Wishbone

From the archive

Notice: Archive.org has a bug where files and folders with ampersands (&) in them can't be deleted, and it's inhibiting my ability to get everything organized properly. I'm going to reach out on their support forum to get these problematic files removed. Episode/Movie files are available at this time, though, if you don't mind navigating around a little mess. You'll know the cleanup effort is done when this message is gone. Wishbone (TV Series 1995–1998) REMASTERED Before you download: Download the files with a .mkv extension (which are encoded in H264), but don't waste your time/bandwidth downloading the mp4 files under the H.264 heading. Archive.org generated those .mp4 files automatically and they will be lower quality. It's annoying that this "feature" of archive.org can't be turned off, and if I delete them they'll just auto-regenerate, so all I can do is tell you to avoid them. IntroductionThis collection contains every episode of the popular kid's show Wishbone - the little dog with the big imagination. The movie "Dog Days of the West" is also included. You might be wondering what the differences are between this "remastered" collection of Wishbone and the original collection, found here: https://archive.org/details/titlett0112225_202112 Well, keep on reading! Special ThanksBefore I get into the differences, I first want to thank brandonhafer20228192 and anyone else involved in making this set of episodes available to the world. Wishbone is a treasure and given the fact that only a handful of episodes were ever given a formal release, it's amazing that this complete set even exists. So, thank you! Why Remastered?It's abundantly clear that these episodes were assembled from many different sources, because virtually nothing was consistent among them. The video and audio quality were all over the map ranging from near-excellent to pitiful. Some episodes had "washed out" low-contrast video, some had white balance issues, some were sharp and high-resolution, some were tiny and blurry, some had overscan and weird borders and other things that needed to be cropped off, some were stretched much wider than their proper 3:4 aspect ratio, some have deinterlacing issues, some had very quiet audio, some were LOUD... There were a variety of framerates, from "IVTC Film" (23.976FPS), to PAL (25FPS), to NTSC (29.97FPS). All of this turned from what I thought could be a quick little project into weeks of work. I use "remastered" pretty loosely here, but think of "remastered" in this case as getting the most we can out of the sometimes very-poor footage available. I've scoured archive.org and youtube in an attempt to find better sources for these episodes, but these appear to be the best available right now, and everything I found elsewhere appeared to be sourced from the same set of episodes I started with. If you find a better source for any of them, please post a comment ("Review") with where you found them and if I have the time I'll upgrade the collection with it. I'd also like to mention that, to the best of my knowledge, these episodes are public domain, or I wouldn't be uploading them here. I hope these enhancements improve the viewing experience for you and your family. I'm not an audio/video expert. Just some guy that knows just enough about audio and video editing applications to do what needs doing. Sometimes correcting the aspect ratio and cropping/transcoding the video softens it a bit, but the trade-off in overall picture quality is worth the minute trade-off in sharpness. There are some quality issues that simply can't be fixed (like the buggy video moment at 25:46 in S01E20, or the deinterlacing issues of S01E15). So, I'm not promising perfection here, but overall they're improved, and if you want to see the differences for yourself, look at the images in this collection to see before and after examples. Additional details are listed out below, and if they seem a little all-over-the-map... ...it's because the whole process was!! Editing DetailsHere are some specifics, if you're interested in what was done:1) Trimmed Video Footage - Many episodes had extra footage on the beginning or the end of the show that was not relevant to the show itself. They've all been trimmed so that they start at the beginning of the theme song and end after the credits. The 35-second spot that would air after the end of episodes, which thanked the public for funding and encouraged kids to visit their local library, has been removed from any episodes it was present in, but has been kept for posterity in the form of the file titled "Funding and Library Spot".2) Cropped Video Footage - Episodes 3-6 in season 2 had a thick gray border around the video footage. This has been cropped off. Season 1 Episodes 5 and 26 had some distracting overscan at the bottom of the frame that has been cropped off.3) Video Aspect Ratios - Some of the video footage was stretched wide instead of being in proper 3:4 format. They've been corrected. Examples are Season 1 episodes 5 and 283) Video Noise Reduction - Some episodes had heavy noise and blocking from bad encoding. I applied conservative denoise and deblocking filters to these.4) Video Color and Levels Correction - S01E21 had dark video heavily skewed toward red/magenta. It has been color corrected and brightened so skin tones look more natural. Many other episodes like Season 1 episodes 35-40 were washed out/dingy prior to correction. I did my best not to clip whites (like the hot air balloon around 17 seconds in) or crush blacks (i.e. turning a gradient of dark grays into a solid splotch of black). Some episodes like 26 and 28 were clearly spliced from two different clips at the book transition near the end of the episodes, and the black/white levels of the clips were totally different, so each "clip" had to be leveled individually. Speaking of that, the white/black levels of the entire show aren't always very consistent. It can have some very bright scenes bordering on overexposed, followed by very dark scenes indoors. When I leveled things, I strove to do so in a manner that was best for the show overall, because I wasn't about to drive myself (even more) insane by leveling each scene individually.5) Audio Compression - Some episodes had jumps in volume that could be jarring. Probably the worst offender is "S01E03 Twisted Tail!" where the volume more than doubled at just after 13:30. By applying compression, the highs and lows of the audio have been evened out.6) Audio Perceived Loudness Normalization - Some episodes were very quiet, such as episodes 35-37 of season 1. Other episodes were fairly loud like episode 18 of season one. Every single episode has had its perceived loudness leveled to -23.0 LUFS, which is the EBU standard for loudness. In lamens terms this means that every episode/movie/clip in this collection will have the same volume, so you won't have to deal with the inconvenience of adjusting the volume when watching episodes back to back.7) Audio Noise Reduction - One of the unfortunate consequences of compressing and normalizing the audio is that noise can sometimes be amplified. Where necessary, noise reduction was applied to remove static and hum from the audio. There were a few episodes with loud clicks/pops at the beginning of the track and these were also removed.8) Audio Pitch Correction - S01E21 might sound bad to you, but it was far worse before - like someone talking to you through a pillow while standing in a mud pit at the end of a tunnel. It was off-pitch as well; too low by 1.4 semitones. The audio of this one was without a doubt the worst of all of them, so I obtained the help of a friend with audio engineering experience to EQ things. You can't expect an excellent result from such a terrible starting point, just like you can't enlarge a tiny photo and expect it to be sharp, but it's in much better shape than the original audio was!9) Consistent Encoding - The video and audio bitrates were all over the map, as were the encoders used for them. All video has been transcoded to H264. I settled on 18.5RF in most cases since it appeared to have equivalent quality to the originals. All audio has been encoded in AAC at a bitrate that is the same or higher than the source.10) Naming Convention - Altered the filenames to follow a naming format that is friendly to media servers such as Jellyfin, Emby, and Plex e.g. "Wishbone S01E01 A Tail in Twain, Part 1!"11) MKV Container - All of the episodes are now stored in MKV containers (.mkv extension), so if someone wanted to, say, add subtitles in the future, it'd be easy with a free multiplexer like MKVtoolnix. VLC and any media server should be able to play them no problem.