This post was written by Dark_Sage. He is Dark_Sage.
We’re so fucking cutting edge.
Softsubs > Hardsubs
In exchange for the loss of visual quality (typesetting, karaoke) that comes from using softsub scripts, you can turn our subtitles off and watch the show without them. I mean, you download releases to not watch the subs, right?
Oh, and you can like… rip the scripts, change the scripts up, and then remux the scripts so you have your own self-styled release! Because that’s what everyone does!
And, uh… Well, yes. That’s it. But I mean, isn’t that awesome? Right? Fuck hardsubs! And fuck any group that fucking dares to hardsub anything. They deserve mocking because… because they do!
10-Bit > 8-Bit
In exchange for some people being unable to watch the show, file size is decreased and banding is slightly lowered. Holy fucking shit, isn’t that great?
Yes, yes, some will make noise about being unable to play 10-bit releases on various systems (like certain phone models), but I mean come on. Would you rather have a release that’s a guaranteed watch or a release that you may not be able to play that has slightly less banding?
I know which side I’m on. Fuck late adopters — Go, fansubbing!
IRC > *
A chat protocol developed in 1988 is superior to everything else that people could use to communicate.
True, nobody knows what IRC is, and only fansubbers exist on our IRC channels, but I mean… when a channel with 500+ people on at a time has such brilliant conversations like this over the course of an hour:
It’s clear that this quality of conversation necessitates a devotion to IRC, as opposed to something where real people converse.
CCCP Standard!
While half of today’s typesetting won’t show up properly on CCCP, its default picture is Chiyo-chan from Azumanga Daioh, so we’re obligated to use it!
Sure, the last CCCP release was in November of 2011, but they’ll be coming out with a new release any day now! We just gotta stand by them!! After all, it must be so super hard to toss a bunch of codecs in a pack together call it a day, right? I mean these people have families and lives!
Popular Trackers, Best Trackers!
Nyaa.eu and bakabt are possibly the greatest trackers ever created. After all, they claim to be able to determine the best releases for a given series. Nyaa.eu, with their “A+” torrents and BakaBT with every torrent they list.
And how do they determine quality? Why, that’s simple! Whichever group sucks up most to the people in charge is legitimately the best gets the nod. And if your group just so happens to have a staff member on these sites who is in charge of determining “quality”, well that clearly won’t affect anything. These judges are anything but not impartial!
They Jellin’
The other scenes must be so jealous of how tech-savvy and cool we are. I bet they want to have sex with us.
In defense of softsubbing, it lets me turn off badly-done karaoke, which I do frequently.
I actually did find myself restyling something the other day!
m-m-more blur?
This is one of my favorite things to do when watching SRT subs.
Huh? The latest CCCP definitely can play 10bit. A lot of groups switched over to 10bit when it came out, in fact.
I think the only thing it can’t really render is anything that uses fractional \fs or \fscx\fscy tags (only recently added to xy-vsfilter). It’s also pretty slow because again, no xy-vsfilter, but it’s still considered the target environment for most fansubs.
I think the new version is in beta, so hopefully it will be out some time before the world ends for real and I can stop putting \fs2\fscx2000\fscy2000 on all my Mocha scales.
I may or may not have been channeling the past.
CCCP is some kind of cp right? Or have I been misfappan all these months….
I-i-i-it’s n-not l-like I l-love you or anything…Aw fuck it, I do.
Not restyling, but I find myself editing out typos and badly phrased lines in my downloads more often than I should…
Macs can play 10-bit easily, just like PCs. I hate Macs, but my friend uses MPlayerX, which seems to work perfectly.
And the main thing I love about softsubs (other than dual audio mkvs for certain shows) is the fact that the subs are always clear and easy to read (generally) because the text doesn’t get encoded with the video, so even if the video quality is ass, I can still read the subs, no problem.
IRC is pretty retarded though.
To be honest, I can’t really think of anything better for the purpose it serves than IRC.
Agree.
QQ
All them chinks use it, must be good! `w`
If you can’t play 10bit on a Mac, you’re a fucking scrub. MPlayerX supports this shit out of the box.
