Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Rizelmine 21 - Why don't we *all* have a seat over there?



It's Christmas at the Iwaki house, and Rizel and Tomonori are alone, confined, and being subjected to all kinds of stimulating stimuli. Despite the post's title, I don't believe the kind of relationship depicted here is wrong, but I had to complete the running gag I had in mind. Of course, since this is the fourth-to-last episode, various forces are sure to prevent the expected outcome from happening so early.


Batch (Nyaa) || Batch (BakaBT)

And now it's time for a little bit of "Adventures in 10-bit h264 on an old POS PC."

With the 10-bit transition extending into some SD releases nowadays, I figured it was finally time to update things. So I tried the old standby, CCCP, only to hit a barrier in its requirement of Windows XP Service Pack 3.  Unfortunately, my attempt to update to SP3 back in November '09 resulted in my system becoming completely inoperable, to the point where I had to use System Restore to undo it. So CCCP will have to remain at 10-10-10 for now. Fortunately, salvation came in the form of the first media player I ever installed for anime playback: VLC. I'd had an older version of that useful screenshot-taking software for awhile, but 2.0 took a lot of the fail out of "FaiLC." I tested it with Chihiro's 480p version (hardsubbed karaoke, softsubbed dialogue/signs) of AmagamiSS+, and lo and behold, the segment linking worked, and the 10-bit video played correctly. The only downside was that my CPU usage hovered between 50-75% (no other major applications running), comparable to what I see on those occasions when I play 8-bit 720p with hardsubbed karaoke/signs.

So at the suggestion of a bakabt user, I may try mplayer2 to see if it's less resource-intensive. But at least 10-bit is no longer completely unwatchable, and that's what counts.

5 comments:

  1. I would definitely recommend a recent build of mplayer2 for 10bit playback. It works great on older systems and the CPU usage tends to be lower than other players.

    To make it even easier, you could use smplayer, which is a gui for mplayer2. See http://sourceforge.net/projects/smplayer/

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  2. If installing SP3 screwed up your system that bad, I'd say you should do a wipe and clean install of Windows, 'cause something's obviously borked. Or wipe and just install Win7 instead.

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  3. What about MPC-HC and LAV filters?

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  4. @Desbreko: I actually had done a clean install less than a month or so before the upgrade attempt. As for later versions of windows, my paltry 512 MB of RAM won't be enough. I tried adding more in the past, but even though I did the research and bought the recommended type for my PC model, the new stick wouldn't physically fit in the slot.

    @anono:
    LAV filter requirements: "PC running Windows (preferably Windows 7). Either an AMD 5xxx/5xxx GPU, Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale/Sandy Bridge CPU, or NVidia 4xx/5xx GPU"

    Somehow, I don't think Windows XP and a 3 GHz 1-core Pentium 4 are going to cut it...

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  5. Muchas gracias por el capĂ­tulo.

    Saludos ^^

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