After weeks of hard work, fiddling around with everything in order to crank out the best quality, we present to you our first three episodes of Mouryou no Hako in eye-popping BD (though they come with certain caveats).
At first glance, you’ll notice the “not insignificant” file size. The reason for extra bang for your episode is the grainy nature of the video, and we decided that removing the grain might have detracted from the viewing experience the creators of the show intended us to have.
Another issue that might come up would be “Why isn’t it 1080p?”. The answer to this one is simple. The Blu-Ray video of Mouryou no Hako is simply an upscale of 720p, and keeping it as 1080p would have ultimately been a waste. With space/bandwidth/practicality in mind, we also opted for ordered chapters, the mechanics of which you may remember from our previous release. You will need the OP and ED in the same folder as the other episodes, and any player that supports ordered chapters will pick them up at the required time. Thus, considering the big file size for each episode, you will end up conserving a total of 1776 MB.
And last, but not least, and perhaps the question that may not have been asked, is “Why did it take so long?” Simply put, we had to redo all the typesetting, which was no small feat considering the amount of signs in this series. With this occasion, we’d also like to introduce one of our new staff members, Paradigm, to whom we owe a big debt of gratitude for putting up with our incessant nitpicking.
Now, for the sake of TL;DR, I’m gonna add more info here. We’ve made certain changes to the website, among the most visible being the new XDCC Bot List page, the addition of threaded comments, and the new “pretty” permalinks. More improvements will be made in the near future.
Expect 04 to arrive soon to an HDD near you. However. The release date for the other episodes is currently unknown, as people seem to be sequentially leaving on vacations, and the amount of work we can do at certain points is limited. As for me? I’m gonna have cold Mojitos in my cozy chair, getting tanned in front of my LCD.
As usual, we invite you to join our IRC channel at irc://irc.rizon.net/norikumi to idle around, and motivate us to work faster 
Up periscope!
-blackguard
TORRENT
OP | ED | 01 | 02 | 03
DDL
Lolipower! – Use the search box to look for Mouryou.
Note: Our releases are also available from Norikumi|Hako in our IRC channel. The packlist is available on the aforementioned XDCC Bot List page.
Tags: Blu-ray, Mouryou no Hako
Unbelievable. You might actually finish this show!
*bounce*
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OMG! You guys are actually alive?
And with 3 episodes to boot? Win win (no sarcasm).
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Nice, finally some quality subs for this.
By the way, do you think you’ll be releasing more episodes semi-regularly (as in 2 or more episodes a month) or would it be wiser to wait until you finish the series?
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blackguard Reply:
August 7th, 2009 at 12:48 am
Not sure. Though, as soon as people get back from their respective vacations, we’ll hasten our pace.
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about the xtra episode on the bluray, are you going to do that as well. anyway, thank you for continuing the fansub. looking forward for the rest.
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oh forgot to mention, will there be any 720p version?
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@donmai: Vol.1 has no extra episode. if the others do have specials, we’ll most likely do them.
And by 720p I think you meant 1080p. The answer is: not likely.
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Fuck yeah, thank you guys. Hope you release the rest soon.
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Yay for Mouryou no Hako subs! Just wondering, are you planning to release a standard definition version?
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blackguard Reply:
August 7th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
We’re not going to do SD of this show.
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O_O
srsly wtf 1gb files and nothing special in this anime.
I don’t know but 1gig is way to much for this.
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At 1Gb per episode, I really though this would be at least 1080p…
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Coma Reply:
August 7th, 2009 at 10:08 am
Well, consider this: real life 720p encodes often go beyond 1GB for this duration, and the grain pretty much pushes this into the “real life” category, as far as compression is concerned.
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ARandom Reply:
August 7th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
If you look at all the “real life” shows on something like thepiratebay, it seems as all of them are right around a gig… and they are 45 minutes long… while this is less than half the length… Remove some of that grain and it will help your compression.
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blackguard Reply:
August 8th, 2009 at 1:05 am
LOL you’re comparing scene rips with our release. When you think about the FFVII Advent Children 1080p Blu-ray being 47 GB, you’ll realize that a 1GB 720p episode is by all means fine. The Blu-ray streams for MnH are 7 GB each, so 1 GB should be enough. And keep in mind this is a show where the grain was intentionally added. In fact, the only thing that wasn’t upscaled to 1080p on the BD was the grain itself (recap: upscaled image from 720p to 1080p, +added 1080p grain).
Urexis Reply:
August 8th, 2009 at 8:25 am
also, grain + larger file size >>>>>>>> degrain smudge
Coma Reply:
August 11th, 2009 at 8:42 am
ARandom: Yes, they’re 45 min long and about a gig, but they’re far from having the same quality. If we had kept to scene quality standards, it would be about 600MB, and look nothing like the Blu-ray.
