Feedback Forum, SPECIAL TIMECOP EDITION
2008/05/27
Welcome to the latest SPECIAL EDITION Feedback Forum, which answers more of your burning questions. This SPECIAL EDITION focuses on some of the issues people have been having playing our new format, and was guest authored by timecop, even though we just fired him for approximately the 5th time.
Perhaps the most burning question this week is "WHAT HAS CHANGED BETWEEN NARUTO SHIPPUUDEN 60 AND 60 V2???" Well, as our FAQ says, usually you can get a brief summary of changes by hovering over the torrent filename in the torrent list. USUALLY is the key here, as we forgot to include this summary for this week's episode. Since most people did not actually notice the problems with v1, we can assume only 1% of our viewers actually have enough English comprehension to understand subtitles. So what changed? 60 v1 was encoded using what is called a "beta script" which is the episode script that has been through the primary edit, but may still contain extra translation notes, misspellings (spell check is run before final script), etc. Since timecop was fired, his new replacement had no idea what was going on, and this was the result.
Ever since the switch to H264, we've been receiving endless amount of feedback which always includes the number "54". I've actually considered adding auto-ban feature for this into the comment system due to huge numbers of stupid people who are unable to read the front page news, yet are capable of finding the "feedback" button. So what's the deal? Clicking on the playback FAQ is really hard, and apparently first thing that comes to mind when an episode doesn't play is "DATTEBAYO FUCKED UP, I MUST SEND THEM A MESSAGE, 400,000 OTHER PEOPLE DOWNLOADING THIS EPISODE DID NOT NOTICE THIS". We don't release non-working files, and believe it, if something WAS broken, you'd be the last one to know.
One gentleman asks us,
"am i able to watch naruto/bleach without downloading the episodes?", to which we have the following reply:
Are you able to defecate without first sitting down on a toilet?
For those too thick to understand, the answer is yes, but its highly not recommended.
And then there's the whole camp of RealPlayer/DivX player/broken DirectShow layer folks who haven't been able to figure out how to play H264 files for over 6 weeks now. Their typical feedback starts off like this: "Sorry, I'm sure you've heard of this, but episode 54 and higher of Naruto are only audio files, there's no video, please correct this ASAP!". These feedbacks are also usually quite long, and most people writing them seem to have at least some English writing skills. Most of them have probably taken more than a few minutes to write. In that same time, they could be clicking on the Playback FAQ and getting all their questions answered without having to bother us.
In the past, and for some reason again with episode 171 of Bleach (did some new retard codec pack just get a new version?), we receive an occasional complaint along the lines of "Sorry, Bleach episode 171 has audio only for 3 seconds and then it stops, halp!!!" Unlike other groups, we don't change our encoding methods with every new episode, so if something does not work it's certainly on your end. That said, every episode is (usually) tested with Media Player Classic Home Cinema to make sure it plays before release. We don't care if it doesn't work in your random codec-pack-bundled media player.
Then we have the "helpful" bunch, who just discovered Google and the internet. They're eager to help us with their vast new knowledge, and usually send us something along the lines of "Hi, I just found SuperMegaJumboFagJewCodecPack 0.3 and it plays your H.264 encodes perfectly! Why don't you recommend it to everyone on your site?". We already have a perfectly good Playback FAQ and as you can see from reading it, we do not recommend any codec packs for playing back our releases. Also, every file we release plays in VLC. If it doesn't, this is NOT OUR PROBLEM (also, this is highly unlikely). UPDATE: INCASE YOU DIDN'T FUCKING GET THE HINT, WE DON'T NEED EVERY FUCKING ONE OF YOU SUGGESTING US YOUR FAVORITE PLAYER, CODEC PACK, CONDOM, ETC. CHANCES ARE WE KNEW ABOUT THE PLAYER IN QUESTION LONG BEFORE YOU EVEN GOT ON THE INTERNET. THANKS.
With all the little kids getting new Dell laptops as school is finishing, we get a new wave of retards using Microsoft's latest collaboration with Fisher-Price, Windows Vista. They usually experience problems like this: "Hello, I just downloaded Naruto episode 56 and whenever I open the download folder my explorer quits with system32 error!". After an extensive googling session, we tracked down the problem is due to (guess what) a FUCKING CODEC PACK. So, uninstall Matroska, CCCP, or any other commie trash from your PC, and you should be fine.
Due to open source failure, there's not a good quality / free H.264 decoder DirectShow filter available. So people usually end up with various pirated / old versions of CoreAVC (some old codec packs included this), ffdshow (finding a currently-in-development version of that is harder than getting a fansubbing group to consistently release episodes), or even something like MainConcept AVC decoder. The problem? Those usually render our encodes totally unwatchable. Old CoreAVC would display entire video as a random mix of colored, diagonal lines. Old ffdshow would fail with block noise and pixelation. The solution? Head over to the Playback FAQ and stop bothering us.
According to one of our viewers, our estimate that a PC 700MHz or above was required to play our releases was completely wrong, because he can't play our stuff even on a 2GHz machine with 1GB of RAM! He continues, "whenever I play an episode, the action is always behind the sound, like I hear something and 10-30 seconds later I can see it on screen". Apparently, 400,000 other people did not have this problem.
And then there's a small whiny camp of "please change your format back to xyz". Those are usually idiots who wasted > $200 on a media playback device, and bought a PS3 (lol) or Xbox (huge) or Xbox 360 (LOL). We are NOT going to change the way we encode things, unless suddenly a large shipment of PS3s or Xboxes start arriving to Dattebayo headquarters in downtown Seattle. Meanwhile, you may consider getting rid of your overpriced media player and looking into purchasing something that costs a fraction of the price, and plays every media format out there, including our releases.
"Hello, I am a mac user, and..." If you have enough money to buy overpriced glossy white shitware from Apple computer, you should have enough to purchase official Naruto DVDs as they become available. If anything we release doesn't work on a Mac, we don't care. However, VLC for Mac does exist, so if you have a problem playing our releases, on a Mac, just use VLC. If you find your "5x faster than competition" PowerPC G4 1.3GHz doesn't actually play H264 without stuttering, try upgrading to an Intel Mac, or just buy a PC.
Hopefully this answers some of the frequently asked (or wanting to ask, but fear being banned) questions.