Macross Frontier and Fansubs

[broody]

thanks... trying out aegisub now...

[Valkyrie addict]

I have had good results with ConvertXtoDVD software when converting .mkv to vob dvd s. I can add in .srt subtitle files to the dvd when using this software. Then I convert the dvd vob files back to xvid .avi files with AutoGK.

thanks, I had already downloaded ConvertXtoDVD but was still crashing...I decided to try it again with other mkv files and it appears to only crash with episode 16 of the gg subs... weird....

[miriya]

Some of the episodes I have downloaded have some screwed up subtitles. I dont know if it is my player or the way I am using it or what but my episode 15 by Lunar is so screwed up I can not make out much. They are translating all the lyrics and multiple dialogs on one single line so all the letters are on top of each other. I am hoping that the gg version wont do that.

What fansub versions are the best for good, non overlapping subtitles?

[miriya]

Oh, by the way, I bought a DVD on ebay of episodes 1 - 13 from a seller in Malyasia that had english and malay subs but the member is no longer a member and I never got the item and he(or she) will not reply to my emails! That was a dumb way to waste $30. I could have gotten some cool toys instead.

There are a couple of sellers on ebay selling these but I do not feel like loosing another $30. Especially if the subtitles suck.

[Spoon_]

Some of the episodes I have downloaded have some screwed up subtitles. I dont know if it is my player or the way I am using it or what but my episode 15 by Lunar is so screwed up I can not make out much. They are translating all the lyrics and multiple dialogs on one single line so all the letters are on top of each other. I am hoping that the gg version wont do that.

What fansub versions are the best for good, non overlapping subtitles?

If you're watching .mkv files using VLC then I suggest downloading this it's a codec pack, which installs quite a few different codecs but you should be able to pick out the one for .mkv files, you then configure it to use your standard windows media player to watch .mkv files.

Downloading that increased my enjoyment of .mkv files immensely as it got rid of those ugly white subtitles/overlapping. Infact after getting the proper codecs .mkv has become my preferred format.

[wolfx]

Nope: The 1280 x 720s .avis' all run like fright trains on my P4-3.2, 4GB, nVidia 6800 Ultra . . .

Refer to Veffidas' post below. Couldn't have said it better myself. Get a Core2 duo with at least a 8 series nVidia card to solve your h264 problems, else just watch it in xvid released by Lunar. I for one cannot justify downloading h264 for the crazy huge files. If i want quality i will have to buy the DVDs and don't download fansubs as substitutes. That way i am also supporting the show that I am a huge fan of.

A lot of people who are having problems are simply playing files with resolutions and encodings their computers cannot run. It has nothing to do with the specific container format, but how they're often used.

Often times, high-resolution H.264 encodes are packaged into MKV containers which is where all the blame on Matroska comes from. H.264 encoding coupled with high resolution, not the MKV container, is what brings a lot of computers to a crawl.

With the AVI container, the simple fact is that it doesn't really support H.264 which is a benefit right off the bat for slower computers (i.e. those who know encoding will never put H.264 in an *.avi). The encodings placed in AVIs are usually XviD, DivX, or WMV, which are less resource intensive. Additionally, smaller resolutions are usually packaged into AVI files, though high enough resolutions will cause problems for older computers, but it's a much a higher threshold to breach (e.g. XviD 1280x720 is fine but H.264 1280x720 is not).

Basically, if you're going to complain, complain about the right thing: H.264 encodings with high resolution. Though, with how MKV is often used, it's understandable how it gets a bad rap (but that's because the container itself is more functional and powerful). And, yes, these things really should go into the Fansub thread. The better place to ask gg if they're willing to release kinder encodes is likely there

[MisaForever]

Refer to Veffidas' post below. Couldn't have said it better myself. Get a Core2 duo with at least a 8 series nVidia card to solve your h264 problems, else just watch it in xvid released by Lunar. I for one cannot justify downloading h264 for the crazy huge files. If i want quality i will have to buy the DVDs and don't download fansubs as substitutes. That way i am also supporting the show that I am a huge fan of.

LOL silly wolfx-KLAN! Just get a Core2 duo with an 8 series nVidia card. If I had money to get those things I wouldn't have complained in the first place!

[d3v]

look for aegisub, with that tool you can edit timings

[/quotWill this work if the timings are off simply because the PC can't handle it?

[Final Vegeta]

Will this work if the timings are off simply because the PC can't handle it?

No, but you can download a raw that works better on your PC

FV

[Duke Togo]

On the subject of mkv files, the problem is burning them. I know some people have older machines that have trouble playing them, but my biggest complaint is they are very tricky to burn and burn successfully.

