Baud Attitude

I realized recently that an awful lot of posts of late had been about, well, fan-service-heavy anime and games, and I wanted to try to offset that in some manner, to point out that I wasn’t a complete perv and that I actually did like some things with Substance.

So, I started to write a post that was a list of fan-service-heavy anime that I’d seen that I HADN’T liked, and after typing out quite a bit and hunting down example images and doing actually quite a bit of prep work, I came to two realizations.

1) No matter how terrible the show was, it probably had SOME fans, and there was a nonzero possibility that they would eventually stumble across my post and be offended and post long ranty comments about my disrespecting their favorite show, and that would trouble me for all of the 10 seconds it takes me to hit the Delete button because I’m a bastard.

2) Making up a list like this was an admission that I had, at one time in my life, actually spent money on Jungle De Ikou!, which I realize I’m admitting now, but I feel a little confession is good for the soul and it hopefully distracts from the REALLY bad skeletons in my theoretical closet.

So, I abandoned that project.  I’ll have to find another way to balance things out.

I’ve been quite enjoying reading the posts at Ogiue Maniax for a few weeks now; it has just the right balance of silly and serious to keep my attention and it makes me feel a little more in-touch.

A couple of weeks ago, they ran a fun article that compared fanservice and chocolate, and mentioned a show called “To-Love-Ru” as the anime equivalent of binging on chocolate.

I’m still kind of getting over the ending of School Days, so that sounded good.

After watching the dozen or so episodes, well, it’s an awful lot like a “re-visioning” of Urusei Yatsura.  That’s not a bad thing – I love UY, and it’s been a few years since I’ve seen a good take on the “alien princess winds up engaged to normal guy, chaos ensues” story.

Plus, yes, it’s heavy on the fanservice, but it manages to ride the fine line between comedy and voyeurism.  Yes, most of the characters wind up sans culottes on a regular basis, but there’s always a conveniently placed object, steam cloud, or blinding sunbeam to keep things tasteful…ish.

It helps that the main character seems like a genuinely nice guy, which does separate it from the UY model a bit.  Part of the fun of watching UY episodes is waiting for Ataru to do something stupid and get electrocuted, which also means that he’s stuck in perpetual lecherous-idiot mode until the end of time.  It’s hard to root for Ataru, but you can’t help but feel for Yuuki.

And, not that it affects the quality of the show or stories or anything, but I’m quite fond of both the OP and ED songs, which is pretty unusual.  Both got put on my MP3 player and into heavy rotation.

Edit:

So, after finishing the series, I have an overall positive impression.  If I have one complaint, it’s that there were a couple of filler episodes in the second half that I could have done without, particularly the “let’s produce a full episode of the show-within-a-show” episode, but that’s a pretty mild rebuke to a series that had me genuinely laughing on a regular basis.

I was initially a little disappointed with the ending, but a night’s sleep changed my mind.  In the end, it seems like everyone is, well, happy, and they deserve to be.  It stays open-ended, so it’s tempting to say that nothing really gets resolved, but what’s really happened is that the characters are able to move forward, freed from the Unwieldy Plot Device that tossed them all together in the first place; they’ve become friends and don’t need an artificial reason to stay together.

Oh, as a final note: Apparently the steam clouds and blinding sunbeams that I praised for keeping a modicum of taste in the show were only present in the broadcast release, and are removed for DVD.  Not actually sure if that’s a positive.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided that I was going to figure out, once and for all, how best to take MKV formatted fansubs files with soft subtitles and convert them into files with burned-in subtitles so I could play them back on the AppleTV and/or PS3.

By all rights, this should have been easy.  I use mplayer to play back mkv files on my Mac, so I should be able to use mencoder to convert them, right?

There’s one problem with that, though.  Well, two problems.  The first is that mencoder really doesn’t write h.264 files very well.  It’s GREAT if you want to convert video to divx-encoded AVI files, mind you, but I wanted to make .m4v container files.

The second, and larger, problem is this:  Most fansubs use “ass/ssa” style subtitles.  This lets the subtitler do all kinds of neat positioning and graphical effects with the text.  Here’s a VERY simple example.

Note that Mplayer will correctly interpret ass/ssa style subtitles and display them:

Mencoder won’t.  The same frame after running the file through mencoder looks like:

…you see the problem.

I did eventually hit on a solution.  You can run mplayer in a mode that directs its output to a file instead of to the screen.  This makes a huge file, but it gives you what you need to then make proper looking .m4v files that play back on either an Apple TV OR a PS3… and, hell, while I was at it, I decided I’d figure out how to make PSP and iPhone compatible files.

This took a little time, and it’s not for the faint of heart or for anyone who fears the OSX Terminal window.

Here’s how I did it.

First: I needed mplayer and ffmpeg.  There’s an excellent guide available on how to get these on to your mac.

Fair warning:  You need to be comfortable compiling programs from source code.

Then, I spent a couple of weeks trying out different encoding settings, and finally hit on some that seem to be both compatible and fairly high quality.  I wasn’t optimizing for file size, mind you.  I owe Robert Swain a great deal for his tutorials, I would not have been able to figure things out without them.

After that, I wrote a shell script that I could run from inside a directory of .mkv files.  This script iterates through every .mkv file in the directory and encodes two new versions of each:  One for the Apple TV and PS3, and one for the PSP and iPhone.

If you want the script, here it is.  Copy this and paste it into an “mkvconvert.sh”, chmod it to executable, and you’re good to go.

Some warnings:

1. You need to be doing this on a partition that supports files over 4GB.  So it needs to be an HFS+ partition, not FAT32.
2. The PSP conversion assumes that your source has an aspect ratio of 16:9.  4:3 files will be stretched and look terrible.
3. I don’t like spaces in file names, so this converts all spaces in file names to underscores.
4. I have no idea whether this will work on anyone’s mac but my own.
5. This rather heavily relies on the input file’s resolution and frame rates being compatible with the Apple TV, since I don’t monkey around with them.  If you throw a 1920×1080 mkv at this, you’re going to get a 1920×1080 m4v out of it and the AppleTV won’t know what to do with it.
6. I’ve had problems with files that throw a “invalid and inefficient vfw-avi” error, because mplayer drops frame like crazy if it has problems.  If you see these messages, you’re going to have out-of-sync video and audio.  I’m trying to figure out a way to remux files to fix this.

With that said, here’s the script.  If you choose to go down this path, I wish you the best of luck.

#!/bin/bash

# fullfilename = full name including mkv extension

# filename = file name with mkv extension stripped

# m4vfile = file name with new m4v extension

# pspfile = file name with _psp.m4v added

for videofile in *.mkv

do

fullfilename=${videofile// /_}

mv "$videofile" $fullfilename

filename=${fullfilename//.mkv/}

m4vfile=${fullfilename//.mkv/.m4v}

pspfile=${fullfilename//.mkv/_psp.m4v}

echo Input file $fullfilename Output files $m4vfile and $pspfile

mplayer -ass -ao pcm -vo yuv4mpeg $fullfilename

ffmpeg -i stream.yuv -i audiodump.wav -vcodec libx264 -vpre hq -vpre baseline -crf 18 -threads 0 -b 3000k -acodec libfaac -ab 160k -y $m4vfile

ffmpeg -i stream.yuv -i audiodump.wav -vcodec libx264 -vpre hq -vpre main -level 21 -refs 2 -threads 0 -s 480x272 -b 500k -maxrate 768k -bufsize 2000k -ac 2 -ar 48000 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -y $pspfile

done