I mentioned a while back that I’d gotten myself BT broadband.
Well, unfortunately I recently had to boost my package to the unlimited downloads one. This is quite a lot more expensive (the broadband bit of the package basically doubles), but there was no way I was going to be able to keep within the bandwidth limit, and they charge you a huge amount for each gb you go over.
There are two basic problems that have really brought this to the fore. well, actually there’s one problem, but it has a couple of facets.
That problem is the entire reason I got the BT broadband in the first place- fansubs.
As I’ve explained before, I got the Bt broadband because I was hammering my landlords connection so hard and so often that it seemed to be causing the line to fall over on a very regular basis. When this happened it meant I had no internet access at all, sometimes for quite long periods of time.
Also, my usage was clearly causing the line to hit its limit often, so when my landlord used it he’d get really slow speeds. Therefore, by transferring my fansub downloading to another line, I’d stop being an arse.
But then two problems cropped up. Firstly, the shower broke. As I explained at the time, that meant I couldn't download any fansubs because my computer is underneath the hatch to get access to the stopcocks. And because it was out for a week, I created a big backlog of stuff.
The other problem is that this year there seems to have been a real problem over shows that have been picked up for legal streaming. I try to be a good boy and only dl shows that haven’t been picked up by crunchyroll and AOD. However, this year a whole raft of stuff either wasn’t licensed at all or was licensed, but I was region locked out of.
A new service called Nico Nico started, which seemed to take several shows and I found the site basically unusable. But then quite a bit of stuff on crunchyroll was region locked and then there was this big announcement that most of it was going to be on AOD.
I’m not sure I buy into the conspiracy theories that it wasn’t picked up by crunchyroll for the UK because of AOD, but what was definitely true was that it was ages before AOD announced they had them and then literally months before they started appearing.
On top of that, AOD’s site has been crushingly slow, making it unusual and there’s still the problem that AOD's content can only be viewed full screen or in a tiny window, making it a much less practical site for me.
In other words, I seem to have reverted back to downloading just about everything.
And things seemed to be going so well :(
But it did mean that last month I was hammering the connection and I had to increase the bandwidth allowance.
What made this slightly more annoying was that when I tried to rest the payment direct debit thing, it wouldn’t let me set it to a sensible level. It had this weird thing of one page was recommending a sensible amount, but then when I went onto the page to change it, it insisted I couldn’t take it below a different “recommended” amount that was £10 more than the other recommended amount. I put the higher recommended amount in quotes, because if you it acts as a fixed minimum value, it’s not really a recommendation is it?
Still, I guess if a large credit build up because of this stupid flaw in the system, I’ll eventually be able to set it lower.
Showing posts with label fansubs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fansubs. Show all posts
Friday, 9 September 2011
Wednesday, 26 November 2008
runchycrolls
(*gets down off hobby horse*) I got a bit carried away yesterday :).
My intent was not to go on a rant about the problems of piracy in anime, but was instead to comment on the whole Crunchyroll thing.
"But what Crunchyroll thing?!" I hear you scream in your beautiful dulcet tones. Well, the announcement that Crunchyroll is going to stop accepting fansubs of course, my young friend.
It's a weird site Crunchyroll.
It's a bit social-networking site (ughh) and a bit YouTube (ughh) and all anime (ug--er, no I mean yay!). Or, to put it more simply, facebook dry-humps YouTube and produces a mutant weaboo offspring.
As you may detect I'm not hugely keen. This is mainly because the whole social-networking thing kinda doesn't appeal to me. It's like internets for kiddies. And YouTube is just the biggest collection of fucktards and fucktardery ever assemble in one (virtual) place.
Basically, Crunchyroll has thrived on piracy since it's inception - users are allowed to submit anime (i.e. they uploaded the latest bit of piracy they've engaged in) and also people post in forums and each other's userpages and all that banal drivel stuff.
One of the difficulties I have is that anime is predominantly a kids thing. I don't mean like little kids - I just mean people who aren't old, like me. Me and my age groups make up a very small slice of the anime watching public.
And while I'm not going to comment on that specifically, Crunchyroll is the sort of place that underlines the fact that I'm up to twice the age of most anime watchers. And that makes me feel old.
