There’s also a number of movies where the best quality publicly available is a pirated rip of an HDTV broadcast from a Malaysian TV network or something similarly odd because the rights holders never released a BD and the official DVD release was a transfer from a crappy VHS or similar.

In cases of TV shows, fans have gone to the lengths of producing the best quality release possible by patching together video, audio, and subtitles from myriad sources, sometimes even splicing individual cuts when their quality varies between sources. It’s so much more effort than you’d see from any official restorations.

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lyu07282 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

The criterion collection being the one noteable exception, and they have their own standalone streaming service that is pretty good:

https://www.criterionchannel.com/browse

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JeremyStinson 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Ironically, signing-up to Criterion isn't available in Australia:

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Request Access

Sorry. This is currently unavailable in your region. Type in your email below and tell the producers you want it in your country!

	▲	lyu07282 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Try a VPN, I think it was easily circumvented

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biztos 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm a subscriber, but the Criterion apps do downloads right some of the time if you're lucky, the choice of subtitles is usually English or English, discovery is Netflix-level bad, they can't be bothered to create any interactive info, and most of the actual Collection is not available for streaming.

I still pay them every month because they have the goods but it's so frustrating that the people with the most film-buff oriented catalog and their hearts (presumably) in the right place have so little ability to deliver on UX.

(I used to subscribe to MUBI as well, which is stronger for new indie films, but didn't have time for both, and MUBI app was so bad it could have been a fork of the Criterion app.)

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qingcharles 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, IIRC NHK broadcast some movies, like 2001, in 8K scans that are hard to find even on the high seas.

And there are one or two movies that have leaked in DCP 4K, which look absolutely stunning if you have the hardware to play them.

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PetitPrince 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> In cases of TV shows

Can you give me some examples of those guerilla remaster ? I know of the various Star Wars projects (Harmy and the likes) and the remaster from "La Classe Américaine", but I don't know any others.

A French movie that bungle together several excerpt from classic Warner movie to tell its own humorous story. A cult classic for French millennials. The director later on went on to make The Artist to universal acclaim.

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SSLy 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Right now it's usually CINEPHiLES remuxes, that pick absolute best sources available, and sometimes splice the video to get each shot the best possible treatment from the available bitstreams

	▲	Cyph0n 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Many other groups do this; look for the HYBRID tag.

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542354234235 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

A couple I can remember off the top of my head, since I can't check my server right now. Scrubs with original music, since they didn't have the license for the original songs for streaming (or the DVDs, I can't remember). Daria with the original music for the same reason. I can't think of any fan visual remasters of tv shows though.

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account42 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's really infuriating how many TV series are only (legally) available as horribly over-compressed and interlaced DVDs outside of streaming platforms.