as a result many, if not all our DDL links may become dead, so from now on all our posts will also include links to the #precure channel on irc.rzon.net and the packlist for the [Precure]AllStars IRC Bot

For those of you who don’t know what that means, I’ve created a video to help. (and before i get any idiots posting about it, The_Code_Monkey is the Alias I use on LJ and TotalCodeMonkey is my Youtube name)

As well as the video, my good friend Elizara has posted a text walkthrough on her website to help out: http://madavies.briggsphoto.biz/irchelp.html

"I beat people up in competition for half-price lunchboxes"

If you don’t understand the caption, go watch Ben-To (one of the better offerings from the anime season that just ended), then look up Yarizui’s seiyuu.

In this episode: Milk plagiarizes, Urara shows us her idea to transform without the Pinky catch, Karen stays in character, Bunbee tries the same thing Arachnea tried back in episode 16, and Nozomi wants the happy ending that she craves.

Torrent | DDL

[Precure]AllStars IRC Bot List on #precure@irc.rizon.net

I, Force Gaia, may be a resident of the United Kingdom, but I still care as many Fansubbers, including Zalis, are based in the US, and there are elements of the bill that will affect those outside the US like myself.

This bill will cause a major problem for fansubbers all over the world as it will give powers that will allow the entertainment industry to prevent access to those sites in US borders, but most importantly, it’ll pave the way for other countries to pass similar laws and will meddle with the inner workings of the internet.

But I’ve just scratched the surface, here is the skinny directly from the http://americancensorship.org/ site.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

The other thing you may want to know is that in protest to this, a number of sites, both large and small, will be going on strike on the 18th.

EDIT 17/01/2012 00:41 GMT by Force Gaia: As i write this there has been some officially confirmed sites that are striking, including: Reddit, Wikipedia, WordPress, Mozilla, Tucows and Twitpic. For a full list of sites both confirmed and unconfirmed, look here.

Coco is in denial about his overeating this Christmas period

I can’t believe I QC’ed this on Christmas eve, although it feels nice to be one of the few fansubbers dedicated enough to do something over Christmas for a non-weekly show.

In this not-so-christmassy Christmas release:

Coco scares the cures, Nuts becomes a hamster, Milk turns food critic, and Hadenya considers quitting nightmare to become a sales rep.

Zalis: Well, it would’ve been closer to Christmas, if I’d been a little less lazy. So now it’s a “New Year’s Eve Eve” release instead.

Torrent [CRC=D838321D] | DDL

Just like every villain in every episode before this one, genius.

The caption was either that or “No shit, Sherlock”

I bet you didn’t expect one this fast? Well as Zalis thought I was as out of action (I originally did too, but i found I’m not so much actually) so he did most of the work for this one himself behind the scenes while I was Qc’ing 35. (Zalis: Actually, I translated and timed it in the 12 hours after 35 was released.)

In this episode:

Nozomi complains, Karen acts the school council president for once, Nozomi complains some more, Rin collapses, and Gamao learns not to trust management the hard way. Oh, and the pretty robotic butterfly is used again.

Zalis: I’ve realized that Pretty Cure 5 aren’t just Magical Girl Warriors, they’re class warriors. And they’re engaged in class warfare against Nightmare, which is clearly a job creator. I mean, look how many employees are in those meeting rooms every episode, getting paid to do practically nothing! But no, Pretty Cure have to throw up all these job-killer regulations with all their talk of justice, fairness, and restitution for the Palmier Kingdom.

Nightmare even has a perfect way of dealing with unemployment and poor people: drive them to the breaking point until they go insane and get themselves taken out by law enforcement, or in this case, Pretty Cure.

Torrent [CRC=E4208953] || DDL

Any Shugo Chara! fans in the audience?

Sorry we took so long. As we explained: my university course started up again and I had to prioritise that and Zalis’ Convention staffing kept him busy. I’d also like to take this chance to mention that the next ep won’t be touched by me until I get my assignments done and handed in, so that may be Dec 18th or later, actually i should be able to fit some in as i’ve not got as much work as i expected, but during the winter break I will try and make up for lost time.

