not dead yet…
Hmmm…
I wonder how long it will take Funimation to get the 6th disk out now that they own it?
I guess I can consider my pre-order for Shigofumi officially canceled now…
This is the only movie to ever earn an ‘A+’ in my ratings. Of all the anime I’ve watched, only Serial Experiments Lain and Now and Then, Here and There share that grade. That’s pretty lofty company.
I’m really looking forward to finally watching 5cm. It’s been sitting on my shelf for far too long.
It’s 2:00 am, and I’ve taken a break from packing things up for a bit. I’m headed down to Huntsville tomorrow. It’s been pretty hectic here lately, but I finalized a few things today - I’ve signed the job offer, ended my lease here, and arranged for Mayflower to move my stuff. It’s a little sad leaving TTU, and I’ll miss the ‘Miller Lite First Downs!’ during football season this year. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse, though - really interesting work, a salary that I’d never have expected, and the company will pay for my tuition to finish my engineering degree starting next spring at UAH. I had no choice but to agree.
Before I packed up my newly built computer I thought I should make a last post here, since I’ll probably be rather limited in my access for the next couple of weeks. Staring me in the face was my review of The Place Promised in our Early Days.
It’s been sitting unfinished for a long time now. I know I’ll never get it right - every time I decide to attack it and finish it off I end up going on a tangent and adding a few more pages, and deleting half of what I’d already written. I looked it over and decided to just throw it out there anyway. I trimmed out all of my editing notes, and resisted the urge to try to conclude it - it will probably always be a work in progress, and I’ll still be able to add and subtract as I get the chance.
I apologize in advance to Nick, who was probably expecting something I’d never be able to deliver.
It’ll be up in the next post.
Continuing from the previous post, here’s the bit in Kino’s Journey that irritated me. Well maybe irritated is too strong a word - I just couldn’t figure out why they’d change this and I preferred the original.
This is in episode four, which is Kino’s origin story. There’s a song that the original Kino sings as he’s rebuilding Hermes (it actually appears first at the very beginning of the episode, but in the timeline it first occurs here):
For some reason it stuck in my head, and a couple of years later when I was watching Kanon I remarked that they were playing Kino’s song. Someone laughingly pointed out to me that Kino didn’t invent it - it’s probably one of the most famous classical pieces ever written - Pachelbel’s ‘Kanon in D’. Well that made sense, and once I heard the strings I immediately recognized it. I guess I just haven’t attended enough weddings.
A while later I was watching Kino again and accidentally played the English dub. The song at the beginning of the episode was completely different, so I fast-forwarded to where it originally was sung:
I can understand changing the lyrics a bit so the pacing in English matches the original animation, but why change the tune completely? Was the voice actor just unable to sing it properly to the tune of ‘Kanon in D’? This can’t be it, since the point Kino quickly makes is that he sings pretty poorly anyway.
Was the idea to ‘Americanize’ it? Copeland’s music, especially ‘Appalachian Spring’, is certainly considered to be the definition of the American style of classical music. Of course, it wasn’t like the original was Japanese anyway - Pachelbel was German, and this piece especially is pretty ubiquitous around the world.
Maybe I’m just being too nit-picky here and ADV did it better. If the point to be made was that Kino sucks at singing, the ‘Appalachian Spring’ version certainly pounds it home - it sounds like an amateurish song a child would create.
In my opinion the ‘Kanon’ version was actually quite nice. I think that she was just a little spellbound and caught off guard when she responded to him. She didn’t think his singing was that bad, but her first inclination was simply to agree with what he’d just said. It certainly explains both of their reactions a little better.
Video notes: Show ▼
A lot of the most recent DVDs I’ve bought sit on my shelves unopened. In many cases this is because I’ve already got the fansubs for this series and prefer them for the convenience, among other reasons. I’ll always at least check out the first disk, though, if only to compare it to the fansub version.
Out of curiosity I’ll check out the English dub. With a very few rare exceptions I can only listen to about five minutes of the dub before I switch back. When there is singing involved, it can get pretty interesting. My favorite part of Haruhi was the concert where they perform ‘God Knows’. It’s a great song and I actually prefer the stripped-down version to the full radio release. I knew there was no way for the English version to come close, but I had to see it anyway. It was terrible. I haven’t listened to any more of the dub for that one, and in fact the only DVD I opened was the 4th one - the other three are still in shrink-wrap. I liked a.f.k.’s translations better anyway.
At least they stayed with the original music on that one. That’s not always the case. Sometimes I can’t figure out a reason behind why they would change something like that (a good example occurs in Kino’s Journey, but that’s a topic for another post).
