Indefinite Hiatus

Well, it’s been a couple of months since the last post here, so I’ll just admit it. I’m not working on anything for this site anymore, and I don’t have any particular plans to continue. That’s not to say it’s done for good. I’ll keep all of my project files just in case I do decide to pick Samurai Champloo and the second Tiger & Bunny movie back up.

I apologize to everyone that was hoping for these to be completed, and I’m honestly disappointed myself, but I haven’t had the desire to finish it for a long time. This kind of thing really is a work of passion, and I lost that passion a long time back. Like I said, I may come back to these projects in the future, but there are no specific plans.

I am “officially” (as official as a copyright infringing project can be…) putting these projects on an indefinite hiatus. For all intents and purposes, they’ve been in that state. I just felt like I should just go ahead and confirm it for everyone who may have still been hoping. I’ll try to keep this site up or even replace it again if necessary, just nothing new in the near future.

As far as reasons go, well, the whole lack of desire. This site was started when I had a lot more free time. Between a full time job now, a bit of a social life, still trying to maintain time for my other hobbies, and another site that has higher priority than this one, I just don’t have the time or energy.

Thank you for all of the support in the past. Again, I am very sorry to everyone who enjoyed my releases and was hoping for me to finish these projects.

New Site

So this was a bit unexpected, though I suppose it was inevitable. My old site was shutdown. I didn’t get a particularly good explanation, but I suspect it was for Tiger & Bunny. Some of the download links were invalidated a few days before, and I had to move some stuff around in my MEGA account to get the files re-shared.

Anyway, you may have noticed that I started another site on Blogspot. I decided to go ahead and create a new account at WordPress and try importing the backup .xml file that WordPress did let me get. That’s about all I can do if I try to access my old site now. Unfortunately, the pictures and some of the other assets I uploaded were lost. I have local copies for most of them, so I re-uploaded the headers and project page pictures. I have not replaced any post pictures, and I probably won’t bother.

I did also have to redo the theme. I was thinking about changing it, but some of the posts and pages were formatted in a way that depended on the theme, so I ended up going with the same base theme anyway. I did alter the organization a bit, but the site should be mostly the same.

For now, I’ll plan to continue posting any updates here. I’ll keep the Blogspot site up just as a backup way to access any links I post, but I won’t be actually posting stuff there. Now I’m just wondering how long it’ll be until this site is taken down.

Samurai Champloo #10 Lethal Lunacy v2

Well, after what was getting pretty close to two months, I finally got another v2 for Samurai Champloo out. As I mentioned in the last, post I didn’t do much retiming. As far as dialogue lines go, I just did my adjustments for the simply styled subs and noticed one line that didn’t have enough padding for my liking, so I adjusted that for the main subs as well. That was pretty much it there. Of course, I added the updated OP/ED subs and made some slight modifications to the title screen and one sign that appears in the episode.

Then the video and audio are as I’ve been doing them, so I won’t go into detail there. The track ordering/defaults are as I did for the last v2, so check a couple of posts back if you don’t remember. Anyway, I put the standard size/bitrate table below.

Version	Filesize (MiB)	Vid. Bitrate (Mb/s)	EA Bitrate (Kb/s)	JA Bitrate (Kb/s)
720p/AAC-LC	757.6	3.581	473.8	473.6
480p/HE-AAC	337.2	1.551	231.5	231.1
FLAC	260.8 (E) 261.6 (J)	N/A	1560	1565

Here’s the same old download link. As a note here, I’ve started to delete v1 files. Currently, I have v1s for episodes 8-10 in a separate v1s folder. I’ll delete them as I need more space in the account. If there’s any specific need for these v1s for some reason, please let me know why. I still have the files, so I can re-upload them if there’s a good enough reason.

Download Folder

Samurai Champloo Status

Well, if you haven’t noticed, there really haven’t been any updates for this site in a while. I’m not going to bother with various excuses. It’s just that I’ve run out of steam so to speak on the Samurai Champloo project. Well, I ran out a while ago and just kept going at a very slow pace. I hate to admit it, but, well, it’s true. (Okay, I got into watching Dragon Ball Kai as well and now started Super… not an excuse, just mentioning it.)

