Backup of post:

TLDR: DS9 upscale is here for Season 1. Skip to the bottom for instructions on where to get it.

Mods, please let me know if you feel this is inappropriate for the sub.

Lately there has been a lot of talk about upscaling DS9 to 4K. There are many people working all over the globe to accomplish this, each trying their own methods and sources.

Much like its namesake, Project Defiant is the imperfect, but sturdy, approach to the problem. We have directly upscaled all of Season 1 from MKV source files. The result isn’t as perfect as some of the other approaches, but it’s quick and available en-masse.

Don’t expect the quality to be equal to that of a native 4K remaster, but it’s a huge step up from the originals. Also, audio synchronization is sometimes imperfect; this is due to the fact that the original source has a variable framerate that was common in 90’s TV shows and had to be converted to constant framerate (CFR) prior to the upscaling.

We sampled episodes from each season, and noticed that seasons 1 & 2 don’t play as nicely with the upscale as the later seasons. The rest of the seasons will be uploaded as they get upscaled (Season 2 is coming in just over a week!)

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Technical details:

We’re using Topaz Labs’ Gigapixel AI for video (currently available for free in Beta, but will eventually cost $100 US dollars). This upscales the video without cropping, which makes everything take longer, but at least no information is lost. Each episode is roughly 5GB, making Season 1 a whopping 99 GB. The later seasons will be even larger since they have more episodes.

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If you want to help:

Send me a direct message here on reddit. Minimum requirements for upscaling: Windows 10, GTX 1070 GPU, 8 GB of RAM. Each episode can take upwards of 20 hours to process, depending on your computer, so make sure that the conversion process won’t cause you any problems or get in the way of other things you need to do on the computer.

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How to get it:

This is the tricky part. DS9 is the property of CBS, and we want you to show them how much you love it; so please buy it from a retailer before proceeding, only then will they consider doing a full remaster. You should never download any media that you don’t already own. Furthermore, downloading anything from the internet can pose a great risk to you and should never be done without a VPN. With that being said, the upscale is available on a specific public torrent site. I won’t mention which one publicly, as I don’t wish to break any rules here. It is possible to find it on Google by searching “Star Trek Deep Space 9 S01 AI Upscale 4K (2020)” (quotation marks included). You may contact me privately for more information.

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PS. If you do decide to go through the trouble of finding and downloading the project, please be patient. As with any new media, all downloads will be painfully slow at first, and won’t reach reasonable speeds until enough people have full copies of the files, which will take a while.

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Edit: At the request of u/SeparateExperience, I’ll upload a few comparison screenshots later today or tomorrow!

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Edit 2; the wrath of retail: Cleared up that we want you to buy DS9 before even thinking about downloading this project. The edit is in bold in the last paragraph.