The Internet is a Series of Failures, at Least in Australia
After a post I made on a forum belonging to the guys that coordinate .wa.au’s largest anime convention, Siren actually replied, and have ammended their blogpost. While I still think this is something that needs to get out in the open, I do think Siren is definitely going down the right path and eventually we will have quality anime in Australia. I shall now proceed to make another post about the quality of Madman webcasting, and what Siren said in response to my comments:
I liked what you guys wrote about standards converting, and how to get Supreme Quality. It was really insightful into how the industry fails. I also liked how your post on this changed after someone decided to look up telecine on wikipedia, that was really cool.
Re: Article: After publishing the article I wrote, our authoring technician pointed out a mistake I had made regarding the the explanation of different options we have at our disposal when converting from NTSC to PAL. The change was minor and made the explanation more concise, and so I did not think to make a public mention of the change but I have now.
So, just a few things I was wondering about. Are you guys considering webcasting like Madman is doing (and perhaps doing it with a sane codec/bitrate/subtitle method?) Also, can we expect FILM framerates on any blu-ray releases you guys may or may not release, or will those be raped with PAL and thus destroy the Supreme Quality we all came to expect from Siren a few years ago? Please answer truthfully Siren, and if you don’t know what I am talking about, say so.
Re: webcasting: we are exploring the options, albeit at present more from a viability standpoint than a technical one. Currently we’re analyzing the required capital investment, ongoing overhead costs and various revenue models involved to recover those costs, then weight them all up. While I don’t have a launch date I’d say it’s simply a matter of time. You’re clearly well-versed on the subject, PM me and indeed, perhaps we can work together in some capacity.
I’ve left out everything they mentioned about blu-ray as it’s not really necessary. I do find it interesting that a publisher is interested in working with fansubbers, given that it’s an encoder we’re talking about while traditionally it’s been the translators that have joined the industry. It seems possible that Australia may have a decent webcast on it’s hands.
While speaking about webcasts, I think it’s time to bring up Madman Entertainment once again. When they first started their Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood cast, I was quite impressed. After episode two, not so much at all. Yesterday I went and capped Madman’s episode six. I won’t say much for their security as it’s non-existant, and the region blocking takes about 3 seconds to overcome, but the stream itself that I got was terrible. It was 576p VP6 video, although the framerate was correct which is a change for Madman, the bitrate was so low I couldn’t bare to watch it on my monitor fullscreen, or even windowed. The audio on the otherhand was very nice, 192kbps VFR mp3, which while it was nice in my ATH900′s, it also wasted about 15MB of bitrate that was desperately needed by the video.
One odd thing about the Madman stream was that it was 576p. While this is practically a standard on Australian DTV, I don’t understand why Madman used it at all. Especially when the player window was 640×480 with 640×360 actually going to the video, which is less than a fansubbers SD, yet it was about the same size as “400p” and looked so much worse. Colours were bad, blocking was abundant, and general bitrate starvation was VERY apparent. So if it’s displayed at 640×360, why bother encoding to 576p at all? Apparently that was for fullscreen, on which it looked even worse.
Australia has a long way to go with webcasting and Madman is really just showcasing what’s wrong. My comparison with Madman’s webcast and my own encode can be found here.
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