That said, I’m not going to end it outright, but I’m going to revise how I approach the rest of the v2s and v3s. For the previous v2s, I’ve been going back and retiming a bunch of the lines, many of which didn’t really need it. With that in mind, I’m going to stop going line-by-line. I’m basically going to fix any known issues/changes. Then I’ll watch through the episode with the main subtitles to make sure there aren’t any other issues I notice. This may include fixing some sign text or something, since I definitely upped my standards for how I do sign text later in the series for the v1s, but I’m not going to spend too much time on them. Anyway, after I’m happy with the main subs, I’ll do all of my regular things to make the alternate subtitle tracks. This is relatively quick, so I shouldn’t have too many problems mustering the will to do this. Then I’ll mux everything together and do some quick checks and upload.

Hopefully this will encourage me to actually work on this more, or at least get episodes out more quickly. Maybe this will allow me to finish Champloo by the end of the year and get back to working on Tiger & Bunny. Anyway, I honestly haven’t really even done much for episode 10 outside of the video, so I’ll implement this method with this episode. By that note, I’ll still be doing the video the same way. The manual work on that is rather small. Most of the work is just done in the background by my computer.

Samurai Champloo #9 Beatbox Bandits v2

And after another pretty long wait, here’s my v2 for episode 9 of Samurai Champloo. I started uploading this last night before I went to bed, and I didn’t have time in the morning to post this. Then I kinda just got distracted with other things after getting back from work…

Anyway, there’s nothing too exciting in terms of episode-specific changes beyond the normal modifying line timing, putting in the updated theme song lyrics, etc. I did implement another change I was mentioning last time with the track ordering and labeling.

In particular, the Japanese audio is now listed first, but the English audio is still listed as the default. For the subtitles, the ordering is:

1) Full Subtitles – Karaoke Songs & Styled Dialogue
2) Full Subtitles – No Karaoke Songs & Simply Styled Dialogue
3) Songs & Signs Subtitles – Karaoke Songs
4) Songs & Signs Subtitles – No Karaoke Songs

However, the third track (the songs & signs subs with Karaoke songs) is the default. This means that if you have no player/splitter preferences, the English audio and Karaoke songs & signs track will play. Also, if you have a preference set to English audio but no subtitle preference, the same will be true. If you have a preference for Japanese audio and English subtitles, the Japanese audio and the full subs with Karaoke songs will play. If you have it set up like with my previous way of doing it with Japanese audio and Japanese subs preferences, it will probably default to the third subs track. I’m not positive on that one though.

For my preferences in MPC-HC’s internal LAV Splitter settings, I have it set as follows:

jpn:jpn;jpn:eng;eng:eng;eng:*|f;eng:off;*:eng

So with this example, first it would take “jpn:jpn”, and it would pick the Japanese audio and then try to pick Japanese subs. Since there are no Japanese subs, it would go to the next selection of “jpn:eng”, and it would pick the Japanese audio and the first English subs track. Feel free to set your settings up as you like. This was just meant as an example.

Anyway, if you have any thoughts on this change, please leave feedback. I don’t want to be changing it back-and-forth, and I hope to just pick one and stick with it for the rest of the v2s and v3s. Either way works for me really.

Here’s our good ol’ friend the bitrate table. There’s nothing exciting here. The AAC tracks are the exact same tracks. The FLAC tracks are a bit smaller due to the higher compression settings. The video bitrates are a bit lower than the v1s. In particular, the 480p is actually noticeably, though not drastically, lower, while the 720p is just a tad bit lower.

Version	Filesize (MiB)	Vid. Bitrate (Mb/s)	EA Bitrate (Kb/s)	JA Bitrate (Kb/s)
720p/AAC-LC	749.2	3.566	454.5	456.8
480p/HE-AAC	332.3	1.531	224.4	225.4
FLAC	267.7 (E) 273.3 (J)	N/A	1602	1636

Well, here’s the same download folder as always. I was thinking of adding a second mirror like my other site, but this site’s uploads haven’t had issues where parts randomly decide not to download (or I haven’t heard any complaints along those lines at least), so there hasn’t been much of a need. That might be because I don’t upload as much stuff in bulk.

