,568)

#  RESIZING
LanczosResize(640,480)

#  DENOISING: choose one combination (or none)
Undot()

Interested to know if there are any improvements I could make, klemo, you seem to know what your doing, anything you could recommend? I sources is quite clear, it just needs deinterlacing and that is a decent pal deinterlacing.

Just salvaged a 20gb hard drive so I can do more capture/encodes now hopefully

[mw2merc]

Unlike Kemlo, I feel Crusade had and showed great potential before it was canceled. It has great characters, cool stories, & all kinds of new stuff. Another show killed before it's prime.



Sliders huh??? I've been a big fan since before day one. I got to meet the cast when they added Kari. They were filming the Exodus 2 parter where the professor dies. I have pictures of everyone with me except Clevant, but including Roger Daltrey in cammies.

On DVD as of Tue:
http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/releaseinfo ... aseID=3582
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... 42-0819239



PS - Looking forward to your Crusade caps. PLEASE make a sample or preview also.

[spudthedestroyer]

I guess I can do a sample, how comes you want one? I take it you have the ones from this thread and want to know if you should replace them?

[mw2merc]

Yeah, plus you're doing PAL & I'm NTSC.

[Blade Runner]

Yeehaa

[Kemlo]

Interested to know if there are any improvements I could make, klemo, you seem to know what your doing, anything you could recommend? I sources is quite clear, it just needs deinterlacing and that is a decent pal deinterlacing.

Yup, that is the best way to deinterlace PAL. The source (from the jpg at at least) looks rather soft, so it might be worthwhile using Lanczos4resize which is slightly sharper than lanczos resize. Undot may not be necessary as in this case it may remove more detail than noise imo.

I should point out that I have never encoded raw tv caps before, so I don't really know whether the above is of any use or not.

/Kemlo

[Bassline]

Following this thread has been great for me !
Remembering all the good things about B5 has reminded me that JMS also created Jeremiah, which I have been watching for the past couple of weeks. I've just finished watching the first season and I like it.

/Kemlo

Jeremiah was good and IMO series 2 is better

[spudthedestroyer]

Kemlo, ah rite, its in the alpha, I was going to say it wasn't a recognized function. Okay advice taken. It's not really that soft, its just he's stood in soft light with a blue screen in front of him (mars I guess?), skin colours are a bit soft. Also note that his head is a tiny bit squished, this is because it isn't cropped, the AR is spot on when its cropped and at 1.33

[spudthedestroyer]

okay as requested I've made a sample, its 18seconds of the begining. Which is very high motion space fighting... if you want some bright talkie scene, let me know. You need to copy and paste this link into your address bar else it won't download (lycos' way to stop people bandwidth steal):
http://members.lycos.co.uk/leagueofsubs ... e.Spud.avi (~3.8mb)

Code: Select all

--- File Information ---
File Name:            Crusade.1x01.avi
File Size:            687,357,952 bytes

--- Video Information ---
Video Codec Name:     XviD
Duration:             00:42:05
Video Bitrate:        2045kb/s : -)
Resolution:           640x480
Aspect Ratio:         1.33 / [4:3]
Frames Per Second:    25.000

--- Advanced ---
B-VOP:                B-VOP
QPel:                 No QPel
GMC:                  No GMC

--- Audio Information ---
No of Audio Streams:  1
Audio Codec:          0x0055(MP3, ISO) MPEG-1 Layer 3
Audio Bitrate:        124kb/s VBR 48000 Hz
Audio Channel Count:  2
Interleave:           40ms
Preload:              504ms
Audio alignment:      Aligned

Code: Select all

--- File Information ---
File Name:            Crusade.1x01_1.avi
File Size:            365,045,760 bytes

--- Video Information ---
Video Codec Name:     XviD
Duration:             00:42:05
Video Bitrate:        1024kb/s
Resolution:           640x480
Aspect Ratio:         1.33 / [4:3]
Frames Per Second:    25.000

--- Advanced ---
B-VOP:                B-VOP
QPel:                 No QPel
GMC:                  No GMC

--- Audio Information ---
No of Audio Streams:  1
Audio Codec:          0x0055(MP3, ISO) MPEG-1 Layer 3
Audio Bitrate:        124kb/s VBR 48000 Hz
Audio Channel Count:  2
Interleave:           40ms
Preload:              504ms
Audio alignment:      Aligned

And Screenshot comparisons... I accidently encoded one at 644mb so that's why there are three shots:

644mb:

350mb:

Orig:


644mb:

350mb:

Orig:


I was thinking of re-encoding to DVD compatible MPEG-2

[mw2merc]

That's not a bad idea, cause then you can do either AC3 or MP2 audio & get compression.

No idea why I can't DL the sample (I'll try again later), any possible eMule link?

[spudthedestroyer]

the avi downloads if i add it as a quick download in operas transfer window.

That's not a bad idea, cause then you can do either AC3 or MP2 audio & get compression.

/me activates selfish mode
The DVD comment was for me
/me deactivates selfish mode

it would reduce the quality to re-encode to MPEG2 then re-encode back to MPEG4. Format conversion can be very lossy. The way I've directly encoded to Xvid from an uncompressed source is the best way to do it I think, and its come out mighty fine. Looks better than a lot of DVDrips I see floating around the place I wouldn't be fond of releasing huge MPEG2 files either, waste of bandwidth in most instances due to the much higher filesize for even the same quality, let alone higher video/sound data, and sources dry up much faster

As far as the audio goes, I get:

Code: Select all

Audio Codec:          PCM Audio
Audio Bitrate:        1536kb/s  48000 Hz
Audio Channel Count:  2 (Stereo)

which in this case has gone to 128kb/s VBR Mp3. A higher quality sound maybe better, but in my experience, unless you got really great equipment you don't really get much out of higher quality that about 320kb/s, 192kb/s sounds like cd to most, for movies, I doubt many can tell the difference between 128kb/s and the higher ones

The DVD comment was just for something to do with the uncompressed Avi before I delete it, take a shot and see if anything comes out. May also give me the chance to see if i can author a decent disc with four or five episodes on.

[spudthedestroyer]

grabbed the sample yet? Downloads in any download manager too. If your using IE then may you die slowly an horribly

[Blade Runner]

Thats miles better than anything out there, gimme gimme gimme

[mw2merc]

/me activates selfish mode
The DVD comment was for me
/me deactivates selfish mode

Bah! Rat bastard!!!

As far as the audio goes, I get: which in this case has gone to 128kb/s VBR Mp3. A higher quality sound maybe better, but in my experience, unless you got really great equipment you don't really get much out of higher quality that about 320kb/s, 192kb/s sounds like cd to most, for movies, I doubt many can tell the difference between 128kb/s and the higher ones

Yeah, on DivX/XviD movies, no need for more than 128 VBR.

The DVD comment was just for something to do with the uncompressed Avi before I delete it, take a shot and see if anything comes out. May also give me the chance to see if i can author a decent disc with four or five episodes on.

Good luck. Hope it turns out better than my John Doe DVD. Too bad JD was 1 ep too many to fit on 2 DVDs w/o compressing more.

grabbed the sample yet? Downloads in any download manager too. If your using IE then may you die slowly an horribly

Still doesn't DL. Just sits there & times out. Yeah, well it's my roomates comp, not mine. Well, it's really mostly mine. Just not the monitor, HDD & RAM.