Anyway, the point of this post was that actually I welcome the whole move to stop fansub uploads. Especially since it seems to be accompanied by a move to get the anime companies submitting stuff.
To me this seems like a win-win situation. If there are more sites with legally downloadable anime that's available soon after the original airing in Japan, that can only be a good thing.
Oh, the other thing I wanted to mention was Bost TV. Having ragged on Crunchyroll, Bost is what I see as the better way of doing things.
Unfortunately for me, I seem to be in a minority, as Bost appears to have pretty much ground to a halt. There's very little new stuff been available for a long time, which to me is a shame as I've really liked it when I've used it.
My intent was not to go on a rant about the problems of piracy in anime, but was instead to comment on the whole Crunchyroll thing.
"But what Crunchyroll thing?!" I hear you scream in your beautiful dulcet tones. Well, the announcement that Crunchyroll is going to stop accepting fansubs of course, my young friend.
It's a weird site Crunchyroll.
It's a bit social-networking site (ughh) and a bit YouTube (ughh) and all anime (ug--er, no I mean yay!). Or, to put it more simply, facebook dry-humps YouTube and produces a mutant weaboo offspring.
As you may detect I'm not hugely keen. This is mainly because the whole social-networking thing kinda doesn't appeal to me. It's like internets for kiddies. And YouTube is just the biggest collection of fucktards and fucktardery ever assemble in one (virtual) place.
Basically, Crunchyroll has thrived on piracy since it's inception - users are allowed to submit anime (i.e. they uploaded the latest bit of piracy they've engaged in) and also people post in forums and each other's userpages and all that banal drivel stuff.
One of the difficulties I have is that anime is predominantly a kids thing. I don't mean like little kids - I just mean people who aren't old, like me. Me and my age groups make up a very small slice of the anime watching public.
And while I'm not going to comment on that specifically, Crunchyroll is the sort of place that underlines the fact that I'm up to twice the age of most anime watchers. And that makes me feel old.
Anyway, the point of this post was that actually I welcome the whole move to stop fansub uploads. Especially since it seems to be accompanied by a move to get the anime companies submitting stuff.
To me this seems like a win-win situation. If there are more sites with legally downloadable anime that's available soon after the original airing in Japan, that can only be a good thing.
Oh, the other thing I wanted to mention was Bost TV. Having ragged on Crunchyroll, Bost is what I see as the better way of doing things.
Unfortunately for me, I seem to be in a minority, as Bost appears to have pretty much ground to a halt. There's very little new stuff been available for a long time, which to me is a shame as I've really liked it when I've used it.
Thursday, 13 November 2008
... and burn
Spent most of last night doing one of the less pleasant jobs involved with being a dirty fansub user.
Fansub files can be pretty big. For a half hour show in normal res they're normally about 180-200 meg and if they're in HD then you're talking anywhere up to 400mb per episode. Now if you say most series are either 13 or 26 episodes long, on average, then you can see that each show has the potential to be several gigabytes big.
Plus of course these things are happening in parallel - it's best to keep up with them as they come out, rather than wait until the end, because normally very few people seed the entire series. So that means you're talking about lots of gigabytes of space needed.
However, my normal hard-drive I use in my regular machine is actually quite small - it's a fast raptor drive, which are blindingly quick, but they have to be small as the trade off. Plus I sometimes like to take fansubs with me. So what I'm saying is that I bought one of those smaller external hard-drive.
Basically they use laptop hard-drives, rather than the big ones, so you can basically put them in your pocket. Now this drive isn't small - it's 150 gig - but as I mentioned fansubs are pretty hefty files and tend to have a lot of series on the go. Espeically because of overlap. It's like the new october season of shows has just started, but of course several of the spring shows are still going. And that's not to mention the delays you sometimes get occasionally with the fansubbers.
Anyway, my point is that every so often I have to clear off a lot of stuff from my external HDD, and that means burning it to DVD. I generally burn the completed (or abandoned) shows I've watched which are therefore just taking up space.
It is quite a shore, though.
Firstly I don't generally stay loyal to fansub groups. I tend to find that fansubbers have the moral scrupples of a dead frog, as in practice none of them draw any line between licensed and unlicensed shows, so I don't feel any particular desire to be loyal to them.
That does mean the filenames can be all over the place, though, and my over-developed sense of tidiness means I often have to rename them all, which is freakishly tedious.
