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NEWS: Stand-Alone Complex Blu-ray Box English-Dubbed, Subbed

Nice post. Everything you said I either agree with or remain undecided on (without further proof). And everything you said is self-consistent so I understand your thoughts on this.

I agree, encoder quality is extremely important, roughly as important as the codec itself. And yeah, usually free encoders are better quality than commercial/proprietary encoders. I agree that the x264 encoder is good (all the fansubs I've seen are made with it so I suppose I have nothing to compare against, but I'm well aware of the stupid things a bad encoder will do, and I generally don't see them in H264 files).

And I haven't seen any detailed test results of what Sony did, only heard the general claim and basic numbers. But I haven't seen anyone else perform similar high-bitrate HD tests to prove them wrong. How can you be so certain that their H264 encoder was crappy while their MPEG-2 encoder was good? Have people done proper tests comparing the x264 encoder with their encoder, as you seem to imply?

This may become a trend, interesting. I don't think I'd be willing to buy something I know will eventually be released in the states for cheaper but if and when something comes out in Japan that will not come out over here it's good to know the R2 LEs have an English track or English subtitles. In other words: sweet.

according to CD Japan, the boxset have both TruHD and 5.1 audio in both Japanese and English tracks...

http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/detailview.html?KEY=BCXA-17

so i'll preorder them....

I dunno if I would be so certain about that, professionals in the industry can be amazingly incompetent at times, which could work either way, but oh well.

In any case, since I only recently started downloading and studying fansubs critically, I've just learned something new. I'm starting to encounter some of the so-called "clockless" variable-frame-rate MPEG-4 and Windows Media Video files. They are impressive. This has nothing to do with "picture quality" so-to-speak but it has to do with the animation quality, accuracy, and smoothness. These clockless files really help animes because they are often mastered inconsistently between 24 fps, 30 fps, or 60 fps, and when encoded at any set frame rate of 24 fps or 30 fps may jerk badly during times when the encoding frame rate does not match the frame rate of the source anime. (encoding at a fixed 60 fps eliminates this problem but then encodes slightly more inefficiently and may introduce or worsen interlacing artifacts).

Encoding clockless seems to idiot-proof the anime encoding process. One can simply encode everything clockless and let the encoder or pre-processor figure it out dynamically and switch modes on the fly, rather than having to use their bionic vision to check if the original anime source is animating at a base underlying rate of 24 or 30 fps and choose accordingly. Plus, on a 120 Hz monitor, one can actually get better animation (for 24 fps animations)....than a traditional fixed-frame-rate 60 fps interlaced or progressive MPEG video displaying on a 60 Hz refresh rate monitor.

So anyway I now definitely agree with you that everything should be encoded at H264 clockless (no fixed frame-rate). Regardless of if MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 AVC allows for a tiny bit better quality at extremely high bitrate, that issue pales in comparison to the advantage one gains with clockless encoding (a completely separate issue but one only supported by the newer codecs). Especially for animes. It doesn't matter for Hollywood movies which are generally always created and put to film at 24 fps.

What porcupine calls "clockless" has a much more common term, and since there seems to be some confusion about this I'll make a bit of an informative post.

Variable frame rate video files (what was called in the previous post, "clockless") are video files where each picture is not displayed for the same amount of time.
The frame rate of the video is usually stored in the container, and not the video stream itself, so when you talk about variable frame rate, you need to talk about the video/audio container, and not the codec.

.avi cannot handle variable frame rate. .avi's are constant frame rate only. Sometimes people will do a fake variable frame rate .avi, however for anime... see *1

.wmv, .mkv, and .mp4 containers can handle variable frame rates. To do this, they store an extra piece of info about each frame, a "duration" (also called timestamps), that says how long to display each frame.
Sometimes people get confused and say that h.264 is variable frame rate, because it's commonly used in mkv or mp4 containers, but there is nothing special about h.264 when it comes to VFR. You could have a VFR mpeg-2 files, as long as you muxed it into a mp4.

*1 Since anime is often produced in a mixed, 24/30 fps hybrid, i.e. with sections are 24 fps and sections at 30 fps, in order to replicate this in an avi you must create a 120 fps avi (120 is the least common multiple of 24 and 30). Then basically you get an avi with a series of 4 or three identical frames, but when played back at full speed it reproduces the original VFR sequence.

Oh, I see. Thanks very, very much for the correction and clarification. It is very significant. I didn't know that the variable-frame-rate was a property of the container rather than the codec itself.

I'll call them variable-frame-rate files from now on too. I initially called them that in my previous post too, but had thought that "clockless" was the current Internet slang term for it since I saw the term being used on online torrent sites.

I've encountered some of those 120 fps AVI's too. They can be about as good as a variable-frame-rate file. One thing I find odd about those 120 fps AVI files though is that if I step through them frame-by-frame with my player, the player also "knows" if the 120 fps file is currently mimicking 24 fps mode, or 60 fps mode, etc. It will set the steps accordingly to neither show repeat frames or skip frames. (except for 12 fps actual-drawing animations or something in which case it will show repeat frames) So even the 120 fps file seemed to me like it was internally somehow storing sideinfo about each frame containing the frame rate. If not, then I guess the player itself is just smart enough to recognize when a frame is a perfect duplicate of a previous frame and thus skip it when stepping-through "frame-by-frame".

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Forum - View topicNEWS: Stand-Alone Complex Blu-ray Box English-Dubbed, Subbed

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NEWS: Stand-Alone Complex Blu-ray Box English-Dubbed, Subbed