In this episode: Komachi actually has more than one line of dialogue at a time, Milk gets forcefully silenced for once, Coco premieres as a stalker, we finally see Mr. Bloody in “action”, and there’s something going on after hours in Natt’s House.

Torrent || DDL

Zalis mailed the script for 35 to me on Wednesday and I’m about to get onto QC’ing it

Now for an abrupt tone-shift:

I jsut want to make this as clear as i possibly can, as we’ve had at least three different people ask about it. To be honest, i can’t believe that I’m actually clarifying how we release as it’s really not hard to understand (plus zalis was doing it EXACTLY the same way while subbing splash), and it’s probable that it’s only a dozen or so ejits morons lesser-than-bright people who can’t get their head around it, but here I am in the hope it’ll stop the aforementioned people from asking stupid questions.

We will continue release as we are doing so currently:

• Torrent (which Zalis starts then a few friends from the precure community help seed it)
• Direct Download Link (DDL, provided to us by CureGecko, and on occasion by Elizara if she’s feeling generous and gives me one when she catches me on IRC)
• Presence on the [PreCure]AllStars XDCC bot in #precure@irc.rizon.net (when Rika_chama notices there’s been a release and puts it on there)

Did anyone notice a method that wasn’t listed there?

Yes, the method I’m talking about is Streaming, and it’s not happening, EVER.

and by that i mean:

WE ARE NOT UPLOADING OUR RELEASES TO ANY FORM OF STREAMING SITE, AT ALL, FOR ANY REASON, EVER, EVEN IF YOU ASK.

and by asking I mean even if you ask us were you can find one already up, and the answer is: we don’t know because they shouldn’t be there

In order to stream we’d need to re-encode the video, which we’re not going to do for the reason that zalis mentioned in a comment to one of said people:

No. We’re not re-encoding these to hardcode the subs or reduce the quality to shitty streaming levels. Google “bittorrent client” and “cccp”, download and install those programs.

Basically he’s saying that in order to be put onto a streaming site it’d need re-encoding into a hardsub, and it’s resolution reduced, which defeats the object of what we’re trying to do in terms of providing a DVD-quality softsub, he’s also referring to my other post about how to play our releases.

Another thing he refers to is a “Bittorrent Client” which you require if you want to download are releases using the Torrent method. (I recommend µTorrent)

If you can’t get your head around that, just use the DDL.

Regardless of which download method you choose you’ll still need to follow the playback instructions in the other post.
If you try and use the argument that your computer isn’t powerful enough: i call BS, as I’ve got a 1.6Ghz + 1GB netbook that will happily run 720p video using the CCCP (and the video in question was one of over-time’s Kamen Rider OOO softsubs), and i seriously doubt anyone is running anything much less than that these days. We aren’t doing HD res so if you have those specs you should be able to play then no problems.
If you try and use the lack-of-space argument, it’s only people with massive HDDs like me who can archive anime, most others DL, watch then delete, and if you haven’t got ~300MB of free space on your computer your OS shouldn’t be able to run. doing it that way really isn’t that different to streaming and you’re not limited to how many minutes you can watch a day, and you need not wait for buffering.

—–

Zalis: I concur with what ForceGaia has said. As far as system requirements for playing these videos go… I (still) watch anime on a ~7-year-old 1-core P4 @ 3Ghz with 512 MB RAM via a ~16″ CRT @ 1024×768.  While it struggles with a lot of 720p videos, and 1080p is out of the question, it’s still more than enough to play low-res h264/.mkv releases like PCSS’ YPC5 and Splash Star files. Given that I use very simple karaoke effects and no complex typesetting (not that PC has walls of text anyway), the odds that you cannot play these files are quite slim.

While we do not endorse any streaming versions of our releases, we also can’t stop any 3rd parties from uploading them to streaming sites. But seriously, if you’re going to stream this stuff, at least re-encode the files to hardcode the subs, thus ensuring that they look how they’re supposed to look when streamed.