Recently I was watching the DVD version of Welcome to the NHK and I noticed something odd. It was one of the funniest scenes in the first episode, but something just didn’t seem right. I started this series on DVD, and only grabbed the subs when it looked like ADV might be dropping it. Since then ADV has come through with the third and fourth DVDs, although the other two aren’t even available for pre-order yet. I’ve rewatched it a couple of times, sticking with the subs out of convenience. The odd thing is that although I watched the DVD version first, the sub seemed like the correct version. It took me a little bit before I realized what they’d changed. Here are the two versions - see if you can spot the difference:
Broadcast version (excuse the French, I’m still having problems converting mkvs):
DVD version:
Did you see it? Show ▼
BTW, I’m at about 95% for finding the tools I need for video editing under Linux. The only problem I’m having is with files in the mkv container. Ffmpeg can convert them, but the audio sync is off by about 5 seconds. I’ve found an option that will fix that lag, but it leaves both the video and audio very choppy.
Other than that I’m really starting to like the command line version of ffmpeg. It’s a lot more powerful than the GUI version I used on my Macs, and if I start with the right source (anything but mkvs as far as I can tell) I can get what I want in one swoop - trimming, adjusting quality for filesize, and converting to the proper output format. It generally takes about 30 seconds, compared to the hour or two I used to waste on my Mac. Rather than try the command line version of Handbreak I tried out dvd::rip, and it works like a champ.
I’m still going to play around with both for a while, but I think Ubuntu has won the OS war over Windows Vista. It took a couple of days to get it configured the way I wanted, but now it can handle any task I need it for painlessly, and works wonderfully as a Media PC as well. I finally managed to encounter some Vista compatibility problems, and now that I’ve run them both for a while I can really notice the Linux speed advantage. There are certain apps that require Windows so I’ll keep it around, but I’ll probably be running Ubuntu 90% of the time, which is what I suspected when I was designing this box. Linux has come a long ways since my first try with it back in ‘98. It’s probably not quite ready to be the desktop replacement for a casual user, but if you’re comfortable with the command line it can do anything you’d want with a minimum of fuss.
I think this might take a while. There may be a good video editor out there for Linux with a nice GUI, but so far I haven’t found it. LiVES comes close, but unfortunately I can’t get it to see audio from the mkv or avi containers, although it grabs the video just fine.
I decided to go to the old standby of ffmpeg. Compiling and installing was relatively painless once I found the latest build. Unlike the very nice ffmpex GUI for OSX, it seems that this is command-line only for Linux. I’ll have to do some work to learn all of the various commands, but that’s not a show-stopper. Unfortunately it looks like ffmpeg doesn’t recognize the mkv format, which kind of sucks. Seems to work fine with avis, though. Let’s see if I can do a one-step process and create an flv file directly from an avi. Here we go:
Perfect! That was a pretty easy example to start with, since I just grabbed the first eight seconds from episode one of SZS. Here’s the code:
$ ffmpeg -i ‘ Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei - 01.avi’ -t 8 -ar 22050 -f flv -s 592×336 szs2.flv
The important bits there are the ‘-t 8′, which tells it to grab eight seconds of video, the ‘-ar 22050′ which sets the audio bitrate, and the ‘-s 592×336′ which scales down the size to what I use to post to the web. In the past I’ve always used another editor (mpeg steamclip usually) to crop the file down to what I wanted, and then just used ffmpegx to convert it to flash. This saves a step, and I can select the start point with ‘-itsoffset’ and use ‘-t’ to set the duration, thus only converting the bit I want. There are a buttload of other options for setting the video and audio quality, which will in a large part determine the final filesize.
Now I’ve just got to figure out a way to convert an mkv to a usable filetype. I haven’t even bothered with trying to grab something off of a DVD yet. At least gFTP works well, so I can upload files to my server at least.
U: Well, mkvs work now. Sort of. Unfortunately the audio/video synch is off, and it seems to want to convert about 7 more seconds of video than I tell it to. Maybe converting to a standard movie format first?
I played around for a while manually changing resolution settings, but still couldn’t fix my problem. I finally just connected the PC to the computer via the DVI cable instead of HDMI and instant success! The highest resolution I could get it to display was 1280×720, so I went back into the xorg.conf file and created another one which matched my LCD TV @ 1360×768. Sure looks pretty now.
Now that I’ve got the problems sorted out, it’s time to play around with some of the Linux apps. Gimp is working fine for image editing, and I’ve been trying out Kaffeine for video playback. It looks nice and has a better control setup than Zoom or MPC. The only problem right now is that subtitles are really small in fullscreen mode. I’m sure there’s a way to tweak them but I haven’t found it yet.
