Why can’t you guys just take Soccer and be happy :sad:
American Football > *
Futbol > American Pigskin
DONE.
lol shari that’s hilarious.
HDR > International Football > Canadian Football > American Football > SSFIV
DONE and DONE!
Ok, I can understand not liking American (real) football, but placing it behind Canadian Football? I don’t think I could even name a Canadian team!
Yeah, I never understood why Americans call our sport soccer and their sport football. It seems to me that soccer would be the more logical choice for being called football rather than a game you spend most of the time with it in your hands.
http://img104.imageshack.us/img104/9577/classicgoodvq5ag1.jpg
My friend did a load of these banners. 
I am really glad someone else can see this and it’s not just us!
g Hmm, Macross eh. Is anyone going to figure out where the 77077 comes from in my name without me explaining it?
I utterly hate Madden! I bought a USA 360 just for APF2k8, cos the asshats didn’t release it in Europe, yet region-locked it anyway ;_;
But where/what is this new Tecmo thing… ? USA release only??? 
The sad thing is, Kyoto Animation is one of the examples of a good studio these days, and it still doesn’t compare to older works. I was fansubbing in 2003, and you could see how things were going when the show list for the season hit, and the groups were trying to decide what to sub. 90% of it was crap, girly or fanservice. That’s part of the reason I quit fansubbing and went back to gaming. I just felt like the hobby I fell in love with (action and nice art) died, and had been replaced with random fanservice shit with mediocre art. The only saving grace was that because there was no frame shake from the old animating process, and that it wasn’t grainy cels/film that it was easy as hell to process and encode, so you could always get a good looking finished product. My group worked on older series (from the cel era) that hadn’t been licensed and you used to get shit like dot crawl and rainbows from poor analog processing in the studio, bad telecine etc.
That was when you had to have a knowledge about video, not like these days with HQ HD raws that they just chuck a subtitle file on and call it complete. I kind of miss it sometimes, there was mad politics involved.
Uh… right guys. This is dangerous territory with me around.
I’ve had roaring pub debates about this one… just get me a few beers and start this one on me. But you won’t need to because I can explain it all to ya here.
Firstly, do any of you actually know where the names soccer and football come from?
Hint #1: The name football has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with kicking a ball with your feet, nor the shape of the ball.
Hint #2: The USA has nothing whatsoever to do with it either.
Trolling attempt #3 - All FF’s and pretty much all J-RPGS are trash in my book, FF6 is the only one I could say is any good that I’ve played. (The only other one that I might try these days would be Chrono Trigger).
Chrono Trigger was damn good. To this day I still cannot understand or believe why it was never released here in the UK.
You have no idea how similar you are to me, just about 5-10 years apart 
I agree with everything here, same feelings… I was never a fansubber, but I was heavily involved with the anime scene when fansubbing was Sub Station Alpha (I used to know the writer) or on Commodore Amigas! I also started 2 anime clubs in the UK (which are both still running!) and helped run a few conventions too
But I’ve totally given up on anime ‘fandom’ these days as, like you, I feel it’s nothing like the hobby I got into - anime today is really different, and the fans have really changed along with the material. Oh well, it’s the nature of things, and I’ve got no big axe to grind about it really
However one of my best mates does… ever heard of “the rise and fall of anime fan subtitling”?
[media=youtube]IUYlqLlbix0[/media]
I don’t agree with my friend about all of this stuff, but I agree with his general stuff. And you might enjoy some of that! 
Chrono trigger was good, and chrono cross was meh.
I’d love to see a Super Metroid 2.5/HDR with a graphical nod towards Castlevania SOTN.
That would be worth paying for as long as backbone wasn’t used to make it. :bluu:
Holy small world Batman. I’ve seen that video before, it’s awesome. I also used SSA too. I didn’t know the guy who wrote it, but IIRC some guys in my group had some input to either it or ASS’ features. I do know the guys who work on Aegisub though. We’ve had many a rivalry when it came to promoting and switching over from XviD in AVI to H.264. I was for MP4 (since it’s the standard), but since those guys were ex-DVD rippers (doing licensed R1 dual audio stuff), they were used to and supporting MKV.
