And its our fault too. Its easy to see shareholders as rich fatcats telling the CEO to “Put MTX in it and make it slow and grindy!”, but if any of us have IRAs or retirement accounts, we are the shareholders too. We want the nest egg we set aside to grow, and that leads to the same problem.

Thank you very much!

Where is the best place for Debrid users to find 4k content since private trackers are a no go for us?

At first when I saw the title, I thought this was done to stop people who VPN swap stores. The article however paints a different picture: Developers do not want Lira or Pesos since they are too unstable. Doesn’t make sense to price a game at X Argentine Peso if next month X is now 30% less valuable. If you have too much inflation, no one wants your currency. Even the Argentine government or presidential candidates said something along the lines of wanting to swap to the USD too.

I am back. So the program for deinterlacing is called Hybrid. Steps to download and use are on this external forum thread here.

Here is the setting for my Sabrina Profile in text form. I did forget to add in scaling that my final output is 1440x1080. I only gave the percentages there.

How much RAM do you need for Topaz? I have access to a 2080 ti 11GB and a 6900 XT, but both systems only have 16GB of RAM.

Before I built this machine, I had 32gb of RAM. You should be fine with 16gb as it isn’t that RAM heavy. Just close out anything not Topaz. Topaz is going to 100% your machine (like it does mine) anyways so you do not need anything else up. On that note, I recommend upscaling over night. A 1080p-4k upscale can easily take my machine 7-11 hours to do. You shouldn’t have that long since you are only trying to bring something to 1080p, but still be aware your computer may be occupied for a couple of hours.

Are there any specific profiles for Topaz you can share? (I assume it supports something like that?)

Yes there are profiles, but they are better for keeping things persistent between series (like I have a Sabrina profile just for Sabrina) rather than a one size fit all. I do have one I found to upscale BRs to 4k with only slight adjustments. I will post in a follow up comment once I get off work. In general though you want to make slight adjustments, render a few seconds of video, review it, then make more adjustments. When you like it, apply that to different scenes in the same movie (I recommend testing dark/night scenes for sure since those a tricky for AI) to make sure it works, then do the actual upscale.

I will also throw in my Sabrina preset since I managed to use it to upscale some other DvDs with minor tweaking as well. It should provide a good starting place for your DvDs.

Is there something equivalent to Topaz on Linux?

I do not know Linux, sorry :(

The amount of commercial AI upscaling software is rather limited (at least when I started searching this May) and focused towards a Windows and maybe Mac audience. That being said, I know there are AI upscaling software on Github so I would not be surprised if someone ported something like Waifu2x (an open source AI trained to upscale anime) to Linux. As to their quality, I do not know. All I can vouch for is that of the commercial software, Topaz was the best when I bought it in June.

How do I get a DVDRip to look clean without any further compression? By default MakeMKV results in files with these annoying lines, which only disappear after passing it through Handbrake (deinterlace/decomb).

I do have a program to deinterlace (remove the annoying lines) which I will also provide you the name of when I give you my profiles. Topaz can also do decent deinterlacing, but my program is better (and also free).

Will I have better results only upscaling to 720p or does the output resolution not matter in terms of AI artifacts?

It is going to depend on how clear your source is. If your input has a lot of compression artifacts, then that means more guesswork for the AI, and more chances for Topaz to guess wrong. Upscaling to 720p is going to be a lot more successful in general since its borderline HD, but if you have a good source and don’t mind the occasional weirdness really only noticeable if you know what to look for, then 1080p is doable for even something like 360p.

One thing I like to do (to the anger of many film purists) is add my own film grain in post. There is something about film grain that helps our brains not notice small errors in the upscaling process. Holy Grain is a very good film grain in 1080 and 4k. Sadly I never found a torrent of it so I ended up spending the cash to buy it myself.

