I’m Sorry Madman But What The Fuck Is This Shit
i am 12 and what is this
Above is Madman’s March 2010 Anime Newsletter email image. It seems Sly is now the quite literal ‘face’ of Anime in Australia.
My only thought is “At least he’s cooler than Lance, when he isn’t doing Madman work anyway.” To be honest I actually like Sly, he’s a nice guy. But jesus fuck do I hate the company he works for. Not much else to say here, the image really says it all. Move along.
Today I Learnt That Pirated Software Runs Better Than The Legitimate Version I Almost Blew Ninety Dollars On
This post is about piracy. If you do not condone piracy, stop here. If you don’t care, are from the GNU legal team, or otherwise find this shit hilariously entertaining, then carry on.
So, this morning, I made a PERSONAL BACKUP of the first bluray volume of Xam’d of the Lost Memories. TO my horror, I came across gods damned DTS-MA audio, and adversary I had encountered on the Eureka seveN movie as well, but previously ignored.
Ofc, there is no open source decoder for DTS-MA, and, for some reason unbeknown to me, my Sonic decoder was broken in wine. So I turned to the next alternative: ArcSoft’s massive lump of shit that includes an HD audio decoder. I almost spent $90 before I realised I had a copy of it somewhere that came with my sister’s laptop. So LEGITIMATE SOFTWARE ON MY PC.
Needless to say, it didn’t work very well. Or at all. I messed around with it for a few hours before giving up and downloading a torrent, but it’s ok because I have a VALID LEGITIMATE SERIAL CODE. Suddenly, it worked. So basically the moral of this story is pirating shit works better than using the proper software, although for legal purposes I’d suggest “paying for it properly and then pirating it and using your legit serial,” lol ensuring I don’t get sued by the GPL people.
In the end I got annoyed with shit fucking up and ended up just installing Sonic on a client’s Server 2003 box and encoding the audio on there. Additionally, this entire exercise was useless because what leechers are going to care about 24bit FLAC anyway? It’s 1.33GB for two episodes. ONOES TALKING ABOUT FANSUBBING.
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.
Creative? Well it used to be…
Last week, I plugged my Zen Vision M (30GB) into drf’s DeviceSync and nothing happened when I searched for it to send media. That was a bit odd but when mtp-connect failed from cli, I figured it was a broken libmtp, which didn’t really surprise me. What did was when I plugged it into Kano, my Windows box, and the Windows MTP driver didn’t read it. It doesn’t even charge when plugged into USB, however the main power line is fine. I am assuming that it’s internal Device Info or something is broken, and it is thus useless for updating with new music (or the new eps of Castle and The Listener which is what I wanted to add this morning to watch on the bus to uni.)
This is not good, as I have had this player since I was 17, a good 2 and a half years now, and I don’t think it’s under warranty anymore (I should really check amirite?) Now, I have no idea what to do, it’s not like I have any cash to grab the new Zen’s, and I really am happy with Creative products in general. I guess it still works for media playback, just not putting new shit on.
UPDATE: Oddly enough, it seems libmtp 0.3.7 can read it while 0.3.5, and Microsoft’s MTP cannot, hurr, but DeviceSync segfaults, gg drf >.<
UPDATE2: libmtp 0.3.7 detects the device but won’t connect, whuuuuuut
UPDATE3: With a bit of hax, I managed to get libmtp working (0.3.7) while 0.3.5 and Windows are still unable to. It seems the device wont send it’s ID and system info, however I got it to bypass that and am now uploading some music and my 2 eps to it. I do want a new player tho, looking at either the Zen 16GB or the Zen X-Fi 32GB (AU$227 vs AU$367) Has anyone used either of them?
I somehow like the keypad better on the Zen, but the X-Fi does look kinda cool. Not sure whats up with the lack of h264 support, or a 16:9 screen, but w/e. Not sure 16GB will be enough tho, I am using 21/30GB on my Vision M in music alone, but I dont know if I listen to more than that anyway, and the X-Fi has wireless, anyone?
nVidia 180.22: Fuck You, OpenGL
I only noticed this today when attempting to compile an aegisub patch for verm, but nVidia’s 180.22 driver has completely fucked up OpenGL, example as follows:
From aegisub’s config.log:
configure:22595: ./conftest
/home/matt/build/aegisub/src/aegisub-build/aegisub/configure: line 22597: 9899 Segmentation fault ./conftest$ac_exeext
configure:22599: $? = 139
configure: program exited with status 139
configure: failed program was:
|
| int main(void) {
| return 0;
| }
configure:22617: result: no
configure:22624: error: in `/home/matt/build/aegisub/src/aegisub-build/aegisub':
configure:22627: error: Please install a working OpenGL library.
Constructive Line Noise
While reading over the panic forums I came across Justin’s AMV thread. After talking to a few people and listening to way too much Boom Boom Satellites (who you may remmber from the Bounen no Xam’d OP) I thought it would be fun to make an AMV entirely in a text editor. This includes but is not limited to avisynth scripting, .ass with some lua and perl magic to get a fair few text effects, imagemagick for any image editing, and I expect a fair heap of shell scripting will be involved. Honestly we’ll probably just resort to AFX for some things, but we’ll see how far we can get with just text editors. It could be constructive after all, and sort of lulz if we did well.
I love fansubbers
23:05:25 @euronymous:� hey Emess the pub on broadway near UWA finally finished being built so I just went there earlier, not that it’s that good or anything, just what I thought was crazy is the urinals are damn 1 way mirrors looking into the pub itself so you can like… I dunno piss on people so as to speak
23:06:40 @euronymous:� it also spawned the fabulous idea of waiting until somebody goes in and then licking the mirror on the outside to freak them out