MKV was a big no-no in fansubbing because it sort of represented the DVD rippers. While we appreciated that what we were doing was tolerated piracy, the fansubs “ethics” were against doing stuff commercially available in the US. The other grey area was softsubbing. I left and MKV eventually got a foothold. Everyone was stuck in the past using XviD, and the only guys promoting or showing how good H.264 is were the MKV supporters. Softsubs caught on because of how quick it was. Rather than sifting through and episode for a couple of hours getting the filtering just right and then leaving it running for a day or so to encode, you can just download a raw, take the subtitle file and slap them in MKV.
It wasn’t all a waste though. I used to hang around in the animemusicvideos IRC channel because I realised that although my editing sucked, my encoding was good, and I wanted to pass this on to other people. I would help people with scripts to fix bad interlacing, dot crawl or otherwise touch up footage. I also promoted H.264 and MP4 to the community due to the better compression and quality. Wrote a huge ass reference guide, and encoding script and lent suggestions to a good friend Zarxrax write a GUI frontend for the x264 CLI. A few years on and I’d say that MP4 is getting some good recognition.
Yeah, a lot of the bullshit that came about in fansubbing was down to competition. Because it became easier, it opened up the competition. There were some huge ass egos in fansubbing. The OTT karaoke was pretty much nothing to do with the fans, it was just an excuse for the script kiddies to show who had the most 1337 coding skills. You would often get established groups running through the latest Gundam series, get to episide 45 (out of 50 or so), it get’s licensed. They drop it, but a “new” group spings out of nowhere with new staff but exactly the same style, all in a bid to keep their leechers.
Not all the competition was bad though. There was some fierce competition among us encoders, which resulted in good things. A lot of the tools, scripts, programs and video editing software available today has played some part, or has been developed by someone in the anime/fansubbing scene. The original coder of x264 (pengvado) was an anime fan (who went on to be offered a job by Ahead, the company that makes Nero burning ROM), and the current coder is also an anime fan.
Now like your friend has his gripes with subtitling, I have some gripes with the new groups/encoders (let’s call them the scrubs of the fansub encoding scene). God damn. They would upscale SD content to HD sizes in order to get more downloads (since people would assume it was better quality). However, by far the most annoying thing are the school boy errors they make when processing the video. They (practically every encoder in fact) would use Lanczos to downscale which is wrong because it produces ringing artifacts which screws compression in turn. For downscaling it’s bilinear, for upscaling it’s bicubic/Lanczos. I also hate how they kill everything with deen or some shit and just smooth the hell out of everything and oversharpen stuff to hell. Some encodes just look utter garbage to me, but it’s like no one has an eye for quality.
But yeah, your friend is right on so many points. I think maybe it’s getting to him more than is healthy if he feels the need to go to the trouble to make such a professional looking video about it, but awesome work all the same. Not all fansubs are crap though, so I’m sorry that he didn’t show any of the better groups. I mean a lot of those groups shown were scrub tier anyway.
This series of posts on fansubbing is admittedly one of the most educational posts on something I’ve always had a small interest in maybe ever. I never knew there was so much drama in fansubbing… I also never really knew the details of how it was done, I just used the end product… very cool.
Yep it’s really a small world! I have to admit the technical stuff is way over my head, but I’m really impressed (once again) with all your knowledge Zero1. That certainly helps explain why so much fansub stuff looks like crap today though! I totally understand all the stuff about competition as well, it’s pretty obvious even to an “outsider” how that’s affected it all. Oh and the egos. Cripes… I can see them from here.
Where I disagree with “MightyOtaking” is that I personally feel that the majority of anime fans are getting exactly what =they= want these days. The trouble is “fans” like us just are a tiny minority these days. And so much stuff gets officially released anyway (compared to how it used to be), the ‘need’ for good fansubs really tried up. In the same way I felt the need for anime clubs and cons and stuff has dried up. However I really like the sound of what you used to do, groups doing old classic material that has never been released or translated and probably never will.
But yeah my friend gets a tad obsessive about this. laughs He’s pretty crazy, but a really good friend of mine, he only lives a few doors down from me, and used to do drunken commentary for me while I was (also drunk) playing HDR. It was damn funny, and always confused people why “I” was slagging off my own play through my mic in a room. “Damn this Remy is one cheap bastard!” etc.