Download Folder

Samurai Champloo #8 The Art of Altercation v2

So after nearly a month, here’s another v2 for Samurai Champloo. Between stuff for my other site and just everyday life commitments and whatnot, I didn’t dedicate a ton of time to this (you could probably tell…). Going forward, I’m not going to promise anything as far as speed goes, not that I ever really have. I hope to be faster than one episode a month, but, well, like I said, no promises. I do still plan on finishing, just realize that it’s not going to be anytime soon. The same goes for the second Tiger & Bunny movie, which hasn’t progressed in a while. As far as this site goes after these two projects, I don’t know. My life has already changed significantly since I started this site, hence having way less time now. It’s hard to say what my situation will be like by the time I finish.

Anyway, all of those excuses out of the way, I guess I’ll summarize the changes really quickly. The video and audio are the same as it has been the last few episodes. The Karaoke subs had a slight change that was mentioned for the last episodes, mainly using a modified font for the OP so that there isn’t a glitch with some of the double letters with certain subtitle renderers (VLC’s in particular). I basically just removed the offending double letter characters from the font.

As far as specific changes for this episode, well, you have the various line timing changes, mostly making some lines appear a little bit longer. I changed how I did a couple of the signs. “The European Store” scrolls in with the scene. It isn’t perfect as the scrolling speed isn’t constant, but it works. Also, for the dojo sign, I just put the text next to the sign in the far away shot instead of trying to put it on the sign in the scrolling closeup or on the sign on the ground a bit after that. It’s easier to read it this way in my opinion.

Oh, and there was a typo that kept being copied and pasted from episode to episode for one of the subtitle stream titles in the MKV header. That was fixed, and it will hopefully stay fixed for the rest of the v2s and v3s.

There was one aspect that a commenter was asking me about that I thought should be brought up, maybe even a poll or something. Currently I label the full subtitles as Japanese and the songs and signs subtitles as English. This allows one to easily setup their stream switcher to pick subtitles based on the audio. Obviously, the full subtitles aren’t actually Japanese, but it works. There is the issue of, if there are actually Japanese subtitles in another (unrelated) video, this will likely mess up the stream selections there.

One option would be to list all of the subs as English but put the Japanese audio and full subtitles first. This way, if your switcher is setup to pick Japanese audio with English subs, this would work. Then the English audio and songs and signs subs could still be set as default so that, if you don’t have any preferences set (or just English audio with no subtitle preference), it will still select the English audio and songs and signs subs. This will then mess up if you have an English audio with English subs preference set, as it will select the full subtitles.

Honestly, I don’t think I can please everyone. I have it set so that it works for me, and I think the case of a video having Japanese audio with Japanese subs messing up the way I currently do it is pretty rare (for me and most people who primarily speak English I imagine), so I’m leaning towards just sticking with how I have it. I’m not the first person to do my subtitle labeling this way, though I know most groups just do it by language, and that’s perfectly sensible. Any feedback on this topic would be appreciated, and if I see enough, I might just go ahead and do a poll of some sort.

Anyway, time for the bitrate table. I’m not really going to bother commenting on it besides just pointing out that the video bitrate and filesize are down from the v1 some, changes in video filtering and whatnot.

Version	Filesize (MiB)	Vid. Bitrate (Mb/s)	EA Bitrate (Kb/s)	JA Bitrate (Kb/s)
720p/AAC-LC	719.5	3.371	461.6	462.0
480p/HE-AAC	316.6	1.435	225.4	226.1
FLAC	250.4 (E) 248.4 (J)	N/A	1497	1485

Here is the download folder. All of the files should be there.

Download Folder

Samurai Champloo #7 A Risky Racket v2

Here are my v2s for episode 7 of Samurai Champloo. Between stuff for my other site, the Netflix Daredevil series, basketball, work, general laziness, etc., this got a bit delayed. Anyway, as far as new things for this v2, there is one thing I really should point out. If you’ve been watching the 720p episodes with VLC 2.2.0, then there’s a pretty good chance that the subtitles were rendering a bit too large, causing line wraps where they weren’t intended. The 480p episodes didn’t appear to be affected by this, and updating VLC to 2.2.1 appears to have fixed this. Nonetheless, I implemented a fix before I realized that the update fixed it. Namely, I have all of the line wraps specified with a “/N” anyway, so I just modified the setting to not line wrap unless there’s a “/N” or “/n”.

