Choose fast recompress from the menu, though, and you're all set.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:42 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Currently there's just the one torrent containing all the clips; creating and seeding dozens of torrents is too much trouble unless there's a lot of interest in this.

Let me know if you have problems downloading (other than speed; it will be slow to start with until I get another seed running), or with playing any of the files.

Oh yeah, this includes the opening and closing credits of Kamichu! in "glorious fake HDTV". Fake it may be, but it is significantly better than the standard 640x360 files.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:52 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Anyway, for this work I use the simple but very functional VirtualDub. VirtualDub lets me say "start here" and "stop there" and snip out a minute and a half of video without the time-consuming (and quality-destroying) re-encoding. It just grabs what's there, bit-for-bit (and creates new keyframes as necessary).

But VirtualDub is designed for AVIs with fixed bit-rate MP3 soundtracks. Kamichu! has been released so-far as an HDTV** Matroska file with AAC audio. Standard VirtualDub won't have a bar of it. VirtualDubMod, which has been patched to handle Matroska files, crashes violently on Kamichu!

I'm not that easy to stop, however. I used MKVextract to split the Matroska file into an XVID-encoded video-only AVI and a separate AAC audio file. Then I used All Converter to turn the AAC file into a raw WAV. Then I fired up VirtualDub again, and told it to load the video from the AVI and the audio from the WAV, and re-interleave them into a new AVI file and snip out this bit (the opening credits) and that bit (the closing credits) for me.

Which it did. And lo, the opening credits were very good. But the closing credits were teh suck, because the audio was hugely, and I mean hugely out of sync with the video, and the main reason that the closing credits of Kamichu! are cute is that they are in sync with the music. As you will see when I put them up for you to download. Via Bittorrent.

This caused a certain amount of puzzlement as it slowly dawned on me that not only were the audio and video out of sync, but that the problem became worse over time. Close examination indicated that even if they were in sync at the start of the clip, they were out by fifteen or twenty seconds at the end, which is a hell of a lot.

This, it turns out, is because the closing credits run at 30 frames per second, while the rest of the show runs at 24 fps. Why anyone would wish to do that I have no idea, but that is indeed what they have done. In the original video file it works just fine, but when I clip out the closing credits, it falls apart. But if I take that clip and tell it hey, you run at 30 fps... It works!

But you can't see it, because we have no bandwidth left.

* Between the anime fans and the bastard referrer spammers, the bandwidth well has run dry this month. I was planning to get another server to offload some of our stuff, but the hosting company seems to have run out as well.
** As it happens, it's really just up-converted anamorphic widescreen 704x480 video, not native 720p. It still looks pretty.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:47 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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In the current episode of Bleach that I'm watching (about ep. 319 or so), the main character says zakenna at one point, and the subtitle comes up Screw you!

Blink blink. It's a very plausible translation in the context (a heated argument), but is that really what the monster is saying in every episode of PreCure?

Apparently so:

[zakennayo] (exp) (X) (vulg) fuck you!/don't fuck around!/don't be a screw off!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:24 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Remember, this is subtitled. 15,000 simultaneous downloads is quite a lot.

I'm beginning to wonder why, though. I picked up a few episodes and started watching it, and it seemed like quite a good series. A bit of action, a bit of humour, a bit of supernatural horror (the show features shinigami, Japanese death spirits, and "hollows", which are ghosts that have lost their ties to the world and seek to fill themselves by devouring other souls).

And then around episode 12, it started slowing down. A fight that might previously have taken half an episode took two. Humour and character development fell by the wayside in place of more fights - which got slower still. And then one of the characters got abducted, and the other characters set off to rescue her, and the whole series just ground to a halt.

I'm watching it now - sort of. I have it playing in one window while I read Chizumatic in another. Some bad guy was mortally wounded three episodes back, and he's just about to die now. I hope.

Honestly. I've said before that Fushigi Yuugi would have been better if they'd cut four episodes from it, but this is ridiculous. You're lucky to get two minutes of actual plot per episode. Given a couple of hours, I could splice each pair of episodes into one (except for episode 33, which is a stand-alone sort of thing) and it would be twice as good. At least. You can just sit there and watch it and see tick... tick... tick... 30 seconds of reaction shots and dialog that add nothing to the story. Snip! Heroes running along the same tunnel they were in five episodes back. Snip!

Meh.

Who wrote this thing, Robert Jordan?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:48 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1. Nominate your choice for the most overrated anime series of all time.

