7 ms·

They are so slow, anime groups seems most innovative and use Hi10P (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Profiles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MP

by GvS 15y ago

They are so slow, anime groups seems most innovative and use Hi10P (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Profiles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Profiles) since almost a year.

pjscott 15y ago
For the longest time, xvid was the standard for these guys. They still have standards requiring that all releases be packaged into multipart RAR files, "in 15, 20, or multiples of 50 MB". In other words, they are kind of inflexible and hidebound. Anime fansubbing groups, in contrast, have no common standards except for -- to paraphrase the IETF motto -- rough consensus and regular releases. If some group wants to encode with Hi10P to get the same video quality at 2/3 the file size, they don't have to ask permission from anyone. Competition between groups gradually pushes forward the rough consensus, which is how they switched from xvid to x264, from container formats like AVI to the more flexible MKV, from SD to HD, and so on. The freedom to not live up to a community standard of quality gave them the ability to exceed it. There's probably a broader lesson in all this.
- jomohke 15y ago
  I remember reading years ago (possibly on Wikipedia's Scene article) that the multipart RAR thing was for faster distribution among the network of servers: Other servers can start downloading parts before the current server has finished fetching everything. There's many layers of hierarchy (from the release groups themselves down to the hoopleheads at the bottom) so it speeds up releases significantly.
  - yxhuvud 15y ago
    That may have been true at one point, but it is a totally obsolete practice due to Bittorrent.
    - krakensden 15y ago
      This is the upstream of the public bittorrent releases- and they still do lots of strange, unfashionably archaic stuff.
    - dfc 15y ago
      What are you talking about? Do you think the cappers are seeding the torrents themselves? A lot things happen before you start leeching from tpb...
      - icebraining 15y ago
        Bittorrent isn't used just on public sites; you can use the same technology to share between a very select group.
    - methoddk 15y ago
      It's still true to this day. Real scene is still done with FXP and then leeched down the food chain to BT/NGz/p2p/etc... Releases are out for hours before they even make it to open user levels. Get it where it's hot, yo.
      - glomph 15y ago
        >hours This is rarely true of most scene releases these days. They will hit private bittorrent trackers often within seconds of preing, and public ones not long after that.
  - tomku 15y ago
    Internal scene transfer was (and still is, afaik) done using FTP servers, often very primitive ones because they had to evade detection on hacked servers. When you're racing a large game or movie from one server to another, the last thing you want is for a random disconnect to ruin it 90% of the way through, or even worse, to finish it and find that the CRCs don't match because of random corruption. It also means that you can race from multiple sources for higher speed, and like you said, use a server as a source before it's actually done downloading.
    - dfc 15y ago
      FXP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol
      - gradstudent 15y ago
        Pfft. Pro couriers don't even bother with FXP. A shell account on a fast European box and mget/mput are the weapons of choice.
        dfc 15y ago
        First of all no "pro courier" is going to be on HN bragging about his "weapons of choice." Second of all FXP was the protocol of choice back in the day(the time period the parent post was referring to). Thirdly, I remember when telix and minicom where "the weapons of choice."
        gradstudent 15y ago
        Have you ever traded? If so, where, and for whom?
        shibboleth 15y ago