Fine, then change the argument target to my phone. Only some 10-bits work right for some reason. It must have been fixed then because Macs were having issues.
Doesn’t particularly matter what it is because I could make the argument fit any kind of device that doesn’t play 10-bit MVKs or MKVs in general as a standard.
Like… a toaster.
My phone is an expensive toaster. :X
My phone is also an expensive toaster… that can’t make toast. Fuck.
Wow! The fansub scene is even better than I thought!
CCCP is so last century. The really cool people use PotPlayer, which comes with Korean as default language! If we can’t have the superior Japanese, we can at least use a player that speaks the same language as the animation studios!
I’d have text in front of all my boobie screenshots with hardsubs :(
I don’t think anyone advocates using hardsubs for dialogue – that’s just really dumb for a whole lot of reasons. It’s more for typesetting and karaoke.
http://puu.sh/1Cc30
Commie hardsubs: Way of the future.
The thing with Mac nowadays is less about 10-bit and more about how much libass sucks.
It’s less that libass sucks, and more that no one cares about Macs to ever give you a pre-compiled update to get rid of problems that were fixed a long time ago. I got annoyed enough to compile libass once on a Mac. I hate Macs.
I sense a certain degree of sarcasm here, but it’s mildly confusing given that most of your bullet points are perfectly valid taken at face value (excepting CCCP I guess, I’ve actually never used it, always just a combo of mplayer/vlc). While other scenes might or might not be jelly, they *should* be. It’d actually make an interesting case study to contrast how stagnant other scenes have been, such as scanslation. Resolutions have gone up a bit, and we don’t really see MS Paint any longer outside of jokes, but otherwise someone stepping forward from 1996 would have little trouble. It’s still just a zip of pngs/jpgs. The tech exists to do softsub equivalents (like PDF layers) but I don’t think anyone does. The overall editorial standards haven’t undergone the same evolution either, as your own recent look at oldsubs makes clear.
Or official subs, for that matter. Actually seeing what the guys who, in theory, should have all the advantages are using really is like taking a trip back to over a decade ago.
So yeah, jerk those egos and then splooge in the face of everyone else on the net. They deserve it.
Judging from the subtle sarcasm, it looks like someone’s volunteering to go back to watching oldsubs.
There would be almost no reason to complain about softsubbed typesetting if vsfilter did what it was supposed to do. ┐(’～`；)┌
I’d complain as a typesetter. At least please allow non-linear \move without fbf and gradient tag. With those combined, current solution tends to bloat script size and lag both Aegisub and vsfilter.
A gradient tag like the one in vsfiltermod would be awesome, but I’m not sure about a non-linear move tag. The issue is, once you leave the realm of constant-speed motion, there’s no telling what sort of acceleration governs the path. It could be exponential or quadratic or cubic; how do you implement a tag that can handle all those cases?
I suppose you could implement a tag that takes as input a formula to calculate its coordinates, but 1) you still need tracking software and a regression algorithm on top of that to determine what sort of equation governs the motion and 2) that’s even more that the renderer has to calculate on-the-fly. Frame-by-frame would be less laggy.
In fact, I know a trick that lets you do, in theory, any non-linear motion on a single line*, but I guarantee you it would be laggier than just mocha tracking it. Calculating the position of the line for each frame on-the-fly is much harder than just redrawing the line at hard-coded coordinates.
* In case you’re wondering, the trick is pretty simple: use \t tags to transform \fscx and \fscy on an invisible vector shape, since \t tags allow acceleration and you can have as many as you want per line.
Oh, I didn’t really thought of that when I was commenting. The only things that come across my mind for nonlinear movement and multiple movement per line is for karaoke~ (right now it’s very tedious to create movement effect in karaoke due to the need to split many moves)
I only watch hardsubs.
Why? Because it’s what I can watch. That’s it. I have a TV that can load up MP4s and MKVs through USB, but doesn’t like .ass at all.
As for my computer… It struggles opening Chrome. It struggles loading up a torrent file. 10bit? More like player crash.
So whenever I can’t get a show with hardsubs… it’s one show less on the list. And boy are my lists short already.