If you think that video is good though, you should see his current Dr Who anime. Ohmigod it’s amazing. He’s spent much of the last 2-3 years working on that! I really hope he somehow makes something out of it.
g
No takers on the football debate though…
Hmm, time to up the ante:
“American” football is actually one of the closest to the true origins of the game of football of any of the major sports that use the name. Rugby football and other variants like Australian rules football are ALL much closer to it than the runtish off-shoot of the sport that is Association football!
Although I was only subbing for a couple of years, the years I was active were probably the some of the more interesting ones. Groups had been using MPEG-4 SP (known as DivX 3.11) since early 2000 or so, back when they had to use a program called nandub and with its hack of the MS-MPEG4 codec. This is when digital fansubbing really started to make ground and take off.
I wasn’t actually fansubbing then, but I remember being a viewer and them switching to XviD in around 2001/2002. It caused quite a lot of problems. Since the new version of DivX/XviD introduced B-frames (something that was hacked to work in AVI, because AVI doesn’t support it), there were all kinds of decoder problems with people getting green screens and broken shit since their old decoders did not support them. As for B-frames, they should have moved to MP4, but they stuck with AVI to avoid shitstorms of people not being able to play back stuff. Not only that but the software was not in place and would have required a lot of new software to be coded, and a change to encoder’s processes.
Well it took a few years and a lot of whining noobs later before everyone had properly transitioned to XviD and updated their decoders, and even so, some groups were stuck in the past and still using DivX 3.11. Naturally you also had the complaints of people on old hardware saying that their PC wasn’t fast enough to play the video. I was one of those people, but I didn’t complain, I overclocked my PC instead lol.
At this point, I was pretty damn good with XviD and encoding in general, so I decided to join a fansub group as a way of saying thanks for subbing a series that I was wanting to see, and also to offer my help to them to further improve the quality.
A few months passed and one of my friends from animemusicvideos.org tipped me off about this new project called x264. I looked into it, and it was clear to me that everyone needed to move to this new codec ASAP. It was hardly optimised, but it blew XviD out of the water. It addressed the inherent flaws in MPEG-4 ASP like DCT drift and the blocking you sometimes get where the quantizer scale wasn’t as fine as it is in H.264. It was better in every way shape and form (except it required more CPU to decode with it being more complex).
As good as MPEG-4 ASP (DivX, XviD) was, it never got officially supported on a big scale. Not like MPEG-2 (DVD, DVB etc). H.264 was different, it was so ahead of anything else that I just knew this was the next big thing as MPEG-2 was so old, so I was determined to do whatever I could to try and help move things in the right direction. I knew that with the fansubbing scene being so big, that it would be a good starting point.
Well after all the bullshit from the last transition, which was no more than an incremental upgrade that required them to install one new codec, you can imagine the challenge I had trying to convince people to install another new video codec, a new audio codec and an MP4 splitter. I plugged away, putting together codec packages, playback guides and comparison encodes showing how much better it was.
So why the MKV/MP4 rivalry?
I’m really pedantic, and I hated the fact that MPEG-4 ASP (XviD) was being put into a container (AVI) that didn’t even support it. It was a horrible hack, and I wanted to make sure that the same mistake wasn’t made again and seeing H.264 get put in AVI. My reasoning behind MP4 was that it was the native container for both H.264 and AAC audio, which means that it would also get hardware support (eg on Xbox 360, PS3 or DVD players/mobile devices). In other words, the more MP4 files we got out there, the more support there would be and better interoperability.
Although for the most part H.264 in AVI works similar to XviD in AVI, myself and a number of other encoders saw the introduction of H.264 as the perfect chance to dump AVI for good. We generally put it out there that H.264 in AVI is just plain wrong and that people doing such a thing deserved ridicule (it’s the video equivalent of a Ken player spamming fierce DP).
Although encoders are generally techy people, there were only a few that would mess with the newest stuff, that being myself and some of the DVD rippers. This is where the difference of opinion comes in. For fansubbing purposes, MP4 was perfect. H.264 + AAC in MP4 served exactly the same purposes XviD + MP3 in AVI, however the DVD rippers would continue to support MKV for it’s Vorbis audio support (which had a slight edge at the time, but is now pretty much tied with AAC) and DVD subpicture subtitles.
