neko's thinkbox

Like this? Minami-cut? No… read on plox.

Earlier in some IRC channel came up the discussion about how Formula (a fansub group) decided to cut the Opening and Ending on their Shugo Chara releases. I thought that might trigger an interesting discussion if it hasn’t been discussed yet.
Note that I haven’t watched Shugo Chara yet so I will not even talk about it – it is just the example – nor am I criticizing Formula because of their choice; I am just trying to compare the pros and cons of this matter.

I copied this statement from from Formula from the IRC channel:

“This release will be used for segment linking for future releases. This just simply means that if you want to see the opening and ending sequence in the future releases you will have to keep this file in the same directory and use CCCP for playback. Does not apply for mplayer or Perian users since they don’t support this feature and will end up playing the future releases without the opening and ending sequence.”

Basically, you download the Opening and the Ending once, and their future releases will then only show the content of the episode and link back to the OP and ED you have on your hard drive.
When I first read that, I thought it was a joke. I mean, we used to get our fansubs with an opening and an ending for all these years, why is there the need to that habit? But after giving some thought, and after some people’s comments, the idea became quite interesting.

Go home Shiki, we don’t need your help to cut the OP.

The Pros:

Indeed, there are a few pros to cutting off the OP’s and ED’s. From a fansubber’s point of view, especially from an encoder’s, it might be an attractive measure to save some precious encoding time. Assuming that a regular anime episode is 24 minutes long, and the opening/endings 1:30 minutes each, he’d have roughly 3 minutes of video to encode – how long the encoding task takes however is a mystery to me, perhaps I should ask around in AnY.

Less to encode, and less to upload as well: the file should logically be around 8% smaller. A 140 MB file would become 123 MB, 170 MB becomes 159 MB, and 200 MB becomes 175 MB. A smaller file size means less bandwidth wasted on both ends, and less space wasted on the viewer’s hard drive/dvd as well.

Finally, not everyone likes to watch the opening/ending for every single episode of a series, so that would be very convenient to them: they wouldn’t have to skip them every time.

However, there are slightly more cons than pros.

Even Sakuya… Guys, we don’t need knives, we need a PROGRAM to cut.

The Cons

The fansubber only saves a little bit of time at the encoding stage, as the OPs/EDs would only be translated and styled/karaoke’d once anyway (timing would take one glance an episode). But, time only plays a great role in a speedsubbing group, and the quality of such groups often is questionable. The great majority of the leechers always wait for the better quality subs to be out anyway.

Quality is important nowadays, which is why many groups use and release HD raws. Especially in these cases, the size of an episode doesn’t really matter. Back in the days (4-5 years ago), when I had crappy hardware and ISDN (64kbps), anime were usually released at around 170 MB per file, and it took me almost 8 hours to download an entire episode. Today, most leechers use DSL ranging from 1 to 30 MBit/s, where an episode can be downloaded as fast as half an hour for 1 MBit, and 2-3 minutes for 30 MBit? File size shouldn’t really matter nowadays, unless you’re one of the few surviving Dial-up users (protip: get DSL, or wait for it). Batch torrents might save quite some more space, especially for series that last for more than 24 episodes – but rare is the series that uses the same opening for more than that period of time.

With faster speeds also came the alternative file formats and encoding processes into the pool: from the old DivX .avi to XviD .avi, then h264 .mkv, or .mp4. Generally, the Matroska (mkv) format is the format to use for same .avi quality for a smaller filesize. This already cuts down files by at least 30 MB, depending on the quality of the raws. Another problem would be that not everyone’s computer hardware can handle those .mkv’s which are needed for linking the different files as Formula does, so the alternative would be the old .avis, with a much bigger file size anyway (I heard that Formula does not provide .avi’s though… shame on them).

Moreover, the argument of not wanting to see openings/endings is just a lazy leecher’s argument anyway. From my own experience, I usually do skip openings and/or endings, and it does not cost me more than a few mouse clicks to do it – one to roughly guess where the Opening/Ending would end, and the others to get closer to the end. But it does not bother me at all to the point to totally cutting it off from the rest of the episode. Also, the fact that not all media players support that function is pretty dumb too – I’m sure not many people would want to install yet another media player just to watch a specific series by a specific subber.

Le sigh… I give up already T_T

The Conclusion

In the end, I feel that the cons clearly outweigh the pros, however without making the whole thing obsolete. It’s mainly the inconvenience of having to proceed in a different way to get and watch your anime. Granted, there definitely are people who would like that (since it triggered a discussion between those who liked and those who don’t, proof that people do care), but I feel that it is not worth the extra effort just to have a few more seconds of convenience. The amount of time and effort saved is not significant, unless you want your episodes to download in 10 minutes instead of 15.

And anyway, as someone argued in IRC, “there are almost always alternatives when a group releases no OP/ED versions, so it’s basically a ‘don’t like it, don’t watch it’ thing”, and it should be treated as such. Who knows, perhaps other groups might follow and create a whole new trend of watching fansubs?