it's all legal like

Well, it's post weekend of doom.

Quite a good weekend in all--I got quite a lot done. I'm not sure I can be arsed to detail it all at the moment, but something of notable interest is that I did my first legal anime download.

I joined bost tv a while back when it was announced they were going to be one of the people carrying gonzo's stuff. The reason I went with bost is because it seemed pointless going for the youtube--I'm really not a fan of youtube at all--and crunchyroll just made my head hurt when I tried to work out how to use it.

Despite all that I was still a little nervous about taking the plunge. My fears were: what if I couldn't pay properly? or it needed some weird codec or other requirement and I couldn't get it to work? or the rental period expired before I got to watch it? or what if the dls didn't work properly? or it was horribly slow? or what happens if my connection flakes out?

What I decided to do was go for the Tower of Druage: The Aegis of Uruk. This seemed to be a short 12-episode show and it isn't quite in my normal preferred genres (i.e. it's a fantasy show) so it wouldn't hugely bother me if it went tits up.

The 12 ep show thing didn't quite work out--turns out it's one of those half season long shows that are really a full length season chopped into two parts for production reasons and it ends on a massive cliff-hanger.

But in terms of the actual viewing of the show it was very much a success.

First off, you can buy individual episodes or a season pass--I bought a season pass as they work out as slightly better value and it seems a little pointless just watching one or two eps.

The season pass basically does what it says--it lets you watch all the episodes in the season. But the key is you can still watch them when you want to. So if you go on holiday or something the pass doesn't expire. The episodes you've already watched do expire, because you're actually just "renting" them.

You rent them for 14 days and you can watch them as many times as you want in that period. That alleviated my concerns over my connection flaking out (which it did do several times) since I could just restart.

In terms of the streaming, the eps are actually broken up like DVD chapters--there's a gonzo splash then the opening credits, part 1, part 2, closing credits and next episode preview and you can skip through them or use the slider to move about.

Obviously, as it's streaming, you need to wait sometimes, but I found the streaming speed pretty quick. Basically, I found that if I start the thing going and then pause it and give it five or ten minutes to build up a buffer then I could watch pretty much un-interrupted and skip the credits.

So when watching eps in a row you can just start ep 1 and half way through open the link to ep 2. If you start and pause ep 2 then by the time you finish ep1, ep2 will be all streamed and you can watch it interrupted, plus start ep3 going in the same way.

Also, and I'm not entirely sure if this is just for season pass customers, you can properly dl the episodes. The dl is intended for ipods and PSPs, but the PSP one is just a regular mp4 file so you can watch it on your PC. I've no idea (yet) if these 'expire' in the same way as the streaming rental.

It's all pretty high quality files--they're not huge res like a lot of fansubs are, but they're a superior product to fansubs (e.g. image quality is better--there's no artifacting, the sound never goes out of sink and the translation is a proper translation, not the broken English you tend to get in fansubs).

As I say, I watched all of the Aegis of Uruk. It was actually pretty good--there's a slightly weird weird "meta" level to it, but as fantasy stuff goes it was okay. But here's the key: if I'd seen it via fansubs it wouldn't have gone on my list of DVDs to buy, so really Gonzo or anybody else wouldn't have seen a penny. But with the streaming, they do--it's a lot less per ep, obviously, but it's better than nothing, surely?

And, while I don't think I'll ever be a real fan of dl content over DVDs, at least if this is the way it all goes then I have found I can live with it.