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Bronies Can't Encode

Like most animation, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is produced at 23.976 fps. Because of TV format restrictions, though, it's converted to 29.97 fps for broadcast on TV. The process is (usually) easily reversible, letting you recover the original 23.976 fps content, and requires all of one plugin and two filter calls in an AviSynth script, and a number of more automated encoding programs can also do it. This is one of the most basic parts of encoding TV and DVD sources for viewing on a PC. Yet every single rip of the first two MLP S2 episodes I've found has been left at 29.97 fps with every fifth frame being a duplicate or, worse, two out of every five frames having a ghosting effect on moving parts of the frame.

Even among crappy fansub encoders, only the worst of the worst manage to completely fail at this.

Edit: Okay, screw the TV encodes — iTunes has S2 episodes now. The colors in them are screwed up, but at least that can be fixed with post-processing in ffdshow.

Studio DEEN why u do dis?

I just watched some 1080p BD rips of the Rurouni Kenshin: Tsuioku Hen (aka Samurai X: Trust and Betrayal) OAV. I'd not seen it since years ago when all I had was a crappy 320x240 MPEG-1 encode that was probably ripped from a VHS or something. So besides being every bit as great an anime as I remembered, it also looked absolutely gorgeous — or at least the parts that were cel animated did.

See, the problem with this OAV is that, while most of it was animated with cels and mastered on film — which usually results in sharp and detailed video when scanned to create a digital master for a BD release since film has a much higher resolution than 1080p — parts of it were animated digitally. And because it was made in 1999, that digital animation was done in SD since consumer HD formats didn't exist back then. Thus, you get beautiful HD scenes one moment, then ugly upscaled scenes the next.

I'm sure most people probably won't care, but being a bit of a videophile, the sudden switching back and forth between pretty HD and ugly upscale was jarring for me. Honestly, I think it's the worst thing about the OAV as I can't find fault in it anywhere else. (No, seriously, it's a classic that any anime fan should see. If you've been living under a rock and somehow haven't watched it yet, you should.) More annoying still was the fact that more and more scenes are digitally animated as the OAV goes on. There are only a few short scenes in the first of the four episodes that are digitally animated, but by the last one, large portions are.

This makes me want to get the BD and do my own encode so I could apply filtering to make the upscaled sections less ugly. While it's impossible to make them as pretty as real HD, it would hopefully make the switch between them less jarring. But I've already got plenty of other things to occupy my spare time, so who knows if I'll ever get around to it.

Streaming: Metroid Super ZeroMission

HAY GUYS, more streaming will be happening tonight in a little bit. Sorry for the short notice.

For anyone wondering what the heck Metroid Super ZeroMission is, it's a ROM hack of Super Metroid. Basically, it's an alternate version of Metroid: Zero Mission using the Super Metroid game engine. You can find more info here, as well as a link to the IPS patch for the game if you'd like to try it yourself.

As usual, I'll sign into Skype and let people know in chat before I start. You can watch the stream on my Twitch TV channel. (Justin.tv's gaming channels, including mine, got moved to their own site, but everything still works the same as before).

Edit: Game's finally over after much raging at dumb level design. How people could possibly think this is better than Super Metroid or even the original Zero Mission, I have no idea.

Look out for my streams of Final Fantasy VI Advance next. I won't be announcing them here since I'll just be playing it whenever I feel like instead of getting people together on Skype every time. I recommend following me on Twitch TV so you can get e-mail notifications when I start streaming if you want to keep up with them.

Professionals Have Standards

In case anyone's wondering why I haven't streamed any gaming lately, it's because I've been busy with a few subbing projects and also because I've been playing Team Fortress 2 again. But don't worry, I'll get back to streaming eventually.

Harassing me in chat about it may or may not influence when I stream. Sending me cookies will definitely have an influence.

Speaking of Team Fortress 2, it's now free to play on Steam. I'd recommend that anyone who likes FPSs check it out as it's the best multiplayer shooter I've played. Just go download Steam, create an account, and you'll be able to download and play the game completely free.

I've been having mixed feelings about the game going free, though. On one hand, it's nice having more players since that makes it easier to find a populated server with the game type I want. But on the other hand, there's been a marked increase in the number of players who have no clue what they're doing. And they have no excuse for this as there's an offline training mode. In particular, the number of people playing medic and instead of healing, they try to kill people with their crappy needle gun, has gone way up.

One thing that made me facepalm especially hard was a capture point match in the Gravelpit map where I was on the Blu team. Now, the Blu spawn point for this map is back down two long tunnels, the entrances to which are raised so that only scouts, soldiers, and demomen can even get into them. And then at the end are the gates to the spawn area, which the Red team can't go through. Blu team is supposed to go through these tunnels, drop into the main map, and try to capture the points while Red defends them.

So I start the match, and what do I see? Two engineers immediately run out and start building turrets and dispensers right outside the spawn room door. This is completely useless because the turrets don't have long enough range to shoot someone even if they're pressed up against the spawn area gates and inside the spawn room is a supply cabinet that instantly refills all health and ammo. I don't even...

Streaming: Super Mario 64

More Mario 64 tonight, probably again around 7:00 PM Pacific or a little after. I might just be able to finish the game tonight.

I'll sign into Skype and let people know in chat when I begin setting up for the stream. You can watch on my Justin.tv channel.

Edit: It's over! If you have suggestions for what I should play next — preferably not another Mario game, as I need a break before I do another one — leave me a comment.