GARO Episode 02 - 10bit h.264

Get over here!

Episode 02

There were apparently a number of hilariously poorly handled lines in the original release, and having looked up the T-N next episode preview from a streaming site, it seems they utterly blew that as well. We're talking embarrassingly so. No idea if the new DVD rip release of theirs fixes them, or if they were just so threatened by the existence of our rips that they did essentially the same thing. If somebody wants to update any lines that they actually did seriously fix, go ahead, but we don't really have the patience to full on scrub the same show twice.

This will be the last warning for this: if you do not have the OP1 and ED1 from the previous post, you will see no opening or ending.

GARO Episode 01 - 10bit h.264

Well... we bought these damn DVDs so long ago that almost the entire series was encoded just in time for a demoralizing hard drive crash. When recovery tools failed to grab the encoded videos, it seemed like hope was lost, and it was hard to muster the effort to start over.

And then MakaiSenki was announced.

Back when the first releases of this series happened, we were up front about not being particularly happy with the the quality of the DVD raws, so this time we've gone all out. The old releases are pretty tolerable if you're not big on the bleeding edge, but for those who are, we have a release for you of 10bit h.264 video (a show this dark bands like a motherfucker) with ordered chapters to cut down on redundant downloading of the OPs and at least first ED. This release has been in the pipeline for honestly too long, seeing as the first episode of the sequel is already out and the second has aired, but as comments and tweets to Over-Time suggest, there's still plenty of people who are not yet on board the great Golden Knight GARO bandwagon. So let's get them on, shall we?

OP1: http://www.multiupload.com/KL22G016OV
ED1: http://www.multiupload.com/D8PAIJ52ED
Episode 01: http://www.multiupload.com/SSMAFNCX8W

You'll need a fairly modern player to deal with this, the easiest is to use CCCP on windows, or mplayer2 (or a gui program that is backed by it). The opening and ending play at the correct time automatically in a correctly configured system, no playlists or trickery required.

The upside of a rerelease like this is simple: the subs are done. Just need to slide them back around the now missing 2:30 and presto release-o. Also this gives a good opportunity to fix a few lingering errors (at least one instance of Guren Forest made it through QC of the DVD releases, for instance) at the same time.

Have fun.

Masked Rider Agito - 26-28

Okay. So as you all know, this is a scrub (a term that someone else came up with for this sort of release after we started, but we like) of the Cruel Angel Productions episodes that were ripped and encoded by BrownRanger. For the most part, we have avoided direct potshots at this release. If you've downloaded them yourself, you understand what these releases are saving you from, both in terms of video and the subtitles. But perhaps some of you are unfamiliar with the issues. Odds are very good that most of you don't even realize the issue with episode 28, which was so mind bogglingly stupid that we felt it necessary to point this out.

First off, episode 27. This is a typical episode, any would do, but 1-26 have already been sacrificed to the pits of BitHell.



And here is its counterpart from our release.



The difference is probably fairly obvious. The DVDs are interlaced anamorphic widescreen, so 720x480 is set to expand to 852x480 (give or take) by the player. This is exactly what is encoded here. To be clear, that one episode that people were complaining about was just improperly flagged, not improperly encoded. A player override would have fixed it trivially, unlike the CAP up here that needs cropping and AR correction.

The trouble is Cruel Angel apparently couldn't figure out how to handle anamorphic DVDs, so the pieces of shit they sold (yes, they asked for money for this, these were not free fansubs) apparently reencoded the video letterboxed. In this case, the 720x480 video is converted by your player to 640x480, and has the black bars built in for you. It's good for the ten people on the planet who bought extremely early (and therefore expensive) DVD players and never, ever upgraded when they became like $20, but for everyone else it just means lower quality. Worse still, BrownRanger didn't do the sane thing with such a garbage source (resize to 640x480, crop off 60 pixels of matting from the top and bottom), leaving you with encodes that are wider than they should be and black bars all over the place. This is Bad.

But now let's get to episode 28, the target of our rage. It is worse. We'll start with a couple shots of the OP.


versus



So, you must be thinking, "weren't you picky assholes just complaining about matted letterboxing?" You'd be right, though you can probably tell just by looking that once again the CAP version is wider than it should be. Moreover, this time the black bars are taking up even more of the screen. Why is that? Well let's compare two shots from the bulk of the episode.





Have you figured it out? Do you understand what happened here? Let us spell it out for those of you that have not: Cruel Angel resized this episode to fit as matted 16:9 widescreen, despite the fact that the original source is primarily 4:3 with only a couple flashbacks (and a flash forward in the very beginning) and the OP in 16:9. Then BrownRanger compounded the issue by failing to correct for the AR issues in a sane way, though to be fair even crop/resize to 640x360 like the rest should have been would have been weird looking here, and a proper expansion to 4:3 would be losing a lot of detail due to the initial incompetence.

This is inexcusably stupid for a paid product, so in this sense we must tip our hats to BrownRanger for pirating the shit out of the original pirate goods, and making it so that nobody should ever really consider paying these assholes money. We only wish BrownRanger had a clue what he was doing himself as he did it, but seriously shame on you Cruel Angel.

With that bit of tl;dr out of the way, have some links:

26
27
28

Enjoy.

Masked Rider Agito - 1-25 Batch

1-25 Batch Torrent

It's been quite a while. In the time since we've ridden together, apologetically, others have joined the cause of scrubbing the cruft from bad fansubs. We salute you all. But this leaves us feeling somewhat foolish, what with our incomplete job. So here we are, roughly at the half way point. After so many months, it did not seem right to merely release a couple episodes, so eight it is.

Incidentally, we at Gomen Rider Fansubs would like to bless some good people from the land of Brazil, for drastically cutting down the effort that goes into these. Scrubbing is actually ahead of raw encoding from the (admittedly ugly, but better than the alternative) DVD5s.

Enjoy.

Masked Rider Agito - 15-17v2

There were some minor aspect ratio related issues with these files. The irony is not lost on any of us. As they are minor, however, the fix is also quite small and simple.

Here is a zip full of patches and a batch to run them. We're seriously just talking a flag to one file, and a couple 100s become 83s in sub streams. No big.

Don't go anywhere though, we didn't begin to ride again just for this.

Masked Rider Agito 1-17 Batch

And here it is, slightly after the new year because welp combing artifacts make our encoder's blood boil so the three that were not uploaded to MU previously have been reencoded.

1-17 batch

Same directory structure as the last one, so you should be able to just hop on as-is (and help seed whatever you already have for people who are late to the game). Enjoy.

Update:

Yeah, that means there's combing bullshit on 11-14. There shouldn't be, they were run through my FieldHints with NNEDI2 for post processing, but apparently it thought everything was a-ok. They'll get v2s when 1-10 get encoded. 15-17 don't suffer the same problems (and are actually less complicated avs scripts) so 18-end won't either. God dammit.