Films and loops from that period were shot on 16mm or 35mm film so the better solution is to use the original negative or strike print rather than apply too much digital manipulation which can smooth out the image too much and lose the grain and depth or 'feel' of film which most fans of the era appreciate.

For late SOV (shot on video) productions perhaps this would be of use, I'm not as familiar with the format.

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I was clearly talking about a home solution. Many of us have older DVDs and VHS movies which could do with a refresh, but I doubt many have access to original 16mm/35mm film copies and the equipment with which to convert it.

Edited by - Moony on 7/25/2020 3:26:23 AM

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To my knowledge (in the UK at least), making backup copies for your own personal use is legal, even if that backup process involves converting to another format and/or up-scaling/up-sampling, down-scaling/down-sampling or compressing

This happens every day when people burn cds or dvds to a format compatible with portable media players.

Edited by - Moony on 7/25/2020 10:17:24 AM

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But speaking of Hardcore DVDs: besides older Digital Playground DVDs and the DVDs from Angela White, no Hardcore DVD I can think of have even CSS copy protection (the basic DVD copy protection scheme). I guess the manufacturer wanted to cheapen out on the licensing fee for CSS. Regularly licensed DVDs are required to have the DVD logo on the front cover and on the spine of the cover (not sure about the back cover, but I guess, there it would be required, too). I guess that logo has to be licensed, too, which is why it is nowhere to be found on hardcore DVDs.
And if the DVD doesn't play in your DVD player - well you can always say: nobody expected this Disc to play in your DVD player, because technically speaking, this hardcore movie isn't stored on a DVD, but something that looks 99% identical to a DVD, but isn't necessarily compatible.
It's a win-win for the manufacturer: save licensing fees and have an excuse if the DVD doesn't play.

Something of a sidenote: I remember when the clerk in my rental store responded to my claim that a certain DVD didn't play the full movie, but only the first half: "Well, from 3 hours of material you were able to see 1.5hrs, so I guess that should be enough". But what can you expect if they sell DVDs (some off-brand compilation stuff) by the minute in the bargain bin. Like in the butcher shop: "Well, next I'd like 1 hour of anal and 2 hours of DP, and half an hour of blowjob". Don't care about who."

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Sorry to go off-topic, but can I ask if a Blu-ray player would be more likely to play a damaged DVD than a DVD player?

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"If you own a CD, you can rip a copy of it for personal use but you have to retain the original CD and you can't distribute the copy"

"With movies, it is illegal to rip DVDs or Blu-ray to make a copy for backup purposes. But if you purchased a VHS movie, you can format shift that. The difference is that the disc-bound movies are encrypted whereas the tape isn't."

"One reason ... 'unrestricted digital-to-digital copying could allow consumers to reproduce the full picture quality and features provided in commercially produced digital film content'."

When Is It OK To 'Copy' Content?

Edited by - Simple Simon on 7/25/2020 6:25:09 PM

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The Topaz application uses AI algorithms trained on thousands of high resolution videos to rebuild or at least approximate detail lost due to the lower resolution - so you do actually end up with a more detailed video. I have also found that even without upscaling, the deblocking and artifact removal works much better than the equivalent functions in say VirtualDub.

Incidentally - in the image in the OP, the frame on the left is actually upscaled using some sort of standard interpolation algorithm so that it's at the same scale as the AI upscaled image on the right. The image on the left is probably akin to what an upscaling blu-ray player would do.

As a further point of comparison - I used a cleaning/up-scaling method I have used in the past using Virtualdub to same frame from the same video. I applied a deblocking filter to try and reduce some of the compression artifacts, upscaled, then applied a smooth filter and some sharpening. This is the result. It seems to have a few more blocky artifacts, but is marginally sharper than the left image. Still nowhere near the quality of the right image though.

Edited by - Moony on 7/26/2020 4:10:29 AM

Edited by - Moony on 7/26/2020 5:21:12 AM

Edited by - Moony on 7/26/2020 6:16:15 AM

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From your post, it's mostly the same, after all. I thought it obvious that distributing a copy was definitely not ok and covered by the right for personal use.
The blank statement for "it is illegal to rip DVDs or Blu-ray to make a copy for backup purposes" is perhaps too broad. As I mentioned, you could always argue with the format shift (Disc to Disk). But only as long as the source is not encrypted. Which is, as I mentioned before, almost never the case with porn DVDs. The Blu-ray standard on the other hand requires all Blu-rays to be encrypted, so there is legally no way of making a backup copy at all.
And VHS to disk is also not allowed, if the VHS has a copy protection (Macrovision). Here in the EU the law says that it is not legal to make a copy if the source uses some form of copy protection that works on a technical level. The 'technical level' assumes that it is not enough to write on the disc/packaging: "No copying" (because for private use, you still can), but if the medium itself uses *some* form of protection (however ineffective), then it would already qualify.

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a) those CDs would not qualify to bear the compact disc digital audio logo, as they weren't standard compatible anymore
b) more and more consumer players used computer grade CD drives which then had similar issues

I actually have two CDs which have some kind of copy protection, which I wasn't aware of at the time, but not the sony-rootkit one, but the other which confuses the CD drives. Luckily, with Linux this isn't a problem at all. Some guys on the other hand then have argued that using Linux was using a "copy protection circumvention", and therefore illegal. Haven't heard much from these guys, though.

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Also, there is an interpolation ai called Dainapp or something that is supposed to do a really good job of making increasing fps. Being a big fan of 60fps I would like to use this software on my old DVD collection and my new content.

I need a much more powerful GPU at the moment though, unfortunately.

I have heard that interlacing on older videos is a bit of a problem and that these ai will actually enhance interlacing artifacts. We May have to use deinterlacing software as well

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Edited by - snufish on 2/28/2021 9:13:38 AM

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