NP-Complete

Not Doing the FLCL BD

Nite Phire — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:31:27 +0000

You might find yourself asking, “Why?”. The answer is quite simple. It is a shitty Q-Tec upscale. I’ve done some comparisons between some BD screenshots and some upscaled shots from my release. The results are the following:

BD1 | DVD1
BD2 | DVD2
BD3 | DVD3

If you think the BD looks better, that’s too bad for you. Find someone else to rip it for you. It is a waste of my time.

Wolf’s Rain

Nite Phire — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 13:47:42 +0000

This was a rather simple release. It took a little while to get the process of frankenmuxing the audio and subs from the R1 DVD with the video from the R5 DVD down, but in the end I think it turned out quite nicely. Aside from a stray interlaced frame or two, the source was progressive, so I didn’t have to do any of the tricky IVTC work that I’m used to. It was a rather pretty source, so I only did some light filtering, and it compressed well enough that I could leave it at CRF16 without it getting gigantic. All in all, it was easy, simple, and clean.

Future Projects v.2

Nite Phire — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 22:56:38 +0000

It’s time to update that giant list of future projects based on what’s already been done, what other competent people have done, and what I decided to add or remove at whim.

Yu Yu Hakusho (Current Project, BD)
Digimon Adventure (Current Project, higher bitrate version of RyRo project)
Cowboy Bebop Movie (BD)
Akira (BD)
Earth Girl Arjuna
Trigun
Hellsing
DN Angel
Beck
Rurouni Kenshin
Samurai X (OVAs and Movie)
Mouryou no Hako (BD)
Naruto
Naruto Shippuden
Witch Hunter Robin
Death Note
Gilgamesh
Paranoia Agent
Peacemaker
Fullmetal Alchemist
Candidate for Goddess
Noir
Elfen Lied
Get Backers
Chobits
Love Hina
Fruits Basket
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Gravitation
Hellsing Ultimate (BD)
Last Exile
King of Bandit Jing

Samurai 7

Nite Phire — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:57:56 +0000

Just wanted to let you all know that I finished work on my Samurai 7 release. I will not be posting any information on distribution here since it is a Funi series, but you are a resourceful bunch. You can find it if you want to.

Anyway, about the release. I’ve got both a 1080p copy and a 720p copy. Both include 640kbps 5.1 AC3 tracks for both Japanese and English audio, as well as English subtitles. I make no claims to final overall quality, especially of the video. I got fed up trying to fix all the problems with the source on disc, and so I’ve left a lot of issues in. There is significant banding in portions of the video, especially at fades. There are also some very strange coloration issues, most notably thick dark/light borders around lines. Not halos. Not even the cel-overlay artifacting you see in some older works like Akira. Just weird fucking coloring. I don’t even know. Anyway, I still strongly feel this is the best release available, so I would encourage you to grab a copy if you like the series.

Gurren Lagann Parallel Works

Nite Phire — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 17:02:40 +0000

Okay, quick little release for you guys. I decided to work on Gurren Lagann Parallel Works in the meantime while I’m plugging away at Samurai 7. It’s a series of what essentially amount to awesome music videos. 8 pieces, 32 minutes total. They feature music from or inspired by the original series, and each video is directed by one of the project’s staff members. They use the same character designs, but are essentially set in parallel universes, so what happens in the videos is not at all canon.

This release does not have any subs. There is no dialogue, but there is some text that remains untranslated. Why? I was lazy, had an R2 source, and didn’t feel like getting someone to translate them for me. If you really want to know what they little bits of text say, you can try and find someone’s translation elsewhere, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s really not necessary. Other than that, this release features stereo FLAC audio from the LPCM on the disc. It’s all music, so the FLAC is more than justified (and in my opinion it is always justified, so whatever). The video bitrate is pretty high as well, but hey, they’re high-action music videos. What would you expect?

Anyway, have fun grabbing it. Oh, and since I seem to have neglected to mention this, we do have a new bot, [NPC]Kino, provided by Faufnir. Not sure when GLPW will be on the bot though, so check in later or just grab it from the torrent.

No More Bot

Nite Phire — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:15:13 +0000

Unfortunately, our IRC bot is no more. OmegaPhil, who so graciously provided us with NP-Complete|Unsolved the past few months, got screwed over by his hosting and lost his server. It’s a pretty crappy deal all around. (This does mean we’re looking for another bot, so if you can provide one, I’d be interested.)

