dead

by >>=2

I certainly should’ve written that post few years in advance, back when I had motivation for this.

As you could’ve guessed from almost a year of inactivity and the post title, the re-encoding thing is dead.

It would be sad if the post only had like one sentence about current not-so-fortunate status, so I’ll write about how it all started.

My shitty android tablet can actually handle both 10-bit decoding and somewhat complex ASS subs hardware-wise, but software had (and still have) a number of flaws that can only be bypassed by using hardsubs and 8-bit video. Obviously there was an established (?) and respectable (?) group (?) called DeadFish that already solved the problem but I couldn’t just go ahead and use their encodes as I was unlucky to be literate enough to know they suck in a number of ways:

• They are kinda slow because doing it by hand would always cause delays
• They keep doing dumb mistakes because doing it by hand would always cause mistakes and because they are dumb
• They keep using x264 from the last decade, what the fuck
• They reencode audio most of times if not always (e.g. they would reencode 128kbps AAC to 128kbps AAC, which, in case you didn’t know, would degrade audio a bit)
• Despite being cheapfags that almost always use 128kbps bitrate with audio they don’t hesitate to bloat video really hard (sometimes making it twice as big as source)
• Their encodes are banded even at high bit-rates because it’s not like they know how to encode
• They somehow manage to do other unexplainable stuff like reencoding hardsubbed 8-bit 720p video into slightly bigger and less hardware-compatible 8-bit 720p video
• Given a multiple sources they would pick the worst because why not

After I actually started encoding things I noticed that the first point wasn’t true because they have an army of minions ready to encode at any time of the day but whatever.

Few hundreds of lines in unreadable scripts and couple of British pounds later I somehow got to the point where I had the system that Just Worked. All I had to do is adding regular expressions to the list. Releases got automatically downloaded, reencoded and uploaded.

During a year or so I fiddled around with scripts, improving some things and experimenting, but after that it was a few years of doing nothing except adding new seasonal shows. Not unexpectedly, once nyaa died and I had to actually fix stuff to work with new nyaa or other trackers I couldn’t be assed to do so. Luckily, fanusbbing was pretty dead anyway and there was no need to continue.

RIP