I do a lot of AI upscaling, specifically 1080p to 2160p with Topaz VEAI, and its quite good. That said, it isn’t magic. It requires a really good source before hand (avoid anything with film grain or has been compressed) and you do not want to make a giant leap. The key idea is the more you tell the AI to fill in the gaps, the more you will get AI shenanigans. If you have a good clean BR rip, then the AI can bring it up to 4k quite easily.

what is the definitive best way to upscale to 1080p in 2023?

1080p to 4k is quite easy, but getting something to 1080p is massive mountain to overcome. Like I said above, you want to leave as little to the AI as possible. Bringing something sub-HD to HD means entrusting the AI with a lot since there isn’t much detail to begin with. My best efforts have been 720p-1080p upscales, but I have had some good results with upscaling the 1990s Sabrina live action series and off the top of my head that is 480p. If you look really hard on those upscales, you can see some strangeness like how words in the back ground are just gibberish or maybe a hand doesn’t move exactly right, but it is a vast upgrade over the terrible DvD release with its low resolution and interlacing.

If you are going to upscale, I recommend Topaz VEAI. Its really easy to learn (I went from having no video editing experience to being able to do some competent upscales in three months), its a lifetime license with a year of upgrades, and frankly its the best on the market. The only drawback is like any AI, you need a hefty rig. I am rocking a 3080ti, i9 processor, and 128gb of RAM. Its also very time consuming. My hefty rig can do the upscaling part in about 45 minutes, but even taking the mild tweaking in DaVinci out of the equation, encoding that same episode is going to take a good 11 hours unless you want a 200gb episode on your Hard Drive. (Please do not trust Topaz to encode for you, its a good upscaler but its better to let Handbrake do your encodes). Throw in the deinterlacing I do before I even run it through Topaz, and it can take me 24 hours of work spread out over a week to get an episode done.

If you have any specific questions, I will be happy to answer them.

I wonder if AI could do a number on those watermarks. Have a program like Topaz upscale it a bit and add some noise and grain. That should be enough to destroy however they identify it visually.

The NFT is not an image. The NFT is the token on the block chain. You can copy an image all you want, but thats not pirating an NFT. NFTs are inherently unpirateable.

A human being with really good/photographic memory can do the same.

The guy said " Private property is a scam, and intellectual property even more so". I think The table comment was a response to the private property part, not intellectual property.

The few copies I found are either 480p rips or no seeders. The best copy is on GRC’s digital store (and now on my PC recording it) I hate to say.

Movie is too niche on public trackers. The one 1080p copy I found being seeded looks like it was Handbraked with a CR of 42 on very fast settings. Just compressed to high heaven.

Dungeons and Dragons (2000). Digging up any copies is tough since you get flooded with the '23 reimagining.

May you please translate ELI5 this for me? I have a full attic of DvDs and VHS tapes I need to backup and your method sounds promising.

Thank you very much! That is what I will do then.

Yes, screen capture with an HDMI splitter and capture card.

and grab the video from something like 1337x in a decrypted format.

This was extremely tempting to do, but this is a bit of a niche movie and the only copy I can find on public trackers (the cons of being a debrid user) with any seeds is one of absolutely abysmal quality. Like my 480p DvD version on my shelf is better than that 1080p torrent.

They use PlayReady DRM so a browser extension might be able to pull the decryption key during playback. One could download that same stream from that playback season then use ffmpeg with the pulled key to decrypt.

I will look into this. Thank you :)

Btw can the said movie be played in a browser via say the GRC site? It may be an easier target.

Yes, the movie can be played via browser on the GRC website. I think you gave me an idea, and I want to run it by you to see your thoughts on it. Now I have the hardware to do a WebRip from GRC’s website, but avoided that for this movie since I wanted to have the higher bitrate of a WebDL. You got me thinking though, what if I do a “webrip” but done from the GRC app? Since bandwith isn’t a factor (I believe) because the 7gb movie is right on my computer, would I not get WebDL quality?

The video is about 7gb. The Audio is about 100mb. Its a 1080p movie.