        ex-pHASE courier here. You must be referring to 0day couriering. We use a custom pftp w/ rel server to chain our FXP routes.
- sdfsdf123 15y ago
  Isn't the multi-part thing for distribution on newsgroups?
- menoyou 15y ago
  It's a lesson our ancestors learned a long time ago and which some people are trying to remove from the pages of history. It's called the free market.
CoolGuySteve 15y ago
A lot of devices don't support High Profile, let alone Hi10P. Frankly, getting video in Hi10P sounds more annoying than 'innovative'.
- tomku 15y ago
  They also don't usually support softsubs or multiple audio tracks, which are completely standard in anime releases. As a result of that, the anime community pretty much gave up on device compatibility when they left XviD behind. People who really want mobile versions tend to transcode, resize and "harden" the subs, but that's a lot of work. That said, I agree that "annoying" is the right word in this case. The Hi10p switch has caused a lot of problems even for people with PCs - software support took ages to reach acceptable levels, and it requires a lot more CPU power on the decoding side for a very minor quality increase. They could've waited 6-12 months before pushing for wider Hi10p adoption, and I think it would've gone much more smoothly.
  - keeperofdakeys 15y ago
    I was actually surprised to find my settop box supported mkv, multiple audio tracks and can even display styled subtitles unstyled (it would need specific support for substation alpha to do this). Software support for 10bit was pretty much there in some form when they majority started using 10bit, it is a lot more wide spread now (mostly a few programs like mplayer2, vlc and MPC:HC). Support for embedded products (like settop boxes) will be a long time, or maybe never.
tomku 15y ago
Anime groups can afford to be much more aggressive about technology because they have special requirements that older tech doesn't allow (styled softsubs, multiple audio/sub tracks, ordered chapters), and because their audience is overwhelming using high-performance PCs because nothing else commonly supports those technologies. In fact, modern anime releases are basically targeted towards one platform (Windows PC with MPC-HC and CCCP[1] without DXVA) with coincidental support for Mplayer on Linux because it uses the same basic open source codecs and splitters. Hi10p is even more aggressive - when they started releasing Hi10p releases, the only decoder that supported it was ffdshow alphas, and even now software support for it is very sparse. Hardware support is non-existent, and will continue to be so unless a mainstream content provider like Apple decides to start releasing Hi10p video content. On the other hand, people who watch non-anime scene releases are much more likely to use mobile devices, set-top boxes and other A/V equipment that relies on hardware decoding support. One of the major reasons that scene releases are standardized is so that they'll play on a wide variety of hardware, and this results in a much more conservative approach than anime groups. The main reason they're moving forward with this change is because H.264 has acceptable support in hardware (primarily in the MP4 container, MKV support is awful) and XviD is really showing its age compared to modern H.264 encoders like x264. [1] - Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net) and the Combined Community Codec Pack (http://www.cccp-project.net http://www.cccp-project.net)
- pjscott 15y ago
  This is a fairly recent development, but VLC 2.0 will play just about anything out there, on any of the big three operating systems.
  - a4paper 15y ago
    While that's true, VLC has had a history of problems with H.264 (quite ironic), ASS/SSA and ordered chapters that makes them shunned in the anime community. Apparently, libass still has problems with skewed and rotated subtitles. CCCP is much more preferred on Windows.
  - Danieru 15y ago
yxhuvud 15y ago
Yeah. It was the same thing when bittorrent became big. It was the anime groups that were the first big adopters. Mainstream releases took a lot longer.

