Lupin the Third 50th Anniversary Special “v2” v2

Torrent

Turns out there’s actually a higher quality version of the Adult Swim stream on Hulu that doesn’t have the video artifacts mentioned in the previous post. It still does have the Adult Swim logo and whatnot, but otherwise it’s pretty good quality. This should be the last release before a BD version.

Lupin the Third 50th Anniversary Special v2

Torrent

Calling this a v2 is technically a bit of a stretch since the only difference is it uses an HD video source instead of SD in the form of a DVD. The audio and subs are untouched from our previous DVD release. This was encoded from the Adult Swim web stream (which is actually just a re-encode of their TV broadcast, as you’ll see later), which is an HD source and thus is considerably more detailed and sharper. However, it does have some quality issues due to being a re-encode of the MPEG-2 TV stream (those artifacts only come from that). I was able to fix those artifacts in some cases where there’s a previous identical frame, but sometimes there wasn’t one so I couldn’t fix it. Most of the times that happens though is in motion, so it’s probably not too noticeable. The video also has TV bugs/English credits and a watermark, so if those things really bother you enough to prefer the older DVD release, it’ll still be up. Also, if anyone wants to put more effort than me into fixing the video or possibly masking the watermark, here’s some of the Avisynth script which’ll save you a bit of time and effort.

If you’re wondering why I did all this to fix some not exactly great video, it’s because this special has been out for a year and a half now and this is the only decent HD stream that exists. There’s no sign it’ll be streaming anytime soon on one of the higher quality Japanese streaming sites, nor that the US BD release is coming out anytime soon. If either of those ever happen, I’ll release a “v3.”