1841

Thanks a lot for the comments, very useful.

The Ryuki series sounds interesting, so I went to download and discovered I already got it :)

I don’t need many advices about what to watch since I’m going to watch everything I can find. Maybe I need to know where it’s better to start. From a side I want to see something representative, from the other I don’t want to see the very best and then have to slog through less interesting series.

And I also skimmed through The Next movie again. The suits are so cool. In every genre around the world there has been progress toward realism and better designs (look at comics), these series retain a lot of what made them cool but it’s odd they didn’t also try to branch out (Garo is an exception?). I wish they made a cool series with the movie suits.

1842

Finally caught up with the current FMA:Brotherhood episode. Awesome to see new stuff.

I guess i should start reading the manga too since they still seem to be skipping some stuff(although less important), probably to try to keep the series at 52 episodes.

1843

The new episodes are intermingled with the old episodes. I’m not even going to watch them until the whole thing is over.

1844

Just a heads up to three movies showing up next month- so it will be several more months before those of us outside of Japan get a chance to see it.

Redline
Directed by Takeshi Koike, directed Trava, Fist Planet.

Summer Wars
Directed by Hosoda Mamoru, directed The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.
Official site

Cencoroll trailer 1, Cencoroll trailer 2
Official site

1845

You’re not entirely correct there. Japanese audiences have no inherent love of realism-- they tend to prefer whimsy and comedy. The most financially successful of the modern Rider shows is Den-O, which is an extremely silly, slapsticky series aimed at 6-year-olds.

GARO was very successful as an independent tokusatsu but had little impact on how the main producer, Toei, does things. The fairly realistic Ultraman Nexus bombed in its timeslot and got canceled about 12 episodes early. The Kuuga experiment was never really repeated.

The idea that realism is better/cool/etc is pretty much an American bias not necessarily shared by a lot of other world cultures. Japan is a bizarre place where Superman Returns outgrossed The Dark Knight and that’s sort of what’s fun about watching their stuff.

(Also, if you want to start Kamen Rider with a series that’s interesting but not actually the best of it, Ryuki is pretty much perfect. The series is groundbreaking in some ways and really poorly written in others.)

1846

You’ve described every single series, as far as I can tell. Since each series is a year long, the middle episodes are almost always poorly written.

What you’ve described about Hibiki is interesting enough to me (being an SMT fan). I will start downloading this series shortly.

I’m surprised by your comment about MKV, though. It’s almost the only format I come across when downloading new fansubs (other than the ever popular Naruto/Bleach). I actually thought that MKV is loved only by anime and blu-ray rips.

1847

This is really only true of the shows from Faiz through about Kiva, where production was rushed and shows clearly began production with no planned ending (or changed plans for the ending halfway through). Kuuga, Agito, and (it appears) Decade are all actually quite consistent in terms of writing, moving clearly and consistently toward an obviously pre-planned ending. Kuuga, in fact, means basically nothing without its ending.

Ryuuki is poorly written in a different way. Basically, the show doesn’t have one resolution. It has 3-4 different ones that apply to different tellings of the story. There’s a TV ending, a movie ending, and a TV special with I think two different endings. Each of the endings offer different “answers” for what the Rider Fight really meant and what was really motivating key characters.

As a result, individual Ryuuki episodes watch decently but the show clearly just doesn’t mean anything if you look at it as a whole. It was an excuse for kewl people to wicked-awesome armor to punch on each other while CGI power animals waggled around the screen. Characters will do things that make no sense in the long run and many mysteries are never addressed despite the many endings.

For some fans this is not a problem, especially if they like the more modern style of Rider as a delivery vector for colorful fights. Some people also like the openness of basically being able to decide for themselves what was important about the show and what the Rider Fight really meant. It’s not typical of the franchise, though, and not for everybody.

I’m surprised by your comment about MKV, though. It’s almost the only format I come across when downloading new fansubs (other than the ever popular Naruto/Bleach). I actually thought that MKV is loved only by anime and blu-ray rips.

