Baud Attitude

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

As I’ve mentioned a time or two before, I’m quite the Studio Ghibli fan.  This isn’t exactly setting me apart from the crowd, mind you; Ghibli’s movies are some of the best loved films to come out of Japan.

Anyway, one of my favorite Ghibli movies is Umi Ga Kikoeru, or “I Can Hear the Sea”, though the official English title is something like “The Ocean Waves” which I don’t really understand but whatever.

I have an odd association with Umi ga Kikoeru and Porco Rosso: I think of them both as “newer” Ghibli movies, though the truth is that they’re both coming up on two decades old.  See, the first time I saw a Ghibli film was in 1991 or so.  That was My Neighbor Totoro, by the way, and watching that made me immediately track down everything else I could get.  At the time, that was Nausicaa, Laputa, and Kiki’s Delivery Service.

So everything released post-Kiki’s gets lumped into the “newer” category, and everything up to that point gets lumped into my internal “classics” category, even though it doesn’t make sense to divide it that way.

Anyway, Umi ga Kikoeru came out in 1993, I got to see a fansub of it in 1994 or so, and I’ve watched it every year or two since then.

It wasn’t until the most recent watching that I noticed something, though, and it kind of blew my mind.

Here’s a very early shot from inside Taku’s apartment.  Note that, while Taku is centered in the frame, there’s a very obvious piece of paper tucked into his mail sorter on the left side of the frame.

He’s getting packed for a trip.  He gets up, leaves, there’s a pause, and then he comes back into the apartment; he’s forgotten something:

What he’s reaching for is, basically, one half of an RSVP card; it’s the half that has the address and time of the event on it.  In this case, it’s an RSVP card for a 同窓会, “dousoukai”, or “class reunion”.  Since he only has half of it, we know that he’s already returned the RSVP part of it to say that he’ll be attending the event.

I wouldn’t know this, mind you, except that we happened to study these things back in JPN301 during Fall term; in fact, one of our assignments was centered around how to properly respond to RSVP cards.

So if you’re watching this and you can read the card, you know exactly what his situation is, why he’s packing for a trip, where he’s going, and why the movie shifts into flashback mode a couple of minutes later and stays in flashback mode for the next hour.

It sets the tone for the entire story.

Unfortunately, neither the fansub I saw back in the early 1990s nor the official Region 2 DVD bother to translate it, and I guess I can’t blame them; it’s a very quick scene in the film and it’s hard to think of  a way you could explain it without putting up a big “cultural note” subtitle.

After School Days, I needed another cute school romance show that maybe didn’t end with any decapitations.  I decided I’d go with Akaneiro no Somaru Saka, which was recommended in Chris Swett’s anime podcast a few months ago.  I figured I was probably pretty safe with it, I’ve known Chris since the early 90s and he’s yet to make a recommendation I really disliked.

Now, then, it always kind of confuses me when translators take care to translate every little bit of dialogue in a show but for some reason never translate the title, and it was a simple enough title, so I figured I could just look it all up in a dictionary and be done with it.

Starting with “akaneiro”… “iro” was using the kanji for “color” and “somaru saka” meant “dyed hills” or “dyed slopes”, so obviously it means the “xxx color-dyed hills”, and that’s when I got into trouble.

See, I’m a guy, and guys have like, oh, 10 or 12 colors.  We’re good with colors if you’re talking about “red” and “blue” and if you were a guy that grew up with a Commodore computer in the 1980s, you even know what “cyan” is, but when you get out of our comfort range we get confused.

“Taupe”, for example.  I never quite got “taupe”.  Eventually a woman explained to me that it simply meant “beige”, and I knew “beige” meant “light brown” and I don’t get why people don’t say “light brown” when they mean “light brown” and stop inventing words for no reason other than to confuse men, because lord knows we’re generally confused enough.

Ahem.

Anyway.  “akaneiro”, according to the first dictionary I picked up – the venerable (my copy dates from 1985) Kodansha Japanese-English Dictionary, means “rose madder”

…

Rose madder.

Huh?

That’s not a color name.  I mean, “Rose” is a color.  It means red.  Well, not red.  It means a color that men describe as “kinda red”

But madder?

I looked through a few more dictionaries.  It turned out that I made a good choice going with the Kodansha dictionary to start, because it’s not a common word.  It wasn’t in the next four dictionaries I looked in.

I was starting to think that they’d made up the word.  I mean, Rose Madder?

I threw it at WWWJDIC and it came back with “Madder red”, so at least we had “red”, which is a recognizable color.  Things were looking up.

Finally, I went to my DS dictionary, kanji sonomama rakubiku jiten or something like that, and it defined it for me as such:

“madder; dark red”

I breathed a small sigh of relief.  “Dark red” is a color I understand, so the title of the show is simply “The Dark Red Dyed Hills”

I’m going to file that away in my list of Japanese colors with “aoi”, which means “sorta blue, unless it means green”

Oh, there was a show, too, attached to the title.  It wasn’t bad.  It had an over-the-top rich princess girl type, which is just about my least favorite character stereotype of all time, so that was a major down point, and the love dodecahedron resolved itself in a way that I didn’t entirely approve of, but it didn’t have any really painfully over the top episodes and absolutely nobody got gruesomely murdered, so it delivered everything I really wanted: A goofy romantic comedy with a host of cute girls fighting over a clueless guy.

