internet & fansubs (BT)

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.