The following are the latest anime figures produced and released (some will be for sale in Summer, see Charlotte Dunois’ example) by Japan in the past few months and are definitely a must have on your desk, shelf, and… well, anywhere you want them to be 😉
If you are wondering what the post title means, allow me to tell you 😀 The SH-06D NERV (hint hint!), is the first official Evangelion smarphone on the market as of late June of this year.
Girls und Panzer (ガールズ&パンツァー) – In the world, the manipulation of tanks (Sensha-do) is one of the traditional martial arts especially for girls. Miho doesn’t like Sensha-do and moves to Oarai Girl’s High School. But the chairperson of the student council orders Miho to participate in the national Sensha-do championship.
A show scheduled to hit the public on fall of 2012, according to the official site. Lantis began streaming the PV of the show earlier today, announcing also the production crew and the main cast:
Title: Dusk Maiden of Amnesia (黄昏乙女×アムネジア) Genre: Mystery, Horror, Romance, Supernatural, Comedy
Summary:
60 years ago, a young woman was left to die in the abandoned school building behind the exclusive Seikyou Academy. No one knows why. No one knows how. But the horrifying tale and the legends of the ghostly haunting that followed live on to this day. Perhaps it’s not so surprising then, that among Seikyou’s many school clubs is one for students interested in “paranormal investigations.” What might raise more than a few hairs, however, is that the founder of the club is the ghost herself. Unable to remember how she died and trapped in the grey land between life and death, Yuuko latches onto Teiichi Niiya, a freshman who can inexplicably see her, and together they and the other unsuspecting members of the club begin to unravel the many dark mysteries that surround Seikyou. Will unlocking the secret of Yuuko’s gruesome death finally free her? Or will her sudden close association with a mortal have even stranger repercussions on both of their existences?
I’m almost positive it’s due to the fact she has the most unique character design…
It was a while ago when I finally watched Amagami SS and I fell completely in love with the anime. I guess watching the Haruka arc would do that to a person when they value closure more than anything else in the world. It was weird at first to see him suddenly fall in love with another girl in a different arc after Haruka, but I quickly got over it after falling in love with the girls. Even though each arc was only 4 episodes, it was enough for me to establish likes and dislikes for all the characters. Even if you argue the Junichi was basically a self-insert or an idiot, I enjoyed him a lot more than most other harem MCs.
I remember when I first heard that Mysterious Girlfriend X was getting an anime. I couldn’t believe it. I was so excited. I couldn’t wait to see my favorite scenes become animated.
You know, the DEEP scenes.
After only three episodes, my will to watch this anime has become stalled.
Probably when I realized the above scene will never happen in length.
Summary:
Furuya’s not interested in the living, he’s got zombies on the brain! When Furuya’s cat dies, he decides he’s going to try and bring it back to life. In the process, he stumbles across a girl whose failed attempted suicide has turned her into a real zombie! What’s Furuya going to do now that the thing he loves the most is right in front of his eyes?
Summary:
The year is 2046. Haruyuki Arita is a young boy who finds himself on the lowest social rungs of his school. Ashamed of his miserable life, Haruyuki can only cope by indulging in virtual games. But that all changes when Kuroyukihime, the most popular girl in school, introduces him to a mysterious program called Brain Burst and a virtual reality called the Accel World.
Chidori3souske Hey there! Chidori3souske here! I’m the new writer here on haruhichan and I’m in charge of giving you guys season previews. Before the season preview I’ll give a very brief intro about myself. My anime preference is very diverse but generally I like shows with romance and mystery in it (well of course I’d love romance I’m a girl). Any series would do may it be horror, action, seinen, slice of life etc. I’ll watch it as long as its interesting. I usually pick up most of the shows every season and after 2-3 eps I’ll decide whether I’ll keep watching it or I’ll drop it. I give shows a chance because maybe there are some unpopular shows out there that are really good too bad its underrated and most people ignore it. After that, I usually write my first impressions and reviews on my site and the other site where I also write so do check it out if you have the time (^_^) (oh yes I have an ulterior motive…to promote my site wwwwwwwww just joking). Enough of introductions let’s now proceed to the intro of the season preview.
