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NEWS: Crunchyroll Responds to Drop in Video Quality, Plans to Re-Encode Catalog

...Ok jig is up. They're all right about us. We are shills. Paid shills. You should see the envelopes we get in return for "reviews". You should also see the lounge at ANN HQ. Gold plated everything. Marble tiles and columns. I'm talking classic Greek level of bribery here. Cosplayers feeding us pocky as we lay with our body pillows. We keep saying we're working on the encyclopedia but really we're just saving up for the indoor bowling alley. Gonna have Steve Blum voice the computer for it when it says strike, spare, gutterball, etc. Paid for by the fine folks at Nishimoto Trading Co.

Now the argument looks more like
Renasviel: Now, a lot of those might not be able to notice the difference in taste (even though it is pretty [expletive] clear) but they are still affected regardless.
You: See that's a contradiction right there though. If they didn't notice a difference in taste and didn't realize there was anything wrong with the taste with whatever food they were eating then how exactly were they affected? Yea the ingredients might have been different but if they didn't notice then their eating experience wasn't actually affected then. Just saying...

Consider the implications of what you're saying in the food industry for example:
As long as the majority of the customers don't notice, feel free to lower the % of real fruit juice as low as it can go.... feel free to replace natural ingredients with artificial ones... It's only a small segment of the population that can tell the difference in a taste test, after all! -> is this the kind of values we want our companies to hold?

mglittlerobin wrote:

Unfortunately, Renasviel, this doesn't "affect" a lot of the users on Crunchyroll because a lot them are free subscribers, this mainly affecting people who pay for Crunchyroll. And if you're not a videophile who scrutinizes video quality, encoding changes won't be noticed by the average Crunchyroll user or free subscriber.

By my count it's a least a million that was affected. I'd say that's "a lot" by any stretch. Now, a lot of those might not be able to notice the difference (even though it is pretty [expletive] clear) but they are still affected regardless.

If pirating is going to provide me with better quality anime then I'll go back to pirating.

So as more information is coming out, it does seem that this whole mess has come from a mistake after all.

That's not a lot compared to Netflix, who has 20 million subscribers,...

Then again, these days the only piracy I engage in is of the bodacious space variety, so I guess times have changed.

samuelp wrote:

Now the argument looks more like Renasviel: Now, a lot of those might not be able to notice the difference in taste (even though it is pretty [expletive] clear) but they are still affected regardless. You: See that's a contradiction right there though. If they didn't notice a difference in taste and didn't realize there was anything wrong with the taste with whatever food they were eating then how exactly were they affected? Yea the ingredients might have been different but if they didn't notice then their eating experience wasn't actually affected then. Just saying...

This is a fascinating window into the way our own personal lives obscure the way values differ from person to person. You hold this example up as an irrefutably obvious reducto ad absurdum, and I'm thinking "yeah, that's right. I really don't much care what goes in the food as long as it does all the things I need from food."

Being able to buy "low quality" food rather than the food that a small segment of the population cares about saves me a bunch of time and money, and helps segregate me from the tedious hipsters in the "Organic" aisle. If Crunchyroll lowering their video quality in a way that's imperceptible to me gives them more money to spend on licensing, I'm totally on board with watching more shows while the videophiles gnash their teeth.

I'd be really curious to see the numbers IF CrunchyRoll ever offered a discounted membership that offered the same benefits of their current membership BUT video quality was only 480 or maybe 720. If it meant you could watch the same anime, at the same time, but you weren't "offered" the 1080 option, I wonder how many would take it. To go off BSP's historical example, I think a sizable portion of CR's userbase pays for the access to shows. And while they WANT things in as high a quality as possible, I don't think that's the primary motivator for MOST of the base.

No, for a video to be qualify as HD or FHD it has to fulfill both the resolution required(HD=1280*720p and FHD=1920*1080) and the specific bitrate for each resolution.

Just because a video has a resolution of 1280*720 doesn't make it HD.
You would say this video: https://my.mixtape.moe/jhxjrj.mp4 is ''HD'' just because the resolution is 1280*720?
Of course not, you can clearly see all the low bitrate artifacts.

But wait, what about resolution? Many people have the misconception that resolution is the biggest indicator of quality — that if something is HD or Full HD, then it must be good, right? However, this isn’t really true. Resolution does matter, but what it actually represents is the maximum potential quality you can have, not the actual quality you’re going to get. See, in order for something to be Full HD, the only requirement is basically that the image is either 1920 pixels in width or 1080 pixels in height. That’s it.

Back in the day the only way for me to get anime was to download it off of limewire while whispering a prayer that what I was downloading wasn't porn or a virus. After waiting 12 hours for the download to finish, what I thought was an episode of Chrono Crusade killed my Dad's computer and boy, was he pissed!
So when I see people screaming bloody murder because the video quality is sliiiightly blurrier than it was before, guys I gotta roll my eyes. Yes point it out, yes hold Crunchyroll accountable for it, but no need to act like they've just pissed on your Grandma's grave.

Pierrot. wrote:

Lmao at Zac's take on this issue. https://mobile.twitter.com/i/web/status/841683097955516416 " I do expect something that looks reasonably like HD video, and I'm still getting that." Videos with low bitrate aren't HD.

Laugh all you want man, i stand by that response as pretty reasonable.

Blood- wrote:

Eh, I've never been one to be able to notice changes in video quality unless they are pretty dramatic. For example, I did not notice any difference in CR's video quality.

See, they're hoping that most of their customers are you: unaware and uncaring. That's why they'd attempt to save money on bandwidth despite record subscriptions. Basically all streaming platforms are kind of crappy, maybe except YouTube, but they have more people and money and tech any of the smaller players.

I'd say I have pretty shitty internet compared to most (in the first world), but there's really no reason to be worried about saving on bandwidth on your end. I've never been much of a fan of encoding to get a desired filesize rather than just letting it be whatever it needs to for a good image.

Chichiryuutei wrote:

If pirating is going to provide me with better quality anime then I'll go back to pirating.

At that point, it never even occurred to me that piracy would look better than the real stuff. I'm continually baffled by the idea that there are anime fans for whom video/audio/subtitle/subtitle color/etc. is a justification for piracy, rather than "it's free" or "it's not available any other way". Then again, these days the only piracy I engage in is of the bodacious space variety, so I guess times have changed.