In light of the recent news, thought it may bring some joy to share my Animax encodes of Dragon Ball Z with the community. This torrent includes episodes 1-291 and both specials (indicated at 063.5 and 175.5, as they were aired between episodes 63/64 and 175/176 respectively). I made these encodes back in 2012 when I was capping DB/DBZ/DBGT off Animax. This torrent is for the people who have always wanted to see the original Japanese version of Dragon Ball Z before it was remastered. Particularly people who find comfort in the warmth of imperfect film sources. This torrent is NOT for people who want a clean, filtered, color-corrected, upscaled experience. This is also NOT for people who think they can do a better job encoding than I did. Move to Japan, buy and set up your own cap box, and spend years capping the episodes yourself every day/week like I did if you want to do that. Z will be aired on BS Fuji again one of these days, and it's probably still being aired on Animax, so there you go. Background about the HDTV aired versions from Animax and BS Fuji: 1) BS Fuji and Animax come from the same film transfer. 2) The episodes were captured from an old film source complete with dust/dirt specs, the occasional hair, and glue at the beginning and end of every scene transition/cut. 3) The film source is from the original TV broadcast where some previews for the next episode featured hype clips for upcoming movies/events. Sadly, Animax/BS Fuji removed these hype clips, but retained the shortened versions of the episode previews. 4) All openings and endings come from the original film reel for each individual episode. They have specs and imperfections at different parts for all 291 episodes and both specials. 5) For some reason, whenever there is an explosion the screen fritzes out for a frame or two. This happens on both Animax and BS Fuji. 6) Animax has a logo in the bottom right corner of the actual episode footage, BS Fuji has a logo in the top right of the screen in the black portion outside of the actual footage. 7) Animax’s average bitrate at that time was ~16Mb/s, BS Fuji's average bitrate was ~21Mb/s (1920x1080 era) or ~14Mb/s (1440x1080 era). BS Fuji aired weekly on Sunday mornings before One Piece and Animax aired every weekday. Thus, BS Fuji caps are very difficult to come by and aside from the logo, the Animax source is actually quite good. 8) The BS Fuji and Animax airings have blended frames from the telecine process during the transfer (very similar to the type of blending/ghosting that many old DVD or LaserDisc releases suffered from), so traditional deinterlacing/decimating methods will result in masses of blended frames. 9) While Dragon Ball GT's airing on BS Fuji/Animax suffered intentional frame blending and frame rate reductions during certain high-flashing scenes, the airings of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z did not. Background about this collection of encodes: 1) I made these back in 2012 from Animax TS sources from my own cap box when I was living in Kansai. 2) I removed the logos with Eraselogo + a custom lgd I made with AVIUtil (sorry). I think I did a pretty good job, but remnants of the logo will always be visible during high motion scenes (sorry, again). 3) I hand-decimated all of these episodes after using a custom deinterlacing script to handle the blended nature of the film transfer. Some episodes did not have any "good" frames to decimate to, and in those cases I left them in 59.94fps. I can't notice the blending during playback, but if you go frame by frame it will obvious. 4) I used crf18 with a 2012 build of x264 (these were encoded in 2012, after all). I optimized the x264 settings to the best of my ability for this aged source, but at the end of the day, the file sizes turned out large and the encoding still killed some of the grain/ultra fine details in the background. I wish I had used crf16 instead, but the file sizes were already larger than I wanted... Use MediaInfo to find out my exact settings if you're interested. 5) My purpose for these encodes was to play them back on my TV via my PS3, so the encoding settings took that into consideration. 6) I used 704x528 resolution to maintain a perfect aspect 4:3 aspect ratio while keeping it mod16. I'll admit that I am a bit superstitious in thinking that filters just work better at mod16. I tried many different resolutions, and 640x480 seemed to kill more details than 704x528 to me in the end, and I saw no increase in detail with higher resolutions. 7) I missed recording Special 1 when it originally aired in 2012. I had to wait until July of 2016 before it aired a second time. I was living in Tokyo then and traveling a lot on business, so I didn't make an encode for it until... Today. Oops. 8) Refer to the included text file for notes regarding "trouble" episodes. Some episodes were more broken than others and took many revisions to fix... Anyway, while I know these encodes are not perfect, I think there are probably many people like me out there who always wanted to see what Dragon Ball Z looked like before being remastered for the Dragon Boxes. I am sharing this collection for those people. Hoping this brings some joy during this time of mourning. I'll miss Akira Toriyama and his creative contributions to society always. Thank you for everything, Toriyama-sensei!