Hi everyone,

We're going to be posting more Zillion soon as well as a repack of the last batch of Vifam episodes, except, well, my net's been down for a week and a half (don't ask), which is making it difficult to bounce files back and forth to people, post large torrents, etc.

If you're looking for past episodes, we recommend checking either lolipower.org or 4chan's RS board for direct downloads. No muss, no fuss, no annoying ratio sites...

As we get with the upcoming '10s, we're beginning to transition encoding to h264. While ongoing releases (Vifam, Zillion) will continue to be released in XviD for the sake of consistency, new projects will be h264 only. To confirm whether or not your machine is capable of handling the encodes, you can test it with this file:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/izjld4

Contained within the RAR are the OP sequences for two imminent releases. If they play fine on your machine then everything's good. If they don't....there's always recoding.

For what it's worth, I tested these on my 18 month old 15" MacBook Pro and had success using the following apps:

OS X 10.5.6: Quicktime Player (via Perian), VLC 0.9
WINDOWS XP SP3: Media Player Classic (via CCCP), Zoom Player (via CCCP), VLC 0.9

Also, please note that these *should* be streamable to consoles (360/PS3) and Apple TV units as well as functioning on the WD Media Box. They are NOT iPod/iPhone compatible (unless iPhone 3.0 delivers support for Main Profile encodes.) We tried a baseline round and it looked OK, but the quality difference really shows on Main - a 175MB encode in Main Profile h264 looks as good (if not slightly better) than a 233MB XviD encode, which is what we were going to do on Mellowlink.

Oh, and speaking of Mellowlink, some of you will notice some romanisation differences. The filenames will retain the fan preferred spelling, but all in-show names use the official romanisations. You'll also notice that it doesn't look brilliant. Some of the more hardcore encoders out there can scream yatta all they want and it won't make a bit of difference when clean frames are nonexistent in your source. Either way, it's coming soon. Very soon.

Blah blah blah another repack.

And another question: would it be preferable for everyone out there if we stick to xvid releases or start doing mp4's with new shows?

Either way, don't even think about asking for matroskas. The format is boned on OSX/Linux and has no true support (just like Ogg...)

Month of repacks continues. Had I read the news comments before putting it together I'd have done Vifam 25-36...guess those are next week's.

OK so this is a strictly business post.

First and foremost, Brave Fighter of Legend Da Garn is now officially dropped. The translator's had multiple valid reasons not to work on it, so we're calling it a day and packing it in. If anybody wants to pick up from episode 18, copies of the DVDs are sitting here behind my chair and the group will try to help where we can.

Second, repacks.

Folks, there's a reason our stuff is poorly seeded: there aren't very many fans of vintage anime out there, and none of us have the bandwidth to spare to anally reseed everything ourselves, nor do we have the cash laying around to pay for a seedbox to do it for us. We don't repack things very often because, well, repacks are lazy releases. Fansubbing is not a big part of our lives (hence the only one episode a week thing) and if we have something new to put out, we put it out. Repacks are for weeks that things slip by or when real life interferes beyond redemption.

But, nevertheless, it seems that all everybody wants these days are repacks. They're so in demand that over the past three weeks we've seen at least three (possibly more) of our projects repacked and posted elsewhere.

And by "elsewhere" I mean "Sites that do not communicate with our tracker and are not listed on any of our sites." In other words, it's an attempt to create a new seed pool (sometimes on a reg only ratio tracker) and by extension keeps people who want to seed away from here.

So, it's time for some spring cleaning. One new repack a week until there's nothing left worth repacking. New releases will continue after that. I don't want to be a dick, and fansubbing shouldn't feel like srsbzns, but right now it feels like others are trying to make a point. And it's pissing us (or at least me) off.

And no, this isn't a cry for attention or sympathy, and comments that work on that assumption will be wiped. This is bluntness: you want it, you got it, and it means I can slack off on finishing the first few episodes of Mellowlink.