October 30, 2009
Regarding James' nightmare from yesterday of a giant school girl straddling an el in Akihabara, I responded:
Japan is a land of many fetishes. One less common one I’ve run into a few times is a fetish for giantesses.
I can think of a couple of examples of that just in my own collection. One of the episodes of Colorful featured a giantess, and there was one in Aika R-16. NSFW frame grabs below the fold.
more...
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at
11:19 AM
| Comments (5)
| Add Comment
Post contains 204 words, total size 2 kb.
Dammit. My sciatica is kicking up, so my left hip hurts. I did something to my neck, so that hurts, too. And I had an idea just before I went to bed, so I have had a hard time staying asleep because of it.
Insomnia is a bitch. And I can't do anything about my back or neck. (NO SUGGESTIONS, PLEASE!) But I can memory-dump the strange idea, and maybe stop having weird dreams about it.
I figured something out about Aika Zero: this is the series where Aika gets her bionic bra. I'll show you the NSFW evidence for that below the fold.
more...
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at
02:20 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 726 words, total size 4 kb.
October 29, 2009
Aika Zero ep 2 hit the torrents about when I expected it. The one I downloaded was downsized to 720p, more's the pity, but I'm sure the full-sized version will show up eventually. In the mean time, it's even more ecchi than the first one. I would say they're perilously close to being hentai.
Really, really NSFW below the fold. I'm not joking. (And there's a duck. I'm not joking.)
more...
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at
05:46 PM
| Comments (4)
| Add Comment
Post contains 150 words, total size 1 kb.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at
04:09 PM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 20 words, total size 1 kb.
BD, DVD, MKV -- pick any two. That may well be the choice facing me. I used to have DVD and MKV and not BD, but now I have BD and DVD but not MKV (and not MP4).
I tried reinstalling the CCCP, and it didn't help any. Zoom Player still won't play MKV's. It displays the first frame and then freezes.
I decided to see if Windows Media Player could do it. It can, but sheesh what an inferior experience. For example, if I watch an MKV that way, I must watch the entire thing in order. There isn't any ability to jump around, or to fast forward, or to rewind partially to repeat a section, or anything like that. And I'm sure there's no mechanism for doing frame grabs, let alone single stepping.
It took me a couple of minutes to even figure out how to make it play a video file. Microsoft seems to be trying to turn Windows Media Player into a clone of iTunes.
Dear Microsoft: if I was interested in Apple Products, I would buy them from Apple. Sincerely, Steven
Of course, there's always the Media Center, but that thing's even more inconvenient.
I'm about to seriously consider emergency measures. There are two remaining to me. First, I can go online and buy the "Ultra" version of PowerDVD 9, the latest they offer. $90.
Second, I can try installing the release candidate of the next version of Zoom Player. (Which has been up for several months. I think development may have stalled.)
But both of those are kind of irreversible. If they don't work, I'm kind of up a stream without a paddle.
I may even end up in Hell: please, please, don't make me install VLC! Anything but that!
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at
11:40 AM
| Comments (13)
| Add Comment
Post contains 298 words, total size 2 kb.
October 28, 2009
I just used MediaInfo to look at every BD disk I currently own. What I found was that there were three different audio formats used, overall.
There's PCM, which I cannot play. (That's what's on the Aika Zero BD, and all the Japanese tracks on DieBuster.)
There's AC-3, which I can play. (Cosmic Voyage, and both audio tracks on DBZ Bardock.)
And there's AC-3 TrueHD, which I cannot play. (Burst Angel)
There's no getting around it. I'm going to have to upgrade PowerDVD. Let's give it a try. First to uninstall the older version, just for cleanliness.
UPDATE: Only I can't. The uninstall data file isn't there.
UPDATE: Installation complete. First thing it did was to phone home and find out that there was an update. But it's a different update than the last time. So I let that install, too.
And I just used PowerDVD 8 to watch the DBZ Bardock movie. Worked fine. And the CPU loading was amazingly light; it only used about 20% in the last part, even when playing from the disk, and displaying full screen.
Now for the bad news: when it finished, there was a readme. The readme described the various versions of PowerDVD 8, and what they can do. And if I'm reading their chart properly, the OEM version doesn't support Dolby TrueHD. Which should mean that the sound on the Burst Angel BD's shouldn't work. Now I'll give it a try and see.
UPDATE: No, it worked fine. Sounded good, and the subtitles display properly. So now to see if Aika Zero's sound is right.
That one plays fine, too. Looks like all the codecs I need are now installed, at least as far as PowerDVD8 is concerned. Now the adventure: does Zoom Player still work for normal DVDs? And if so, does it work on BDs?
UPDATE: Zoom Player plays DVDs fine. But it's still using PDVD6's decoder.
UPDATE: Zoom Player trying to play Aika Zero is exactly the same as before: huge CPU load, and no sound.
UPDATE: If I try to make Zoom Player use PDVD8's stuff, it doesn't work with DVDs at all, and it doesn't know how to handle BD menus, and when it tries to play the Aika Zero M2TS file there's still no sound and it still hammers the CPU. In other words, it can't be used for BDs.