by GvS 15y ago

They are so slow, anime groups seems most innovative and use Hi10P (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Profiles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Profiles) since almost a year.

pjscott 15y ago

For the longest time, xvid was the standard for these guys. They still have standards requiring that all releases be packaged into multipart RAR files, "in 15, 20, or multiples of 50 MB". In other words, they are kind of inflexible and hidebound. Anime fansubbing groups, in contrast, have no common standards except for -- to paraphrase the IETF motto -- rough consensus and regular releases. If some group wants to encode with Hi10P to get the same video quality at 2/3 the file size, they don't have to ask permission from anyone. Competition between groups gradually pushes forward the rough consensus, which is how they switched from xvid to x264, from container formats like AVI to the more flexible MKV, from SD to HD, and so on. The freedom to not live up to a community standard of quality gave them the ability to exceed it. There's probably a broader lesson in all this.

jomohke 15y ago
I remember reading years ago (possibly on Wikipedia's Scene article) that the multipart RAR thing was for faster distribution among the network of servers: Other servers can start downloading parts before the current server has finished fetching everything. There's many layers of hierarchy (from the release groups themselves down to the hoopleheads at the bottom) so it speeds up releases significantly.
- yxhuvud 15y ago
  That may have been true at one point, but it is a totally obsolete practice due to Bittorrent.
  - krakensden 15y ago
    This is the upstream of the public bittorrent releases- and they still do lots of strange, unfashionably archaic stuff.
  - dfc 15y ago
    What are you talking about? Do you think the cappers are seeding the torrents themselves? A lot things happen before you start leeching from tpb...
    - icebraining 15y ago
      Bittorrent isn't used just on public sites; you can use the same technology to share between a very select group.
  - methoddk 15y ago
    It's still true to this day. Real scene is still done with FXP and then leeched down the food chain to BT/NGz/p2p/etc... Releases are out for hours before they even make it to open user levels. Get it where it's hot, yo.
    - glomph 15y ago
      >hours This is rarely true of most scene releases these days. They will hit private bittorrent trackers often within seconds of preing, and public ones not long after that.
- tomku 15y ago
  Internal scene transfer was (and still is, afaik) done using FTP servers, often very primitive ones because they had to evade detection on hacked servers. When you're racing a large game or movie from one server to another, the last thing you want is for a random disconnect to ruin it 90% of the way through, or even worse, to finish it and find that the CRCs don't match because of random corruption. It also means that you can race from multiple sources for higher speed, and like you said, use a server as a source before it's actually done downloading.
  - dfc 15y ago
    FXP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol
    - gradstudent 15y ago
      Pfft. Pro couriers don't even bother with FXP. A shell account on a fast European box and mget/mput are the weapons of choice.
      - dfc 15y ago
        First of all no "pro courier" is going to be on HN bragging about his "weapons of choice." Second of all FXP was the protocol of choice back in the day(the time period the parent post was referring to). Thirdly, I remember when telix and minicom where "the weapons of choice."
        gradstudent 15y ago
        Have you ever traded? If so, where, and for whom?
      - shibboleth 15y ago
        ex-pHASE courier here. You must be referring to 0day couriering. We use a custom pftp w/ rel server to chain our FXP routes.
sdfsdf123 15y ago
Isn't the multi-part thing for distribution on newsgroups?
menoyou 15y ago
It's a lesson our ancestors learned a long time ago and which some people are trying to remove from the pages of history. It's called the free market.

CoolGuySteve 15y ago

A lot of devices don't support High Profile, let alone Hi10P. Frankly, getting video in Hi10P sounds more annoying than 'innovative'.

tomku 15y ago
They also don't usually support softsubs or multiple audio tracks, which are completely standard in anime releases. As a result of that, the anime community pretty much gave up on device compatibility when they left XviD behind. People who really want mobile versions tend to transcode, resize and "harden" the subs, but that's a lot of work. That said, I agree that "annoying" is the right word in this case. The Hi10p switch has caused a lot of problems even for people with PCs - software support took ages to reach acceptable levels, and it requires a lot more CPU power on the decoding side for a very minor quality increase. They could've waited 6-12 months before pushing for wider Hi10p adoption, and I think it would've gone much more smoothly.
- keeperofdakeys 15y ago
  I was actually surprised to find my settop box supported mkv, multiple audio tracks and can even display styled subtitles unstyled (it would need specific support for substation alpha to do this). Software support for 10bit was pretty much there in some form when they majority started using 10bit, it is a lot more wide spread now (mostly a few programs like mplayer2, vlc and MPC:HC). Support for embedded products (like settop boxes) will be a long time, or maybe never.

tomku 15y ago

Anime groups can afford to be much more aggressive about technology because they have special requirements that older tech doesn't allow (styled softsubs, multiple audio/sub tracks, ordered chapters), and because their audience is overwhelming using high-performance PCs because nothing else commonly supports those technologies. In fact, modern anime releases are basically targeted towards one platform (Windows PC with MPC-HC and CCCP[1] without DXVA) with coincidental support for Mplayer on Linux because it uses the same basic open source codecs and splitters. Hi10p is even more aggressive - when they started releasing Hi10p releases, the only decoder that supported it was ffdshow alphas, and even now software support for it is very sparse. Hardware support is non-existent, and will continue to be so unless a mainstream content provider like Apple decides to start releasing Hi10p video content. On the other hand, people who watch non-anime scene releases are much more likely to use mobile devices, set-top boxes and other A/V equipment that relies on hardware decoding support. One of the major reasons that scene releases are standardized is so that they'll play on a wide variety of hardware, and this results in a much more conservative approach than anime groups. The main reason they're moving forward with this change is because H.264 has acceptable support in hardware (primarily in the MP4 container, MKV support is awful) and XviD is really showing its age compared to modern H.264 encoders like x264. [1] - Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net) and the Combined Community Codec Pack (http://www.cccp-project.net http://www.cccp-project.net)

pjscott 15y ago
This is a fairly recent development, but VLC 2.0 will play just about anything out there, on any of the big three operating systems.
- a4paper 15y ago
  While that's true, VLC has had a history of problems with H.264 (quite ironic), ASS/SSA and ordered chapters that makes them shunned in the anime community. Apparently, libass still has problems with skewed and rotated subtitles. CCCP is much more preferred on Windows.
- Danieru 15y ago

yxhuvud 15y ago

Yeah. It was the same thing when bittorrent became big. It was the anime groups that were the first big adopters. Mainstream releases took a lot longer.