I torrented a few episodes from 1337x, but they are quite compressed/low-quality. Is this the best there is or is there a higher quality version hidden somewhere? It wasn’t originally filmed it at such a low quality, right?
It probably was broadcast at piss-poor quality, usually 520p
Yes, that is the quality of the original presentation. If anything it looks worse because it has been converted from film to a digital signal, as well as being stretched to be a bit larger than normal. Lmk if you young whippersnappers have any questions about this, I grew up watching this on VHS back in the dark times 👴
Bingo. Same goes for pretty much any show from the 90s and beyond that didn’t get an HD remaster. It’s the same quality with older shows on any legit streaming service.
Mr. Bean only exists at 576p DVD quality. It probably wasn’t shot in high quality film, so no HD releases have been released.
this is a screengrab from the best quality amazon prime has, think it’s all the same videotape
I don’t know much about the series, but I found season 1 of it in 1080p on The RARBG - 17.6GB. That’s all I could find in 1080p aside from some specials and the animated series. Possibly AI upscaled, if that matters (can’t confirm either way tho)
Edit: Theres a bigger collection on Bitsearch, supposedly the complete series in 1080p. Looks to be about 28 episodes, but the total size is only 5.98GB. Again, not sure if AI upscaled, possibly worse quality than the first one, but more episodes?
Yes, both are upscaled p2p releases
Sorry for the potentially stupid question but what’s a p2p release? A Torrent?
The groups forming the roots of digital media piracy established ‘the scene’, which holds itself to rules and has particular distribution methods. For example Usenet was popular for many years. https://scenerules.org/
By P2P I’m meaning these are ‘non-scene’ releases, just something a random person on the internet cooked up and released somewhere, in these cases by feeding some prior standard definition release through an upscaler and creating a torrent from the output, which involves certain considerations.
We can’t exactly determine the pedigree of these files, but we can say they are lossy transcodes, that is they first existed in a compressed format and later were re-encoded by the upscaler to another compressed format.
While the upscaled may look sharper to your eyes, data from the files as they were before that process was inevitably lost due to this transcoding. If we define “quality” as the amount of information from the original presentation that was retained in the output, then the standard definition versions are definitely higher in quality than the upscaled ones.
I’m not meaning to use the term in any perjorative sense, but it’s useful information to have. If an official HD presentation is ever made from the original film, it would certainly get a ‘scene release’ that would look better than these ones.
Tbh that’s actually pretty good for what is probably a VHS rip. They might not even be all that compressed compared to the original.
Looks better than I expected
You can find most if not all episodes on YouTube as well. I don’t think there are any high quality versions around anyway.
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Yep, that looks like the one I found per my comment. Wasn’t sure if we could link