Well, it could have done with more girls with glasses, I guess.

Still, pretty good.

Dear Diary:

Today, in an effort to be more “in tune” with modern anime fandom, I watched all of “School Days” in one sitting.

As a result, I now feel slightly more up-to-date, so desired effect achieved and all that.

Unintended minor side effect: I’m convinced that the world is a bleak and uncaring wasteland devoid of any hope for the future.  It’s not that the characters didn’t get what was coming to them or anything, but woof.

I mean, WOOF.

I need to scrub my brain with something now.

I had a few posts last week about video encoding, mostly because I’ve been on a quest to take .mkv files with soft subtitles, which is the Current Popular Format, and crunch them into Yesterday’s Popular Format of .avi or .m4v files with burned-in subtitles, so they can be played back on the AppleTV or PS3 hooked up to our TV.

I’ve had some success in this.  Mind you, there’s an obvious quality drop because I know virtually nothing about how to encode video properly, so I’m more or less making things up as I go along, but I’ve managed to make it work.

In the process, I found out more than I wanted to know about h.264 video, and I found out that the AppleTV doesn’t display animation as well as the PS3, using the exact same files, but does seem to have the edge for live action stuff.

It’s also had the effect – since an awful lot of what I was reading was blog postings and forum posts and the like – of catching me up to date on the anime “scene”, which is one of those concepts I’d been vaguely aware of only in that I was pretty sure I wasn’t part of it and hadn’t been for at least the last decade.

Put simply: It’s ugly out there.  Well, that is, it’s ugly if you’re a western anime licensor. Firefox claims that “licensor” isn’t a word, but I think it is so I’m going to leave it in there. I digress.  Where was I?  Oh, yes, it’s ugly out there.

The advances in technology over the last few years have made it so that a program broadcast in Japan can be grabbed from Japanese P2P networks, translated, subtitled, and put up for download in the US within a day, and popular programs will have three or four different groups of translators competing to be the first ones to put up their version.

Furthermore, the old “gentleman’s agreement” to do this only with shows that hadn’t been licensed for western release has been completely tossed out the window, because it gets in the way.

Obviously, groups wouldn’t be competing to put out fansubs faster faster faster if there weren’t demand for it, and ye gods is there ever demand.

I ran into several fans claiming to watch at least a thousand episodes a year – that’s something like forty complete series.  Granted, that’s probably only a quarter to a third of the complete anime output of Japan over the same period, but it’s still a staggering amount.  I’m not sure if I’ve watched forty complete series in the last five years.

These fans tend to have blogs – and there are a lot of anime blogs – that exist solely to recount the blog owner’s day-by-day watching of the Latest Hot Shows, with Brief Commentary and Extensive Screencapping of each episode to prove that they are, in fact, keeping up with the Joneses, and also of course that they are current with the latest memes and imported-from-2ch jargon.

I do much the same with video games, I suppose, the difference in my case being that most of the games I’m playing are at least five years old, so in my case I’m carefully chronicling how far behind the bleeding edge I’ve fallen.  🙂

Anyway, lots of people trying to Keep Up With The Bleeding Edge combined with fansubbers that are competing for bragging rights and have lots of time on their hands means that the domestic distributors are in a boatload of trouble.

See, fansubs give their audience instant gratification in the form of HD-resolution video files (even if at pathetic bitrates), with soft subtitles, the day after the show airs in Japan, with no pesky copy protection, for free.  It’s hard to turn that down in favor of waiting for a DVD release, or watching a low-resolution ad-supported stream.

Moreover, the industry doesn’t seem to have any personality, so there’s no sense of community.  Back in the Good Old Days, by which I mean the days when we were paying sixty-five dollars for a laserdisc, or forty dollars for a tape with four episodes on it, there was kind of a sense that the anime companies were On Your Side, that we were all part of the same Grand Crusade to bring anime to the english-speaking world, and that actually charging money for it was just an unpleasant reality.

That was then.  Now, the smaller, fan-run or fan-centric companies seem to have gotten out of the business, leaving a few big names – Funimation, AD Vision or whatever they’re calling themselves now, Bandai – to hold the reins.  There’s no more sense that, say, bootlegging an Urusei Yatsura LD is taking money from Robert Woodhead’s pocket, now it’s that subtitling the new Full Metal Alchemist series before it can be streamed legally is putting one over on a giant, uncaring corporation.

I’m not going to hold myself up as any bright shining example of respecting copyright, mind you. I’m not deleting my fansubs and buying the DVD releases as soon as they’re announced; I got burned on THAT after I spent $70 buying the first two volumes of Welcome to the NHK and having the series get canceled.  I do replace fansubs on occasion, but I have to admit that I wait for the entire series to be released, and then I wait for it to be collected in a thinpak version; the last show I went all-out on was the limited edition Haruhi discs.

Basically, back to the thing where I said that domestic licensors were in a pile o’ trouble: yeah, they are.  I’m not going to predict The End Of The Industry here, but I think it’s fair – if sad – to say that, if every single American anime distributor went bankrupt tomorrow, it wouldn’t actually have much of an effect on the “anime scene”.