This repo contains a guide on how to upscale Deep Space Nine using Topaz Video Enhance AI as well as the current status of my upscale.
If you want to perform this upscale yourself, follow this guide.
If you'd rather just download an existing upscale, magnet links are available on my Reddit, /u/queerspaceworm.
If you download my upscale, I'd appreciate feedback here.
I post clips and status updates on Tumblr.
Diminishing returns. The upscaling software takes more than 6 hours to process each episode as it is. No matter what resolution I choose to output, an AI upscale will never be as good as a proper remaster by CBS. The higher resolution I choose to output, the more time, disk space, and bandwidth it takes.
Additionally, AI-based upscaling is fundamentally just software making educated guesses at details that aren't present in the source material, and the higher resolution I ask for, the more it has to guess based on the same information, increasing the frequency with which it guesses wrong in a noticable way.
Given the limitations of the source material and the software, a 2x upscale hits the sweet spot for me by noticably improving the visual quality compared to the DVD source without the costs (in GPU time, disk space, bandwidth, and upscaling errors) being too high.
If you'd prefer a higher resolution, you're more than welcome to use my guide to upscale it yourself. Some anecdotal evidence from others suggests that Topaz's performance for higher resolutions is better when it goes through multiple passes (e.g. 2x up to 960p, then 2x again up to 1920p), so you could even try starting from my upscales and then upscaling again to your desired resolution.
Note: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. All of this applies only to the United States.
If you're downloading the upscales that I've made, definitely not, but you probably already knew that.
If you're ripping DVDs you own and upscaling them yourself by following my guide... it's actually still illegal! The DMCA does have an exemption for making backups of content you own a copy of, but if you need to break DRM to do it (and, unlike CDs, pretty much all commercially-sold DVDs have DRM), it's still illegal. This isn't something individuals have been sued over AFAIK though (though the creators of the software used to break the DRM of DVDs have faced legal action).
As for the morality of it, I doubt even the most cynical media executive would think that ripping and upscaling DVDs you own for your own private use is morally wrong.
Upscaling it all yourself requires a significant amount of GPU time and a license to the software though, so I think that most reasonable people would agree that torrenting the upscale if you own the DVDs is morally fine.
Personally, I don't really see a huge moral issue with pirating a decades-old TV show from a giant corporation, especially if you already pay for access to a streaming service where you could watch it legally (and all the pre-Discovery Star Trek shows are currently available on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and CBS All Access in the US, so there's a good chance you do).
tldr: Legal? No. Moral? That's up to you to judge.
If by "safe" you mean "does it have any viruses?", then yes, it's safe.
However, torrenting copyrighted material can get you flagged by your ISP, so you may want to use a VPN to do so. As I understand it, this flagging process requires the copyright holder to be monitoring the torrent in question so they can report you to your ISP, so depending on the popularity of this upscale, and how much ViacomCBS cares about you downloading it, you might be able to get away without one. Most ISPs use a three-strikes system for this as well, so if you've never received a warning before, you could try your luck without one.
The penalties for torrenting on networks you don't control can be much more severe, so unless you want to be fired or expelled, don't torrent on your school network without a VPN or on your work network at all.
Using a VPN is the smart choice for this though. When shopping for a VPN, don't listen to their marketing about how it's necessary to protect your general online browsing, and you shouldn't enable it for your day-to-day web use. This video is a good overview of the problems with how VPNs market themselves. These sorts of VPNs really only have three types of customers: paranoid people, pirates, and people who actually need to hide what websites they're visiting from the person or organization who pays for their internet. The VPN companies don't want to be seen marketing to pirates, and the latter demographic is fairly small, so they focus on the paranoia.
I connect to a VPN from PrivateInternetAccess when torrenting, and I've generally found it to be reliable and fast, and it's cheap when you pay for a year or more in advance. I don't use it for general browsing though, I don't recommend you do either, unless your threat model is a parent or partner who controls your internet. You shouldn't trust your ISP, but you definitely shouldn't trust some random VPN company.
tldr: No viruses, but use a VPN to prevent being flagged by your ISP.
Maybe. If it doesn't look worse than the DVD source, or if it's unlikely to be noticed during normal watching, I probably won't bother, but you can file an issue on this repo and I'll keep an eye out for it if/when I do another upscale of that episode.
No contest. This upscale at its best can't compete with the scenes they remastered for What We Left Behind. However, remastering just those scenes was a huge undertaking, and unless CBS decides they want to do it for the whole show (unlikely), AI upscales are our best hope at improving on what we've got.
I'm a queer woman, as is Jadzia Dax, whose symbiont could also be described as a worm. Hence, QueerWorm. On Reddit and Tumblr, that name was already taken, so I'm queerspaceworm instead.
I haven't tried it myself, but I assume the process I use for DS9 should work just as well for Voyager. At the moment, I don't have plans to upscale Voyager myself (I'm just not as interested in rewatching it as I am in DS9), but if I ever do in the future, I'll mention so here.
If someone else uses my guide to upscale Voyager, let me know and I'll link it here.
Probably not. The intersection of "shows that aren't available in HD" and "shows I care about enough to invest the time into upscaling them" is pretty small.
One show that did fit this venn diagram is Avatar: The Last Airbender, but you don't need me to upscale it, as it's already been done. Nickelodeon also did an official HD release, though I've found the fan-made one to be better for most episodes.
This project was started purely out of my own interest in seeing Deep Space Nine in HD and I have a stable job that pays me enough that I can afford to spend some of it on computer hardware and fancy AI upscaling software.
If you have money that you would have used to pay some random girl on the internet with a GPU and a lot of free time on her hands, you should instead use it to support the protestors fighting for racial justice.