once again i am cursing the fact that 1080i ever existed in the HD universe and is still foisted upon us

not to mention the fact that they clearly felt they couldn't ship 1080i50 material to a US audience and converted to 1080i59.94 instead

in the years 2024 and 2025

BUT!

at least it's not 480i lol

"Spacefall" has an audio commentary track! cooool

however it's implemented by encoding a second copy of the episode in each of original & remastered state with a different audio track (*lolsob*)

Jenna was so stylish, and also street smart

also this is gonna make a great reaction image

lolsob

i figured out (thx stackoverflow) how to group versions of episodes in jellyfin (you have to do it manually in the user interface via long-press on things to select them and then a kebab menu, it's weird -- unlike for movies where you just name the files right and it Just Works)

BUT for some reason it seems to order the items differently for each episode

eg some have Remaster come up before Original, others have Original come up before Remaster

and I haven't the foggiest how to re-order them

there are at least 2, and sometimes 4 versions of each episode!

Original
Remaster
Original with commentary
Remaster with commentary

this is gonna take extra hdd space ;)

ok, Jelllyfin itself groups everything properly but Infuse (the tvOS app I'm using on the AppleTV as a frontend) only seems to show the default version of each movie or episode :P

i'll worry about that later

(long-term, jellyfin's own app should eventually be complete on tvOS but it's not yet)

workaround: pull up Jellyfin in Safari on a Mac, start playback with a specific version variant or extra feature, and then AirPlay it to the AppleTV

it'll do in a pinch but not ideal

arriving Saturday for the movie/TV collection:

Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin (Blu-Ray) - we watched these on streaming when it came out, it's cute! Rounds out our Pitch Perfect 1/2/3 movie set.

Jeremiah season 1 (DVD) - watched when it came out long ago, there's a second season I still have to track down

Max Headroom (DVD) - saw this when it came out even longer ago :D

The Starlost (DVD) - never saw this, picked it up on a whim

started churning through the series 2 blake's 7 discs

was pleased that the episodes with audio commentary in this season actually use secondary audio tracks instead of having a second copy :D

(i can probably postprocess that shit in ffmpeg on the series 1 episodes if i get antsy)

there are 3 episodes in series 1 with audio commentaries, in 2 versions each

so i can save like 50 gigabytes by merging the commentary audio tracks as secondary tracks and discarding the extra copies of the video :P

anyway, no rush on that. should be straightforward fmpeggery when i get to it

seems to do the job

churning through now...

seems to have done the trick!

trying makemkvcon's firmware dump before attempting to flash the drive firmware, and it's just hanging

apparently this is a problem for the linux version of makemkv that others have seen :(

will attempt to resolve...

forum recommended downgrading to a known-good version for the firmware flash: eg makemkv 1.17.7

this runs and claims to be successful but when i reboot i'm on the same firmware so it's not taking

i may have the wrong images :D

ok seem to have found the right version; attempting to read a 4k disc now :D

claims to be ripping Ghost in the Shell (1995) in Ultra-HD now :D \o/

movie itself is 54 gigs, plus a few gigs of special features which I assume are in HD, we'll see later

Ultra-HD discs ship with video in HEVC, so they'll benefit the least from a potential re-encoding to AV1 for space savings despite being the largest space-takers because they ship four times as many pixels as HD :D

For MPEG-2, VC-1 and H.264 discs I can get much more significant space savings if I decide to re-encode them, but I have to deinterlace any 480i, 576i, or 1080i material.

Interestingly a lot of Blu-rays these days ship lossless audio tracks which are also quite large!

3.1G Ghost in the Shell (1995) - DVD.mkv

21G Ghost in the Shell (1995) - HD.mkv

51G Ghost in the Shell (1995) - Ultra HD.mkv

ah, moore's law

score! Infuse on the AppleTV actually plays back the original HDR HEVC, even if I enable subtitles

looks nice. is it worth an extra 51 gigabytes of disk space? maybe :D

ok back to the salt mines...

and now back in the Ultra HD mines... :D

another HD/UHD pair:

25G Pitch Perfect 3 (2017) HD.mkv
56G Pitch Perfect 3 (2017) Ultra HD.mkv

the HD disc has an H.264 8-bit SDR video track at about 26 Mbps average, plus several audio tracks and subtitles

the Ultra HD disc has an HEVC 10-bit HDR video track at about 74 Mbps average, plus the same audio and subtitles

my rough mappings for experimental AV1 transcodes:

2 Mbps for 480p/480i/576p/576i <- from ~5 Mbps MPEG-2 on DVDs

12 Mbps for 1080p/1080i <- from ~24 Mbps H.264 on Blu-rays

60 Mbps for 2160p HDR <- from ~75 Mbps HEVC on Blu-rays

(for interlaced sources I have to deinterlace))

However I'm not certain my current AppleTV groks AV1 in hardware, I'm going to have to do some test runs before I commit to anything.

