• The third most annoying detail of Shingu, after the opening and closing: the sub consistently uses “I could care less” when a character means the opposite.
• The greatest weakness of digital photography is that it is too easy. Back in ancient times, i.e., five years ago, after shooting a roll of film, I’d either have to develop the film myself or drop it off at the lab. Then I’d scan the prints and spend several minutes on each image cleaning up the scan and tweaking the curves before cropping and resizing it for the web. While not a difficult process, it was laborious enough that I selected only the best or most interesting images for my websites. ((It’s amazing how complicated photography used to be, and how much good work was done in spite of the difficulties. In the 19th century, Matthew Brady and Timothy O’Sullivan worked on battlefields and in the wilderness with portable darkrooms to develop their glass negatives. The most elaborate large-format projects I’ve ever done are trivial in comparison.))
Nowadays, it is possible to take five hundred or a thousand pictures in an afternoon and upload them all, unedited, to a photo-sharing site in the evening. Too many kids with cameras do just that when they attend conventions. I like to see pictures of well-made costumes, but I don’t have the patience to plow through hundreds of mediocre images, fifteen to a slow-loading page.
• I hate MKV. About half the time I can play a Matroska video with one of the versions of VLC that runs on my ancient Mac, ((The most recent versions don’t work on my setup because of a conflict with Quicktime)) but even then the subtitles are often screwed up and the video is jerky. (H264 doesn’t do me a damn bit of good, either.) Someone has finally subtitled the third and fourth episodes of Oh! Edo Rocket, and I can’t watch them. Grrr. (Maybe I can see them during lunch at work tomorrow.) ((Don’t tell me to get MPlayer. I’ve tried installing it several times, but I’ve never been able to get it to work.))
• I dread all nifty new video software. That elegant new codec may work beautifully on a brand-new machine running Windows or Linux, but it chokes my old Mac (which I can’t afford to upgrade at this time). ((Even if the codec does work on my Mac, the people encoding the fansub need to know what they’re doing, too. While I can watch the first episode of Master of Epic easily with either VLC or Quicktime, the second works only in Quicktime for me. To watch the third at home, I have to run VLC and Quicktime simultaneously, the former for the sound, the latter for the video.)) Memo to fansubbers: I don’t need high definition. XviD avi files 640 pixels wide are fine, and there is nothing wrong with a hard sub.
Update: I really hate MKV:
>>I hate MKV.
Amen to that. I was going to recommend CCCP and the included ZoomPlayer, but then I noticed the Mac part. That must suck. I really find it annoying how people champion mkv’s soft subs like they’re the best thing since sliced bread, when there’s no noticeable use for them — since when does anyone really care about being able to edit subtitles? I know I don’t.
It’s probably just ignorance and insensitivity when a fansub group chooses something popular and chooses to only release exclusively in h264 mkv, ignoring a large demographic who don’t have a good pc and can’t have access to one. Really blows.
>>I hate MKV.
Amen to that. I was going to recommend CCCP and the included ZoomPlayer, but then I noticed the Mac part. That must suck. I really find it annoying how people champion mkv’s soft subs like they’re the best thing since sliced bread, when there’s no noticeable use for them — since when does anyone really care about being able to edit subtitles? I know I don’t.
It’s probably just ignorance and insensitivity when a fansub group chooses something popular and chooses to only release exclusively in h264 mkv, ignoring a large demographic who don’t have a good pc and can’t have access to one. Really blows.
And it’s getting worse.
I deal with crossplatform work all the time (it was my living for about 10 years). Matroska basically works well ONLY under Windows. Under other platforms it’s the worst thing ever, and in most cases is a cycle-hog. Adding on the fly text generation on top of it even makes even basic Xvid/MP3 choke on even newer non-Windows machines. Don’t even get me started on putting x264 (not h264) in matroska (in such cases I only get 1 frame EVER to display, on all my computers). BTW if it wasn’t obvious, I don’t have Windows, but I do work for machines that use it.
The only real reason people use it is because they got the encoder for free and it is apparently easier for the subbers to use… NOT the watchers. Anybody with half a brain looking at download figures would instantly realize it. And high-def does not require matroska.
BTW there are a few transcoders out there for the mac now… but most of them don’t work very well, especially if x264 is used for video. If you don’t mind some dropped frames and horrid horizontal video smearing, you might want to give MoKgVm2DVD, a frontend for several command-line tools (available on Macupdate.com), a shot for those things you HAVE to see. Even the MKVextract tools do not work on any platform I use when they use x264, or improperly code things (super-fast video, sound-stretching, and unrecognizable streams are common as well — crap I’ve never had to deal with, EVER, before matroska became all the “RAGE.” I miss OGM, never had ANY problems with it’s soft-subs.
And it’s getting worse.
I deal with crossplatform work all the time (it was my living for about 10 years). Matroska basically works well ONLY under Windows. Under other platforms it’s the worst thing ever, and in most cases is a cycle-hog. Adding on the fly text generation on top of it even makes even basic Xvid/MP3 choke on even newer non-Windows machines. Don’t even get me started on putting x264 (not h264) in matroska (in such cases I only get 1 frame EVER to display, on all my computers). BTW if it wasn’t obvious, I don’t have Windows, but I do work for machines that use it.
The only real reason people use it is because they got the encoder for free and it is apparently easier for the subbers to use… NOT the watchers. Anybody with half a brain looking at download figures would instantly realize it. And high-def does not require matroska.
BTW there are a few transcoders out there for the mac now… but most of them don’t work very well, especially if x264 is used for video. If you don’t mind some dropped frames and horrid horizontal video smearing, you might want to give MoKgVm2DVD, a frontend for several command-line tools (available on Macupdate.com), a shot for those things you HAVE to see. Even the MKVextract tools do not work on any platform I use when they use x264, or improperly code things (super-fast video, sound-stretching, and unrecognizable streams are common as well — crap I’ve never had to deal with, EVER, before matroska became all the “RAGE.” I miss OGM, never had ANY problems with it’s soft-subs.