I was going to link to about a million examples (screenshots from scene releases), but I’m WAY too tired for that right now. I’ll do that when I wake up.
Did you know: most scene groups copy paste x264 settings from some document published two years ago. Some even use very old versions of ffdshow to encode.
Amazing, this is really the best thing to happen for me on a crappy day.
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I’ve been waiting for proper subs for this show(don’t even mention Aero)!!!
THANK YOU GUYS!!!
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All hail Norikumi!
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Sweet! Thanks guys, I appreciate it.
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Thank you so much for this guys, I’m happy to see that this series gets what it deserves
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Thank You!
You are great
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In a day and age when hard drive space and processing power are cheaper than gasoline and food you are complaining about file size? There are 25GB 2.5 hour movies, 10GB games and 20GB operating systems (I’m looking at you, Windows 7)… Why is one measly gigabyte worth complaining over?
It’s not like you are paying for it anyhow. GTFO my internets
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To those of you who are complaining about the filesize: We don’t care. We explained why they’re so big, so either accept it or find somewhere else to get your subs. We made a decision based on the materials we had available to us and your whining will not cause us to change our decision. Please, if you still feel the need to complain, we direct you here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2z6vD4e8pk .
And also, uh, yeah, what semi said^^: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822101135
gl;hf
Sincerely,
Your loving, caring Paradigm
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blackguard Reply:
August 7th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Disclaimer: Norikumi doesn’t support or approve of Paradigm’s rants, and cannot be held responsible for them.
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i smell the remains of moetaku and paradym from paradigm comments. lmao
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blackguard Reply:
August 8th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
We have absolutely no relation to Moetaku.
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Paradigm Reply:
August 9th, 2009 at 8:42 am
I have no idea who either of those two are
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Paradigm Reply:
August 9th, 2009 at 8:46 am
And also… yeah, I guess I may have went a bit overboard, but I still think all my points stand. The grain was meant to be there and taking it out would detract from the feel of the show. We decided to leave it in for purist’s sake and we ended up getting a 1GB episode. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.
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1gb per episode. *damn*
Guys, I am on a 256kpbs connection here. This will take like forever. And no, this country does not provide connections with speeds greater than 256kpbs…
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blackguard Reply:
August 8th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
It’ll only take 4 times longer than it takes to download your “usual” episode. And if we hadn’t made them ordered chapters, it would have taken even longer. Tough luck.
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egress63 Reply:
August 8th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
well, yeah – that is true. Well, I guess I’ll try out one episode and compare this to my other DVD fansubs. That ought to make a cool comparison, eh?
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egress63 Reply:
August 8th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Oh, btw, I forgot to add: Thanks so much for the episodes.
*should have said that earlier.*
I love you guys – the video quality on this is so beautiful, I could die.
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Just noticed on Underwater’s site that there’s a new feature called macroblock tree in the new x264 version.
Would using that make the size less than about 1 GB while keeping the same quality and if so, is Norikumi going to use it?
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blackguard Reply:
August 10th, 2009 at 12:19 am
We’ll do some test encodes and see how it turns out.
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SnickS Reply:
August 10th, 2009 at 12:35 am
Sounds great.
I also forgot to thank you in my original post, so thank you very much for this show!
It’s been a long time since Fall ’08 and it’s sad that a show like this hasn’t been subbed (completely) yet, so it’s great to see a group changing that.
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Coma Reply:
August 11th, 2009 at 9:06 am
I’m downloading the test encodes now, but it’s unlikely there will be a significant (or even noticeable) improvement, considering the nature of Mouryou (GRAIN), what mbtree does and our high standards.
mbtree allows x264 to reduce quality in specific parts of a frame, instead of reducing quality for the entire frame. It reduces quality for the parts that are referenced the least. In a nutshell, this means the static parts of a frame can remain high quality, and only the more expensive (bit-wise) parts take a quality hit. Since our target was to get something that would be as close as possible to the Blu-ray, this is sort of nullified. There are still some relatively grain-free areas in Mouryou, but probably not enough to make a real difference for the file size. I was aware of mbtree while it was still in early development, but decided not to wait for it for the aforementioned reasons.
You can see mbtree in action at http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/Flash/lowbitrateanime.html
This is an extremely low bitrate clip. Notice how whenever something moves, everything in that area falls apart, while the perfectly static backgrounds remain beautiful.
SnickS Reply:
August 12th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Thanks for the explanation, I already stumbled upon the flash video but I never exactly knew what mbtree did.
Sounds like a smart compression technique that will especially improve the quality of anime encodes (if the animator won’t add something like grain, like you mentioned). I don’t think that it will really improve live-action encodes, though since they probably won’t contain that many static scenes.