Does your TV at least like .srt?
Actually, what TV model do you have?
And while you’re at it, what are your specs for your computer? (trying to think of a solution to watch soft-subbed videos on your TV)
My computer specs are fucking disastrous. I’ll begin by saying 700 MB RAM (cue laugh track), integrated graphics (cue it again), Pentium 4 (hysterical laughter), and the most disastrous of them all: a user with a full schedule and who gets paid almost enough to cover his tuition and the bills.
(Makes me wonder why the fuck am I trying to watch anime in the first place!)
My LG Flatron does take .srt very well, yes. But no .ass file I’ve thrown at it works (even though .ass is listed as supported sub file); and even if it did, the TV doesn’t support styles nor reads .ttf files.
Aegisub can export .ass files to .srt
http://i.imgur.com/9vglE.png
Since I imagine you’re not archiving the hardcodes, though, I don’t know how much it’ll matter. I wouldn’t be too surprised if softsubs got screwed up anyway.
Except typesetting will look really weird in srt files unless El Huesudo II edits them out.
I suggest you get used to streaming sites.
Poorly encoded 240p Hadena releases all the way~
P32L, I can’t even handle that. The video goes at half the speed and the audio crackles.
Huh, I know where you’re coming from. My TV displays everything WAY better than my laptop screen (better colors & I think it does some cheat-mojo with the framerate so everything plays much more smooth) so whenever I wanna watch something that’s high on my priority list, I hardcode it myself and watch it on my TV.
Also for oldsubs:
480p on a laptop screen = ugly sh*t
480p on a TV = not bad at all
That’s probably because you don’t sit 10 cm away from you TV :P
your*
And because TV screens have a lower resolution – grab an old CRT and 480p encodes will look better than on your LCD with your current settings.
Or you could configure your codecs to do nicer upscaling, resulting in even better quality, but that’s another story altogether.
I was actually comparing a 1080p TV to a 768p laptop with crappy insides… But yeah, I guess 3m vs 50cm watching distance does make a difference.
You should consider joining us in the 21st century. Nobody cares about your Pentium II from 1997.
You forgot to mention all the drama going on between the groups. How everyone respects another’s work and would never dare to present it as their own…
I focused mostly on the tech here. Complaining about fansub culture would take about 30 articles.
This blog’s future regarding the content should be safe then.
RIP Elyasray
I’m sure Doki will let him translate the next season of KoreZombie as well.
Ahh, now this I like. Good, stupid humor.
BTW, I’d like to start Hunter x Hunter one of these days, though I dunno whose subs I should watch. From your reviews, UnMabushii Corp placed in the B tier…aren’t there any groups more worthy, though?
Consensus seems to be the CR rips are the best choice. In the sixty episodes so far they had only one or two lines that annoyed me, making them far superior to every fansub release I watched recently.
If you really like karaoke, watch CGi – they don’t mess-up (or change in any way) the main script.
Go with Sayonara-Group for 1-45 and Coalgirls (not that they’re any better than HS but hey, they’ve got kara) for the ones after that.
If I’ll have to drop a group because they didn’t finish the project, then I’d prefer to go with another group and follow their subs from ep1.
That’s sayonara for Sayonara – what about Coalgirls? They edit CR’s script? If it’s really worth the effort, then maybe I could check them out, if not, I guess I’d pick CR/HS like corocoro suggested.
SG is still active – their last release is 5 days old (still they’re like 17 episodes behind). If you really care about consistency that much… you’re making a big mistake.
Oh and I believe CGi is mostly non-edited CR script.
Non-edited CR script + karaoke + HDTV encode. Not much to compare, but some people go insane without their kara. :p
Okay, thanks for the info. I guess I’ll watch an episode or two from SG, CG and HS and see what I like best. Hopefully all groups’ll be consistent and one episode will be enough to form an opinion, though it sounds like CR/HS is the worst choice…
Haha, and yeah, karaoke never really interested me that much :p
Karaoke is the spawn of Satan and the freezer of my poor little toaster that already struggles hard for a decade old device.
I also don’t see the point in karaoke, styles or no styles; and I don’t think I want to meet people who do.
