Of course when I quickly go back through some episodes looking for those errors I can't find them. But trust me. In the scripts currently circulating there are errors where "dream" is spelled "deeam" then "dweaa" the next line. Sometimes it goes on for 2-3 episodes in a row with multiple words. Along with odd use of quotes in places. How does this even make it past a spot check? There were tons of errors. I understand checking everything in a 26 episode TV anime can get boring but surely someone watched it before it got sent out for distro, right? I notice a lot of easy to avoid errors in video/audio portions of a lot of shows.

Don't get me wrong I'm happy someone tried to provide it and did it for (mostly) free. But there is always room to improve.

Basically, I wanted to see if any other a/v nerds were around here that wanted to join forces and work on some things together. Moon Phase felt like the best shot of getting interest since it could use a once over anyway.

At the moment I'm slowly working on; MahoAko, Puni-chan, BPS and a once over of Onimai's script. Along with some other shows I grabbed raws for but don't want to list now because there is too much on my plate already. A friend has been doing the bulk of the work on Onimai's scripts. It's mostly a basic script clean up. Most of this stuff already has a decent TL and the scripts just need some minor spell checking or timing/pacing once over. Others could benefit from a new encode since a better source came out since it was last done or the encode wasn't that great (but usually watchable). BPS is the exception because I need to OCR the hardsubs from an encode I did decades ago as I lost the original script files years ago.

I'd like to set some modernized standards where each release gets two "editions".

First edition would be the general release designed to play on all devices released in the last 10-15 years. It would be designed for direct play on cell phones, PCs/laptops and on home streaming servers like Jellyfin/Plex. This would be the "play anywhere" edition. Track order would be standardized to solve the every group does its own thing with audio/subtitle track order problem. Usual .ass subtitles but at least one .srt track required for compatibility with devices that can't/aren't powerful enough to render more complicated .ass stuff. Either AAC or Opus audio codec required for audio tracks. Some other misc. things (mkv container of course).

Second edition would be a (near)lossless version with uncompressed audio and/or remuxed from source audio and whichever near-lossless video codec we agree on. Idea is HQ raw for other groups in the future that might want to produce their own version. Pure archival is the goal basically with mild filtering of video when/where needed.

Scripts and everything else released would be released to public with notice that they're free to use/modify/re-release/whatever the subtitltes, video, audio and anything else included to their heart's content. Always room for improvemnt.

A final note on standards;

For a long time I've been thinking about making a subset of the mkv container (similar to webm) or just some basic rules on how things are put into mkv container for anime. There is a wide varation about where people put things and how they label them. This breaks auto detection of audio and subtitle tracks in a lot of players and on a lot of devices. No mattter what you set your player to default you usually end up in a situation where you get the first audio track (usually English these days) along with a subtitle track you didn't expect. A lot of people don't even bother to label the tracks or set the proper language for them. This results in having to mess around with changing tracks all of the time on TV based players no matter if you want Japanese+subs or English+signs only.

A lot of people even include batch scripts with their releases now to appease both sides of the dubs vs. subs folks. But you still have to check each and every release since everyone is using something different. So I've been thinking why not adopt some rules about data track orders and hope it catches on? I don't want to post a spec here now. But the jist is rules like "Original audio track is always track #10" and "English Signs+Subs is always track 21" and "Full English subtitles are always track 20" and so on. Those wide gaps in numbering are so you have room for other languages and multipe types of data in the same track types (e.g. Main Japanese Audio, English dub, then a bunch of commentary tracks). The spec wouldn't be that hard to put together it's getting people to follow it that's always the problem (hence why I thought new container format would help it along but that's a whole other can of worms in itself).

At any rate I'm fambling again. Just been giving some thought to fansubs (or just straight warez these days I guess) and wanted to see if anyone was interested in helping out or had thoughts about the general state of things. It isn't all bad of course. I've just noticed some areas where we can improve as a whole. Fansubs used to ride the bleeding edge of a/v stuff for many years. While AV1 is around and people are using it I've noticed some regressions on the whole container front as of late. Although I'll be the first to admit I don't miss ordered chapters. But I feel like we can do better than just cramming whatever we feel like into mkv and calling it good.

We had a thread about subbing stuff before, but it never really made any progress. I've done fansubbing before and would like to do it more (there are like three sequel series I need to do but lack TL help for), though I never bothered much with the encoding side of things. I don't think ambitious attempts to break the mold with how groups work is a great idea, you avoid drama by getting decent people involved and personal connections are paramount for getting people to help with projects they're not particularly invested in (it's easier to give when you know it'll let you take later).

Also, I do use a group tag and try to build a reputation, not because I attentionwhore with it, but because it helps people to know what they're getting when they grab that torrent.

>>122424
>surely someone watched it before it got sent out for distro
The issue is one of time. Even a 12 episode anime takes a minimum of 6 hours per pass to QC, so unless you really, really like an anime and are in no rush to release then you want to minimize the number of times you have to go through and rewatch it. When errors get through on my releases, it's typically because I only did one pass where I was trying to fix typos, timing issues, enhance typesetting, and delocalize/tlc all at once with only some spot checks after. If you've got a pool of skilled QCers with nothing better to do than immediately spend a whole evening reviewing your release, that's great, but in my experience you're more likely to end up having to do it yourself. Compounding that is that a lot of BD subs probably just take the TV subs with some slight retiming, so all the errors that come from racing for quick releases are still there.

OniMai was okay, but do I really want to give it my undivided attention for another watch? Not really. I might give MahouAko another go just for BD changes, but I'm not in love with the idea and it's popular enough I'm inclined to leave it to other people.

So basically, I'm willing to help with checking things over and uploading/seeding, just not on Moon Phase for someone I don't owe a huge favor to.

Wow, what an elaborate April Fool's thread!

But seriously: I can help with some of it. I'm fine doing script reading and testing out stuff, although I think my setup of Windows 10 and basic MPC-HC isn't very unusual. I'm decent enough at taking screenshots and making comparison frames so I could at least compare different encodes at different times? I'm in AB (although that's not rare here) so I could help find stuff, but my upload is 1MB so I can't really you upload much. I'm someone that really lacks motivation and drive, though, so I should say that in advance.

And yeah, Moon Phase's subs are, uh, interesting. I kind of just accept them, I guess.
Looking at my drive I have the following:
Tsukuyomi Moon Phase (DVD Dual-Audio Opus)
[mottoj] Tsukuyomi Moon Phase (R2DVD 1024x576 HEVC FLAC)
[Exiled-Destiny] Tsukuyomi Moon Phase_ (and its DVD special)
[Arigatou] Tsukuyomi Moon Phase DVD Special
月咏 (no subs on this of course)

To my untrained eyes the mottoj one looks the best, but I'm no expert.

I can always help with some testing and grammar checking, also with initially seeding as well. Not with posting them though, didn't get my Nyaa account created in time because I didn't think it'd be something time gated.

Also if you need help tracking down old DVDs or BDs and stuff I could try my best to find stuff and acquire it. I'm fairly well off so as long as they're not insanely priced old collector marked up editions I should be able to get stuff. Also it's nothing really worth nothing right now since it's not old and probably will be one of the most available BDs, but I ordered Mahoako on prerelease if there's any interest in doing work on that.

I'm back. I got really busy with IRL stuff this last month and a half.

First off, to whomever came to IRC offering to help source raws I do appreciate it. They ran off when I suggested maybe ghost leeching was a better option than forcing them to download then upload about 3TB+ of data. I didn't have a private server set-up to hold that much data at the time (still don't). Was merely trying to save you some trouble. I understand if people don't want to risk private tracker accounts despite how much I hate what modern anime distro has become. If you're ever worried about something like that simply say no and we can work something else I'm out I'm sure. I'm going to split my replies over multiple posts about on-going projects instead of one long novel. Dump of text incoming.

