Video: x265/HEVC CQP:20 Audio: AAC CBR 128kbit/s Subtitles: ASS softsubs (inside MKV) https://anidb.net/anime/344 The main reasons for this release were: - The original Bandai R1 DVD's (including mine) are starting to be unreadable because of DVD rot, right about now. Naturally they saved a few pennies by using the cheapest material available. - The [Xei][Exiled-Destiny] rip seemed to be the best available out there, but it's outdated / low quality by today's standards, overcropped for some reason and overblurred enough to lose details like pupils at times. Not saying my rip is perfect, but it should be an upgrade. - This series is actually very good and the OST is great, but most importantly, Megumi Hayashibara <3 The source material is old, relatively bad quality and has plenty of issues, but I did what I could. Throughout the series, you can see some combing artifacts mostly in scenes with screen shake, those are leftovers from some earlier production process and "burned in" in the source. Those would need to be fixed frame by frame (that is if you wanted to avoid heavy collateral damage) and I don't have that kind of free time. The same artifacts can be seen in the [Xei][Exiled-Destiny] release as well. Episode 22 is particularly bad in this regard, and for some reason has much worse quality overall than the rest of the series. About encoding, I compared the quality and file sizes of three options: Encoding Size(ep02) Size(ep03) Size(ep10) x264 10bit q16 189MB 252MB 239MB x265 q20 172MB 251MB 229MB x265 q21 146MB 210MB 185MB The smallest (x265 q21) and largest (x264 10bit q16) were almost identical quality-wise. Both had visible encoding artifacts around edges, x264 10-bit was a tiny bit sharper overall but had more issues in scenes with movement. The middle option for file sizes (x265 q20) however had the best overall quality by far and compression artifacts (besides those already in the source) were almost non-existent, so I went with that one. Also, fuck Dup() filter. Darker panning scenes with slow movement were being wrecked and I blamed the stabilizer first, but it turned out that Dup was marking too many of those frames as duplicates, even with thresholds set low enough to make Dup practically useless for it's intended purpose. Subtitle timings on the DVD were not so good on some episodes. I fixed the worst cases so it should be tolerable. The official translation is also far from perfect. It can be embarrassing at times. I did some small fixes and edits here and there. Perhaps some day in the future the series will be released in HD with a better translation (and a new video transfer)... well, one can hope :) Also added the Romaji lyrics, some titles and additional signs, and positioned most of the signs. The background songs in episodes 12,18 and 24 were missing subtitles and/or translations for some of the lines, added those too. And yeah, I left out the English audio track. Sorry. Even if the dub wasn't shitty, which it is, replacing Megumi Hayashibara with anyone else would be blasphemy anyway. -X