The Borgias debuted in 2011, a magnificent large budget tale of the renaissance Pope Alexander VI, also known as Rodrigo Borgia, and of his family and the disputes and wars that ravaged Italian peninsula in the late 15th century.
Unfortunately the high production costs doomed the series after just three seasons of 29 episodes, the story incomplete.
I decided to create a single torrent, using my three Blu-ray season sets.
I wished to upload material that can readily be used by the widest audience, so I chose h264, level 4.1 for the video. This should work on most devices. My aim was to create the best possible video, free from pixellation, and with a minimum level of artifacts, in a reasonable size for downloading.
I used x264.exe to create h264, level 4.1 video. All episodes were created using the "placebo" preset, which offers the highest quality encoding but slowest encode speed. I used CRF in preference to a two pass encoding. I chose a CRF suitable for each episode, high enough to keep the final file size somewhere around my target size for the video, so, normally 25-27. As can be seen, some episodes are larger than others, yet have a similar run length; this can be attributed to the x264 encoder's use of higher bandwidth to reproduce more video changes, on "busier" episodes such as S02E07 "The Siege at Forli".
The audio is AAC 5.1 at 384kbps
Finally, English subtitles are available, as SRT files embedded in the stream (not hardcoded).
Enjoy, and please, please, continue to seed after you have downloaded. Please click on a screenshot to view the full version.
Video: 1920 x 1080p | 23.976 fps | h264 Level 4.1 | Chroma 4:2:0
Audio: AAC 5.1 | 384kbps
Subtitles: Subrip SRT
