October 28, 2009

Real Bout High School -- the DVDs

My latest order of DVDs was delivered today. Included were the four DVDs of the R1 release of Real Bout High School which I first encountered as a mystery meat.

I think they're the first TokyoPop DVDs I've ever bought. They seem to have been mastered by someone called "Cinesight". And they did something weird in the DVD encoding, because they've done something strange to Zoom Player. It can play the DVDs fine. But when it's running, I can't use the player menus to turn subtitles on and off. I have to go out to the DVD menus to do it.

Even weirder, when I try to take a frame grab, using the ALT-F hot-key, I get told, "Can't frame capture this file format" What the heck? I've never seen that error before.

Which means I have to fall back on the other way I have to doing frame grabs. I open the raw VOB file using Vidomi, and take a screen grab using Thumbs Plus. It's a bit clumsy, but at least it works.

/images/03346.jpg

After I've grabbed a bunch of them, I have a Thumbs Plus batch file that strips out all the cruft, leaving just the central 720*480 of the raw image. Then I can use a batch file in Paint Shop Pro to resize the image to get the proper aspect ratio. (I'm sure you have a better way to do this. Don't tell me about it.)

/images/03347.jpg

I wonder what the heck they did? It's strange in other ways, too. The first DVD is 4 episodes, but they used six and a half gigabytes to encode it.

UPDATE: Looking at the ANN listing for the series, I noticed something else strange.

Kimura Ikue, who did the voice of Ryoko (and was really pretty good), turns out to have been a real flash in the pan. She worked on three major series (and a couple of others) in the time frame of 2001-2002, and then vanishes completely from the industry. There must be some sort of story there, but I suppose we'll never find out what it is.

UPDATE: She sang the OP and that is really good. I wonder if she went into recording instead.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 12:36 PM | Comments (19) | Add Comment
Post contains 375 words, total size 2 kb.

1 Her Wikipedia page is pretty sparse (no agency, no real bio, no recent work), and there's nothing on Amazon, either. She appears to have just dropped out of the business, right around age 25...

-j

Posted by: J Greely at October 28, 2009 01:18 PM (9Nz6c)

2 If I was a betting man I'd wager she got married and like most Japanese women decided to be a housewife.

Posted by: Doyen at October 28, 2009 03:21 PM (GTo9u)

3 I haven't been able to get a screencap with Zoom Player for months... it either says "heck no," like your error message, or it takes a screenshot of the first frame of the file (usually a black screen).

Something they did a couple of updates ago broke it.

Posted by: Wonderduck at October 28, 2009 03:26 PM (4Mcos)

4

Wonderduck, you got me curious. I just tried taking a framegrab from a DVD I know I've done frame grabs from before, and it failed again with the same error.

It occurred to me that I had changed renderers from "VMR9 Windowless" to "EVR", so I changed that back again. And then frame grabs worked.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 28, 2009 05:13 PM (+rSRq)

5 (Of course, after you make that change in the setup, you have to stop the program and start it again.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 28, 2009 05:14 PM (+rSRq)

6 If http://blog.livedoor.jp/ikuxxx/ is her blog, she still performs in some remote corner of the entertainment (theatre maybe? I cannot understand).

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at October 28, 2009 05:20 PM (/ppBw)

7 Wonderduck, I was having the same problem, but something fixed it.  Damifino what.  There's a thread on the Zoom Player website that describes several fixes and none of them worked. I just don't remember what did it.  New NVIDIA drivers, maybe?  Reinstalling the CCCP, or changing a setting in the Haali Media Splitter?  I know something fixed it....

Posted by: ubu at October 28, 2009 05:23 PM (FxDET)

8 Or yeah, what Steven said.  (Ninja'd while I looked at my archives for the answer...)

Posted by: ubu at October 28, 2009 05:24 PM (FxDET)

9

And now frame grabs work even from Real Bout High School:

/images/03348.jpg

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 28, 2009 05:25 PM (+rSRq)

10 Hm.  That fixed it for me, too, though I KNOW I tried that before.  I tried all the renderers back then, and none of them worked for screencaps.

This'll simplify things.

Posted by: Wonderduck at October 28, 2009 05:30 PM (4Mcos)

11 But I still can't turn subtitles on interactively on those DVDs, so I'll probably still use Vidomi to take frame grabs.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 28, 2009 05:30 PM (+rSRq)

12 There's an authoring option to lock the subtitle track while it's playing. Not all DVD players respect it, however.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at October 28, 2009 11:52 PM (vGfoR)

13 Why in the heck would anyone want to assert such an option?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 28, 2009 11:59 PM (+rSRq)

14 Say you're a Japanese licensor. You're (nominally) worried about reverse importation. You aren't much worried about the English dub (who wants to listen to anime dubbed into English, in Japan?), and if the Japanese audio is only available with the English subtitles on, then that's another reason for your otaku not to import the disc - they'd have the subtitles on the screen all the time.

If players respected it MORE, this might have been the standard for how dual-language DVDs worked in the US. But one of the best arguments against this plan was that enough players would just change the subtitle track anyway that it didn't actually do any good.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at October 29, 2009 12:11 AM (vGfoR)

15 I think they did it to lose customers and go out of business.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 29, 2009 12:16 AM (PiXy!)

16 Or what Avatar said.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 29, 2009 12:17 AM (PiXy!)

17 I find its not rare, in matters of IP, for publishers to take actions that only would make sense in a world not ours. . .

Posted by: metaphysician at October 29, 2009 05:10 AM (vM63Z)

18 Looks like that's her, alright; in a quick scan of the blog, I didn't see any reference to seiyuu work, but she has the same birthday, and the occasional picture is a plausible match.

As far as her career goes, the best I can figure out from the blog is that she's part of a two-woman idol group called Angelic that is no relation to the GT idol/racequeen/singing group of the same name. Her partner in the group is the other blog she links to, and I managed to find an entry showing them performing.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at October 29, 2009 11:17 AM (9Nz6c)

19 One of my online friends is a burnt-out idol who could not find enough success and eventually said "screw it all", moved back to her native town in Hokkaido where she's working random OL jobs. She's 35 and shows no sign of getting married any time soon.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at October 29, 2009 11:39 AM (/ppBw)

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