It’s Good to Be Useless

Nite Phire — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:25:47 +0000

Looks like Funimation just licensed FLCL and is planning a Blu-ray release. Guess all that work I put into the DVDs was for pretty much nothing, except the intervening months before their set comes out. Also, removed the release page so they don’t try to get my site taken down like they did with THORAnime.

FLCL Released!

Nite Phire — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:09:33 +0000

This is probably the hardest I’ve ever worked on a release. Which is weird, because it started out as the “killing time while Samurai 7 encodes” project. I thought, “Oh, it only has 6 episodes, it should be quick,” but I was oh, so very wrong. I started work on it during the summer. It’s now almost Christmas.

These DVDs had a ridiculous number of problems with them. It was a horrid time trying to properly IVTC them with the mix of strange patterns and oddly placed fully interlaced sections. There was plenty of 30fps footage and actually a bit of 60fps too. On top of that, there were artifacts all over the place, so finding the balance between garbage cleanup and detail retention was pretty tricky. It took a lot of tries to get right (or at least what I think is right). So, you can see in some of the screenshots on the release page that certain scenes keep a lot of artifacts, but this was to avoid completely blurring the crap out of it. As if that wasn’t enough, the entire series suffers from horrible aliasing. It’s a simple byproduct of the rendering process, but one which many releases haven’t dealt with properly. I think I did a decent job of cleaning that up.

Furthermore, the subtitling was a pretty ridiculous task as well. I decided that the one thing that I was really impressed by in any FLCL release I’d seen was the subtitle styling that KAA did. I decided to adopt a similar style with vivacious character-specific styling for the default track in this release. Now, I limited it to one main font with different colors, where KAA used a different font and color for each character. Since not everyone appreciates such colorful subs, I also provided an alternate track with much more toned-down styling. I also made it a dual-audio release, so a songs and signs track was included as well, along with the Japanese commentary track and English subtitle translation.

Lastly, our new QC staff, twc (seen in IRC as thewebcat, thewebchat, and a few others), played a big role in making sure this release is as good as it is. Just wanted to throw that out there.

Grab the release from IRC if you want it quickly. Otherwise you have to wait for my slow connection on the torrent. If you’d like to help, grab it from IRC, rename the files, and help seed the torrent!

New and Totally Lame Layout

Nite Phire — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:18:51 +0000

I’ll save you all the trouble of yelling at me about how my new layout is all lame and anti-functional with the banner and navigation at the bottom and weird plain-text at the top. I don’t really care. I like it. It’ll stay there until I get bored with it and change back or to something else.

That said, yes, the FLCL art in the banner is a hint. We’re finishing up the last round of QC soon and should be releasing either in the next day or two, or next week (I’ll be packing stuff up and heading home from school over the weekend, and don’t want to cut out in the middle of initial seeding, so we’ll see how that works).

After that, it’s back to serious work on Samurai 7 and probably Wolf’s Rain followed by Trigun. Samurai 7 should go much more quickly now, and Wolf’s Rain should be almost trivial. FLCL was just a pain in the ass all around.

It’s Good to Be Loved

Nite Phire — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:21:09 +0000

EDIT: It would seem the person I had this conversation with was an imposter. But it’s still pretty damn entertaining.

The following is a conversation from the IRC channel. This is why I have so much respect for the few good encoders I meet. (Note: I do not consider BluDragon among them, if that wasn’t obvious enough already.)

