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.

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.)

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
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