First up let's talk about Moon Phase;

As far as I know the DVDs are still the best source out there. I managed to track down a proper raw from nyaa today but it'll be awhile before I have it downloaded since I have about 2TB worth of stuff in queue. This one here: https://nyaa.si/view/861541

I can handle encoding/muxing/etc. The main help needed is checking the translation and editing the existing scripts. I'll dump out the raw .ass files from existing fansubs today or tomorrow and upload them to MEGA for anyone that would like to help. I've watched about half of the [mottoj] release (most popular on public trackers) which uses a translation by some group called [YukinoAi]. It's FILLED with errors which I assume are from a bad OCR or simple laziness. The next most popular release used OCR->ASS subtitles as well. Along with removing most honorifics and other minor changes. I haven't checked it yet but I assume it's the same script from the release I have (https://nyaa.si/view/780760). I also need to grab the older fansub script to compare it to the OCR: https://nyaa.si/view/327132

Once I gather the various versions of the scripts I'll upload them all to MEGA. From there we can decide which translation we want to base our own edit upon. I'll reply when I have all that done with the MEGA link once I've been able to quickly go through the scripts. From there someone could help TL check. Then I'd get started on encoding everything from DVD Raw.

Next up; Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha

The guy that helps out with Onimai has expressed _a lot_ of interest in releasing this show (and the later seasons). The [Fete Rider] release is good but it's in Hi10 x264 along with FLAC audio. Which means it runs natively on basically nothing that isn't mpv and MPC-HC. I was forced to do a quick transcode for my media server for this show. Something I try to avoid if at all possible. In other words since I'm having to re-encode everything anyway I might as well do a proper encode from a proper raw.

The plan was to start with season 01 once obtaining some good raws and maybe doing some minor editing to the subtitle scripts. Since some of the font choices used by the group that did it last aren't that great (or well supported by some devices).

The issue is it's impossible to source raws for this show outside of U2's private tracker. I need to look at both the DVD and BDMV raw to determine if the BD/upscale is worth using or if we'd be better off just using the DVD raw and leaving it in its native resolution. Which is what I prefer unless the BDMV was mastered/upscaled properly.

This was the show I was talking to that other anon about when he offered to source the raws for me. But when I tried to save him the trouble of downloading+uploading it someplace just so I could have a look he vanished and I haven't seen him again.

I would really appreciate it if someone could source both raws from season one for me. Even if we end up using the DVD raw for video the audio from the BDMV is probably much higher quality and would be better to use as the source for our audio encodes. Basically, no matter what we end up using as a source I need both.

I can't remember how large the BDMV+DVD raws are combined but I know it's probably over 1-2TB. If someone could check for me and let me know I'll try to make arrangements for a private ftp server I have to have enough space for you to upload for me. Or perhaps we can work out some way to share it between ourselves directly using p2p.

The guy that helped out and does the bulk of the work on Onimai releases is a huge fan of this series and I'd really like to re-release it for him and for the rest of the public. Since the only good release at the moment is in a format that isn't widely supported by hardware decoders, set-top boxes and media servers. We'll probably end up doing all the movies and later seasons in time.

Next: Mahou Shoujo ni Akogarete

I've been working on doing a release of this one since the first BD released. I'm through the first 3 episodes so far since I haven't been able to work on it for the last several weeks. I've fixed some of the minimal issues from the BDMV (mainly aa) as well as improved the existing translation/subtitle script released by [Chihiro]. I actually offered to work with [Chihiro] during the original airing. But we were unable to agree on a way to communicate that didn't include discord (despite their website promoting their IRC channel and them clearly being able to talk through it). As such I gave up on working with them back then.

I was content to work on this myself and would still be doing so but the issue now is _no one will share the BDMV raw_ for vol2 of the BD on a public tracker. The first one was posted the same day it hit private trackers. But now people seem to be hoarding access to it so others can't do a proper release that includes subtitles that aren't a CR rip. Which as I'm sure most know caused a bit of drama when the show was airing.

I was also unable to secure a copy of the actual disc myself since it was sold out most everywhere last I looked around. Even if I could get it shipped in now it would take many weeks and frankly I don't have a lot of cash to be blowing on such things at this time.

I basically need someone that is willing to secure raw BDMVs for this series going forward. Unless some kind soul decides to post copies beyond vol1 on a tracker like nyaa. Which I've been seeding religiously for the last month by the way.

I'm running into this issue with multiple shows lately any time I announce I'm working on something in certain circles. I try not to be paranoid and assume the best in people. But there is a certain group of people that like to prevent other people from releasing stuff and do petty things to prevent other groups from releasing their work on both public and private trackers as I'm sure you all know. If I didn't have a life I'd go into their private chats and come back with logs to prove it. But I have better things to do with my time.

Anyway, if this show interests you and you'd like to see a proper high quality release for it please let me know if you're interested in helping secure raws and do quality checking before it's released to the public. Once I finish episode 4 I'll post what I have so far so you can at least have the first four episodes with a good translation + slightly improved quality over the BDMV. Note that pic related isn't the best representation of quality as I had to compress the image when I originally captured it to post it at anyone place that doesn't accept large files.

Next: Puni-chan

I've been working on this since last year and need to get back to it soon. I have secured raws (DVD) for this show so the bulk of the work is minor filtering and re-writing the subtitle scripts. Not much to say at the moment other than it's in the queue and I expect to have it done sometime between now and the end of fall. It really needs a re-release since the original subtitle scripts are pretty rough and the "official" scripts aren't much better. If you'd like to quality/TL check do let me know.

Next Next: Battle Programmer Shirase

Again I've secured raws thanks to a kind anon. I'm working on it off and on. But the DVD/BD releases were very different from the TV airing. Multiple episodes were combined in odd ways. The OP/EDs were changed. All my original scripts from the original TV airing need to be re-done and the raws need to be spliced/merged to restore the show from the butchered DVD/BD version. Thankfully, all the content is there it's just a lot of scripting work to get it back to how it's supposed to be. Like Puni-chan it's something I plan to try to have out before the end of the year.

Forgot to sage last post apologizes. Last one from now although I have some other stuff on the back burner. No point in mentioning those until work starts.

#### Onimai

After months of trying I've still been unable to secure a BDMV raw for the GERMAN release of Onimai. The reason we'd like to have this raw is the fact that quality may be improved over the JPBD which was frankly not that good. We'd also like to get a copy of the German dub on the BD for inclusion in the next Onimai archive update which should be coming out before Christmas.

We've been doing a lot of work on the Onimai archive since the last release on Christmas day. We're currently going through all the subtitle scripts and improving the translation and the flow of the English. We've re-timed a lot of them to fix slight errors. We've added and fixed some minor errors in signs. They are so far removed from the CR subtitles now that they might as well been done from scratch. We're up to episode 5 thus far.

We've also improved the quality of the video encodes by building our own custom fork of x265 and taking advantage of some experimental and new options that proved to be much better in testing. The scripts used for filtering have also been slightly adjusted to improve video quality and compression ratio. But we _really really_ want to take a look at the German BDMV raw to see if things could be improved further. We know the German BD has some hardsubbed portions so our plan (if the video source is better) is to splice in video from the JPBD for those sections. In addition we'd OCR the hardsubs from the German BD and provide them as a "signs" subtitle track for people that prefer the German dub.

Further more: The next archive release will include an additional commentary track for episode 1 (announced on Neko's twitter a few days ago). Along with subtitle tracks/translations for many other languages that were not included in the original anon release.

Outside of the anime: The archive will get many misc. updates. Most every manga chapter will be replaced with a slightly higher quality version with better scans when possible. Some early chapters are being re-done since the anons working on those now weren't doing the scanlations originally. Several doujins and spin-off mangas will be included as well.

The video TL notes will be re-done with softsubs so people can translate them into their own language. They will also no longer be broken up into multiple files. Instead one video file will be produced with sections/chapters for each episode. This will make it easier to view them on media servers like PleX/Jellyfin as well as sharing it outside of the torrent archive itself.

Basically, most everything in the archive will get either a re-touch or an update. Minato-kun's spin-off manga will also be included of course.

We're also hopeful that more Drama CDs will be included. It just depends on if we have the time to translate more of them after re-working the anime's scripts. If you'd like to help TL or QC please let me know.

If we could only get one raw right now the German Onimai BD is the one we want. I know it's up on U2 or maybe AB. I've seen other people talking about it (and gloating about keeping it "private" so a certain group of anons can't get access to it).