I agree with everything in this article. We’re number one by far. Drama + scanlations can suck it.
/yawn
I can unironically agree with everything except for CCCP.
Watching hardsubbed 480p stuff fullscreen is painful, while being able to render the subs at the screen resolution makes it a lot nicer to read. That still applies for 720p scaled to 1080p.
10-bit h.264 (and also the implied forcing software decoding) gives you better quality than 8-bit and hardware decoding. If I’m going to watch it somewhere else, I’ll do a hardsub encode for that device. If I can afford other devices, I have the computing power to do that. Not a big deal, and it’s not like anything other than a real computer can play softsubs well anyway.
IRC is flexible and XDCC is something you can’t do with anything else. Its one fault is how much of a pain it is to use in comparison to everything else that exists. With great power comes great reason for you to get off of your lazy ass.
A centralized, organized, and searchable place for decentralized content distribution that works? I’ll take it, even if it’s full of people trying to make my decisions for me. They can be ignored. It’s not that hard, I promise.
Everything about the ‘fansubbing scene’ is obtuse to any lazy person who has no idea what they’re doing. It’s nice not being in that category.
Hey everyone, a fansubber visited this site! Lucky us! We can have him answer all those questions we’ve been dying to know the answers to!
So tell me, how do you make the subs appear on the screen like that? Is it some kind of black magic?
Taking this question seriously, this isn’t a question for a fansubber at all.
How the subs to show up depends on your media player and subtitle renderer. Xy-vsfilter will just render the subs and composite them on the video. Using a libass-based player will do this most of the time, but if you’re using the gl output of mplayer (or gl3 output if you’re using a new mplayer2), it will render the subtitles at the resolution you’re watching the video at (which is the size of the window or, if you’re watching it fullscreen it’s your desktop resolution), and composite the subs onto a scaled version of the video. This gives you sharper fonts and clearer typesetting, but at the expense of showing more easily where typesetters aren’t using enough /blur. The unfortunate thing about doing the compositing in the graphics card rather than in software is that colorspace conversions (RGB to YUV) can be inconsistent, resulting in the need for messages like the one on GotWoot’s site for the UTWoots release of SAO.
Personally, I run mplayer with ‘-vf scale=2560:-2,ass -xy 1’ to software scale 1280×720 video to 4 times the size (2 times the width and height, which avoids problems with things like UTW’s gradients on the title screen of Fate/Zero which can have gaps when scaled to non-integer multiples of 1280×720), apply the subs in software, and hardware scale it back to the original resolution so it isn’t absurdly large in a window. Typesetting is then clear when watching fullscreen in 1080p and still rendered correctly.
Please, feel free to ask any more questions you have.
I’m sure typesetters and encoders, for example, have no idea about filters and codecs, and none of them certainly would have more knowledge about subtitles than, say, you.
Ignoring some sarcasm, they do, but the layman does not. I’d actually want to learn how to do video filtering properly so I can actually fix problems with videos. I can only do a simple transcode, nothing to be proud of.
Who is the layman among fansubbers? I fail to see how, beyond your false humility, you have knowledge that exceeds a typical fansubber and would make you a resident expert on this site.
No false humility here. There are things I know and things I don’t. The things I know are just things that have been useful to me thus far. When referring to the layman, I was talking about the regular viewer, not fansubbers. I’m a tech guy, so I’m just a little less passive with these things than your average Joe who is just downloading and watching shows.
My kind-hearted side would like to believe that you are completely oblivious to your patronising attitude, especially considering the supposed laypeople you addressed your comments to. Of course, my cynical side feels you’ve been talking yourself up a little too much. Either way, this discussion has been entertaining.
I’m not normally patronizing, I was doing it here on purpose to have a little fun. On the other hand, all of my posts have been truthful; I didn’t make anything up.
My cynical side reminds me that most people don’t know much technical stuff – not because they can’t, but because they haven’t had to. It’s far safer to avoid blank stares by not assuming people have certain knowledge. I’m not part of the fansubbing scene, so I don’t know the individuals involved. I hope I didn’t cause much offense, given that it would be counter-productive if I ever decide that I want to try my hand at fansubbing.