[veffidas]

On the subject of mkv files, the problem is burning them. I know some people have older machines that have trouble playing them, but my biggest complaint is they are very tricky to burn and burn successfully.

I presume you mean you want to be able to play them in a standalone DVD Player. Basically, you need to re-encode the file. Here's a instructional link, although I can't speak for its reliability:

http://www.afterdawn.com/faq/convert_video...m#selected_item

[Duke Togo]

I presume you mean you want to be able to play them in a standalone DVD Player. Basically, you need to re-encode the file. Here's a instructional link, although I can't speak for its reliability:

http://www.afterdawn.com/faq/convert_video...m#selected_item

Reliability, you hit the nail on the head.

[Morpheus]

Is gg the only fast subber at this time?

[MisaForever]

Wow, this long and only one file and group. My hope and faith in fansubs is dropping big time.

[UN Spacy]

Kei was fast but I think they're gone.

As for Lunar this WAS a dialog heavy episode, plus Ranka's new song just adds to the wait.

I have AiA&IZ for episodes one thru ten and Lunar for episodes eleven and on.

[Heron]

My hope and faith in fansubs is dropping big time.

One should not make such remarks..Don't get me wrong not trying to be rude but I appreciate the efforts of our fansubbers and so long as I get a translation, even a .txt, they will have my thanks and faith.

Edit: Inaccurate quote.

Edited August 19, 2008 by Heron

[Morpheus]

One should not make such remarks..Don't get me wrong not trying to be rude but I appreciate the efforts of our fansubbers and so long as I get a translation, even a .txt, they will have my thanks and faith.

I appreciate their effort in subbing, it just the number of subber went down in a short time. I think it got something to do with summer (vacation and stuff).

However general popularity also affected by how fast a sub came out, like when one of my friend saw a sub for certain anime came out less than 12 hours he said "hey thats pretty quick, must be popular, let me see em" ^^.

Well I still have the patience to wait for quality sub (since my PC doesn't like mkv)

PS: Luckily I know Japanese a bit, so I could understand 50-60% of the episode.

[SanosukeCL]

WingZeroFansub FTW =D =D

[miriya]

If you're watching .mkv files using VLC then I suggest downloading this it's a codec pack, which installs quite a few different codecs but you should be able to pick out the one for .mkv files, you then configure it to use your standard windows media player to watch .mkv files.

Downloading that increased my enjoyment of .mkv files immensely as it got rid of those ugly white subtitles/overlapping. Infact after getting the proper codecs .mkv has become my preferred format.

Thank you. Too bad it is not for mac.

[miriya]

So I got the DVD from Malyasia. It finally arrived. It has 13 episodes on one disc and I have just breifely scanned through on my TV to make sure it was widescreen and to quickly check the subtitles. It has chinese, malay, and english subs. From the quick scan, the subs are not absolutely horrible, just about decent actually. There are no subtitles for the songs and no transliterations for the songs either which is a bit of a bummer and from the quick scan through it did have some grammar issues (but then again, so do I). I have yet to check it out on my macbookpro. Hopefully it will look decent enough</report>

[magnuskn]

WingZeroFansub FTW =D =D

If they´d get over themselves and publish better resolution quality than 848x480, then I´d agree. Their subs are good quality.

[1/1 LowViz Lurker]

Ok I'm a noob at watching this and want to know:

1. so what is the best fast subber group to watch? (swearing isn't a problem for me)

2. will someone at some point release dvd rips with the shin-sen subs on them later? (I want to keep those - no worries about piracy since this thing will never get released in english otherwise we would have had macross 7 and dyrl ages ago)

I've just started to watch it and have had the episodes on my computer for ages without bothering. Been avoiding this part of the forums so I wouldn't get the story spoiled to me.

So far I have watched about 7 episodes. The big titted shy chic is hot. As is the Zentradi in macro form due to oversized chest.

Really great animation on the mecha fights and dogfights, but I still say the vf-25 reminds me of the nirvash from eureka 7 because of the shoes.

Sniper rifle gun pod kicks ass. That was one thing I would have liked to see in mospeada where instead of the kids trying to dance around the stupid inbit they could have set traps to lure the inbit into an area first (like rambo hiding in the bushes to surprise the enemy) and have the sniper shoot the inbit mecha in the eyeball to kill it efficiently and silently.