And I'm not committed to re-encoding in the first place still, just fiddling around.

the ultra hd ghost in the shell blu-ray is fucking gorgeous

Dark City Director's cut Ultra HD disc has *eleven* audio tracks:

* 7.1ch Dolby TrueHD + Dolby Atmos
* 5.1ch ac3
* 5.1ch DTS-HD MA
* 5.1ch DTS
* stereo DTS
* stereo ac3
* 5x stereo ac3 audio commentary tracks

and one English SDH subtitle track

and for some reason the HD Blu-ray of Babylon 5: The Road Home (2023) has a second copy of the film, with only a video track (no subtitles or audio)... at a higher bitrate than the main copy

The Stuff (1985) - Theatrical release Ultra HD disc has three audio tracks:

* stereo 24-bit PCM
* 2x stereo ac3 (commentary)

Apparently you can straight up ship uncompressed PCM audio on Blu-ray and everybody considers this a fine use of bitrate. :) :P

found the secret to selecting which version of a title to play back in the Infuse front-end on Apple TV:

*long-press* the play/resume button on the title screen

then pick 'Select version' from there

it occurs to me there was a time when these 100Mbps Ultra HD Blu-ray streams would fill my entire network bandwidth <3

fuck yeah 2.5Gbps backbone in the apartment

Dark City 4k edition comes with both director's cut and theatrical cuts in Ultra HD 2160p/HDR

The Stuff 4k edition has the theatrical cut in Ultra HD 2160p/HDR and a prerelease cut in HD 1080p/SDR

Pitch Perfect 3 and Ghost in the Shell 4k editions ship the same cut in both Ultra HD 2160p/HDR and HD 1080p/SDR versions on separate discs.

no consistency :D it's the wild west here

Hm, the external drive doesn't like Max Headroom disc 4. I'll try it on the other drive later...

the portable drive seems a lot pickier about discs than the internal drive

internal drive likes it fine \o/

i now has a complete archive of Max Headroom, both seasons (and they're short seasons for an American show of its time: 6 and 8 episodes respectively. what is this fucking britain?)

also done ripping The Starlost, which'll be fun

and working on Jeramiah season 1

still have to track down season 2 of that; I'm not 100% sure I saw the whole end of season 2 when it first came out

up to series 7 watching Red Dwarf, finally got into episodes I haven't seen before :)

*watching Max Headroom ep1*

how did they get this project funded it explicitly shows the network executives as evil bastards :D

also, this show has the namesake of Ogg Theora ;)
A/B testing should definitely come with rebus tapes (hashtag dystopia)

wait, Theora has a *car* in her bedroom?

how does she afford this apartment in the big city

@brooke want it funded by MTV? I would guess they considered themselves as rebels back then?

@loke hmm.... Wikipedia says the original UK pilot was on Channel 4 and the US series was developed for ABC, which is one of the big networks here, but it was produced in both cases by a smaller studio

probably gave them more leeway ;)

@brooke It’s a British show, but the evil execs are US-coded.
@brooke iirc, a separate BD disc is a fairly common way of packaging UHD BDs, just so people don't buy the wrong thing and complain?
@lw haha yeah i bet they literally calculated the cost of customer support for people being confused about compatibility vs the cost of just shipping both discs in the same box and the latter came out cheaper

@brooke my Pirates of the Caribbean 1 MKV has one pcm_s16le English audio (4608 kb/s) and one ac3 (640 kb/s) ^^

(and I always switch to the second one because I think the voices are weirdly quiet on the first… though taking a closer look now, I think it might just be that little Elizabeth is too quiet compared to the music at the very beginning of the film, regardless of the track ^^)

@brooke wat

is the visual quality also better? ^^

@LucasWerkmeister eh looks good enough to my eye either way ;) no point trying to merge them, i'm just chucking the extra copy ;)

i bet it was background for a menu or something ridiculous

@brooke my Back to the Future 1 + 3 MKVs for some reason have the Japanese audio before the English track, which is always a fun surprise

I should just fix that with a quick ffmpeg tbh

@brooke *wistfully* ah, moore’s law