millenniumfalcon.com

or Skinemax for you knuckledraggers

http://www.tvweek.com/news.cms?newsId=10567

August 17, 2006

'Star Wars' Going HD on Cinemax

By James Hibberd

The "Star Wars" universe is about to make the jump to high-definition. Cinemax has made a deal with Lucasfilm to offer all six "Star Wars" movies in HD for the first time.
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The Time Warner-owned, premium movie cable channel plans to premiere the films in November and launch a national marketing campaign.

The release is certain to thrill "Star Wars" fans, who have helped the franchise earn about $4 billion at the box office worldwide.

The two most recent "Star Wars" titles, "Revenge of the Sith" and "Attack of the Clones," have separately run on HBO and Cinemax in hi-def. Fox has also aired "Clones" in HD.

But the original trilogy has never been available in the format, and offering all the films together on one network is without precedent.

Last year, Spike TV announced a deal to acquire all six films in an exclusive basic cable contract, but the run doesn't kick in until 2008. Also, Spike TV does not currently offer an HD channel.

Of the various incarnations of the films, Cinemax will run the same special-edition versions that were most recently released on DVD.

Terms of the deal were not available, but Cinemax typically plays films several times over three months during an initial run. A run on sister network HBO will almost certainly follow.

Something to look forward this fall...

more pirating

This is very good news. Let the "which version of the prequels will they show" speculation begin.

My money's on digital TPM Yoda.

But don't expect an HD or Blu-Ray disc release anytime soon, though.

I won't care about HD DVD or BluRay, as long as someone records these and releases them.

Cinemax November 10th @ Midnight: http://www.cinemax.com/starwars/poster.html
Star Wars HD @ Cinemax Schedule: http://www.cinemax.com/starwars/schedule.html


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The Episode III HD Trailer featured on the mini-site:

[spoil]
[video width=480 height=376]http://www.hbo.com/cinemax/av/interstitials/max_star_wars_pro_ref.mov[/video][/spoil]

Oh adult swimfluence...

This may be good news, but I think we've all seen these films way too many times.

But...

"IN ORDER."

Take that, you "omg u have 2 watch it bkw3rds or u dont 'get' it" losers.

I hope to god someone grabs these. It would be unfortunate to miss such an opportunity to have ALL 6 in HD.

I'm sure PerfectCr and Duke will have screencaps up and the rips will be available for download at the usual newgroups and torrent sites like hdbits.org.

The Cinemax Star Wars HI-DEF mini-site updated with a new trailer set to Cold Play's Fix You:

[spoil]
[video width=480 height=376]http://www.hbo.com/cinemax/av/theatricals/max_starwars_cold_ref.mov[/video]
[/spoil]

You better believe I will be grabing these! I already have Ep III @ 1080i and Ep II @ 720p but I'll get the others for sure

Episodes I, II and III have all been released in 1080i in the last couple of weeks in a.b.hdtv.

All of them are H264/DD5.1 captures from SKY movies.

I just grabbed a sample of TPM from a.b.hdtv and the sample looks like crap. Artifacts everywhere.

I couldn't see any samples of the H264 encode, but it looks like someone is posting a H264 - MPEG2 conversion. It wouldn't surprise me if this was artifacted.

I grabbed the H264->MPEG 2 Attack of the Clones sample and it looks interlaced to all hell. It's distracting.

The original H264 file is 1080i50, so perhaps someone screwed up the interlacing on the conversion.

Still downloading here!

there shouldn't have been a conversion. encoding to mpeg-2 from h.264 is retarded.

So, when Cinemax says it's broadcasting in HD, is that..
720p?
1080i?
1080p?!

You're right, there shouldn't be! It looks like someone has uploaded the H264 files, and then someone else has converted them to MPEG-2, perhaps for MovieFactory5 compatibility for HD DVD?

chumbo @ www.abhdtv.net is converting and posting sample clips from H264 back into MPEG-2 format.

http://www.abhdtv.net/forum/showthread.php?t=2574 (requires registration)

Is there an HD DVD burner on the market?

Not that I'm aware of, but you can burn out DVD+R DL discs with about 1hour of HD MPEG content on them.

You can get a sony bluray burners now but with a price tag of $1300 and discs at about $40 it is a big investment for HD.

I just read their message board rules and I can't believe how strict they are. You can get banned for alot of stuff. Some of which I think is uncalled for.

No it's not, a lot of computer's can handle processing h.264. There's no quality loss converting it to MPEG2, it's just a bigger file size.

That's because whatever you are watching it with is not deinterlacing it. Play with VLC, right click and deinterlace with Bob.