Also while I try not to give attention to certain people: I've found it really pathetic that a certain group of people have been doing everything in their power to keep the anon release blacklisted on several websites in favor of a release they _admit_ is not good. Same people admit they can't TL check because they don't know Japanese and admit they can barely speak English. So my question is: Why are they bothering to release this show in English in the first place? I've even seen them talking about how they don't like the series at all. Why waste your time? Further more; Why shit talk someone else's work then lift the codec settings they used for your next few releases? I don't get it.

On a positive note:

The next Onimai archive release will be split over two torrents. The first torrent will be the full archive. The second torrent will be the anime only and some related extras. If you download/seed the first torrent you'll be able to seed the smaller anime-only one as well.

Again any help is appreciated. Even just watching the release and giving feedback. I wish I could comment on the usual places or answer people's questions. But the nyaa mods are still refusing to even speak with me. Meanwhile, one of the people shitting up the comment sections where they know we can't reply openly admits to buying an account to nyaa, getting caught, getting banned for it and then being given a new account which and I quote "I'm not allowed to comment on how I'm able to still upload to the tracker".

I'm really sick of the cabal/idiot club/"gatekeeping" by the ESL-can't-speak-Japanese-refuse-to-properly-moderate club.

Oh and one other update;

I've been working on the new container format for anime but I don't have spec sheet worked out for people to look at yet. It's going to require some minor modifications to the mkv tools and mpv (and other media players in time). I'll post an update about that once I have some software ready for people to test and look at. I've expanded it beyond just a simple a/v container. I'm working on something for manga in particular which will allow interactivity and some other cool stuff.

The main container format for anime/video will basically be a reduced sub-set of mkv that is kind of like .webm with some more freedom. It's geared towards anime. There will also be a "archival" version of the format geared towards raws. The manga version has a lot of neat tricks like a simple scripting language. But I'll post about that another day (in another thread) when I have more time and I'm further along with this project.

Last but not least: I am working on something to solve this stupid private tracker/sekrit club situation. But it isn't worth mentioning anything about it now due to the fact that I haven't gotten anything set-up yet. But just know. It's coming and I'm hopeful it might solve a lot of issues we've been facing over the last 1-2 decades with a certain small group of people being asses towards everyone else and hoarding stuff that shouldn't be hoarded. I'm confidant I can provide a much better "service" while flying under the radar of the copyright trolls and avoiding the __mysterious__ DDOS problem that seems to befall everyone that decides to open a nyaa-clone. It will be something between the current private trackers and the old nyaa back when registration was open and the "cabal" wasn't in charge. You'll even get to become an anime girl when you sign up for it. Although most interactions with other users through the service will be 100% anonymous to avoid the old namefag issues.

Again something I'll post about when I'm further along. I have more projects than I have time (and money). Thankfully, on the money front some kind anons that seem richer than me have offered to help with paying the bills. But so far I haven't been able to bring myself to accept their charity. Perhaps when I'm further along with that project I'll be more willing to accept their generous offers.

I hope everyone has been well since my last visit. Remember to always stay comfy and positive in life. Don't let the negative people drag you down or ruin the fun!!

>>122454
>but I ordered Mahoako on prerelease if there's any interest in doing work on that.

I should have paid closer attention before replying here; >>124416

I hope you're still around. Yes, absolutely. I need a copy of every last one of those discs. I'll bump this show to the top of the work load if you're willing to provide me with the raws.

>>124412
>I managed to track down a proper raw from nyaa today but it'll be awhile before I have it downloaded since I have about 2TB worth of stuff in queue.

One note about this: I bumped the DVD raw for Moon Phase up to the top of my queue. Currently, I'm managing to download at the blazing fast speed of 20kbps-500kbps due to the lack of seeds and the one good seed throttling my speed very aggressively. So I expect it to be several days before I have it downloaded. Whenever I do manage to finish I'll come back and report on the quality and start working on filtering it. I'll seed it for as long as I can. But there is only one other peer who I can seem to push more than 30kbps to at the moment. So that's not helping matters and I think the sole seed thinks I have bad upload speed. While my upload bandwidth isn't that great due to my ISP/location I assure you it isn't nearly that bad.

I'm _always_ willing to seed things to a good ratio and basically forever upon request. The main issue is it's impossible for me to fulfill such requests any longer. I took multiple breaks from the "scene" between 2006-2012. Then later from 2014-2020 or so. The first time I was living so far in the sticks we didn't even have internet access beyond 14kbps dial-up on a good day. The second time I was working so much that I basically didn't use the internet at all.

When I returned it seemed like everything had changed for the worst. Private trackers were suddenly a thing along with people selling snake oil (VPNs) and people hoarding data for no reason. Public trackers had all closed. RAWs became nearly impossible to source from XDCC bots. All the old private ftp servers I used to enjoy access to were gone. Everyone had moved on to locked down "platforms" like discord and social media. Things I refuse to participate in for various reasons I'll spare you the novel on right now. Also, the usual haunts suffered from de-platformings/got overrun with bots/were now dead thanks to discord and social media. Both times I left the internet for a bit and returned it wasn't the same when I came back. I suppose I'm getting old. Hell half of this stuff I can't even make an account on anymore because it demands a cell phone number. I refuse to carry a cell phone since about 2018. I do have a landline. But none of those services support verification using one. Aside from Apple strangely. Which I only know about because they thankfully let me open an Apple account to set-up an AppleTV I was forced to buy to have cable installed at my new house.

It's so bad now I can't even watch combo videos for my favorite fighting games because they're "discord fighters" and all the stuff that used to be on the web/wikis/forums has been moved to discord and locked behind channels that require a verified account with 2FA/cell phone number to access. Requesting access from moderation is useless. They either ignore you or claim you're "just a troll" because they can't fathom the idea of someone refusing to "get with the times".

For what it's worth; I originally got into fansubbing back around 1994. My first job with a group was distro. As-in real distro where I made copies of our fansubs for people that sent us either 1st generation VHS tapes in exchange for shows we had or send money to cover the costs of tapes+shipping. When digisubs started to become a thing in 1998 or so I produced some of the first transfers from VHS -> RealMedia and .asf files. Then later on when DivX 3.11 ;-) came out around 1999 I did some of the first VHS->DivX transfers and helped out with some of the first real digisub releases like Love Hina (one of the most oversubbed shows ever). All of that is why I originally got into editing video, timing and started taking Japanese as a second language. So I've been around for a long time and care a great deal with quality of the work and making friends while doing it. I also take a lot of pride in the work. Anything worth doing is worth doing right!

I've seen the "community" change so much over the years. Usually for the worse. I'm happy I wasn't around to see what the so-called cabal did to the "community" during those years I was away dealing with stuff IRL. Now that I'm older and frankly unable to do the type of manual labor I did for years anymore I was excited to have time to devote to this kind of stuff again. But I've found it very frustrating dealing with the modern "community". Not you guys though. You're okay in my book.

I just find it very sad that we have more access to content than ever before. ISPs offer speeds faster than ever before. Yet I'm finding it harder these days to source a good raw than I did back in the late 90s/early 2000s when I was forced to use Japanese P2P services to track down some crappy low quality raw some Japanese guy didn't properly encode. I should be able to source anything I need now on my own. Alas I can't because people put up road blocks for no other reason than to make themself feel like they're a member of some exclusive club or that they're important. If you ask me those clubs aren't very exclusive at all considering they have dedicated general threads on places like 4/g/ and reddit _EVERYDAY_.

Locking away data like that goes against every ethic I was taught when I was getting into computer science and the "scene" for the first time back in the 90s. I am hopeful that sometime in the next few years I'll be able to maybe do something about these types of problems.

Again I appreciate any and all help and hope you've all had a good day.

>>124423
>Last but not least: I am working on something to solve this stupid private tracker/sekrit club situation.

I know I ramble and said I would talk about this more later once I had something worth showing off. But I wanted to add one important point about this while it was fresh in my mind.

