(From Wikipedia):
Mobile Police Patlabor (Japanese: 機動警察パトレイバー) is a Japanese science fiction media franchise created by Headgear, a group consisting of manga artist Masami Yūki, director Mamoru Oshii, screenwriter Kazunori Itō, mecha designer Yutaka Izubuchi, and character designer Akemi Takada.

This is a remux of the US Blu-ray by Maiden Japan for the 1989-1990 TV Series of Patlabor, referred to on the title card as “Patlabor on Television”, along with its collected 16 OVA episodes that are commonly referred to in English releases as “The Early Days”. This Blu-Ray contains the restored HD version of the series, the original Japanese audio, the Central Park Media dub, and some newly-created subtitles.

Should be noted that this series follows a different continuity from the original OVA series (Watch my rip here!) and the famous 2 movies by Mamoru Oshii.

Given this is a remux, no extra encoding was performed to preserve the disc’s quality. The video is the original H.264 encoded present on the original disc, and is a 4:3 1080p picture pillarboxed to 16:9.
As for the audio, the first 12 episodes are a special case. When loading up the first three volumes, you are presented with this message, explaining that you will not be able to switch audio in the middle of the episode, as apparently it was impossible to sync the two different audio tracks to the same video track, and as such they’ve included 2 video files for each episode on these first three discs, one for the English dub and one for the original Japanese. I’m not quite sure why they had to do this, but I’ve heard a rumor that apparently the Japanese licensor mistakenly gave Maiden Japan an American TV broadcast version of the English dub of the first 12 episodes that was cut down for either censorship or runtime, and as you would expect, trying to sync the audio from one language to the other’s video would result in desyncs.

Luckily, I was able to acquire .iso rips of the original Central Park Media DVD release of the TV series (thx Risunabe and Masterjun53) and these discs contain the original English dub uncut. Of course since this DVD used the original, unrestored analog tape source, there’s different timing with the gaps between the OP, episode, and EP, however I was thankfully able to sync the audio from the DVDs more or less to the episodes themselves. You might notice some desyncs during the intro and outro because of this, but the episodes themselves should be fine. The only caveat is that CPM did not include Signs & Songs subtitles for these first couple DVD volumes and instead chose to bake those into the video on the DVDs, as such this does not have Signs & Songs for the English dub, but only for the first 12 episodes.

As for The New Files - if you’re not sure what these are, these were originally bonus episodes that were exclusively released on home video formats in Japan after the series ended, up until 1992. The first four episodes of this conclude the overarching “Griffon” arc that was left open at the end of the series itself. The episodes following this are then a little sillier and honestly are some of my favorite, definitely give them a watch if you’ve never seen them before. Given that they both conclude a story arc from the series, and are part of the same distinct production team/continuity that stands in contrast with the original OVA and movie, I figured it made sense to bundle them here as well.

As for the English dub for these episodes - only the first four episodes, the Griffon arc ones, are dubbed, and the rest are sub only. To be perfectly honest, this dub is pretty terrible, the characters are all horribly miscast, and Noa’s shrieky English voice really gets on my nerves - and this was the common consensus back in the day as well, as CPM themselves figured dubbing the last 12 of these bonus episodes with an English cast and direction everyone hated and didn’t watch was simply not worth the costs involved. If you look up the box of the last couple DVD volumes of The New Files, you’ll see they mention only including “The Fan-Preferred Japanese Audio”… Yeah, the situation was pretty dire. But hey, I included everything so you can judge it yourself :)

Media Summary:
Video Codec: AVC H.264
Audio Codec: DTS-HD Master Audio, AC3 (English Dub of first 12 episodes)
Subtitles: Maiden Japan (PGS)

See you next time.