Now, this doesn’t fix the other issue I found for the OP where the double t’s in the word “battlecry” seem to change styles for a split second while it’s animating. VLC does appear to style the double t’s a bit differently than the other t’s, so it might just be that VLC is using a special double-t character, but it can’t render only one of the t’s being animated, so it changes to normal t’s while it’s animating and changes back once it’s done. Aegisub and MPC-HC just seem to use two normal t’s the entire time, so they don’t show this problem. As a quick note, I just messed around with editing fonts, and I managed to create a modified version of the font to remove the double-t character. A quick test as I’m typing this post shows that VLC now renders the double-t the same as Aegisub and MPC-HC. I’ll use this modified font from here on out, and I’ll do v3s for every episode up until now to fix this and whatever other issues come up. If you see any other weird font quirks or anything really, please let me know.

EDIT: There are other double characters I’ll have to look through. There’s an instance of a double-n that also gets messed up similarly to the double-t’s.

Anyway, there also is the introduction of the second version of the ED with this episode. I didn’t bother doing full retiming like I did with the NCED. I did make the same stylistic changes, namely altering the line fades some. Also, I’ve started putting the ED chapter earlier with these v2s, which also helps make sure the first subtitle line of the ED renders when jumping to the ED chapter.

Here’s a bitrate table. There’s nothing particularly interesting to point out here besides a slightly weird imbalance between the English and Japanese audio bitrates, but that isn’t new with the v2.

Version	Filesize (MiB)	Vid. Bitrate (Mb/s)	EA Bitrate (Kb/s)	JA Bitrate (Kb/s)
720p/AAC-LC	757.3	3.626	438.3	461.4
480p/HE-AAC	328.4	1.518	216.9	225.9
FLAC	229.9 (E) 233.9 (J)	N/A	1376	1400

And here’s the download folder. EDIT: The v2 FLAC files are up. The only difference is that I re-encoded them with higher settings with the newer FLAC encoder such that they are a bit smaller.

Download Folder

Samurai Champloo #6 Stranger Searching v2

Here is v2 of episode 6 of Samurai Champloo. There’s not much to say about this one. The video has the same updates as the previous episodes. The AAC tracks are the same as the v1s, and the FLAC was similarly re-encoded to compress it a bit better. The subtitles were mostly minor timing changes. The simply styled track did have to split the Dutch dialogue subtitles to keep a couple of the lines from wrapping. Since I had to move them up to not cover the Japanese subtitles, I decided to split them rather than let them wrap.

Below is the bitrate table. There’s nothing particlarly worth mentioning besides maybe the audio bitrates being a bit on the higher end.

Version	Filesize (MiB)	Vid. Bitrate (Mb/s)	EA Bitrate (Kb/s)	JA Bitrate (Kb/s)
720p/AAC-LC	731.8	3.427	472.7	473.2
480p/HE-AAC	322.7	1.460	232.2	233.1
FLAC	281.5 (E) 278.8 (J)	N/A	1685	1669

Here’s the same old download link.

Download Folder

Samurai Champloo #5 Artistic Anarchy v2

Finally, here is the v2 for episode 5 of Samurai Champloo. I hoped that this would go faster, but I just can’t bring myself to actually work on this during the week. I know it’s just me being lazy, but it is what it is. I’ll try to get into a habit of at least working on it a bit every night (this or the Tiger & Bunny movie), but I can’t promise anything.

Anyway, I guess there really isn’t too much to point out about this one. The 720p:480p video bitrate ratio was higher for this one than any of the other v2s at 44.2%. That’s getting into the lower ratios of the v1s. I figure that I’m just going to stop caring about this. Whether or not I think that maybe I’m skimping on the bitrate for the 480p version or not, the results are fine (in my opinion). As far as the audio bitrates go, there really isn’t much to point out here either. The AAC tracks are the same, and the FLAC tracks got a similar 10 Kb/s or so drop from the higher setting FLAC encoding.