The goal for this project/platform I'm working on is to capture the feeling of the old anime clubs I used to belong to IRL. Back in the the good old days when colleges and high schools had real anime clubs with a library of stuff you'd never heard of, would have weekly screenings/watch-togethers, would trade tapes with each other and would translate shows into English so they could be traded or sold (at cost) to club members and clubs from other schools.

Well that and the early BBS/Forum/Imageboard culture I adore from the days when I first got access to the internet. Back when dial-in BBS systems, USENET and later web forums/boards allowed you to talk to real people and have actual discussions instead of getting flooded with shitposting and bots. I'm sure people here have noticed I type fast and post "walls of text". Back in the day nearly every post was a "wall of text" or a "novel". Although we did have our fun flamewars. But every thread didn't devolve into one.

So what I'm basically planning is a "platform" where initially a few good people will be given access. These people will be given invites they can share with their friends. The hope is through word-of-mouth we can build up a club like those old clubs I used to belong to. We keep it quiet from outsiders. We have just a few rules that basically boil down to "be kind to each other". We have a small place for discussion both real-time and like this board here. But we also have a weekly watch-together/stream along with a small p2p network (probably torrent based but maybe IPFS) where we can ensure the otaku content we all enjoy can be archived forever and always available.

The hope is in time it'll grow into something large enough to sustain itself (and the archives) without becoming the fiasco that is existing private trackers. For example, we won't cry over the fact that people outside of the club are helping seed the content in our archives without even realizing there is a club they don't have access to.

But I digress from the point of this thread. It's time for dinner. I'll hopefully come back at some time in the near future and explain more about it once I've finished coding it all.

Just know this: when you're given an invite and sign up you'll be given some multi-choice questions or something produce a seed to be combined with some random data. Based on that you're going to get a username along with a randomly created picture of an anime girl using AI. You'll get your pick of like 10 of them or so. Then you're stuck with them forever. That's now (you) and how you'll be presented within the club. That way even though we have names no one can ever be sure who each other are (aside from typing habits and communication off-site of course). But this name won't be used everywhere on the platform. Just in certain areas where it's allowed. Posting on the boards and in the p2p area will be totally anonymous. You'll be able to create groups for the purpose of releasing stuff on the p2p network. Since tagging things with a group name is very useful in some respects.

Frankly, the details aren't all worked out yet. Most of the software is done I just haven't integrated it all together yet. I try very hard not to dox myself but in the long long ago I helped create some software a lot of people still use to this day. I'm honestly surprised it's still so widely used. I guess people still use it because we did a halfway decent job and people are kind of lazy.

Ultimately, the goal is to have our own little private place that isn't overrun with the problems plaguing the greater internet in 2024. Well that and a p2p network where you can be sure everything on it is of high quality as voted on by the club members. Late but not least. Something that improves the issue of metadata for otaku content. Since places like MAL, anidb and tvdb aren't doing such a great job on that front and that metadata is very useful for people like me that operate private media servers for other people to use. One goal of this new club is to have our own little private Netflix-clone for the content we all enjoy. Every member will be allowed to access it and have a say in what is stored on it.

I know at some point to run something like this is going to require club members to donate money. I _loath_ begging for donations but I can't fund all of this out of my own pocket. I can only promise you this; every donation and what they're spent on will be itemized and available for all other club members to audit. There will be monthly itemized updates for all in-coming and out-going expenses. All moderation actions and moderators will be carefully selected and held accountable for their actions. I've learned a lot over the last several decades running BBSs/forums/boards and other types of websites. I've learned from my mistakes. I am hopeful we can avoid most of them.

But I've rambled too much once again. I was supposed to be at dinner 10 minutes ago. I'll let you all go for now and try to avoid taking this off-topic too much in the future. I just wanted to let everyone know I'm attempting to make a comfy place in the near future. I love this one and I wouldn't dare attempt to lure the users away from here. I'd just like to provide a comfy place where we can access and discuss the content we all enjoy while avoiding the problems that have been plaguing the open web for the last many years. If you've made it this far I know you know exactly what I'm talking about.

I have _a lot_ of software to write/modify over the next several months/years. That's for sure.

>>124411
Cool!
That wasn't me, but I'm in AB and could download/upload stuff. Do be forewarned that my upload is... 1MB/s. Uploading stuff is a pain, but I can set up queues and do it overnight.

>>124412
I don't know how to actually look at that video tech stuff, but the two best releases I have on my drive are the Exiled-Destiny and mottoj R2DVD ones.
The [Exiled-Destiny] release has a higher framerate, but I don't know if it's noticeable since I only just now realized because I wanted to make a frame comparison screenshot. 43000ish frames versus 35000ish. The [mottoj] release also has the nice title cards done by a veritable who's who of the era. The [mottoj] release is higher resolution and seems to have a bit more rows of pixels at the bottom.

The Moon Phase official manga translation famously died after the fan translation was killed off by said official translation. That's a project I'd like to help with someday since I hear it's quite a bit different from the anime.

>The goal for this project/platform I'm working on is to capture the feeling of the old anime clubs I used to belong to IRL.
>...
>Well that and the early BBS/Forum/Imageboard culture I adore from the days when I first got access to the internet.

That sounds really nice! (and the rest of the post too, but I'm too tired to give more of a reply now)

>>124433
>title cards
Err, not title card. I forgot what you called these things at the end. The one with Hazuki as Arcueid is probably my favorite, but I can't remember if that was actually included in the ending card thing or if it was just physical and scanned. Either way, boorus have a lot of scans of them and they're very nice.

>>124433
What you're mainly seeing video wise in differences between those two releases are the DAR (display aspect ratio). The show was produced in widescreen but released in SD. So the DVDs stores the video as anamorphic widescreen and depends on the video player to stretch it to the correct resolution upon playback. What that one group did was apply the stretch using a filter. Then encoded the result at a slightly higher resolution that would be allowed by the DVD standard (max is 720×480 for NTSC and 720×576 for PAL countries). What might have happened here is one group used an NTSC DVD raw and the other used a PAL EU/JP raw. But I don't see either listing any source information used beyond "DVD".

The different in framerate can be explained by this depending on what the [E-D] version is (is it 29.97fps?). That is the native framerate for NTSC stuff but it's usually telecined. Most people IVTC sources to bring them back down to 23.97fps which is what the [mottoj] release is at. But PAL is 24fps so...

Probably they both used the same source and decided to handle it differently. I'd have to grab the [E-D] version to look at it. Which is in queue at the moment. I also need to look at the DVD dump I'm fetching to see how the original video was encoded and if it has native variable frame rate. Variety of reasons why either group might have done what they did. Most likely the later release just decided to do an upscale and target HD playback devices only.

I do know the subtitles in the [m] release are kind of wonky in a lot of places. Since I got through the first 15 episodes or so and spotted tons of spelling errors just with causal viewing. Back in the day I would have grabbed [Exiled-Destiny] over the other group's simply because I didn't care about 10-bit h.264. But now it's a huge pain because I'm supporting other users, not watching anime exclusively on PC and HEVC has native 10-bit color support that's supported everywhere. The DVD the [mottoj] group could be either NTSC or PAL natively. Since they only list "region 2 DVD" as a source. Which covers both Japan and UK/EU and some other countries in PAL land.

>>124434
I've always called them bumpers/endcards. If they aren't part of the DVD source we can certainly add them no problem using images. Hell we could do an HD upscale if we wanted. But I'm not a fan of that. I'd rather release in the native resolution and let the end user do that in real-time if they want. Better quality, smaller files and doesn't force my choice of filtering on the end user (beyond what I do to clean up source anyway).

Back in the early digisub days we used to do some fun stuff at the end of some episodes. If you check out the [A-Flux] BPS release's last episode you'll see a custom credits screen in English listing everyone that worked, produced, voice acted, and animated the show. Along with a message from the staff apologizing for not being able to finish it. We did that because they gave us a shout out on a long dead website thanking all the fans from overseas for supporting the show. It never got finished and production was forced to stop in the middle of it airing. It just got taken off TV one week with no warning due to lack of funding.

>>124424
>I need a copy of every last one of those discs
Ah, alright then. I just need to order another BD player since my cat barfed on and killed my last one....