There are particular groups that are very fond of MKV, especially the Blu-Ray rippers. The vast majority of fansub releases are still provided primarily in AVI and MP4 formats, though, and it’s not hard to stir up a nest of MKV-haters on anime forums.

MKV’s main issue is that it’s not very portable and a sizable portion of the American fanbase dislikes watching on their PCs. MP4s convert easily to Apple portable devices and AVIs convert easily to PSP and can be played by DivX DVD players. To my knowledge, you can’t run MKVs on anything that’s not a computer and they have issues outputting to VHS (yes, some people in the US still do that).

To this day there are “re-encoding” that do nothing but strip extraneous things like multiple sub streams out of MKVs and then redistribute the subs in a hardsubbed AVI format with reduced video quality. A lot of people prefer these files to the original MKV files because they can be downloaded more quickly!

1848

The WD HD TV can play most MKVs with subtitles, even up to 1080p. I’ve encountered a few misses…like the sound won’t play, or video cannot be decoded anyways. I can expect this little segment of video player thingies to be more robust next year, and then die a category death the year after. Another good alternative for playing EVERYTHING is to hack an Apple TV and install XBMC on it, but people who can do this are computer savvy, and will just watch on the PC anyways. (I ended up buying that WD HD TV thing when I discovered that my xbox360 can play avi’s and mp4’s, but not mkv’s.)

I just confirmed with my friend, and Hibiki is not his most favourite series. It’s more like, he really respects its uniqueness, and he knows the history of that series (basically, what Lynxara said). He just told me he likes Agito the most.

I just realized none of us talked about Blade. LOL. Let’s keep that up.

1849

TVersity allows your 360 to play MKVs. It’s a pain to set it up but once done it works pretty much flawlessly.

1850

This probably has to do with what a weird format MKV is. What makes it so flexible is that it’s really just a wrapper that can hold video and audio encoded in numerous different ways. I’m sure the files the player can’t play back correctly are just ones using codecs the player wasn’t made to support. Sadly this means any dedicated MKV-playing box is probably not going to be able to work flawlessly for long, since new codecs are coming out all the time.

1851

MKV is a pain in the ass because even on PC it’s not supported by a lot of media players. I mean, the only thing I’ve been able to consistently play MKV with is VLC player, and that player itself regularly explodes on my system.

1852

I play MKV with Media Player 11 or Classic all the time without any problem.

The problem may be only having the right codecs configured well.

1853

Oblivion Recorder.

1854

I can play mkv’s in either windows media player or zplayer. Those are all I mostly use.

1855

I play mkv`s all the time using WMP11, I just used Vista Codec pack. All you need to do is find a complete codec pack for your OS and install it - uninstall all your other codecs first though.

1856

mkv files are popular for fansubs because they are convenient for including soft subs. That is, subtitles not hard coded into the video image, but which are rendered by the playback software and can be turned on and off, adjusted for size, font, color, etc.

If you have trouble playing them just get Media Player Classic- Home Cinema.

1857

Something that’s always baffled me regarding MKV and fansubs is that most groups don’t use soft subs when encoding in MKV, unless the release is multilingual. Most of the MKV encodes I have feature hardsubs of the sort you’d use for AVIs or MP4s.

It drives me nuts because I would really much prefer to see softsubs in fansubs. Instead I rarely see people using the softsub capacity of MKVs frequently outside of bootlegging official releases.

1858

I haven’t encountered any hardsubs in a mkv in a really long time.

1859

Me neither. Who are these “most groups”?

Also, you just need a few filters/codecs to play an MKV:

  1. Matroska splitter
  2. FFDshow (for whatever video/audio is used in the file)
  3. DirectVobSub

And I’d recommmend also:
4. DScaler audio decoder for digital audio streams, especially if you use coax/optical digital out to a receiver or something.

1860

Most groups I’ve ever DLed a fansub MKV from. If this has up and changed (edit: actually it would be in the past four months) when I’ve not been watching a whole lot, then good.