Anime groups can afford to be much more aggressive about technology because they have special requirements that older tech doesn't allow (styled softsubs, multi

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)