Version	Filesize (MiB)	Vid. Bitrate (Mb/s)	EA Bitrate (Kb/s)	JA Bitrate (Kb/s)
720p/AAC-LC	753.8	3.568	468.18	468.6
480p/HE-AAC	340.1	1.576	227.0	227.6
FLAC	241.5 (E) 239.3 (J)	N/A	1445	1432

There were a couple of things about the past couple of episodes that I could potentially fix in a v3, but they’re so small and unnoticeable that I’m not going to bother to do v3s unless I happen to find something more significant. For episode 3, it’s basically just how I round off the times for the chapters. It makes zero difference as far as playback goes. For episode 4, it’s just cleaning up some of the crap left in the subtitle files during editing. There was one thing that I was worried about, namely that the subs have the color matrix defined as Rec.709 in them, but I don’t think that actually affects subtitle rendering. From what I could tell with MPC-HC and VLC, the subs didn’t look any different for the 480p version, which uses Rec.601. I assume that’s because they’re overlayed on the video after the video is rendered to R’G’B’. The colors in the subs are defined in what is essentially R’G’B’, so no conversion goes on there. From what I can tell, there isn’t a field for the color matrix in the ASS spec anyway (maybe I’m looking at an old spec), so it’s likely just something Aegisub adds just to know how to display the video you’re using when editing.

Download Folder

Tiger & Bunny the Movie: The Rising Preview

So I have my initial encodes for Tiger & Bunny the Movie: The Rising done. I haven’t started doing any subtitles for it yet, and I don’t have a timetable, though I know it’ll be quite some time before it’s done. I’d joke about saying that I hope to get it done this year, but I probably shouldn’t joke about that considering how much time (very little) I’ve been putting into Samurai Champloo recently. This particular preview is of the 720p encode, since that seems to be the most popular. I’ll get more into the video details below. If you don’t care about any of that stuff, the download link is at the bottom.

Anyway, I’m also experimenting with a few different audio encoding options. I’ve mentioned using Opus in the past, as I find that it just has a bit better quality-to-bitrate ratio than AAC. As such, I have included both AAC-LC (Nero Q0.5) and Opus (VBR target bitrate 360Kbps) encodes of both the English and Japanese 5.1 audios. (Blu-ray PGS subtitles included.) The AAC-LC encodes averaged around 460Kbps, while the Opus encodes ended up around 311Kbps (surround/LFE channels make the target bitrate inaccurate). I doubt most people will be able to hear the difference, but I would like to hear feedback on any issues or preferences between the two codecs.

In terms of frequency response, since that’s easy enough to measure, the Opus tends to win on the high end. AAC-LC at Q0.5 has a significant rolloff starting around 18KHz. Opus at this bitrate (and even lower really) doesn’t rolloff until 20KHz, which is right at the top of the human hearing range (hence why it was designed that way…). Below these rolloffs though, Opus does have a tendency to compress the dynamic range somewhat. This happens especially on the lower end of the human hearing range (20Hz to a bit above that), but it still gets quiet enough so that it gets lost behind all of the other audio. That said, I still have to give it to the AAC-LC on the low end. It really comes down to low bitrate tests I did in the past, where I was really comparing Opus to HE-AAC, so this isn’t exactly applicable, but I liked the Opus tracks more (and most studies I’ve seen tend to agree with this). At the bitrates here, it’d take listening very closely to small samples repeatedly to really tell the difference, so the decision mostly rests on the low bitrate tests and the fact that the Opus encoding gives me more bitrate flexibility. AAC-LC at lower bitrates than Q0.5 starts being noticeably bad on the high end, as that rolloff just starts earlier and earlier. HE-AAC manages to make a decent looking frequency response graph, but it has a noticeable thinness to the sound at times if listening through headphones in my experience, so I defintely wouldn’t want to use it as my 720p/1080p audio option (and I haven’t been). As the bitrate goes down, Opus just seems to compress the dynamic range a bit more and more, which is harder to notice than an early rolloff on the high end (again, in my experience).