NOTICE: This is taken from www.haruhichan.com – Moving this over from the main site to the blog. Comments are closed.
Hello, my name is Swaps4/Eirin and you’ve stumbled across the L4D2 K-ON mod! This page will be used as the main hub for the latest update of the main project we’re working on at the moment. All other projects that we plan to do will be listed here and on the blog.
If you followed the link above, you would find out that we also have a Steam Group (Yay), so be sure to join if you use Steam. (Especially if you play Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead 2.
Taketatsu Ayana (Voice of Nyakano Azusa) on the K-On! movie. (updated her blog just a minute ago) [translated and posting the bits I find moving]
I feel a little sad and it’s been in the corner of my mind for a long while now. That this movie might just be the last thing we ever do with a K-On anime.
Being my first ever regular role (VA for a regular character in a series)For the last three years, I’ve been walking side by side with Azusa. [Aurey note: ;_;]
The first time I stepped into this role was for the first season’s episode eight. With the script in my hand, and my legs shaking uncontrollably and my mouth going dry.
When the after recording was completed, I was undeniably glad and my heart was dancing with joy that I was able to deliver what was needed.
Working with K-On, I have received what I feel was more than I could have given. And for that I am extremely grateful.
[All the fragments of my memories] have truly become my treasures (note: she’s quoting Tenshi ni Fureta yo lyrics)
I wish that from now on, I can still walk each and every step, one at a time, alongside Azusa.
From now on, I’ll still always be with Azusa. That’s why I’ll be fine.
I’m not worried anymore.
I’ve still got a lot I want to talk about but, most of all, I would love for everyone to be able to experience and thoroughly enjoy K-On! The Movie.
To those who have come along with us, and have loved K-On as much as we did through all this time. Thank you so very much.
I love K-On!
I love everyone!
Truly, I thank you all.
Run the (use the LinkICCGUI.exe utility) and point it to your profile’s .ti3/.icm files, then click “Save as .3dlut” and save it into the madVR folder. (Alternative guide coming here soon, to use LutScript instead)
Open the madVR configuration dialog (right click the madVR icon on the system try while playing back a video), choose your display device, go to calibration and choose “calibrate this display by using an external 3DLUT file” and load the .3dlut you saved earlier
Go to the “color & gamma” section in madVR, enable gamma processing and set the value to “pure power curve”, 2.40
Enjoy correct colors!
Note: You have to make sure the 2.4 gamma profile is being used before you watch anything. If you want to use the 2.4 gamma profile alongside the sRGB profile (from the other guide), I recommend using dispcalGUI to switch between the two before/after a movie. Alternatively, you can just keep using the 2.4 gamma profile for everything since it works reasonably well for most computer content as well. But it’s not 100% accurate for them. Your decision.
The Dell UltraSharp U2410 uses a native 8 bit H-IPS panel (which is much, much better than the 6 bit panels in use everywhere else) and has very good AFRC for 10 bit simulation, so you can display 1.07 billion colors with no noticeable flickering at all. It’s like a native 10-bit panel.
Along with that, it has 12-bit hardware LUTs internally, but you can’t officially reprogram them (I’ve heard you can hack it, but that breaks warranty).
Color fidelity
The colors are absolutely perfect, I have mine calibrated down to 0.2 dE average deviation (maximum error 0.5), which is considered so good that you can’t tell the difference using just your eyes. It literally blows $2000 LaCies and NECs out of the water for its price.
Color space
My U2410’s color space was measured at approximately 110% NTSC, which allows you to display a huge variety of gamuts with ridiculous ease, including Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB. It comes with a built-in sRGB and aRGB emulation mode factory calibrated down to dE 3.
This guide is intended to be a quick checklist to make sure you don’t make any obvious mistakes when buying a monitor – not a comprehensive guide.
