Cyber City Oedo 808 remains my all time favourite Manga series. It was released in the UK on retail VHS in the mid 90s by Manga Entertainment. It was also shown in 1995 on UK Channel 4 in the Late Licence slot, along with a number of other notable Manga series' including Legend Of The Four Kings, Doomed Megalopolis, and Devil Man. The three episodes that make up this series were shown over three weeks and were the first programmes I ever recorded with my brand new VCR.

Manga Entertainment gave each of the three episodes it's own VHS UK release around 1995, but unfortunately their rights to this title lapsed, and they never subsequently released this DVD, nor did any other company. Jump forward ten or so years, and I decided to buy this on DVD, but no UK version left only the US, Japanese or Australian DVDs as the only options. I plumped for the R1 US Manga Corps DVD, but was extremely disappointed to discover that the pounding rock score I so loved from the old UK version was gone, replaced by some mediocre to poor soft rock nonsense, which I found out was actually the original Japanese score. A UK specific score had been composed by Rory McFarlane for the Manga Entertainment release, and as such, was only ever been available on that 90s retail VHS release, and a separate score CD released at the same time, which is now incredibly rare. In 2008 Demonoid user HairySh*t created 3 custom DVDs (one episode each, just menuless video) with the UK VHS retail soundtrack audio recording synced up & dubbed onto the retail DVD video, basically perfectly recreating the original Manga Entertainment release. He uploaded all three DVDs as torrents to the bittorrent tracker Demonoid. I snapped these up, but was again left slightly disappointed. Somewhere during his process, the video stream had picked up a one frame step every second, which was quite obvious with any camera movement or action, and was really quite annoying to watch.

In 2015 I finally decided to do a proper job myself. I used the R1 US Manga Corps DVD as my video source, and HairySh*t's VHS ripped AC3 audio tracks, as they themselves were perfectly fine and of decent enough quality. I used Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5.1, with the retail audio and VHS ripped tracks on a timeline, which were then split into sections where needed, each sped up or slowed to properly sync everything up, so I could then just mux them back with the untouched retail video streams. I also wanted to add in the Manga Entertainment UK Promo Reel which was shown before the main feature on a fair number of their UK VHS releases and brings back some happy memories. This is the thing I'm talking about. I searched round for a decent version to use, and only came up with a number of YouTube rips, of which the quality was okay, just okay. I posted on a number of forums in the hope that someone would reply who had a tape they'd be willing to lend out which I could transfer, but nothing, so in the end I bought both Akira and Urotsukidoji - Legend of the Overfiend VHS tapes from an Ebay user for a total of £4 (inc P&P).

I transferred these using a JVC HR-S7600EK S-VHS PAL VCR, connected to a PC with an Asus My Cinema ES2-750 PCI-E 1x TV Tuner Card via an S-Video cable and Left & Right audio phono leads. Captured with VirtualDub 1.9.6 with the Huffyuv 2.1.1 codec and uncompressed WAV audio. While the rest of the proposed DVD would be NTSC, I decided to encode both PAL 25i, 25p & NTSC 24p versions, so others could use them on their projects if they wanted to. I used VirtualDub's Smart De-interlace filter to deinterlace where needed, then Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5.1 to encode the MPEG2 video streams, and AftenGUI 1.4 to encode the AC3 audio. Because the Akira tape looked a little cleaner, but the Urotsukidoji was sharper, I captured & encoded both. You can download them below; I went with the Urotsukidoji - Legend of the Overfiend transfer for my DVD. I designed a custom main menu & disc art and the DVD was complete, with all three episodes on one disc at around 7GB with a DVD-ROM folder. I swapped my US R1 US Manga Corps Retail 1-way DVD case for a 2-way case, and kept the retail cover, so only needed to design disc artwork. The DVD was authored with Adobe Encore 1.5, and the 1m 07s promo reel was set to play before the DVD menu, as per the old VHS releases, but it can be skipped.

In December of 2013, I got an original copy of Rory McFarlane's 1995 UK Score CD, and intergrated a 1:1 CD IMG copy of the disc, along with 600dpi scans of all the artwork on the DVD's DVD-ROM folder. I don't share this project online via P2P (or sell it, of course). I've simply posted these details on some fan forums and stipulated that anyone wanting a copy of this DVD would obviously need to own one or other of the retail DVD or VHS versions, or I guess the 1995 original Channel 4 recording. In July 2015 I got the 1995 UK Cyber City OEDO 808 Files 1-3 Manga VHS in a trade, and decided to revisit this project in November 2015, and captured the full tape myself. For this I used a JVC HR-S7600EK S-VHS PAL VCR, connected to a PC with an ASUS ES2-750 'My Cinema' TV Tuner card via an S-Video cable and Left & Right audio phono leads. It was captured to an AVI file using VirtualDub 0.9.6 with the Lagarith Lossless video codec 1.3.27 and uncompressed WAV audio. I then loaded up the previous 2013 project edit I still had saved using Adobe Premiere Pro CS6, and chopped up and re-synched all the VHS audio to the R1 US Manga Corps DVD.

In editing, I discovered that portions of the UK VHS video, did not match the US DVD video. The end credits of each episode I already knew about, but virtually every Japanese language overlay, title and computer screen shown in the US DVD had been replaced with an English translated version on the UK VHS. I swapped out all this DVD video out, with the captured VHS version. From File 1 (44m 15s total running time), I replaced a total of 6m 9s (4m 52s end credits, and a further 1m 17s covering the title screen, some shots during the opening credits, and some computer screens. File 2 (47m 27s) I replaced 5m 43s (4m 54s end credits, and 0m 49s other stuff), and File 3 (43m 19s) I replaced 5m 56s (4m 54s end credits, and 1m 02s other stuff). I also captured the 7m 11s of trailers which play at the start of the UK VHS, featuring; Manga Entertainment promo, Street Fighter II Animated Movie, Ghost In The Shell, Ninja Scroll, and a Piracy warning advert. This all gave a presentation completely accurate to the old VHS release, but for the most part in DVD quality.

Finally I used Premiere's packaged MainConcept MPEG-2 Encoder for the MPEG2 M2V encode (leaving the hard interlace as it was on the original R1 US Manga Corps DVD, and converting all the new 25fps PAL video to NTSC), and Wav To AC3 Encoder 5.0 for the AC3 audio. The M2V & AC3 files were then multiplexed together with ImagoMPEG-Muxer 1.1 giving the final MPEG2 files. The artwork all remained the same, I just changed the DVD contents. I don't share this project online via P2P (or sell it, of course). I've simply posted these details on some fan forums and stipulated that anyone wanting a copy of this DVD would obviously need to own one or other of the retail DVD or VHS versions, or I guess the 1995 original Channel 4 recording. If you're interested in any of my fanmade projects, you can contact me via email at , or through the Rob's Nostalgia Projects Facebook page. Check out & 'like' that Facebook page to see the latest in-progress updates to any current projects, and check out my Wants List to see if you can assist me with any future projects or upgrades.