As far as compatibility goes, most players seem to support it, but Opus in Matroska container support still seems to be spotty. MPC-HC (well, the internal LAV filters) has supported it for a while, and I haven’t had any issues with it. VLC apparently just got support for Opus in MKV support. I actually had to manually update to 2.2.0 to have it supported, and I’ve noticed an issue where it takes a while for VLC to start decoding the audio correctly after jumping in the video. Hopefully that gets fixed. If it doesn’t, then I’ll probably just stick with AAC tracks, but they likely have a while to get that done. As far as other players go, I really don’t know to be honest.

Now, as far as the video goes, I kept a bit of a lighter touch than previously. I haven’t noticed any weird noisy frames like in the first movie, but I haven’t watched through it all yet on the Blu-ray. I hope someone noticed that and made sure it didn’t happen with this movie though. Anyway, I started dealing with some line aliasing by essentially applying NNEDI3 four different times and merging the results. Two of them were on the video in its normal orientation, and two of them were on the video rotated. For each orientation, one pass kept the even lines and interpolated the odd lines, and the other pass did the opposite. Then I merged the results, weighting them all evenly. As such, each pixel was 50% the original pixel, 25% a horizontal interpolation, and 25% a vertical interpolation. Then I did a very slight sharpening of this and then applying a denoised edge mask to merge it with the original video. At this point, the flat areas were the original video and the edges were the smoothed and slightly sharpened version. Then I debanded with GradFun3, though not much was needed, and from what I can tell, it actually affected detected a surprisingly small amount of gradients. Anyway, at this point, I just output the 16-bit depth result to x264 for the 1080p version. I used the Dither package-based resizing method, as with the current Samurai Champloo rips, to resize in 16-bit depth and then output that to x264. Also, I’m pretty sure that there will be no color issues this time. A) I explicitly set the color matrices in the scripts. B) The Dither package functions change the defaults based on resolution anyway.

Talking about x264, I’ve also considered testing out x265, or rather, I’ve tested in some already, and I still don’t think it’s much better than 10-bit h.264 at similar encoding speeds to what I currently use with x264. It seems to be potentially better if I’m willing to let it go at really slow speeds (already taking 2-3 days for the 1080p version at my settings with x264, not including the Lagarith filtering passes). I recognize that there’s still a lot of room for improvement though, so I’m still open for the final release being in h.265.

As far as the x264 settings go, I think they’re the same as the first movie. I didn’t look particularly hard, but I didn’t modify them much off the very slow preset in the first place. Also, I’m planning the same CRF 16, 15, and 14 values for the 1080p, 720p, and 480p respectively.

Well, I guess I’ll throw in a bitrate table. I included all of the tracks for this preview release. Just as some additional notes, the 720p video is about 46.8% the bitrate of the 1080p video. Then the 480p video is about 57.3% of the 720p bitrate. It looks like the resizing method isn’t causing any weird bitrate drops here. I’m not sure if it’s the material or the different encoding values. That 480p value is actually higher than I’d like compared to the 720p, but it’s right around 26.2% of the 1080p bitrate, so it’s close to the 25% or so that I’d find ideal. I like to target whatever quality/bitrate balance I like for the highest quality version and then reduce the bitrate by about half each quality step down, and this is approximately the case with the above percentages. If I do end up using Opus audio, it probably won’t be quite like this. With the greater encoding flexibility, I’d probably actually different versions for each resolution. I used the 360Kbps bitrate target for 720p. I currently have encodes with target bitrates of 480Kbps and 240Kbps for the 1080p and 480p versions respectively. This may change, but this targets a total 50% reduction with the 720p version just being right in the middle.

Version	Filesize (MiB)	Bitrate (Kb/s)
720p 10-bit h.264 (CRF15)	2607	3628
5.1 E AAC-LC (Q0.5)	332.3	460.9
5.1 J AAC-LC (Q0.5)	330.9	458.9
5.1 E Opus (360)	219.9	306.1
5.1 J Opus (360)	226.2	314.9
Total	3722	5180

Anyway, here’s the link. I don’t blame you if you skipped all of the stuff above…

Download Folder