Quote:
Originally Posted by leongsh
If you can ignore the crappy quality of the video, it's very serviceable.
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It looks like BOST has the episode up too. I tried Druaga epsiode 1. Blassreiter still says "Coming Soon".
Video:
- Stream, regular size: Loads without delays or buffering. Video quality is better than YouTube, but the window is far too small.
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- Stream, fullscreen: Loads without delays or buffering. Not quite full screen (menu at bottom takes space). Video quality very poor, odd jerkiness to animation.
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- Download, PSP: 97.24MB .mp4, downloaded in 1m4s (dl speed well over 1MB/s). Video quality very poor, odd jerkiness to animation.
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- Download, iPod: 102.57MB .mp4, downloaded in 0m46s (dl speed almost 2MB/s). Video quality very, very poor, odd jerkiness to animation.
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Subtitles:
Font is good.
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Position is too low.
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They read smoothly from my spot checks.
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I think I saw at least some honorifics maintained.
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OP and ED themes were not translated at all (kanji, romanji or english). I don't like karaoke, so I'm not asking for that, just a translation of
some sort.
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I don't think I saw any traditional full Japanese names mentioned, so I don't know if they're maintaining original naming order or Westernizing the names.
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Miscellaneous:
- Watermark in the top right. I'm not quite seeing where that would make anyone think twice about distributing it illegally, especially when it's free to view on YouTube for people who don't care about quality, and those that do wouldn't want to watch the poor video contained in the download. And presumably they'd want to C&D
any unauthorized distro of these episodes, whether it had the watermark or not, so what's the distinction for? Watermarking just feels like something someone in upper management was told was "necessary" by a drunk man on the street, and they accepted it without ever asking why or giving it a second thought. I can watch things with watermarks if I have no alternative, but I don't like it, especially if I'm paying for it.
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- The video jerkiness was strange. It wasn't a result of my computer's processing speed, that much is certain. It wasn't the typical desync/stuttering I get when I try to play something too demanding, like a high def 1080p encode. Instead it's like the animation just skipped a bunch of frames here and there whenever there was motion. Or like a really, really, really bad case of interlacing on a DVD. Someone more technically inclined might have a better way to word it.
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- The show was really bad from what I managed to watch, but that's not BOST's fault.
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- Their servers provide fantastic download speeds.
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- NO DRM!!
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Verdict:
BOST needs to offer higher quality versions of their downloads, ones meant for actual full screen PC viewing, not just for portable devices. I'm not even a video quality whore at all, but when played on a computer monitor, these look markedly inferior to a mediocre xvid/avi fansub encoder's work.
There are a number of things they need to do before I can see myself actually paying for these episodes. I still think it's really awesome that there's no DRM, but I don't want to watch the files as they are now (even ignoring the quality of the show) so that only goes so far. If the only reason they're eschewing DRM is because they know they're not offering something most people want, that's not much of a step at all.