Actually - there are various changes to the dvd releases. Ian McDermid now in the empire strikes back, for example.

In Return of the Jedi on the dvd - they have also added a stormtrooper being torn limb from limb by the crowd in coruscant during the final celebrations…and if you listen very carefully…you can hear jar jar cheering.

Do i win the geek prize now?

When you say ‘First Star Wars Trilogy Limited Editions’ do you mean the *original* versions of Star Wars episodes IV to VI, or the ‘Special Editions’ released by George Lucas in 1997?

Both versions were available on laserdisc. The first version was (I think) just Dolby Stereo, but the Special Edition (which was available as a box set) had Dolby AC-3 Digital (i.e. true 5.1) encoding, as well as a much cleaner picture + extra scenes added by George Lucas.

Movie Trivia:
Do you know what the only difference is between the laserdisc Star Wars Trilogy (IV-VI) SE box set and the DVD boxset of the SE versions which were release shortly after Episode I? At the end of Return of the Jedi movie, in the celebrations of the defeat of the Empire, the apparition of Anakin Skywalker is the original Skywalker/Vader character on the laserdisc, but on the DVD version it is Hayden Christensen.

Paul

He obviously hasn’t seen *my* bootlegs.

Henning’s description is pretty accurate. More precisely, I oversampled the video to reduce sampling noise (that only works because the discs were pressed in CAV, which means one frame per track, which means the player will repeat the frame directly from the disc in slow-speed mode rather than digitally sampling it internally and repeating the sample), ran the result through a custom inverse telecine filter to recover the original 24 fps film frame rate while also cutting off the black bars at the top and bottom, and added in the digitally-transferred audio. Since the subtitling had been done in the black bars I had to redo that too. The result was compressed to MPEG-4. Each frame is a faithful representation of the original film frame - no interlacing artifacts or anything. (And not because the interlacing artifacts were removed by a cheesy heuristic averaging/deinterlacing filter, either, which is the typical process in NTSC video capture. In my process, NTSC frames that consist of fields from different film frames are thrown away before being de-oversampled - only NTSC frames consisting of fields from the same film frame are used. There is no averaging or guessing involved.)

The result is the cleanest 24 fps video you can imagine, suffering only from MPEG-4 compression artifacts in the lowest-contrast areas (star fields and Darth Vader’s suit being two of the more prominent examples). The lack of flicker and rock-solid image registration are kind of spooky! Somehow you just don’t expect images to stay that steady on the screen.

It took me nearly a year to do the transfer, the bottleneck being mostly CPU time, and to a lesser extent disk space. But I think the result is worth it.