>>124438
>>124439
I didn't expect to download the [E-D] release so fast. I just took a look and understand more about the differences now. Both are from the same source. Here is what I _think_ happened with each.

- [Exiled-Destiny]

They encoded the video to 8-bit h.264 at an acceptable bitrate. It's a straight transcode from mpeg2/VOB -> h.264. However, the guy that muxed it forgot to set the metadata for the framerate and display aspect ratio. So the frames are not being stretched properly by the video player upon playback.

Audio wise they muxed both AC3 audio tracks directly from the DVD. So it does have higher quality sound than the other release (highly subjective though. I doubt most people could tell in blind test).

For subtitles they muxed VOBSub (image subtitles format for DVD) directly in. So it's the "official" translation and not a proper fansub script as I originally hoped. Most likely, it doesn't suffer from the spelling errors and such.

- [mottoj]

They encoded the video to HEVC 10-bit directly from the DVD/VOB just like [E-D]. But they did properly set the DAR (display aspect ratio) in the mkv container. Thus ensuring it's properly stretched by you video player to fill the entire screen. The bitrate used is acceptable. But the video quality isn't great (although on par with the [E-D] release).

Audio wise they transcodec the original AC3 -> Opus @ 128kbps. Which is rather low bitrate for opus (debatable) and a lossy -> lossy process (some data was lost). If at all possible you always want to go from lossless -> lossy when transcoding audio. Although I've broken this rule several times in the past myself. Most likely they did this because browsers and modern devices natively support Opus audio playback for free while certain hardware devices and video players do not (or charge a fee due to patents on AC3 decoding).

Subtitles is where they got into the most trouble and borked this release. They did a lazy OCR conversions of the VOB subs then failed to go through them and check for errors.

I know some fansub scripts from back in the day are floating around for this show that are already in ASS/SSA format. I'm going to look around and try to track those down. But worse case we can work from what we have and correct bad localization/errors in translation (if any) as we go.

For what it's worth. Instead of doing entire batches and getting burned out on one show taking months. In the future I'm planning on releasing episodes one at a time. Meaning we do say 2-3 shows at the same time and just have fun going at our/my own pace. The only batch I'm really concerned about is the Onimai archive and I work on that off and on anyway and only update it once a year or so (well the torrent anyway).

One more post to follow.

I'm about 50% done downloading the DVD raw for Moon Phase at the moment. But looking at these other encodes I see a lot of common errors that should be easy to filter and fix without destroying the art. In my opinion a lot of these groups this last decade or so has just been slapping stuff together and not taking the proper time with it. I'm confidant I can improve the quality of the video is what I'm saying. I've fixed some similar stuff in BPS and Puni-chan in the last few months. I have some good filter chains and have used them enough over the years to know what works.

A lot of these younger guys don't read man pages or even understand basic things like SAR, DAR and how digital video works. I wish they were less hostile towards outsiders and would stop parroting bad advice and being so mean when you attempt to teach them something. But I digress.

At any rate I'll make sure to get a preview of episode 1 up soon so you guys can let me know what you think.

>>124443
I have a very good BD-R/W in my PC. I've ripped a lot of stuff in the past and shared it in public places when possible (and when I can get an anon to upload it for me). Maybe we could work out something with shipping where you let me borrow some discs. I'll rip them and return them. I promise they will come back in pristine condition. I could set-up a PO Box or something for this purpose if need be.

If you need help picking out a disc drive or with the ripping process I'm willing to teach as well. It isn't that hard and you could probably fish a BD-R/W drive out of a dumpster easy right now with everyone constantly throwing away old tech stuff.

>>124447
>I'm about 50% done downloading the DVD raw for Moon Phase at the moment.

Okay I now understand what's going on with this show and why the quality is so bad for every public release. The DVD dump that's available is frankly horrible. It is an English R1DVD released by Funimation that crammed in a ton of ads and did a horrible job of encoding this show into mpeg2. Parts of it look so bad that I frankly don't want to work with it. I'm going to try to track down the Japanese DVDs which I'm sure were more generous with the bitrate given to the video portions.

This is the one floating around on public trackers: https://www.amazon.com/Moon-Phase-Complete-Collection-V/dp/B005HVWW12

It squeezes in two English audio tracks (one in surround sound 5.1 which is larger than the other two combined). In addition the subtitles are _horrible_ so I understand why the OCR everyone did to get softsubs from them is so filled with spelling and errors. The font funi picked couldn't be worse.

In Japan this show was released as a 6-disc DVD set which must be of better quality considering they didn't pack in two more audio tracks and a bunch of crappy ads in English for unrelated shows.

I've found a few sellers that have the entire Japanese DVD collection. They seem to be going for about $30-$40 right now for the entire set. One such link is here: https://www.depop.com/products/strawberry_milk-moon-phase-complete-anime-series/

I've also found individual DVDs from this set on ebay for about $8-$10 each.

Is anyone interested in buying it for the greater good? I'll see if I can scrape together $30 and take the risk of buying from that seller. But no promises. I'm going to try to look around to see if anyone has uploaded it anywhere first. As much as I'd love to own the DVD set I'm never going to use it after ripping it.

If anyone could take a peek at the usual places to see if the JP DVD 6-disc box set has been uploaded there I'd appreciate it.

I can not begin to explain how awful the US DVD looks it terms of video quality. It looks awful even on a CRT from that era. If I get a chance later I'll take some screen shots.

>>124470
Just look at how horrible this scene looks. It's even worse in motion. The entire video portion of the anime on this US DVD Funimation release are overly compressed more than any other source I've ever seen.

If you have access to the Japanese DVD dumps please let me know. We need them badly.

Great choice of font Funimation. Look at how awful this scene looks despite being bright compared to the last one I posted. I wish you could see it in motion. The macroblocking and dot crawling is really something else.

I'm considering this a total loss excluding the dub tracks. I can't believe the English dub team had the audacity to sacrifice so much video quality just so they could include a 5.1 surround sound version of the dub. Which is most likely use a bad edit of the English stereo track since I'm sure this show was produced in stereo. They basically included an extra bloated high bitrate AC3 track for no reason.

Half of each disc is ads by the way. Which are all in great quality of course.

>>124470
>>124471
>>124472
sorry for quad-post but I know the R2 DVD was out in the wild at one point. Since two different people shared it on nyaa one all the way back in 2008 and another in 2016; https://nyaa.si/view/877005 and https://nyaa.si/view/42527

But due to circumstances beyond my control I can't request re-seed of course. All I can do is hope someone comes along and seeds it again. I'll leave it in my queue for a week and hope some kind anon helps out. If you find it elsewhere please let me know. The US R1 DVD is unusable outside of the English dub (which I'm not that keen on including anyway).

Just another example of how frustrating things are in the current climate. It seems every time I want to work on something I spend more time hunting down raws that I do spending time on actual work. It's really sad that it was easier to source this stuff in the 2000s than it is now. Sorry for mini-rant.

If no one shows up to seed in a week I'll break down and buy it I guess. Once I'm done ripping it I'll gladly donate the discs here to anyone that may want them.

>>124473
Yeah, looking at those filesizes I don't have anything like that. Everything I have is 1/4th the size of that so I can safely say I have nothing that you're after.
AB has these two things that are both around 31GB:
DVD9 | ISO (R1) | 16:9 | 720x480 | AC3 2.0 | Dual Audio | Softsubs |
DVD9 | VOB IFO (R1) | 16:9 | 720x480 | AC3 2.0 | Dual Audio | Softsubs

Dual audio so it's definitely not the thing you're after.

>>124414
I can get the S1 BDMV+DVDISO for you. A torrent with DHT disabled so that some random Indian from BTDigg doesn't show up & waste my bandwidth would be easiest. How would you prefer to be contacted with the .torrent file?

>>124416
This is unfortunately marked as exclusive on U2 which is why it hasn't been shared.

>>124473
I'll seed the second Nyaa link sometime next week. Just keep it in your client and I'll eventually get to it.

>>124579
>I'll seed the second Nyaa link sometime next week. Just keep it in your client and I'll eventually get to it.
Was that you? If so thanks. I got it about a day ago.

>Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha
I do need both the DVDs and BDs to compare. Since I have no idea which source would be the best one to work from without looking. Are you okay with email? We can talk privately there if you want. I keep this open and check it regularly for fansub projects I work on (we primarily work through anonymous email as a group). You can reach me here; fansubs [--at--] waifu.club

>MahoAko
I have MahoAko vol 1. I'm not surprised U2 is hoarding vol2 forward. I think it's ridiculous some people get angry about people sharing stuff they've ripped and uploaded to one place. They pretend like they're being really sneaky and the copyright police don't know. In reality they just ensure the content will eventually be lost forever.

We're doing a mostly original translation for MahoAko. Since the official one is so bad. The Chihiro translation is decent and ours will probably be similar to theirs. But they made some styling choices we didn't like. I did steal their timing/scripts and use them as a base for our own though. But a lot has been changed. We originally wanted to work with them while it was airing but we couldn't agree on a means of communication.

I've had someone offer to buy the entire set and have it shipped to me but I'd prefer to avoid it if at all possible. IF we end up doing that to finish the project (since we started on 1-4 already). I'll rip them myself, upload to a tracker (and hopefully someone will upload it to nyaa) AND send the entire set to one lucky person for free. Since it would just collect dust here and I'm not into keeping material things even for series that I like.

My only reason for buying discs has always been ripping them to share with others for free. Since for a long time it was the only way I could obtain good sources to work from (fansubbing on dial-up was torture. Especially when you're the main encoder).

>>124528
I managed to get the JP DVDs thanks to a kind anon (I assume the one I just replied to). The [mottoj] release you have is the one that inspired me to re-visit this show. Since the subtitles aren't that great and the quality is pretty bad. But I'm starting to understand why it's so bad after looking at all the DVD sources. See related picture related.

This is from the climax of episode 1. The zoom-out/pan used in that scene is awful due to mpeg2 compression artifacts being everywhere. As well as the fact that no keyframe was placed correctly. The encoder they used shit the bed for this scene and a couple of others at the start of the episode. This episode also makes heavy use of grain for artistic reasons. But the mpeg2 encoder they used basically turned it into a riving of macroblocks.

Right now I'm trying to figure out the best way to go about cleaning it up. If it's worth cleaning up at all. Most of the options I have would simple blur everything and lose a lot of the detail that is there. What I might do is inject even more grain and hope the x265 encoder will hide the blocking behind it. This would also solve the issue of the banding all throughout the episode since most of it takes place at night time or in dimly lit rooms.

This is pretty typical of shows I do by the way. A lot of shows will start out with an episode like this then become much easier to filter as the series progresses and they go less heavy on the artsy stuff. Then you'll get one or two episodes near the middle-end of a season that ramp things back up. Episode 1 usually takes me weeks to properly filter. But after that I can re-use a lot of my script since I've already found good settings for the source and they usually work well for the rest of the batch.

Biggest issue with the [mottoj] release and the others I've looked at is they aren't properly scaled. They could have left them at native resolution and set DAR in the mkv container to signal the end user's player to stretch things out to 16:9. Instead they opted to do some wonky resizing. This show is anamorphic widescreen. Meaning it's stored as an SD resolution but intended to be watched as widescreen. That's also the reason why the DVD looks so awful. When it came out it was produced with the intention to being watched on a CRT monitor. CRTs naturally have a low-pass filter that hides a lot of grain and macroblocking. That's why it's kind of funny that people now are so obsessed with preserving grain from those old shows from the CRT era. Those shows were mastered on CRTs/PVMs that actually hid most of the grain are playback. People at home watching on consumer CRTs saw even less that those with high end CRTs.

But I digress.

I'm working on it slowly. There is a horrible looking workraw/test encode up on the MEGA right now. But it's mainly for timing the subtitles. If anyone would like to help out with TL/Subtitles do let me know. I don't need anyone doing QC just yet but I expect to have something ready for QC by next week. I've already made more than a few changes to TL since yesterday. Plus I've actually set a proper font style and scaled it so it isn't using whatever viewer's system font is.

>>124687
For comparison this is how the show is supposed to look when properly scaled to the correct DAR. The last picture was taken directly from the DVD I'm editing in my frameserver. So it isn't having the picture stretched and shows how the pixels are stored on the DVD as-is.

This was a common method for displaying HD/widescreen content from DVDs back in the day. It seems most people aren't aware of how to properly handle it anymore. I seen a ton of releases on nyaa that either do not set the DAR properly or do some upscale to a wonky resolution for no reason. I try to avoid upscaling if at all possible for many reasons.

>>124686
Email's fine with me. I'll email you sometime this week.

>Was that you?
It wasn't, I guess there's another kind anon in the midst. I doubt some random person miraculously stumbled on an old ISO torrent with 1 leecher.

>>124689
Thanks anyway. I've noticed some of those 0 seed torrents really have one seed. But they rarely connect and when they do it's always at a slow speed like 40-200kbps. It took me about 5 days I think to get that entire 48GB archive. The upside is it included all the scans of the discs and covers a long with a bunch of other bonus content. Which I'll make sure to share once I'm finished encoding all 26 episodes.

Concerning how I'm going to release this;

I'm debating on if I want to release one episode at a time as they're finished or wait until the entire batch is gone. For people outside of this board I mean. The reason I'm considering going to one episode as a time is the fact that I've got about 5 unfinished projects going at the moment. Most of which are older 90s-2000s era shows that are in bad need of a proper re-release in a modern codec and need their scripts revised. Now that I have some reliable people to TL check I want to get them out before they vanish. Plus working on different shows at the same time prevents burn out. Only issue is will someone upload the .torrent to places where people will actually see it. I can upload myself to *tosho and a couple of other less known public trackers but nyaa is never going to reactivate my accounts since the mods won't speak to me. I'm not buying an account like some people or begging to be let "into the club" who's openly bullied and run off so many people over the last few years.

I digress again sorry;

Once Moon Phase is done I will be releasing two torrents for it. The first will be an archive with all the anime episodes, the OVA and the bonus material in an archive. The second will be an "audiophile pack" that will include;
>FLAC audio
>PCM audio
>AAC audio
>AC3 audio
>The English dub
along with some .sh/.bat scripts. You'll be able to copy/paste the episodes+OVA from the first torrent into a directory from the second torrent. Then you can run a script and it'll spit out FLAC/whatever version for you or dual-audio with whichever track you want as the default.

Standard release will be HEVC+Opus as I've settled on this lately due to compatibility reasons. Anything that can play HEVC can play Opus audio in my testing. I prefer Opus over AAC for reasons I won't get into. But I know some people prefer FLAC/raw audio/need AAC or want the dub (these people are insane). It isn't much trouble to offer the option since the scripts are easy to write. So I don't see any point in not doing it.

We'll be doing the same thing for other archive/batch releases going forward for all other series we do.

Final note: I'll be releasing this under a new group tag. Probably [kissu] unless the people here object. I'm also going to pack in hidden files again. Once they're all ready to go I'll make a call for files you guys want included as hidden files. Can be anything you want. .webms you like, art, LNs/books, text files, games or whatever. I just ask that we keep it under about 30-50MB per episode. We can also come up with a fun game to unlock them. We'll password protect them and you guys can suggest riddles or trivia or whatever as passwords. It was supposed to be a fun little game for the last release I did but it got ruined by a few hateful people. I'd like to try it again.

Anyway, I'll check my email tomorrow. Looking forward to it.

>>122453
>Looking at my drive I have the following:
>Tsukuyomi Moon Phase (DVD Dual-Audio Opus)
>[Exiled-Destiny] Tsukuyomi Moon Phase_ (and its DVD special)
>[Arigatou] Tsukuyomi Moon Phase DVD Special

Hey I'm sorry it took so long to reply to this post. But do you know how to use MKVextract? If so could you get the .ass from these two releases extracted and upload them somewhere like MEGA for me? I can maybe track down these and do it myself. But I just need the scripts from them so I thought maybe you could save me the hassle. I have [E-D]'s on CD-R somewhere I think. But my disc drive isn't plugged in right now because I dropped in two new HDDs in my main workstation. I need to get my disc drive plugged in again for ripping purposes. But I gotta order an extension cable for my PSU first since my only free power lead won't reach now.

