Forum

Not sure if this goes here, but Crunchyroll is giving away membership access to all it's newest shows currently airing in Japan-- for today only. You can watch the latest Naruto Shippuuden, Natsume Youjincho, Shugo Chara, Skip Beat, Gintama, etc.

Here's the link to get a free membership:
*link removed*

I'm sure a lot of us already have CR accounts, but they're trying to get more people on the site, so I thought I'd throw it up here too. Wink

[EDIT: Do not exploit this forum to increase your referrals. I'm sure people can find their way to CR and their promotion on their own.~Zalis]

I really despise free trials that require a credit card number. They are banking on people forgetting and that's garbage.

What quality are the HD streams there? Are they better than what's available at Hulu or Youtube?

It's the only reason I was going to check it out, but I'm not willing to put in a credit card number on a whim.

The 720p stream for Naruto isn't even as good as what you'd see on an SD TV broadcast. The frame rate is low so it stutters when anything pans, colors tend to be blotchy and run, and the picture is a bit grainy. Supposedly this is thanks to crappy source material and not their fault which might be true, the 480p run of Natsume Yuujinchou is actually a better picture.

Emerje

Well, while I'm curious to check I'm unfortunately not far enough in Naruto since I've decided to wait until all the filler is out to marathon it (and I am really comitted to the dub anyway).

There are other shows they have that Hulu does or that Youtube does, so what I was more curious of is "are they better" by enough margin to support the fees that are paid to them.

It has to be enough to overcome what I find to be extremely annoying "promotion" practice of forcing credit card numbers to be provided when that is 100% unnecessary.

And this "today only" thing also sounds "meh" as a promotion. If I were doing the promotion in this type of a buildup period (and maybe even permanently), I'd strongly consider doing something promotional a single day out of each week or one week out of a month or something like that.