But if I return its settings to what they were, it plays DVDs fine. Looks like I'll have to use PowerDVD8 for BDs.
Which is not the worst of fates. Anyway, I do have a BD playback solution now.
UPDATE: PowerDVD doesn't seem to have made the new codecs publicly accessible. HandBrake still blows up on processing the Aika Zero file. Bummer.
UPDATE: Well, CRAP! Zoom Player locks up when I try to play MKV's and MP4's now. PowerDVD 8 won't even try to play them; it doesn't think they're media files.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at
09:08 PM
| Comments (1)
| Add Comment
Post contains 489 words, total size 3 kb.
One of the things I bought this week was the BD complete collection of "Burst Angel. It's 24 episodes plus extras.
I was curious how many disks it would take to hold it all. It turned out to be 3. So did that mean they shipped me 480p versions of it? Nope, it's 1080p.
The first BD has the first 10 episodes plus three extras. It's 45 gigabytes, so I guess they averaged about 4.5G per ep, which probably is about right for MPEG-2.
The directory structure shows 10 files averaging about 4.5G each, so presumably they put each ep into a separate file.
UPDATE: Interestingly, I can play it in real time directly off the player. No obvious stuttering or pauses, and the highest the CPUs ever get is about 65% busy.
But I can't hear any sound. Dammit. I have got to figure out how to fix that!
I don't see any way around it. I'm going to have to install a player program that knows how to play BD's. I guess I'm going to have to try the newer version of PowerDVD again. Or maybe outright buy the latest version, instead of relying on the free cut-down one I got with the drive.
UPDATE: Here's a thumbnail of a frame grab:
Here's the real thing, full size.
UPDATE: I just took a look at the files using MediaInfo. The video is AVC, which is a version of H.264. That explains why I can play it without stuttering. And that also explains why the files are so small. The Aika Zero file, which did use MPEG-2, was twice the size.
The audio is "AC-3 (TrueHD)". That's a version of Dolby Digital.
The subtitles are in something called "PGS" which seems to be the standard for Blu-Ray for text streams.
They show up in Zoom Player's streams menus, but only as ID #'s. When I tried to select them, I got told they were unrecognizable formats.
I've tossed the whole report from MediaInfo below the fold, for anyone who's curious.
more...
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at
08:07 PM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 632 words, total size 12 kb.
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
Post contains 375 words, total size 2 kb.
October 27, 2009
My shipment of anime tomorrow will include a considerable number of BD disks, and tonight I decided to try an experiment.
I can't play BD on this computer with my BD drive. Playback stutters. But it occurred to me that it might be better if I ripped the BD to disk, which also decrypts it, and then see if I can play back the result. So right now I'm ripping the Aika Zero BD that I bought, and copying it to storage on Deneb.
Here's what's cool: sustained transfer rate is about 14.5 megabytes per second, with a CPU load here on Procyon of about 30%. I think the limiting factor is the BD drive read rate. Its activity light is solid blue with no flicker at all.
Another problem I had was that my stuff doesn't support all the audio codecs used by BD. I was able to hear sound on the two American BD's I bought, but not on Aika Zero. Another reason I wanted to try this with the Aika Zero disk was to see if that changed with Win 7. Probably not, but you never know until you try.
Still, I'm really pleased with that read rate. If it was gonna take a couple of hours per disk to rip it, then it would have been really painful. But ripping a disk in about a quarter of the normal playback time is completely acceptable.
UPDATE: Rip complete. Playback is a little jerky, with the CPU running between 70% and 90% busy. But it isn't intolerable, the way it was when I was trying to play directly off the drive. (2 seconds of play, one second of nothing.)
I don't know what the sound would be like; I still can't hear anything. Grumble. I need a codec, and I don't have any idea where to get it.
UPDATE: I just ripped "Cosmic Voyage". 11 gigabytes in 13 minutes.
Except that one won't play at all. ZoomPlayer locks up.
Am I gonna have to install that newer version of PowerDVD that came with the drive?
UPDATE: Mass copying from Deneb to Procyon is about 60 megabytes per second. Which I have to do because Handbrake refuses to open a file on Deneb.
UPDATE: Well, crap. Since I was successful using Handbrake to translate the Cosmic Voyage BD, I thought I'd try the same thing with Aika.
'Twas not to be. It kept crashing as soon as it started trying to process audio.
I really really really don't want to install the newer version of PowerDVD. I remember what grief it caused me last time. But I may have no choice but to figure out how to use it.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at
06:54 PM
| Comments (5)
| Add Comment
Post contains 452 words, total size 2 kb.
Stripey asks, "What does your top 5 anime say about you?" An interesting question. It's been a long time since I've even thought about a top 5 list, so I had to stop for a moment. But here it is:
Dragon Ball Z
Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha A's
Banner of the Stars
Divergence Eve: Misaki Chronicles
Shingu: Secret of the Stellar Wars
So what does that say? I like engaging characters engaged in desperate struggle for the highest possible stakes.
UPDATE: I think I should amend that slightly: "...for the highest possible stakes, without getting angsty."
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at
04:37 PM
| Comments (36)
| Add Comment
Post contains 98 words, total size 1 kb.
47 queries taking 0.7419 seconds, 160 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.