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Comment by magila | Hacker News Reader

The pirate scene isn't what it used to be when it comes to adopting new technology. In the past the scene would adopt whatever codec gave the highest compression efficiency with little regard for anything else. You could see this in the adoption of MPEG4 ASP even though it was not widely adopted by the commercial market.

Today compatibility with set-top boxes is much more of a consideration than it used to be. The increased speed of internet service and reduced cost of storage have also lessened pressure to pursue ultimate efficiency.

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> In the past the scene would adopt whatever codec gave the highest compression efficiency with little regard for anything else

> Today compatibility with set-top boxes is much more of a consideration than it used to be

My experience was the opposite, they seemingly stuck to Xvid in AVI containers for the longest time to support those divx-compatible DVD players even when newer codecs were more performant. Whereas these days while not the most common codec, most things do end up getting a release in h265.

> Today compatibility with set-top boxes is much more of a consideration than it used to be.

My experience with the anime and tokusatsu fansubbing community is the opposite. There's a lot of "you must use mpv or CCCP", and a ton of disdain for people who watch on something other than a PC.

A small handful of groups will provide alternate "toaster-friendly" downloads for people on set-top boxes. For example, for ongoing TV shows, the main release will be a 720p or 810p softsubbed MKV with Hi10P video, and the "toaster-friendly" release will be a 480p hardsubbed MP4 with 8-bit video. This is mostly in the tokusatsu scene, though; for set-top boxes, the anime community mostly relies on dedicated encoding groups like DeadFish who provide "toaster-friendly" versions of other groups' releases because most groups won't even consider releasing something that's set-top-box-friendly. Also, there is an assumption that if you don't want to watch on a PC, then you don't mind SD video.

For fansubs that use Blu-ray-sourced video, there are no "toaster-friendly" options. You can basically expect groups to do a 720p Hi10P release alongside a 1080p release which is either Hi10P or HEVC, both of which are softsubs-only and in MKV containers. The audio is often, but not always, FLAC.

For those unfamiliar with how subtitles work, softsubs are incompatible with pretty much every set-top box. And there are some groups that will use intricate typesetting that can bring even decent PCs to their knees. For example, Commie is notorious for releasing an episode of JoJo's Bizarre Adventures with typesetting so over the top that it crashed most people's computers (I've never seen the episode myself, but I understand it involved hundreds of lines of text all continuously zooming in and out).

But even the anime/toku community doesn't use AV1, and HEVC is only for 1080p releases sourced from Blu-ray video (and to reiterate, a lot of groups will still use Hi10P even for 1080p).

The anime piracy community is kind of its own beast. And we like it that way. :) Also, I would assume that there are different considerations for primarily dealing with animation as opposed to primarily live action.

> Also, I would assume that there are different considerations for primarily dealing with animation as opposed to primarily live action.

Eh, I've noticed similar from the tokusatsu community, and that's live action. The only difference is that some (but not all) toku groups will also provide toaster-friendly encodes in addition to their top-quality encodes, while anime groups rely on DeadFish for that.

The only toku group I can think of that touches HEVC is Pocket Universe, who specializes in muxing other groups' subs with Blu-ray-sourced video. Everyone else is mostly Hi10P.

>But even the anime/toku community doesn't use AV1

It is much too early for AV1 do see any real adoption. The existing encoders are very slow and/or lack features/tuning, and hardware support is non-existant.

In a year or two we will see encoder(s) at a sufficiently high optimization and quality level that it will be a candidate for high quality encodes, and if AV1 gains traction (outside of streaming) at that point I'm certain it will start in the anime scene.

edit: went and searched on Nyaa, and there are actually some AV1 encodes of various content, so some people are already experimenting.

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