>>124695
I have no idea what that is, but I could look it up. I'll do it tomorrow since I'm going to bed soon.

>>124433
>The Moon Phase official manga translation famously died after the fan translation was killed off by said official translation. That's a project I'd like to help with someday since I hear it's quite a bit different from the anime.

Sorry for so many replies. I'm trying to comment on things I missed before.

It's very possible that we could get this manga scanlation project going. I will talk to some people I know that already do weekly/monthly releases and see if they're interested in taking on this project. I'll let you know once I hear something back from them.

If anyone wants these now the JP-DVD archive I downloaded included several audio CDs in lossless (TrueAudio) format. Along with a lot of cute art work and scans from the covers/discs. If any of you want this stuff sooner rather than later let me know and I'll upload them somewhere for you.

I'm going to get some sleep and see about getting episode 1 properly filtered to acceptable quality level tomorrow. Then I'll upload v3 to MEGA with that new encode plus some minor alterations to the script. I'll upload the .ass subtitles along with it do people can check out the TL without having to demux it themselves.

>>124696
Hey friend don't bother unless you want to learn how. I just realized I already did that several days ago. I need sleep as well it seems. The [E-D] release is just the English subtitles from the Funimation DVD. I'll try to track down some old fansub group .ass/.ssa scripts from back when this was first airing. Although knowing my luck they'll all be in xvid format and hardsubbed if I can find them at all.

Polite sage due to so much double posting.

>>124698
Here is the list of extra content from the archive I managed to fetch this week. Not sure if these are uploaded anywhere else outside of that archive. If TrueAudio/.cue isn't to your liking I can always convert them over to FLAC if you want.

>>124697
>It's very possible that we could get this manga scanlation project going. I will talk to some people I know that already do weekly/monthly releases and see if they're interested in taking on this project. I'll let you know once I hear something back from them.

I still haven't gotten to sleep yet because I got busy working on another project. I talked to one of my friends from a scanlation group I work with off and on. He's expressed interest in picking this up but he's not sure if he can fit it into his schedule any time soon. He's also going to need time to familiarize himself with other translations and catch up on 12 volumes first. He said he'd ask some of his scanlation friends if they might be interested in doing this after they finish some other projects.

In other words. Probably at some point but not for awhile. He said people would probably appreciate anything though even if it came out at a slow pace. Since it was dropped in 2008 and no one has picked it up in all these years.

I'll let you know if situation changes.

A big thanks to anons to provided some raws I needed over the past week. We had one person so up that dumped MahoAko BD2 and another that provided both the BDs and DVDs for Nanoha.

>>124686
>I'm not surprised U2 is hoarding vol2 forward
As a heads up, all 3 were just uploaded in a batch to U2 without being marked exclusive so it'll probably trickle down to Nyaa before long.

>>124900
Any time, I'll probably have the third BD soon too so I'll send it through the same channels.

i forgot to say it this time

>>125086
Someone has already been ripping+providing copies but good to know in case they can't continue doing it going forward. I would actually prefer to get them from someone ripping the BD themselves anyway.

MahoAko actually turned out to be a much bigger pain in the ass than expected. For a show that had almost no budget they sure used every technique that the x265 (well all mpeg) encoders struggle with. Usually, this wouldn't be a huge deal because such effects are only used in short scenes. But in MahoAko the main characters use the effect (glowing halos) in many still shots.

I spent the last week running 13+ test encodes with various different settings attempting to prevent macrobanding in those scenes. I even zoned out the episode into 44 zones and boosted bitrates sometimes by double to prevent artifacts. But nothing really worked well unless I was willing to those 10Mbps+ at those frames. Then after a week of frustrating I started over and de-tuned the codec. Which finally allowed me to stumble upon some settings that work for the most part.

I am not lying when I said I've probably seen episode 1 without audio now at least 25 times. I've had to put off everything else because it was frustrating me so much. But I finally landed upon some settings for this show that will allow me to release it at acceptable (sub-GB per episode) sizes. I might still need to boosted bitrates in one or two scenes but I finally solved the main problem.

I also stumbled upon two bugs in the current x265 source code. I thought it was my own build at first but when I tested mainline it has the same issue. x264 also has both bugs. I'm considering submitting patches to fix them. But the last time I tried I didn't find the people in charge of both repos to be that friendly. I don't understand why we don't have a decent codec in 2024. AV1 is no better. In fact, it has the same problems and even more. I don't expect to use it for anything for a long time. Since any file savings it offers are too small to matter especially with what it does to source material.

Anyway, episode 1 is always the biggest pain in the ass when I do a show. The rest come out much quicker once I land upon good settings for a show. So going forward it shouldn't be much of an issue and I'll probably be able to catch up with BD releases by the time vol 4 comes out.

I'm really wanting to get MahoAko done so I can start focusing on some older stuff I've had planned for awhile. A friend also asked if we'd be interested in doing a show that multiple other groups have dropped and no one seems interested in finishing. They're supposed to send over raws for it in a couple of months. They sent over some half finished scripts and handful of timed episodes. If our translator isn't interested I may attempt translating it myself for practice. As long as he's willing to check behind me.

Long story short: It'll be awhile yet before I get back to anything that isn't MahoAko.

>>125125
Here is what I'm talking about. It happens every time Venalita in on screen. No amount of pre-filtering or grain injection will prevent it at sane bitrates. It's an inherent issue with x265 and to a lesser extent x264. It isn't limited to Venalita a lot of scenes in this show are set in a dark room/area with a fire like glow around the character. Which is exactly what mpeg codecs struggle with the most (along with the color red).

The "fix" involves a combination of turning certain features off designed to compress the frames better. Along with tuning how the codec inserts P and B frames. Along with manual insertion of I-frames if the codec doesn't automatically place them where they need to be. That almost eliminates it entirely.

Or you can just throw a lot of bits at it and hope it goes away. Not really an option when you need to do it 44+ times in one episode though.

I swear they spent half the show's budget on the first half of episode 1. At the very least half the scenes with a lot of movement are packed into the first 10 minutes. Which make file size estimation useless. Since the second half consists of a lot of static scenes and file size estimates can sometimes drop by 400+MB depending on settings use. I expect some of the other episodes to be much smaller than the first.

At any rate I learned more about how the inner workings of x265 work when trying to solve this issue. I'd run into it before but it was never this frustrating to make go away. Since the other times I could just throw more bitrate at one or two scenes and call it good. If I did it with episode 1 of this show I'd have to release something north of 1.6GB for one episode. Which I'm never going to do for a 25 minute show.

I should probably not worry about this as much as I do. Since 99% of people I show a "bad" encode to say it looks great. But once you see you can't unsee.

are you talking about this?

>>125126
This frame has the same problem but it's more visible because she's taking up more of the frame and the glow effect is stronger. In x265 you get these "grain swirls" or microbands depending on how you've tuned the codec. In x264 you get a blocky mess instead unless you use heavy deblock. In which case it smears everything to shit. Or you can use insanely high bitrate like most people do and sometimes avoid it.

If you collect BDs I encourage you to check out scenes with glow and fire effects. Even at BD bitrates you'll see h.264 barfing up blocks everywhere. Even more so if red is the dominate color being used for the scene.

The Onimai BDs have one scene in particular that looks fucking awful despite peaking the bitrate above what's in spec for BD standard.

I don't know why it's such a long standing issue. Its been a problem with mpeg codecs since at least mpeg2.

>>125127
Depending on how your monitor is configured you may need to adjust contrast to see what I'm talking about. It's very evident within all black/near-black parts of the frame in this post; >>125128

I need to bring my face up to the monitor and stare at it from a high angle to see it. It's there, but I doubt I'd see it in motion and under normal viewing conditions. But I'm accustomed to stuff such as pic related, and on top of the quality issues with that source I watch on a TV that's suffering from discoloured pixels in a big patch at the top.