Then there's the whole burning thing. Now my drive is awesome and the software I use is pretty efficient, but there's no getting around the fact that transferring up to 4.5 gb of data is pretty slow. I mean it would be slow if I was just moving them from one hard-drive to another, let alone burnign them.
One weird thing I did find, though, is that my drive is really slow when it comes to DVD-R disks. For some reason it will only write these at up to 4x, whereas for DVD+R disks it will write them at up to 16x. I have no idea why this is (though I have to say I also don't actually understand the distinction between the two types, +R and -R).
So I spent a good couple of hours burning stuff to DVD last night, but I probably won't need to do any more until Christmas. And even then it will be more out of a desire to get ahead of myself than a necessity as it was last night.
For some reason, and I've no idea why, I've started reviewing stuff in session zero over at AP this last couple of weeks. I really am not at all sure why. I mean, I don't really need the papers, as I still have over 100,000 and people never really paid much attention to what I said anyway, and they still don't.
I think part of it is because, if I'm honest the standard of wallpaper that's getting approved seems to have dropped a little. However, the numbers are quite low, so rather than be all whinging I thought maybe it was because people aren't getting very good advice at SZ, and rather than be part of the problem I'd be part of the solution (omg, I think I'm turning into an American management executive :().
Fansub files can be pretty big. For a half hour show in normal res they're normally about 180-200 meg and if they're in HD then you're talking anywhere up to 400mb per episode. Now if you say most series are either 13 or 26 episodes long, on average, then you can see that each show has the potential to be several gigabytes big.
Plus of course these things are happening in parallel - it's best to keep up with them as they come out, rather than wait until the end, because normally very few people seed the entire series. So that means you're talking about lots of gigabytes of space needed.
However, my normal hard-drive I use in my regular machine is actually quite small - it's a fast raptor drive, which are blindingly quick, but they have to be small as the trade off. Plus I sometimes like to take fansubs with me. So what I'm saying is that I bought one of those smaller external hard-drive.
Basically they use laptop hard-drives, rather than the big ones, so you can basically put them in your pocket. Now this drive isn't small - it's 150 gig - but as I mentioned fansubs are pretty hefty files and tend to have a lot of series on the go. Espeically because of overlap. It's like the new october season of shows has just started, but of course several of the spring shows are still going. And that's not to mention the delays you sometimes get occasionally with the fansubbers.
Anyway, my point is that every so often I have to clear off a lot of stuff from my external HDD, and that means burning it to DVD. I generally burn the completed (or abandoned) shows I've watched which are therefore just taking up space.
It is quite a shore, though.
Firstly I don't generally stay loyal to fansub groups. I tend to find that fansubbers have the moral scrupples of a dead frog, as in practice none of them draw any line between licensed and unlicensed shows, so I don't feel any particular desire to be loyal to them.
That does mean the filenames can be all over the place, though, and my over-developed sense of tidiness means I often have to rename them all, which is freakishly tedious.
Then there's the whole burning thing. Now my drive is awesome and the software I use is pretty efficient, but there's no getting around the fact that transferring up to 4.5 gb of data is pretty slow. I mean it would be slow if I was just moving them from one hard-drive to another, let alone burnign them.
One weird thing I did find, though, is that my drive is really slow when it comes to DVD-R disks. For some reason it will only write these at up to 4x, whereas for DVD+R disks it will write them at up to 16x. I have no idea why this is (though I have to say I also don't actually understand the distinction between the two types, +R and -R).
So I spent a good couple of hours burning stuff to DVD last night, but I probably won't need to do any more until Christmas. And even then it will be more out of a desire to get ahead of myself than a necessity as it was last night.
For some reason, and I've no idea why, I've started reviewing stuff in session zero over at AP this last couple of weeks. I really am not at all sure why. I mean, I don't really need the papers, as I still have over 100,000 and people never really paid much attention to what I said anyway, and they still don't.
I think part of it is because, if I'm honest the standard of wallpaper that's getting approved seems to have dropped a little. However, the numbers are quite low, so rather than be all whinging I thought maybe it was because people aren't getting very good advice at SZ, and rather than be part of the problem I'd be part of the solution (omg, I think I'm turning into an American management executive :().
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)