Sorry things have been quiet around here lately, but I’m staffing a convention (http://www.animenebraskon.com/) this weekend, and things have been busy due to all the last-minute planning and preparations. Starting next week, I should have more time to get things rolling on some more YPC5 translations.

Force Gaia:

It’s funny how me and Zalis both have these periods of not being able to do anything at the same time. I’m a bit bogged down with University work at the moment (and it’s only a single module that’s doing it!) I’ll do what i can when i can, but I’m betting the next time I’ll be doing a reasonable amount is after the 16th December when my uni term ends (or when that module decides to give me a break from trying to do the impossible)

But as i said last time: you’ve waited years for this, and we’re on the case now, we’re not going to disappear, we’ll get it done eventually. We aim to get it done, but we never said we’d get it done fast.

As we’ve had MANY people enjoy our subs with no problems, I can say for sure it’s a problem on their end, most likely with their playback software.

When fansubbing anime we have to encode our releases so that what you’re downloading isn’t all that massive, but that also means at the other end, you guys have to have the right stuff installed to play it back. What you need then is a codec pack.

Read on for info of how so get yourself ready to watch our releases.

For Windows:

The codec pack supported in the fansubbing community tends to be the “Combined Community Codec Pack” (or CCCP for short), there are also standalone players that have their own codecs but I’ll get to that in a bit.

The pack comes with a program called “Media Player Classic Home Cinema” (or MPC-HC for short) pre-configured to use the CCCP, all you’ll have to do is make sure you set it so that MPC-HC becomes the default player for all your media files when prompted in the codec setup

if you still experience problems seeing subs make sure the following are set in MPC-HC’s options:

Playback -> “auto-load subtitles” should be checked (Credit to Desbreko for correcting me here)

Stand alone players for windows:

There are a few other players that don’t require codec packs but they’re usually not as reliable due to not being as easily updated or just being not brilliant in general.

DO NOT USE VLC as it has problems with some embedded subtitles.

My player of choice for the most part is The KMPlayer however if you’re not savvy in setting up things I suggest you stay away from it as although it’s powerful, it does require some setup and configuration tweaks to get it running properly, and it does have the problem that it doesn’t support (at time of writing this) the Hi10p format of encoding that some groups are switching over too

For Mac

I don’t own a Mac so can’t help much here, but I’ve heard people use something called MplayerOSX

For Linux

I don’t use Linux, but apparently MPlayer2 works.

About Hi10p

If you flit about fansub groups like I do you may have heard of this thing called Hi10p or 10-bit h264. It’s a new codec that many groups are moving over to in some way or another (example: Doki is only using it for their 1080p blu-ray releases, while Over-Time and Æsir are using it for all their HD Kamen Rider Fourze releases)

It’s basically an improvement to 8-bit h264, allowing for a better picture quality while having a smaller file size, however, it’s not supported by everything yet. If you have the newest builds of CCCP or the K-lite mega pack you’re set for Hi10p as they support it.

Shoving a 10-bit video into a player that doesn’t support it may have differing effects. If it supports 8-bit, it may play it, but it will look sucky; while some players will just outright refuse it and/or crash.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to mention that PCSS will not be using Hi10p for the episodes, as what we’re doing doesn’t warrant it’s use, and K.o.R has already encoded the raws for us anyway.

However Desbreko has encoded some raws of the YPC5 Movie for us and the HD version of that is in Hi10p, so should we get around to doing that you’ll need to be set for Hi10p if you go HD (SD is standard 8-bit as far as i know)

In this episode:

Nozomi gives the fan-pairing more ammo, Milk is strangely quiet and non-annoying, Hadenya shows us how to properly throw a Kowainaa mask, and Karen uses a lightsaber.

Torrent [CRC=C3B6FDFD] || DDL

Zalis: True, Milk is tolerable in this episode, but I did get some Shilling The Wesley vibes. And isn’t it convenient that they can forget about Pinkies for several episodes at a time, only to find the exact one they need, when they need it?

Incidentally, this is the first episode that I did not translate for Aesir months ago.