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?
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 👴
Some was 16mm but probably mostly shot straight to vhs:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096657/technical/?ref_=tt_spec_sm
And the bbc was notoriously bad at not losing archival footage of tv shows
I remember the VHS we watched was presented as a compilation of episodes with a new introduction and interludes so my guess is there was some kind of professional reproduction of the episodes themselves
Yeah I’m not saying they didn’t edit it, but rather the master footage they were editing was on vhs or similar. I guess it’s probably quite likely they would’ve had some sort of better quality magnetic tape rather than vhs come to think of it though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m sorry, I meant to respond about the lack of BBC archival footage, as it had to be archived to be able to compile it. You’re right that it was probably shot straight to VHS.
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.
It was made for British TV in the late 80s maybe.
It wasn’t going to be done on 35mm with movie making kit. What you see there is probably the best it’s going to be.
Mr. Bean only exists at 576p DVD quality. It probably wasn’t shot in high quality film, so no HD releases have been released.
I pulled down Tubi’s 720p release and it’s good enough for a videotape based show.
Also, FT Depot on YouTube has nice 4K film scans of the two 20th Century Fox movie shorts of Mr. Bean from the 90s which are also must haves.
I downloaded the whole lot as an AI upscale from the usual public trackers.
Looks better than I expected
this is a screengrab from the best quality amazon prime has, think it’s all the same videotape
I watched a YouTube video several years ago that discussed how Mr. Bean live streams and compilations have flooded YouTube despite the original series not being that long. I can’t find the video because the search results are indeed flooded with these
It probably was broadcast at piss-poor quality, usually 520p
*576i
deleted by creator
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.
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.