I imagine it's noticeable because you know exactly where to look because you intimately know the weak points of the codec. It's kind of like how if you ever do any scanlation work, you immediately notice and can't unsee how people are 90% of the time following the recommendations of the first google result, meaning AnonBlack's guides that tell you about Wild Words as the general font and Augie as the handwriting font.

>>125130
I test on 5 monitors. Which I know is over kill but it's easy since my workstation is set-up like that anyway. On one of them it's _very_ evident because it's designed to seeing such things (it's a high end 144hz studio monitor). On all my other monitors you can barely notice it or don't see it at all. They're all consumer grade stuff. Some high end. One low end. Another an old CRT. I work with a variety of content so I need them all.

What's funny is a lot of things people obsess over now like grain in old 80s-2000s shows aren't even visible on an old school CRT. Since CRTs act as a kind of low pass filter for grain. So a lot of people are throwing a lot of bits at something that wasn't even the artist's intention. Since such shows were mastered on studio CRTs/PVMs.

But I digress...

My philosophy with this has always been if you're going to take the time you might as well do it right. The video is the least important part of the package anyway after translation and next sound. Sound is what you pay for when it comes to content. They've always been happy to let you watch for free. Plus you can always pair the translation with another person's encode anyway and anyone can learn to encode video/audio in a weekend. But getting better quality than others with less file size has always been a fun goal. I should probably not obsess over it too much. Since I've murdered many a CPU and HDD in pursuit of smaller file sizes over the years. All for something that's going to be re-encoded by someone else when the next new shiny codec comes out in 5-10 years anyway.

>>125131
That's true as well. I can't watch broadcast television anymore because the quality is so awful. People brag about their new TV and 4k cable package to me but all I can see are macroblocks from the company cheaping out and trying to squeeze another channel or two into their limited bandwidth. Satellite TV is particularly bad these days but cable is usually worse because cable companies are evil manifested.

The truth is they get away with it because 99% of people either can't tell or don't care.

>>125133
>I can't watch broadcast television anymore because the quality is so awful.
yeah its fucked up. when I was a kid I stood next to a big TV playing some stuff for normal people and I thought to myself that every frame looks like if you saved a jpg at a quality level of 40 and after saving, tortured it with the sharpen tool. that really put me off TV

>>125134
Digital has been pretty bad from the start. I'm old enough to remember C-band, analog cable and analog OTA TV. The quality was much better back in those days even with the limited bandwidth because each channel got the entire channel's bandwidth. When they switched to digital/DBS the entire point was being able to cram multiple channels into the same bandwidth that used to be occupied by just one.

Analog also degraded much better. When OTA was still analog I could pick up about 8-12 channels locally on bunny ears here. They might not have all looked perfect but they were all watchable for the most part. Worst case you might have to move the antenna a bit for certain channels coming from further away or a different direction. Very rarely the environment would be just right and you could pick up some far away channel for a few hours and everything local would come in perfect.

When they did the digital switch over they pretty much ruined OTA TV here. I can't pick up maybe 2 channels now that are watchable. The rest are a constant sea of macroblocks and freezing as the signal drops below the level where the decoder can gracefully fail. 9 times out of 10 it does it during the actual content but commercials will come in clear for 30-60 seconds. But it probably only feels that way because commercials are shorter than content and make up the bulk of run time now.

The best thing ever was C-band. Which was analog satellite service. For the first 10 years or so you could pull the back feeds down directly. Which were basically the feeds cable companies and local stations got before commercial were inserted and they were edited for public viewing. You not only got the content commercial free you could listen to what was being said while the program was at commercial if it was live. It was also extremely high quality because they wanted to deliver the highest quality possible for production. Truly the Golden era of television.

Of course we can't have nice things so it was shut down. First by scrambling then later with encryption. Which only became possible with the switch over to digital/mpeg2.

C-band was also really cool because the dish was massive. We used to set the receiver to lock-in on another satellite then run outside to watch that massive dish turn and tilt. It was the coolest thing when I was a kid. TV from space! Sometimes we'd troll through random satellites for hours looking for wild feeds. Found so much interesting stuff I wish I would have recorded. We saw so many respected television people snort drugs and yell at their staff during pre/post-show and commercial breaks. I think it was good to be exposed to that young because I knew TV was fake from seeing how it was produced. The best feeds were the 24/7 feeds from the coast during hurricane season. You could watch the poor guy they'd sent to the beach to report on the storm live stand in the rain for hours. If you watched on the regular weather channel they'd only show you a couple of minutes of footage they'd copied from those days long live feeds. My mother was terrified of storms so she watched that pretty often.

>>125136
>We saw so many respected television people snort drugs and yell at their staff during pre/post-show and commercial breaks.

I know I'm way off-topic but I just remembered something from my childhood that will be burned into my mind forever;

When the first George Bush was president he went on Larry King's show which was pretty popular at the time. During a commercial break they started discussing Halcion. Which was an old school benzo drug for sleep that had been pulled from the market for causing a lot of deaths. The president said
>I don't really think it's that bad
and Larry King replies with something along the lines of
>My cousin is in the pharmaceutical industry. He told me a new drug is coming out of Israel soon. It's better than Halcion!
then he shushes the president because he's got to deliver a line between commercials. After that he starts laughing and bragging about his cousin being in the know. He was basically telling Bush to short the companies stock because it was going to go up soon (aka insider trading). They're just sitting there carrying on like they're having a private conversation. Openly discussing the fact that they're making money off drugs that killed people and had been a big scandal in the news at the time. The way they talked "in private" was totally different from the persona they put on for prepared statements and during the actual interview segments being broadcasted to most people.

Anyway, not long after that Larry King had Bill Clinton on his show. I think it was the lead up to the 1992 election. Anyway he said something to Clinton that always bothered me and even back then I knew it was strange. Larry starts talking about Ted Turner and how he's a great guy to work for. Then he tells Bill Clinton;
>You should call Ted after you win. He'd be willing to uh...serve you. If you know what I mean

Even as a kid I wondered what he meant by "serve you". You could tell he wasn't talking about "serving the president" and it was more like Ted Turner was offering some service. What kind of service I don't know. But the mind goes to horrible places. It was just the way he said it. They started discussing it in a hushed tone and you could tell both of them were uneasy about saying it where other people might over hear them. Why they did it in front of a camera I have no idea. I guess they were just so used to being on camera that they forgot about it.

You could tell some people were more aware of being broadcasted to the entire country than others. Al Gore's wife was totally unaware until a make-up girl clued her in. We were watching the feed one day when someone told her. She stared into the camera with this really paranoid look on her face.

One really funny thing was watching Larry King (and others) suck up to all the candidates. Larry King in particular was really sleazy about it. I think he was trying to convince him to let him be a moderator at one of the debates or something. I can't remember now.

You could see them warring with each other in real time. All their political ads ran on back feeds days-weeks before they were seen on regular TV. So you'd get to see responses to attack ads produced and aired within hours-days of the other side's attack ad. Before the attack ads even ran on regular TV the other camp had produced a response. It was obvious they were all monitoring each other's back feeds closely.

Sorry for tangent. Its just been a long time since I thought about C-band TV. The political stuff just sticks out in my mind because that's when you'd see most of the terrible stuff and my father followed that election closely that year for whatever reason (he's not usually political). We also saw a lot of other stuff like Dan Rather spouting racist remarks while practicing his nightly new monologue. I remember one Today show during Columbus day they had an Indian historian on the show. Who basically told them Columbus was the devil and enslaved people. As soon as he walked off set and was out of ear shot the anchors started calling him names and spouting racist remarks about Indians. It was pretty funny. When the riots were happening in LA they were casually throwing around racism during commercial breaks.

I really wish I had access to something like C-band again. It was interesting watching them come up with lies and spin in real time. I don't think they'll ever allow something like that to be shown to the general public again. The best part is it was all free after you bought the hardware. I think my Dad dropped about $1-5k on our set-up but after we installed it all cable TV and PPV TV was free. Everything was being broadcasted with no encryption what-so-ever. Dad didn't consider it stealing because they were literally beaming it right into our yard. At least that's what he told me when I asked him if it was stealing.