Hm... Considering that, I wonder if these will be in DAPHNE at some point? Hah. Either way, I'll be looking forward to progress on this stuff.
I'm holding out for 02-112 personally. Unfortunately, optical discs are specifically provided for in various tariff schedule books around the world and are considered an entirely different entity than "video games of a kind used with a television receiver." The latter are duty free in the US, optical discs are dutiable in a very small category. The first six digits of tariff codes are generally universal, so the same kind of logic can be applied in AU as in the US when Nintendo tried to get around paying duty on games imported by suggesting that their's were proprietary and only used with their systems. Here's a link to that ruling from US Customs. Had the game been on a cart of sorts, they probably could have gotten away without paying duty. Not sure if they'd still be duty-free in AU. Just looked it up. That game would have probably fallen under AU tariff code 8523.49.00 (Optical media, other), which is duty-free. Not sure what they classified it under that you had to pay duty. It would still likely fall under 8523, which is duty-free. In the US they still have a separate charge called "MPF (Merchandise Processing Fee)" that has a percentage regardless of commodity and is paid on top of the dutiable amount. That may have been what you had to pay. Again, I'm not at all familiar with AU Customs. Note: I may have to revisit this post and make more sense of it later. My thoughts have changed three times while writing it and I'm hopped up on cold-medicine.
Do we even know what that number means? It might not be version number but # of copy printed of the same version.
5 more off to Nemmie for dumping. The only one missing now (apart from regional variations and the NEC LD-ROMs) is the last Mega LD game released - 3D Virtual Australia. It is estimated that less than 100 were produced, so they are hard to source and go for stupid amounts of money.
I have that myst guide, doc. I don't think it's actually specific to any version, it's just a general guide to myst. they probably grabbed it for testing or something.
Wow, that's pretty amazing. I'm curious how Nemesis is capturing these? Is he using a lossless solution? I would love to try to get a lossless Lagarith or HuffyUV version of TimeGal. I'd like to try to ivtc it back to the original progressive film frames at 23.976fps before it gets compressed. I work with video for a living, and I've been working on something similar for Cliff Hanger. The problem is Time Gal costs so much that the laserdisc is way beyond what I can afford.
I think the intention is to dump them once and for all using the most lossless method possible, and releasing both the lossless version for the freaks such as yourself, and an easier to download compressed version for the masses. Since compression algorithms can improve with time, it's always good to have the original source handy. Nemesis hasn't had much time to focus on this lately, but I'll let you know when he resurfaces. I just finished paying my final installment on the Myst 111 prototype, so I should be getting it soon. If anyone wants to chip in to help with my credit card debt, I'd be more than willing to accept donations. =P My vision is not only to release a GoodMegaLD set of the ripped tracks, but also a "Great"MegaLD set, including scans of the outer sleeves, discs and manuals. Of course, these will go up on Sega Retro too, but it just seems like a really nice idea to have it all in one torrent or zip file.
Hahaha, freak. I'll take that as a compliment! IVTCing (3:2 pulldown removal) is actually better for compression. When you compress an interlaced source, the lines often bleed into each other, so it's better to get it to progressive first if you can. That way, when the MPEG4 compressors get to it, it has a full picture to work from and not just half the picture. It also results in better filesizes. Here's a little diagram I made: Thanks for the effort, Doc Eggfan. I know these are super expensive and we're lucky you're willing to spend on these. Time Gal alone, right now, is 1k on Yahoo Auctions, though it's the only auction I can see with it. Maybe it's cheaper elsewhere, but I'm not sure where to look.
With of course the added note that it really has to be done sooner rather than later because the media is starting to bitrot. Better to have difficult-to-deal-with filesizes now that in time won't become an issue (remember how big 650MB CDs seemed back in the mid 90s?) than losing the data by waiting.
Who's the man? I'm the man. Thanks for all your donations =P + - Thanks for nothing you cheap bastards
Taking a break from SC-3000 scans to focus on my laserdisc collection Sega_Amusement_CG_World_Best_Collection Hopefully those back and front thumbnails update soon. Is this the sort of style laserdiscs should be presented? Keep the obi strip separate, just like the spine card for CDs? Also notice the very thin 'spine' and 'top' images.
Yeep. Looks fine. The great thing about scans like this is it allows us to see the release date and price, since it's actually printed on the box (albums do this too). It's like they knew one day this would be documented.
I still see no reason to make lossless captures of NTSC video. At least none other than an initial intermediate, certainly no need to send huge files in at least the double-digit GB range across the internet. Distribution should be in I-frame only MPEG-2, to preserve the "instantly access any individual frame" capability that many LDs have. I suggest MPEG-2 because even GPUs that are several years old can decode MPEG-2 in hardware, and the format is generally more robust as a result of its maturity. One can also analyze the way the games use the content, and save space by only restricting yourself to I-frames where necessary (and also by starting a new GOP on the exact frames that the game seeks to in the case of video sequences, which will mean that there is no need fo the decoder to seek back to the previous I-frame since we could guarantee that the first frame of the sequence is always an I-frame). In fact, for distribution I think we should do very light noise reduction. Spatial only, nothing that will blend adjacent frames, possibly a software comb filter to reduce dot crawl (can be used only on sequences that exhibit bad dot crawl, to avoid any possible loss of detail, if one is worried about that, although I'm not personally since there is a bandwidth limit to how much resolution the disc can actually resolve, which is also part of the reason that a lossless capture is not as necessary as one might think). Absolutely no deinterlacing, the stream should be kept in its original interlaced format and deinterlaced on playback (since all said GPUs can also do hardware deinterlacing, hell the GPU in my nearly ten-year-old HP laptop can decode MPEG-2 and pre-AVC MPEG-4 with deinterlacing). Another reason to stay with MPEG-2 - support for MPEG-4 deinterlacing in hardware is far more spotty in my experience, whether the issue be with the software driving the hardware or whatever. Alternately, if MPEG-4 AVC is used, I would recommend deinterlacing using somethng like Yadif to a 60fps video, which will retain 99%, if not 100% of the benefits of the original interlaced video, while sidestepping the issues with interlaced AVC. At least there's no longer talk (that I see) of capturing the raw NTSC data from the disc at the standard sampling rate for capture cards (which is something like 13.5MHz). That would be a colossal waste of time and storage.
Mega_Drive_Perfect_Video_'92~'93 Thanks Squirrel for merging the pages, didn't notice you'd already started.
The need is, frankly, that these laserdiscs are going to bit rot eventually and having a lossless digital backup, untampered with as much as possible, is archival. It is to future proof this release. Mpeg2 in SD is not archival. It's good enough for casual players, but there should be an archive of these capped straight from the LD, losslessly compressed somewhere so that when the day happens that all the laserdiscs are ruined that it still exists somewhere. It's future proofing for whatever comes next.