Glad macross is more brainy and tactical now! Maybe an 8th MS team-style macross OVA with hyper realistic deaths will be done. (to match the gore of DYRL death scenes, ie point blank range face explosion for example)

I like the darker mood of this series. These things are presented as much more scary than the zentradi giants were in SDF:M. They are not just giant, but have brutal melee attacks and are fast like the xenomorphs in aliens. I can totally imagine that if I were human I would think that being inside an armored robot will make me feel a lot safer. But not that safe since these things have guns which is something those bugs in Blue Gender never had. (and which made them so helpless and defencless, robbing the story of any real tension imo)

Blue gender(bugs)+mospeda(exosuit)+Aliens(the can move fast not like the blue gender aliens)+MS Team (usage of VB-6 Monster, elint, and sniper valk for special purpose) = good formula for bringing back the old school macross fan.

You can actually take the enemy seriously and fear it! Danger is back. This is what I like. And because it is set in space, unlike mac zero, we get the Qrau-dodging robot acrobatics, close combat melee desperation attacks, and multiple transformations to survive, which was kinda redundant before in an atmosphere where the battroid mode seemed a little silly having to just hover there on the spot and waste energy. See, in space the robot mode can float in that mode without worrying about gravity.

The idea of the melee attack to me is that if the monsters are so fast and can rush you like a tiger lunges at a slow-moving human, then the knife attack might actually be your last resort if you can't aim down the barrel of your weapon in time. It's like a backup weapon not something that replaces the gunpods. This is something I like! In DYRL max and miria only did their close range attack to sort of "show off". It was a stylish method of killing someone to show that you could dodge anything the enemy threw at you and get in thier face to shot them at close range to humiliate them.

But here the monsters can move fast enough to close the distance between you and them very quickly. So it makes sense to know how to beat them up with close range attacks. In gundam the beam saber was more about safety reasons so that you wouldn't accidentally damage the inside of the colony so it was reasoned that cutting up the robot in pieces to disarm it to limit the damage it can do to the innocents, was why it was invented. (not just to make the robot more like a samurai)

But macross legitimises that a bit more because the bugs have good armor meaning it pays to go for the weak point, and also because the weapon looks like it can eat the material quicker. (like how a knife can stab at an unarmored portion of someone wearing plate armor where a big sword might not be able to fit through the tiny opening due to being less accurate)

I'm thinking the only thing left is for the biomecha things to shoot acid at the valks to make them 1 level more deadly than they already are. The humans have the pinpoint barrier dagger, while the aliens have the acid. hehe. And no, not just because the xenomorph had acid for blood in the movie "Aliens", but because it makes sense that the aliens like to use natural methods of destroying things in fitting with their "we are living weapons" motif. (and besides don't some of the dinobots from transformers do that?) Inbit had their gradual evolution cycle in mospeada, xenomorphs in "aliens" had the multiform maturation into adults and then queens, ...so these guys must have some way to upgrade "naturally". Maybe psychokinetic abilities? Like a newtype cockroach! Produces tentacles by materialising them into the 3rd dimension and having them home in on the unique vibrational frequency of the human pilot it can sense. (gubaba had the 'force' ability to sense things in macross 7 - these bugs at their highest evolved form might have something similar)

Nothing seems more militarily threatening than the protodevlin in macross 7 since those things were like ghosts/vamps/demons that could do just about anything. (levitation, shooting beams of lights, demonic possession, ancient knowledge allowing them to make use of humans as zombie-puppets, folding at will etc) Yet they just weren't 'scary'. These bugs ARE scary, but hopefully not as powerful as the PD because then there would be no reason for the valks and you'd have no story.

Edited August 21, 2008 by 1/1 LowViz Lurker

[Graham]

1. so what is the best fast subber group to watch? (swearing isn't a problem for me)

I'd recommend watching Shinsen subs as far as they go, which IIRC is up to episode 11.

The AiA-IZ subs were pretty good as well, but they only did eps 1-10 and then stopped as the translator moved to Japan to study IIRC.

Lunar subs have been pretty good and getting better despite the occasional traslation error. AFAIK, they are the only fansub group to have actually subbed all 19 episodes to date.

gg have done eps 7-19 and are pretty good, but many people have trouble playing the .MKV file format.

Kei while they lasted were also pretty good, but only subbed eps 13-16 and then stopped.

In conclusion, I'd say Shinsen and Lunar.

Graham

[1/1 LowViz Lurker]

thanks graham.

I have no probs with .mkv.

I use a PC with XP as the OS, and a codec pack called "CCCP" through the "Media Player Classic" media player.

The two codec packs I recommend are KLite or CCCP. (but always make sure to use one or the other at any one time, or you might encounter conflicts. *Uninstall all the installed stuff you already have first, then install the newest versions of either of those two)

I used to have lots problems with codecs. I think it might just be a codec problem so that's why people might be having problems with some files.

I will download all shin-sen and then for the ones they haven't finished translating yet, get the lunar sub for rough idea of what's happening.

*I just think that it is always safe to do a clean install to eliminate any possibility of confusion.