2. Disagree violently with all the other nominations.

3. If anyone comes along and calls us geeks or something like that, dogpile!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:54 AM | Comments (82) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The Algebraist, Iain M. Banks

In Brief: A cast of badly-drawn P. G. Wodehouse characters searches for a map of the fabled London Underground, in space.

Banks does what many thought impossible, and produces a bad book, or at the very least a dull one.

Century Rain, Alastair Reynolds

In Brief: Disaffected Slashdotters, deprived of their favourite website by an all-consuming database bug, return to the Paris of 1959 in an attempt to exterminate the human race.

While there are some strong elements to this tale, the background setting and the motivations of the major parties make no sense whatsoever. Features nano-tech handwaving.

Ilium, Dan Simmons

In Brief: Descendents of humanity find themselves at a loose end, decide to while away the hours holding historical re-enactments and All-Solar-System Summarise Proust Competitions.

If possible, the background for this one makes even less sense than Century Rain. It's like a dumb-plague infected the universe of this novel some time back; I can't see any other way for the situation described to have arisen. Again, features nano-tech handwaving and a general disregard for the laws of physics.

Bah. There's a new C. J. Cherry out, Destroyer, book one of the third Foreigner trilogy, and it's apparently quite good. Doesn't seem to have reached Australia yet, though.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:49 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Warning: Not entirely work-safe. Contains boobies.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:20 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The first one, dedicated to LeeAnn, is Stop the Rock # It's just Apollo 440's song, with, well, you'll see.

One of the things too many AMV creators get wrong is combining a great idea and clever editing with a lousy song. No such problem with Elvis vs. Anime # It's an animated version of the clip for the remixed version of A Little Less Conversation. Great song, cool video.

Jungle Wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu is one of the standout anime series of the last couple of years, and footage from the show is used to great effect in Hale's Mom. # That's pronounced "hah-lay", by the way, not "hail". Hale is the little boy, the strange little girl with pink hair is Guu, and the woman who looks like Hale is Hale's mom, Weda. The song: Stacy's Mom, by Fountains of Wayne.

Moving more into the novelty category, we have the Bounty Hunters Who Don't Do Anything # Video is from the brilliant series Cowboy Bebop, music is The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything by Relient K. It's a brilliant combination.

Then we have Jinnai and the Bugrom Live # The song is Hubba Hubba Zoot Zoot! by Carumba, and amazingly enough it even sounds like Jinnai. The video is from El Hazard; the original OVA series of which is a minor classic, but this video is taken from the TV series, which ripped out half the plot and stretched the remainder from 7 episodes to 26. I mean, they removed the shadow people, which meant that the three-sided conflict was watered down to a straight good-vs-evil battle, and all the political scheming went with it, and without the shadow people to kidnap Princess Fatora they decided to remove her too, so we didn't get the whole cross-dressing deal with Makoto, and that meant you didn't get the scene with Makoto and Alielle exploring their gender roles. Not to mention the travesty of what they did to poor Ifurita, demon goddess of destruction... Never mind, just watch this clip.

And speaking of gender roles, I Wish I Was A Lesbian # No, that's the name of this clip. And of the song, which is by Loudon Wainwright III.

The Excel Pop Up video # takes Jewel's Standing Still and gives it the treatment it so richly deserves and only Excel Saga can deliver.

Men in Black II # takes on a whole new look at the hands of VicBond007, with help from the anime series The Big O. Masterful editing in this one.

The last two are more for the anime fan than the casual viewer, but here I go anyway: Eva Bebop # which replaces the opening credits for Neon Genesis Evangelion with something that will be strangely familiar to fans of Cowboy Bebop. If you've seen both series, you'll recognise the insane genius involved; if not, then... not.

And finally, its the Lord of the Yen trilogy #, which transplants the characters from Azumanga Daioh into Tolkien's great work. The brilliance here is in the casting. Of course Sakaki-san is Aragorn, and that means that Kaorin is Arwen. And Osaka and Chiyo-chan as Frodo and Sam, and Nyamo-chan as Gandalf. And then there's Elrond, and Gimli, and Gollum, and Saruman... Quite remarkable. It's a huge file, but it runs for over nine minutes, and the video quality is excellent.

Enjoy! (Oh, and click on the # to go to the appropriate page for each video at AnimeMusicVideos.org.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:14 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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This is the source of our capital.

Thanks to the snail prohibition, the price for these guys has gone through the roof.

Enter the madness!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:07 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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