Well, his supersampling has certainly gone over my head! This whole time I’ve only been typing words at the screen.
I’ve been using glue and newspaper cuttings.
Oh, you poor deluded soul. I’m not a fansubber at all!
Just doing simple video editing and a 2-pass h.264 encode doesn’t qualify me as an encoder.
I may be quite the cunning linguist in addition to having a command of comma use, but that doesn’t mean I do script writing or quality checking.
With all that color matching and those transformations in 3D space, typesetting is far to difficult for someone with only 3D programming experience to wrap their head around.
In short (or tl;dr if you prefer), I could probably be a fansubber, but then I’d have to apply to groups, be lucky enough to get accepted, and commit to shows. And then I’d have to actually do a good job, or you’d tell me that I didn’t live up to the greatness portrayed in this comment.
This sounds like a lot of hot air from someone who thinks adopting a condescending tone makes him seem superior.
Well, this is the internet after all.
Nah. Although I honestly think I’d be able to get into fansubbing more easily than most, I was really just bored and laughing at being mistaken for a fansubber. I just watch some anime and enjoy good subs and typesetting.
I don’t think anyone mistook you for a fansubber. Then again, most people didn’t take the article at face value either, thus the lack of thirty-thousand comments discussing every little detail ad nauseum.
Because if fansubbers like one thing, it’s arguing about nothing.
No, we don’t! How dare you say such a thing! If you’d fansubbed for more than 30 seconds, you’d know that what you just wrote is complete and utter lies.
I’m right and I know it! I dare you to prove me wrong!
You may use complex arguments stretching several paragraphs (that can be summed up in half a sentence), falsities, claims of authority that are as unprovable as they are made up, and references to a disturbing lack of blur in herkz’s TS!
Derailing the conversation by talking about spelling and/or grammar mistakes is also permissible, by the way.
:effort:
So you’re a timer?
Great! Hadena’s looking for timers.
No, but I play one on the internet.
I’d have to learn proper lead-in and lead-out to do that. Plus the things I don’t know that I don’t know.
Those unknown unknowns, tricky shit.
There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that, we now know we don’t know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.
(Just making sure that everyone else made the same connection you did thar, DanV2 :D)
Well, still better than the scene
>PICK A CHANNEL
>ANY CHANNEL
>#GG
you didnt know that it was dead or are you just trying to be funny?
you got me xD
“In exchange for some people being unable to watch the show, file size is decreased and banding is slightly lowered. Holy fucking shit, isn’t that great?”
i want to burn it in my cd so i can play it in my car boohoo fuck the scene am so edgy and cool xD
P.S. CCCP was shit the moment it was created LOL
P.P.S.S. i dont watch any animes so i dont care anything written here XDDDD
Out of curiosity, Dark_Sage, is this the sort of comment you alluded to in the, er, Thingeries post?
Yes. Yes, it was.
Real talk? CCCP just got updated.
I’m already making the post.
Jokes aside, on the encoding end at least, fansubbers are leagues above, say, the Scene.
In the very slight off-chance that you were actually serious..
1) I don’t see a problme. At least I can finally watch releases like LoGH and 0083 that have retarded styling.
2) If you’re playing anime on your phone you’re retarded. If you own a Mac, you’re retarded.
3) What exactly do you propose to use as a form ofc communication? Facebook group chat? Skype? No, seriously, what?
I didn’t offer any alternatives to anything in this post because I didn’t have any alternatives to offer. If there’s any point to it, it’s my grudging acceptance that even though things aren’t perfect, they’re still the best options we have when all arguments are considered (which I specifically left out of the post).
About 10bit: i can watch 720p 10bit in a 800MHz phone+512MB ram (and most of it is occupied with other stuff) using mxplayer (free version actually works better than the pro version….) and for the guy that has a pentium 4 mplayer2 is probably the best option for him (never tried with 1 single core but my shitty [email protected] dual core played it fine)
About IRC: I believe XDCC+ “staff chat” is the main reason fansubs have them.
ANyway, nice article xD