Panel type
If it is not listed anywhere, avoid at all costs. If it says “TN”, avoid at all costs. The reason why is because not only are TN panels usually very cheap and bad in quality, but they also have poor viewing angles. Even though you’re sitting straight in front of your monitor, gamma will severely distorted the further you get from the center. Don’t believe me? Have a look at http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/viewing_angle.php. Good panel types are H-IPS, S-IPS or S-PVA. e-IPS is worse, but still better than TN.
Color depth
Look for an information on the amount of colors. If it says “16.2 million colors”, it means they actually use 0.2 million colors but dither to give the illusion of more. Good signs are “16.7 million colors”, which is usually still dithered, but often indicates higher quality dithering or even a native 8 bit panel. (Or, if something advertises “1.07 billion colors”, you know you’ve struck gold – usually native 8 bit + dithering to 10)
Screen size / resolution
Huge screen sizes but comparatively low resolutions (eg. 27″ but 1920×1080) – avoid these, they’ll end up looking like shit. Good sizes are 22″ for 1920×1080 and 27″ for 2560×1440.
Backlight type
“LED” screens are just a marketing hype word for edge-lit white phosphor LEDs which don’t offer any image quality improvements. (They do, however, offer lower power consumption than CCFLs). Real active matrix or RGB LED screens are much more expensive, but good. Don’t be scared of buying CCFLs, they can still be very good.
Color management, in its most basic form, is simply ensuring that all colors get preserved as much as possible when transitioning media; for example from computer images to your display, or from your camera to your printer). This guide focuses exclusively on the former, and allows you to ensure all digital images get represented as closely as possible on your monitor.
What you will need:
For all forms of manual color management, you will need a device that allows you to measure color – either a colorimeter or spectrometer will do. A spectrometer is more expensive but can be used with anything; be it an LCD, CRT or projector; and will work with any sort of colors. A colorimeter in contrast is cheaper, usually only works with LCDs and CRTs and will only allow you to calibrate a specific color gamut, for example sRGB. In other words, you can not use a colorimeter with wide gamut monitors.
This guide uses the Spyder 3 Express colorimeter, which is relatively cheap but still uses decent sensors.
Alternatively:
If you don’t want to or can’t afford to buy a colorimeter, you might want to check some online reviews and find out what primaries your monitor uses. You can then skip straight to Step Three, but doing this will be less accurate than measuring them yourself, and the monitor still won’t be properly calibrated – at best, it will ensure that colors get displayed more correctly on a wide gamut monitor.
FFmpeg‘s FLAC decoder cannot handle some multi-channel configurations correctly apparently, also some occasional issues about sound distortion. I don’t really know how true any of this is since I’ve never come across it, but some groups have recommended (in the past) to not use the ffmpeg FLAC decoder, or decoders that depend on it. MadFlac is guaranteed to be lossless no matter what you throw at it.
Download and install madFlac. This will generally be relatively stable since it’s already lossless and bug-free and there’s not much else to do, but in case you want to check the thread every once in a while, you can
Unpack the file anywhere (you’re going to keep it there) and run “install.bat” inside the folder
Step Two: Setup
Open up MPC-HC’s options menu, and browse to “External Filters”. Click on “Add Filter”, choose “madFlac Decoder” from the list and hit ok. Highlight the new entry and set it to “Prefer” as shown:
Grab the latest CCCP and use the player that comes with it (CCCP will dither everything down to 8 bit before rendering. You might also run into performance issues on slower hardware)
Use MPC-HC together with madVR and LAV (jump to guide) (maximum quality but needs a bit of configuration + tweaking)
Download the latest unstable build of VLC Media Player (you really shouldn’t be using VLC) and install it
If you’re having trouble playing Hi10P due to performance reasons, CoreAVC 3 is now out, but it still hassome issues. Oh, and apparently worse performance than ffdshow. Never mind this, don’t install CoreAVC except for 8-bit software decoding (oh, LAV Video has faster CUDA decoding as well for 8-bit)
Pick one!
