... 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 :().