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I’ve been completing my anime collection over the last couple of weeks and what strikes me is this … The groups surely have to be the most unprofessional sort I have ever come across. I say it’s well overdue to enforce some sort of scene rules for anime as well. I’m sick of varying resolutions, varying bitrates, varying file sizes, outdated codecs, bleeding edge codecs, varying container formats, naming schemes. Not to mention individual choices of subtitles and alternative audio tracks — and the lack thereof. It’s charming for a while and many groups do amazing work, but the overall result is shaky to say the least and terms like REAL, PROPER or NUKED have very little meaning. In short, it’s anarchy rather than a free market and it shows in terms of efficiency. There is usually no rush to release new material and the encodes are usually limited to group affiliated IRC channels, bots and trackers.
And as if that isn’t enough there is a notoriously pernicious tradition of visually tagging your releases. As some territorial pissing contest i.e. self-aggrandizement / self-advertisement. Sometimes they’re relatively discreetly tucked away during the credits and / opening sequence. More often as recurring messages, also hardcoded of course, during the feature itself. Sometimes even as an entire extra intro sequence inserted at the beginning. It’s nothing short of outrageous. Just imagine what would happen if an actual scene group did this to the latest Hollywood blockbuster. My guess is they would be digitally tarred and feathered. This just has to go. As must any other form of excessive editing of the content (the jury is still out on karaoke and advanced typesettings). A compromise could be to move the ads to the softsubs inside of the container or to find a way to include several video streams into one container — just as long as you don’t have to view secondary streams by default.