(3:53:31 PM) BluDragon: hi nitephire, why do you keep releasing shows i already did
(3:55:36 PM) nitephire: uh. i haven’t done any yet.
(3:55:45 PM) nitephire: and i do it because i don’t like your releases.
(3:55:49 PM) nitephire: i think they’re half-assed.
(3:55:50 PM) BluDragon: why not
(3:56:00 PM) BluDragon: I use the best sources available and the latest rules
(3:56:08 PM) nitephire: no filtering, poor ivtc, and vobsubs.
(3:56:11 PM) nitephire: latest rules?
(3:56:13 PM) nitephire: what rules.
(3:56:15 PM) BluDragon: Latest rules.
(3:56:33 PM) nitephire: seriously, what rules?
(3:56:48 PM) BluDragon: rules that professional rippers know to use
(3:57:09 PM) nitephire: yeah, sure.
(3:57:28 PM) nitephire: if all you want is a copy of the dvd, then yeah.
(3:57:42 PM) BluDragon: nitephire, look, the methods i use are guaranteed to provide a highly compatible release
(3:57:49 PM) nitephire: so?
(3:57:51 PM) BluDragon: using standard uncompressed audio
(3:57:55 PM) BluDragon: and highly readable subtitles
(3:58:15 PM) nitephire: yeah, i support standard, un-recompressed audio.
(3:58:25 PM) nitephire: but vobsubs being highly readable?
(3:58:30 PM) BluDragon: yes
(3:58:38 PM) BluDragon: compared to nigger crap like badly ocrd srt and ssa shit
(3:58:46 PM) BluDragon: because they are original dvd quality
(3:59:07 PM) nitephire: they’re like 2-bit and low-res.
(3:59:21 PM) nitephire: if you want eye cancer, go ahead.
(3:59:43 PM) nitephire: but yes, badly ocr’d srt is just about the worst.
(3:59:57 PM) BluDragon: right
(4:00:06 PM) BluDragon: that’s why the latest rules ensure only original VOBSUB quality
(4:00:28 PM) nitephire: or you could, you know, take the time to ocr them right and give them a decent styling.
(4:00:55 PM) BluDragon: look, no ocr is perfect, just as there is no perfect codec
(4:01:00 PM) nitephire: but seriously, stop talking about rules. shitty private tracker rules don’t do anything.
(4:01:08 PM) nitephire: ocr -> fix them manually
(4:02:39 PM) BluDragon: look, if the producers wanted people to read SRTs they wouldn’t have put vobsubs on the disc
(4:03:29 PM) nitephire: they put vobsubs on the disc because that was the easiest way to do it with limited hardware compatibility in 1993 or whenever they defined the video dvd standard.
(4:03:56 PM) nitephire: low-res bmp overlays are a bit out-dated.
(4:04:28 PM) nitephire: that’s like arguing that if the producers wanted people to use x264 they wouldn’t have put mpeg-2 on the disc.
(4:05:19 PM) BluDragon: the point is, the only way you can be sure there are no errors in the subtitles is to use the vobsub
(4:05:28 PM) BluDragon: no matter how accurate your ocr process is, you will STILL get errors somewhere
(4:05:37 PM) nitephire: right. try proof-reading.
(4:05:43 PM) nitephire: you have eyes and a brain, don’t you?
(4:06:00 PM) BluDragon: i think i’d rather use that time to rip more dvds thanks
(4:06:30 PM) nitephire: proper releasing isn’t an automated process. i appreciate that you put out such volume, but i’d rather have a few series that i work on for myself and do a better job on.
(4:06:41 PM) nitephire: i prefer quality over quantity.
(4:06:52 PM) BluDragon: likewise, i think that everyone would appreciate it if you did useful releases instead of dupes
(4:07:13 PM) nitephire: by that merit everything has been released by somebody and there’s no reason for me to do anything ever.
(4:07:19 PM) nitephire: or you for that matter.
(4:07:30 PM) nitephire: and fuck you.
(4:07:39 PM) nitephire: what dupes?
(4:07:43 PM) nitephire: flcl?
(4:07:49 PM) nitephire: because i haven’t even released that yet?
(4:08:13 PM) nitephire: i work on what i want to work on, and if people choose to download it, that’s great.
(4:08:29 PM) nitephire: i’m not releasing for other people. i’m releasing because i want to.
(4:08:51 PM) BluDragon: what’s the point of releasing things if you’re not releasing for people to watch it
(4:09:10 PM) nitephire: i’m ripping things for myself, and then putting them out on the internet in case other people want them.
(4:09:24 PM) nitephire: if no one downloads a release, it just means that i ripped something for myself.
(4:09:26 PM) BluDragon: how about you do it the other way and rip things so that people on the internet *will* want them
(4:09:32 PM) nitephire: they do.
(4:09:46 PM) nitephire: (most people *do* like my releases, in case you haven’t noticed)
(4:10:04 PM) nitephire: (you get more criticism than i do)
(4:10:24 PM) nitephire: (for exactly the reasons i’ve given you)
(4:10:35 PM) nitephire: (well, those and some more as well)
(4:10:50 PM) BluDragon: i see that we just can’t agree on what quality is
(4:10:56 PM) BluDragon: but have fun with ur rips that nobody watches
(4:10:57 PM) BluDragon left the room.