Star Wars (1977) - 35mm Theatrical Silver Screen Edition x265/AAC 1080p

This is Team Negative1's amazing restoration of the unaltered theatrical version of Star Wars scanned from an original 1977 35mm film print. You haven't seen Star Wars until you've seen this. Period. You will be transported to a 1977 theater watching Star Wars for the first time on the big screen.

The only problem is that TN1's original file was way too big for practical purposes. At nearly 25 GB, it was about the size of a full Blu-ray disc. The quality was immaculate, and if you want the ultimate experience that is what you should download, but I thought an alternative was needed for users of more limited bandwidth/hard drive space/patience. So I re-encoded it to a vastly smaller file size using a number of tricks to obtain maximum compression while still retaining as much quality as possible. Thanks to the new and extremely efficient H.265 codec, it is now possible to encode HD sources at drastically smaller bitrates while maintaining the same quality as much larger H.264 files. The only problem is that it isn't widely supported yet, so this file will not play on everything. The free, open source VLC player will handle it without a problem however.

I also cut out TN1's loud and unnecessarily long introductory animation from the start of the film, so it opens on the 20th Century Fox logo as Star Wars should. And I replaced the audio track, which was originally sourced from a 1993 Laserdisc remix, with the original 1977 35mm mix. In terms of both sound and vision, this is the most authentic Star Wars possible. And you won't find a better file size/quality ratio anywhere else. This is the encoding YIFY should have done.

Technical Specs:

HandBrake
Video: H.265 (x265) RF 28 (equivalent to RF 23 H.264.)
Audio: AAC Stereo 128kbps
Resolution: 1920x820 (1080p with black bars cropped), 16-bit/48000hz