Mplayer2 (and SMplayer by extension) will be fine for most users, especially those who want something that just works out of the box. For the maximum playback quality however, you’ll need to use MPC-HC + madVR as shown below.
CoreAVC in CUDA mode, DXVA, LAV CUVID as well as the stable versions of VLC and ffdshow do not support Hi10P at the time of writing, because no graphics cards support 10-bit decoding
Note: Using VSFilter (aka DirectVobSub) with Hi10P requires dithering material down to 8-bit first, which can introduce some quantization inaccuracies later on and also uses incorrect levels due to a bug in swscale (when using CCCP/ffdshow or LAV to dither)
Pros of Hi10P:
Significantly higher compression ratios resulting in vastly decreased file sizes. The first rounds of testing show a 20-40% improvement on file sizes
Far more information is preserved from the original, removing such issues as banding and poor detail in dark scenes
Slight compatibility issues when using obscure, obsolete devices like the PS3 to play back movies — but who does that, really?
Motivation behind switching:
All technology is designed to move into the future. It was the same way with DVDs, the same way with Blu-ray discs, the same way with DivX and it’s the same with Hi10P. Newer decoders are much faster even with Hi10P content than decoders were in 8-bit mode a year ago, so that alone gives us the power needed to back it.
How to encode in Hi10P:
Assuming you already know how to encode, grab the relevant “10bit depth” build of x264. On Linux, just run “./configure –bit-depth=10” before compiling.
Special notice: The official x264 builds are still bugged and convert the levels incorrectly. If you want an unofficial build of x264 with the the fixes, use JEEB’s builds or patch it yourself.
If you use CRF, increase it slightly. If you use a bit rate, you can lower it a bit. Groups are still working hard to find the best settings, so only time will tell how much to raise/lower CRF by.
Make sure you either tag your releases with “Hi10P” or mention it somewhere in the description. Feel free to link back to this guide in the post/readme, to help people set up a working media player before they go whine in your comments section.
Examples of Hi10P content:
Hi10P anime samples can be found click here or here.
Having a 10-bit (aka 30-bit / DeepColor) display is NOT needed to see the benefits of Hi10P – 10-bit content, even when dithered down to 8 bit, is still significantly higher quality than 8 bit content, and the file sizes speak for themselves.
This method will result in higher image quality and performance than using CCCP (or anything ffdshow-based, really), so if you’re struggling to play back Hi10P anime, or even regular 1080p, consider trying this. MadVR and LAV are updated regularly and uses very new versions of libav for decoding as well as custom edits to make 10-bit decoding even faster, giving it much more speed than the ridiculously outdated ffdshow-tryouts project, and the even more ridiculously outdated CCCP codec pack that is based on it.
Step Zero: Prerequisites:
Uninstall ALL instances of MPC-HC, CCCP, ffdshow, madVR, Haali, K-lite, CoreAVC etc. you might have on your system.
This is a clean guide that requires no other prerequisites to function, and ideally should have none installed either.
Step One: Downloading and Installation:
Download and install the latest version of MPC-HC (you want the .exe version for an installer) Note: Get the 32-bit version (called x86) ONLY! The 64-bit version is incompatible with madVR and will not function at all
Install the LAV Filters. These are necessary for decoding video and audio. You need to select the Splitter as well if you don’t want to use Haali, otherwise you have to install Haali manually:
Note: You can skip this step if your PC isn’t very powerful! Download the latest version of madVR and extract it anywhere you like. Run install.bat inside the folder. DO NOT DELETE THE FOLDER AFTERWARDS, madVR lives inside it and does not copy itself anywhere else. Move it somewhere sensible before installing, for example C:\Program Files\madVR. Note: Make sure you’re logged in as an Administrator when running this! Do not right click and “run as admin”, log in as admin and run it normally!
