Old Studio Ghibli productions are progressively coming out in HD resolution.
For fans these re-releases are like “Cheese on the Macaroni” 8).

We are waiting this from ages. Well done Ghibli!

Enjoy HD display owners!

Currently I have found these titles:

Laputa, Castle in the Sky (天空の城ラピュタ)
Whisper of the Heart (耳をすませば)
My neighbours the Yamadas (ホーホケキョとなりの山田くん)
Howl’s Moving Castle (ハウルの動く城)
Tales from Earthsea (ゲド戦記)

Porco Rosso (紅の豚) and Mononoke Hime (もののけ姫) has been broadcasted together with other Ghibli prods on the Japanese television in HD format.

They weren’t clear as a BD release but worth watching anyway. Always better than the DVD or upscaled DVD versions.

I’ve also finished also the quality check and the syncronization with my stored version.

This evening I will watch it sitting comfortably in my sofa!

Unfortunately there is no software with the same SIMPLE characteristics that run natively under MacOSX.

Forget Adobe suite, Final Cut or similar suites. Too much MB of professional features, useless for the simple video cut/paste/merge/convert user.

Iìm trying to make it work under Wine.

IMO an option to PASSTHROUGH the source audio is the only option missing in this suite.

I hope that the programmers consider it as soon as possible.

I don’t understand why I have to re-encode an AAC source audio in AAC again (losing some quality) instead of just copy the audio track.

Other programs have this feature.

But I can’t edit a video in an application and then the audio in another and then mix the results. It’s a waste of time.

Pegasys-inc, onegaishimasu!

EDIT 27/11/2011: When a user KEEP PRESSED the “skip to next keyframe” button, it should continue to jump to next KEY frames and NOT to the following normal frames.

Good. I have now a HD version of this drama.

When I watched the original broadcast, years ago, I liked it a lot. It has a surprising finale. It came to my desire to watch it again.

I’ve heard that the specials and the movie are not good as the serie. FYI: the special star is no more Shinohara Ryoko but the young girl Kitano Kii. What a pity.

When I’ll have some time I resync my softsubs with this new version and rewatch it again from the start!

English softsubs are available for the serie stored in my archive.

I just noticed that a good cast play in the serie, so expectations are (were) high!

What a “complex” jdrama!

The first episode scenes shows a “final episode” text in the center of the screen. I was a bit confused. I admit to have verified twice if I had started from the right episode.

While watching a mixed and confused background setting bring me to a premature NEGATIVE opinion of the serie (no opening theme, fragmented storyline, impossibility of define quickly the characters roles).

I tried to watch a bit more… the storyline becomes more clear. It’s “watchable”. But IMO the screenwriter has gone mad before writing this jdrama… 8o

Boh, I don’t know if I will continue watching it. I will try.

But they gone to the Antarctic territory to film that ? Wow…

It’s quite some time that I’m revisioning my “Takuya Archive”.

I have found a 1280×720 version of “Good Luck!!”. And I’m done ripping the subtitles from the hardsubbed JTV version.

As GTO, I have corrected weird english phrases, adjusted paragraphs and converted to SRT subs.

Together with GTO movie, I’m checking and adjusting the subs for my version.

I’m done up to ep08. This evening I will finish the last two episodes.

What a “time consuming” work! But I’m satisfied with the results.

I had in my archive from ages the JTV version, that’s hardsubbed.

I liked the characters a lot. Currently I’ve some free time so I started to extract english subtitles from the hardsubbed video, corrected some weird translations and converted all  into SRT format.

I prefer SRT subtitles; I can customize the characters, shadows, colors and even the position.

Hardsubs are lame, as the groups that obstinately release only that type of subs.

50% almost done.

After finishing this task I’m planning to rip also the subs from the TV serie. I would like to have a “perfect” archive of the jdrama Great Teacher Onizuka.

a lot of time passed since I wrote something here.

Life is busy.  Other interests/problems kept me away from the net.

I deleted a lot of entries of this blog as well as a lot of other things connected with my “presence” on the net.

I’m bored (tired).  Pardon me.

Maybe I’ll write my thoughts here from time to time.

Feel free to partecipate.

Some days ago I started to convert my Digital TV recordings in a format suitable for archiving (mp4). And I stuck my head on the file format created by my new video recorder!

The Jepssen Mediabox ST-3 records video streams in several 1,5Gb files: the first file is a .TRP and the following ones have extension .001, .002, .003 and so on.
Each file can be played by KMplayer. They are recognized as MPEG2-TS streams.

If you import individually on the timeline of a video editor (ex: Tmpgenc Xpress/Video Works5 or Womble MpegWizardDVD 5) and join them, the converted file is watchable by every video player but, on every original split point of the source files, there will be frame errors or audio/video flickering.

The result file will trigger when the player reach these points. In the worst cases this could bring audio out of sync issues (happened!).

This because the TRP and following files cannot be joined together in that way.
Using a “simple_attach_together_the_files” utility like HJSplit produces the same behaviour.

These are special SPLITTED streams.

To make a perfect joint of these sources, you have to use one of these two small utilities: H264TS Cutter or TsDoctor.

H264TS Cutter is a freeware utility. Under the OPTION menu there is a “Convert TRP/REC” entry that do this job. When it works (rarely), it works well. But this utility is full of bugs, nearly always crashes. Under a virtual machine is practically not usable, the read/write file function it’s extremely slow.

TsDoctor is a shareware utility that can be used to do the same job better. In addition it can optionally check and fix the video streams. The join streams function works excellently with TRP sources. Select the .TRP and the subsequent files to be joined, enable the check/fix file automatically option (advisable) and press the go button.

Both utilities produce a single file, that can be imported and edited into video editors. This file will not have the errors left by a simple join utility.