Now that I’ve got the sound working I also need to find an app to play my mp3s. I just installed iTunes in Vista, but I’ll need to find something different here. I also need to find some video software so I can rip, burn, edit, and convert. That’ll probably take a while, but most of the apps I used under OSX should work fine here, and I imagine there are some better solutions out there if I look around for a bit.
I also need to play around with the built-in FTP app, so expect me to be posting a few random videos/songs while I sort it out.
I figure today is the last day I can work on it, since I’ve got to start packing up for a move next week. I’ll probably be laptop-only for a couple of weeks, at least.
U:Well Brasero works fine to burn DVDs. I rebooted in Vista to make sure the disk worked there as well. Wow, the display is about 1000 times better under Vista using the DVI out. So much for the HDMI.
Another non-anime post as I continue working on my media-pc…
Linux is running well enough that I can post with it at least. I’ve still got some problems to fix, though.
Now that I’m happy with my Vista install, I decided to risk it all by installing Ubuntu. It was pretty painless, actually. I gave it a 50-gig partition and let it rip from the boot CD. The installation went off without a hitch and didn’t cause any discomfort to Vista. I’m letting GRUB run the boot and Vista doesn’t seem to have a problem with it. That’s the biggest hurdle I was worrying about, so now I just have to get into the weeds.
Ubuntu had no problem with my wireless keyboard/mouse, and happily used the ethernet on my mobo to connect to the internet. So getting drivers won’t be a problem, at least.
The first problem was with the graphics card, but simply selecting ‘hardware drivers’ let me know that it could download and install the NVIDIA binaries. That was pretty painless, and now I’ve got a very crisp display instead of the horrendous safe mode I was running under. In fact, it looks superb - just like the display when I’m running my mac on the TV. Vista is slightly eye-straining in comparison, which makes me think I’m going to have to go back and do a little more tweaking there.
There’s still a problem, though - it doesn’t fit the screen. About 1/2″ gets cut off on all four sides, which eliminates the menus. I can blindly fish and click which is enough to get the options I want since I’m familiar with the layout, but I imagine I’d be lost if I wasn’t familiar with the layout already. My first inclination was to try and adjust the screen resolution. That didn’t turn out so well.
When adjusting the resolution, a menu pops up which is very similar to both Windows and OSX - it asks if you’d like to keep the new settings, or revert, and also has the standard countdown of 15 seconds before it will automatically revert. This would be a pretty good failsafe if it worked, but unfortunately it keeps the new setting regardless. That meant several reboots during my trial and error phase. Unfortunately I’ve yet to find a resolution that actually works - 1920×1080 looks the best, but has that 1/2″ problem I mentioned earlier. 1280×720 gets me back the edges of the menu bars, but most of them are still off-screen.
I’d think this might be a problem with the TV - it has many adjustable settings for a PC, but it expects that the input will be via DVI. Right now it thinks my computer is a DVD player because I’m using the HDMI input. I had no problem setting it up under Vista, though, so I’m a little stumped. Right now my mac is still connected to the DVI port, so I might swap those and see if that solves anything.
Along with the video problems, I’m not getting any audio via the HDMI. I guess I’m asking a little too much from Ubuntu there, although Vista handled it fine. I don’t normally use the internal speakers on my TV anyway. I’ve been running the optical out from the MB directly to my home theater system and don’t think I’d want to downgrade from that kind of audio quality anyway.
Unfortunately Ubuntu doesn’t seem to recognize my sound card either, so right now it’s running silent. That should be a quick fix, and is next on my list after I figure out the display settings.
On a better note, I can see both internal drives and use them, even though they are formatted in NFTS. I’d heard that was a problem for Linux, but apparently Ubuntu 8.04 has overcome that problem. It also sees my external FAT32 drive fine, which I expected.
On a whim I tried the bundled movie player on some HD fansubs. It needed a codec installed, but that was just a click away and it seems to play pretty nicely now. The subtitles look really nice at least - hopefully I’ll be able to manage some sound shortly.
Well, off to solve some problems. At least I can now claim I’ve made my first post under Linux.
U: Command line is my friend. Several problems solved, but still working on the display and sound. I get sound fine through the headphone-out, so the card is working fine at least. I’ve just got to figure out a way to get the optical out working under Ubuntu.
U: Sound finally fixed. Still working on the video, though…
I’m finally back home. I took a week after I finished finals to go visit family (and attend my nephew’s 1st birthday party, which was a lot of fun. That kid has a great arm - when he gets a little older I’ll have to start recruiting him for Tulane Baseball…)
When I got back I needed to catch up on the fansubs for the shows I’m following this season. Now that my Windows machine is up and running, I decided to check out uTorrent. I’ve heard that it is the best client out there, but since it isn’t Mac or Linux capable I hadn’t had a chance to check it out.