Edited August 21, 2008 by 1/1 LowViz Lurker

[veffidas]

Thank you. Too bad it is not for mac.

A new recommendation for Mac users: MPlayer OSX Extended. The main draw for this one is the performance H.264 decoder. A lot of players for OS X haven't had good codecs, but this MPlayer OSX revision has an option for "Fast libavcodec decoding..." which improves audio/video syncs. Now my Mac plays large resolution files on par with my similarly spec'd Windows machine.

[Kelsain]

Well, it looks like I've had the lag problem solved for me.

My Mobo just died... It was 5 years old and running pretty sluggish with some stuff. Hope the HD is OK, I'll be checking that tonight. So, I now have an Athlon 64 Dual Core and GeForce 8600 on the way. Around Wednesday, I should be back in business! Hopefully then I'll be able to enjoy those h264s! I bet Corel Painter will run much better too!

*Bwah! Come on UPS! The CPU's gonna be a day behind the rest! I'll be 2 episodes behind then! Wants Ep20...

Edited August 26, 2008 by Kelsain

[d3v]

Speaking of gg, they had a release out for episode 20 this morning but it's gone now. Anyone know what happened?

[azrael]

Speaking of gg, they had a release out for episode 20 this morning but it's gone now. Anyone know what happened?

It's a fake. If it appeared this morning (Friday morning), then it's not from [gg]. [gg] does not (normally) sub from the MBS broadcast. They have consistently used the TBS broadcast which won't have been available until this afternoon . It wasn't even from their tracker.

[miriya]

A new recommendation for Mac users: MPlayer OSX Extended. The main draw for this one is the performance H.264 decoder. A lot of players for OS X haven't had good codecs, but this MPlayer OSX revision has an option for "Fast libavcodec decoding..." which improves audio/video syncs. Now my Mac plays large resolution files on par with my similarly spec'd Windows machine.

Thanks for the help!

[Morpheus]

Finally downloaded gg sub for epi.20, and it miraculously works on my vlc player (while other failed).

[magnuskn]

Finally downloaded gg sub for epi.20, and it miraculously works on my vlc player (while other failed).

That´s because gg hates the VLC player. That the others failed, I mean. Although some times watching their subs on VLC can bring unintended hilarious results, like a certain unkind reference to Ranka, for example.

Try Media Player Classic for their .mkvs, that one works perfectly.

[MisaForever]

Wow, it's the Wednesday after the release and no AVI. This is pretty sad.

I'm going to say this about fansubbers. We appreciate you doing the work that you do but if you start to sub a series, PLEASE FINISH IT!!! It does no good and is no help to the fans if you only sub part of it and then disappear. It seems quite a few groups have done this since Macross Frontier came out.

[RF-26AAC]

Wow, it's the Wednesday after the release and no AVI. This is pretty sad.

I'm going to say this about fansubbers. We appreciate you doing the work that you do but if you start to sub a series, PLEASE FINISH IT!!! It does no good and is no help to the fans if you only sub part of it and then disappear. It seems quite a few groups have done this since Macross Frontier came out.

Seriously!!

If you guys don't get this done I won't know what has been happening for two weeks in a row!!

Oh teh noes!!

[Mellow Yellow]

For those still having trouble playing MKV's using high res h264 video, I'd strongly suggest trying KMPlayer . I kept reading about it and finally tried it, and to me KMPlayer is greater than MPC and VLC combined. It's got a ton of options to optimize it's performance on slower machines.

In the initial setup of KMPlayer, choose Performance (1GHz) for the preset, as well as Use Internal Decoders for decoder usage, and Small (60 C/L) for subtitle configuration. The player also has it's own built in decoders/codecs and can run independently without external codecs installed.

Using internal decoders, song lyrics aren't positioned at the top in fancy karaoke fonts. They're at the bottom of the screen, but speech text is displayed above them in the same font. Kinda strange, but at least it isn't a jumbled mess like VLC. However you can get it to display correctly with fancy fonts just like in MPC (if MPC didn't lag all to hell) using the external sub module from CCCP, if it's already on your system. You can enable the external subs by right clicking on the player screen, then going Options>Preferences>Subtitle Processing>Multi-Sub/etc>Advanced tab> Then under the External Subtitle Module section, check the 'Enable' box and 'Render in real time' box. There might be some slight sub lag during playback, but it's a hell of alot better than MPC and VLC.

Darn, this was kind of a long winded post, but I hope this helps you guys run the gg releases, as it did for me on both my single core pc and dual core laptop

Edited August 27, 2008 by Mellow Yellow

[hobbes221]

I'm with Mellow Yellow on this, KMPlayer has worked real well for me too.