Step Two: Configuration:
Open up MPC-HC’s options menu. Under “Internal Filters”, disable everything. You can leave some of the ones on the left active, but make sure you’ve disabled all of the ones not selected here:
Under Playback, enable “Auto-load subtitles”:
Under Subtitles, make sure “Allow animation when buffering” is enabled, and “Maximum texture resolution” is set to “Desktop”:
Under Output, choose “madVR” as renderer: Note: If you skipped madVR, or you’re experiencing lagging, frame drops or poor performance in general, set this to “EVR Custom Pres.”, “Haali Renderer” or “VMR-9 (renderless)” instead – try them in that order until you find one that works.
Make sure the LAV Video is selected as default decoder. If in doubt, go to external filters, choose “Add Filter”, select LAV Video Decoder and switch it to “Prefer”:
After making the above changes, restart MPC-HC and play back any file. You should notice the madVR icon in the system tray. Right click this to access the settings:
Once inside, disable the “fullscreen exclusive mode” under Rendering -> General Settings. I recommend leaving this off unless you are having playback problems, because it prevents you from taking screenshots and makes the transition to fullscreen very ugly (It also messes up MPC-HC’s interface):
Step Three: Confirmation:
Play back a Hi10P file and use Ctrl+J to enter the OSD: (If it doesn’t show up or looks completely different, doublecheck output configuration)
Correct
Incorrect
Finally, check the “Filters” list (in the right click menu of MPC-HC during playback) and confirm that LAV Video is being used:
If you see occasional blocks or screwed up, oversaturated color, but it’s otherwise completely fine, then you’re not using one of the above-mentioned software, or you’re using an outdated version that doesn’t support Hi10P playback correctly
Remember to restart MPC-HC about every time you make a change – it only reloads filters and renderers on startup
If you’re using MPC-HC’s internal subtitle renderer and animations don’t work properly or anything else looks wrong, enable “Allow animations when buffering” in the Subtitles menu. Note: The MPC-HC internal renderer uses the same exact rendering code as DirectVobSub, except it’s also multi-threaded. Everything that DirectVobSub can play back, MPC-HC can too! It is not bugged or lacking.
If you don’t see subtitles after adding madVR as prefer, update your version of MPC-HC to at least build 3520 (which is still beta)! Alternatively, don’t add it as prefer and remove / de-prioritize the conflicting filters instead (example with ffdshow is shown above)
If you still don’t see it, double check to see that you have the 32-bit version of MPC-HC and not the 64-bit version
Creating Direct3D device failed (8876086c): Go to your output configuration and change the video renderer from madVR to something like EVR Custom Pres
Slow performance, frame drops, lagging: See the line above
If you’re having trouble taking screenshots, keep in mind that the best way to take screenshots from madVR is pressing PrintScreen on your keyboard, then pasting it to an external editing program like mspaint
Adding ffdshow will allow you to use its audio decoder (for filters + a more customizable mixer), as well as using it for formats other than AVC1 (H.264), VC1 and MPEG-2. Especially for older 480p and worse content (which isn’t likely to be encoded in AVC1), you can use the ffdshow deblocking or debanding filters to attempt to improve image quality this way.
Open ffdshow’s settings dialog, under “DirectShow control” set the merit to normal: (To get here, just go to Start -> All Programs -> ffdshow -> Video decoder configuration)
Double check Step Three to make sure ffdshow doesn’t touch your H.264 video
Enjoy Anime!
Feedback and disclaimer:
If something is terribly wrong here or needs to be updated (even if it’s just a typo), leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to get back to you. You can also contact the author directly.
All content here is provided as-is with no actuary or implied warranties or guarantees of bodily, mental or otherworldly safety. If you don’t like the fact that every sentence is full of links, blame MediaWiki.
Guide originally inspired by Ryuumaru. All content based on nand’s original research and Google. All text and images are in public domain, except for the background video content on the OSD screenshots, which belongs to the owner of Bakemonogatari.
No credit needs to be given when copying any content in this post in whole or in part, but a link back would still be beneficial since this post is guaranteed to be updated constantly and reflects the latest developments in decoding / media playback.
Swaps4 Productions and Big Bang Studio are excited to unveil the highly anticipated launch of Melody's Melon Mania, featuring Projekt Melody! This captivating, free-to-play...