I’ve got a speedy connection, and for a long time Azureus ripped along quite satisfactorily. Something happened when they became Vuze, though, and my download speeds went south. I’d still max out my upload, but I was averaging about 40 kB/s down per file no matter how well seeded a torrent was. If I had several going, I’d very rarely break 100 kB/s total. I tweaked every option I could, and was beginning to suspect my ISP was bandwidth-throttling (although it would be odd to limit downloads instead of uploads…)
I installed uTorrent and started grabbing the torrents for the series I’d missed while I was away. By the time I’d grabbed the third one I realized that the first two were already finished! Granted, they were relatively fresh and well seeded, but that was a new record for me. I played around a bit and seemed to max out at about 1.5mB/s. Swell.
I’m averaging about 2.5 minutes to download a full episode right now. That’s blazing fast. My upload is the same under uTorrent as it was under Azureus - about 130kB/s. That means about half an hour until I’m at a 1:1 ratio. I generally seed for a lot longer anyway, which brings up an interesting moral dilemma.
I’ve been through the whole ‘fansubs = stealing’ argument many times before. I’ll admit that I’m a thief. Any excuses I can provide are just ways of justifying my actions, and trying to squeeze some gray out of a black and white issue. That doesn’t work, which is why I admit what I’m doing is stealing.
Still, I’ve been able to sleep at night.
For one, I’m not going to be arrested for downloading content that isn’t licensed in the US, and many times never will be.
Few people read this blog, and only a small fraction of those readers actually respect my opinion enough to check out a series I really like. Still, I’d like to delude myself into thinking that my cheerleading for a series like Sola had some small impact in getting it licensed here in the US (if BV-USA will ever deliver, that is). If Myself, Yourself were to get licensed I’d take it as a personal victory, since I’m pretty much alone on that one.
I haven’t counted the DVDs, but I’d estimate that my collection is well over 500 disks now. A while back I posted a photo of my anime DVD cabinet, and that’s now spilled over to almost entirely fill another one. Granted, I’ve bought a lot of them during various fire sales, but I’d estimate that I’ve spent at least $10,000 on anime DVDs. (Writing it down like that makes me realize what an expensive hobby it is - I’ve probably only spent half of that on my brewery, and only my firearms collection can top it money-wise.)
I don’t buy figurines, or other related merchandise (well, I have bought quite a few OSTs…), but I’d put my DVD collection up against any Otaku out there and would expect to come out on top almost every time.
I’ve been able to justify watching fansubs by claiming I support the industry by buying DVDs. I’ve even justified grabbing fansubs for licensed series - when I got caught up in Welcome to the NHK and realized it was on the ADV ‘maybe’ list I found a torrent and grabbed it. I’m still buying all of the disks the day they come out, so ‘no harm no foul’, right?
Maybe not.
If fansubs are driving the US anime distributors out of business, then I’ve probably been one of their worst enemies despite being one of their best customers.
Over the last year I’ve relegated my Mac-mini to being a seeding box. I just opened up Azureus and looked at the statistics. Since the last time I re-booted the machine it has been up for 249 days. During that time, I’ve downloaded over 100 GB worth of fansubs. During that same time I’ve uploaded over 1.4 TB of the same, since I’m constantly seeding.
I’d never thought about this before - since I had the bandwidth, I just assumed it was common courtesy to seed. Other than donations, this was another way to help out the fansub groups and show them some appreciation, I thought.
I’ve been able to justify my behavior because I buy the DVDs once they are licensed. But for every copy of a fansubbed series I’ve downloaded, I’ve provided over eight more copies to others. Are they doing the same as me, and buying the series when it finally gets released? Probably not.
I suppose I could say that if that’s the case they’d have never bought it anyway, and thus aren’t taking any profits from the US distributors. That rings hollow, though, and makes me feel pretty shitty inside.
I felt OK about what I was doing and hadn’t given any deep thought until now.
Did I kill Geneon? Did I drive ADV to the straights they are in now?
Not by myself, but I surely contributed. With a well intentioned smile I drove my little knife just as deeply into their backs as everyone else did.
The realist in me can shrug off this guilt - it’s survival of the fittest, and the outdated business model these companies were following was doomed to an evolutionary dead-end. When a fansub group consisting of a few college kids can provide a superior product in days rather than the months or years it would take an established company to provide a lesser product the writing is on the wall. Adapt or die.
It’s a seachange, and we’re only seeing the beginning. I don’t know where we’ll be in five years, but I know that it will be better for both the fans and the creators in the end, and we’ll find a balance.
Along the way, though, I hurt those who gave me the most, and I’m sorry.
I’m still going to be downloading fansubs for now, but maybe I’ll just go for a 1:1 ratio. Call it a temporary bandage for my guilt.