I basically tried to spread the word for H.264/MP4 on my own, and was met by trolling DVD rippers quite often. There were constant flames on the forum, until one day I posted the biggest ass post these trolls had ever seen and they basically went, “Well, he’s knows his stuff even if his opinion doesn’t match ours”. We agreed to disagree, and even ended up getting their respect (which is something you never saw DVD rippers give to fansubbers). They refused to admit that a fansub encoder could be as good as, if not better than them, until I bit them back.
Now they actually did a really good thing for the community in the end, although I’m still convinced it was a trojan horse for spreading MKV support. They released a codec pack called CCCP which was a minimalist install that included support for MKV/MP4 and H.264/AAC/Vorbis/Softsubs. A dumb, one click install that would mean that any leecher could install the codecs without any hassle and play our videos. It was great and played a good deal in the acceptance of H.264.
While all this was going on, the group was handed down to me because I had taken up Gundam X as a new project and the old leader wanted to retire. I was left with a dwindling staff and any attempt to get the project off the ground got stuffed in one way or another. I later found out that my editor was causing shit, telling the original members to leave and find new groups. This came from my typesetter who is a very good friend, and told me that the editor told him to leave because it’s a dead group. I got fed up with the bullshit and called it quits.
It was around this time that the companies started licensing more and more stuff. They knew that the traditional fansubbers stop when something is licensed, so a lot of the shows were getting licensed before they had even aired in Japan. This pre-licensing was not popular and caused another split in fansubbing. You had the groups that would respect the old ethics, but you had others that would say pre-licensing was a shady tactic to stop fansubbing and would continue until it was actually released. It’s true that in theory, a company could license a show and not release it for a few years, that was the fear.
Yeah, incredibly competitive environment. I can relate to what OtaKing was saying about names in the titles. Everyone wants to work for the biggest groups and be recognised as the best at what they do (since it’s not like you can go to tournaments and win at typesetting or encoding LOL). Outside of promoting MP4 I kept a relatively low profile and worked with the smaller groups who I thought I would be the most help to. I didn’t care too much for the large groups because they expect you to do things to a tight schedule, and I am so pedantic that I just cannot make that kind of promise
Even though I’m only getting a gist of what you are saying, I can tell you know your stuff! It’s also giving me a lot more insight, even though I only have a vague understanding of digital picture-quality terms. When I was involved with fansubs, it was all about VCR tape copying! At least I could eyeball video tape copy quality pretty well and let people know what they were getting ^_^;;
… and CCCP is the only thing I know about this g FIERCE SHORYUKEN!.. Once I was told to get CCCP it was the first time I could ever be arsed trying to get any fansub (or any dl video really) trying to run on any of my PCs, short of just bothering one of my friends to “get it working please, I’ll buy you dinner”. hah. I just didn’t care enough anymore about any of this stuff to bother to find out. CCCP got it to scrub level where I could at least download & watch something without feeling like I was back at work.
Good decision by the sounds of it!
See, whilst I can understand the human side of this, I never got much of that myself. For me my anime ‘fandom’ was all about “holy crap this is a great show that no-one has seen, I want them to see it”. Power to the one who doesn’t want it… I guess that’s why I ended up being dedicated enough to do the ‘boring’ organisational side of things. I suppose there’s some “I want to be big fish in a small pond” element to all kinds of fandom though. I can’t deny feeling a small bit of that, but it was never really very motivating for me.
PS: Play in REMY77077’s EURO XBL HDR TOURNAMENTS! MADE BY REMY77077, RUN BY REMY77077, TIMED BY REMY77077, EDITED BY REMY77077, TRANSLATED BY REMY77077, VIDEOD BY… UH… ScarGfx 360 and Sharizord. (shh)… PROMOTED BY REMY77077!
If any of you are into house music and clubbing: [media=youtube]LwW2kUj6JGw[/media]
Random but I thought I’d post it.
EDIT: Can anyone provide cliff notes for Zero’s post? All I see is MPEG… are we discussing the best porn formats?