CatBus

TV’s Frink said:

I’ll take the 42nd Anniversary Thread for two reasons.

Someone start a thread to guess what those two reasons are.

Done.

My guesses for the two reasons:

Reason #1: This is the easy one. Just the simple Hitchhiker’s Guide reference.

Reason #2: A slightly more abstruse Hitchhiker’s Guide reference. One very nice explanation for how 42 could actually be The Answer was that “To Be or Not To Be” is The Question, and could be written as “2B || !2B”, which in hexadecimal, means “43 or not 43”. The answer being 42 means that the answer to “To Be or Not To Be” is “Not To Be”. Which, very cleverly, also answers the thread title.

Nice job, Frink.

TV’s Frink said:

MathUser said:

Are you gonna make a thread for the 41st anniversary too?

Don’t give him any ideas!

I’ve got dibs on the 50th Anniversary thread, but I promise to phrase the thread title as a question (“Will we finally see an OOT release in 2027?”) so that people can simply apply Betteridge’s Law of Headlines (“No.”) and move on.

I’m leaving the 60th Anniversary thread for someone else though. Diamond Anniversary thread, big demand, reserve it while you still can. Platinum’s also available as far as I can tell. I’m afraid there will be new threads for this topic going for as long as people keep deluding themselves into thinking it’s a possibility.

nightstalkerpoet said:

CatBus said:

Stinky-Dinkins said:

Then you’ll need to DL ImgBurn. Again, it tries to DL shit and horseanus onto your PC if you allow it.

I tried to tell the Enumclaw Police Department that’s where those photos came from, but they didn’t believe me.

You’re in WA, CatBus?

Well, yes, but not in Enumclaw. At least around here, jokes about Enumclaw and horses never get old.

Edited to add: Not the best subject to Google from work.

If you two can’t stop fighting for five minutes we’re not inviting either of you to the wedding. I’m serious. SilverWook can give me away. It’s my special day, dammit.

IMO the H1/H2 font is a free implementation of the Trade/Franklin/News Gothic font family used in the Star Wars crawls and subtitles. While I’m also not entirely sure it’s a great choice for general-purpose web design, I think there’s an aesthetic to it that actually matches the site’s reason for existing, which shouldn’t be easily discounted.

Jay–feel free to use the fonts from my project if you want to embrace that aesthetic even more, but with the warning that there’s such thing as going too far.

I have a very worse news, FatherSkywalker got
banned from originaltrilogy.com, why, because
he has sexy thoughts about Hayden Christensen

later,
catbus

Pfft. You can’t outmaneuver me on technicalities, Frink. Read between the lines. The flowers are already in the mail, and we’ll be related by next week. Nice try.

EDIT: Damn, was that the Internet’s first mid-air marriage proposal collision?!? You saw it here first, folks.

Tyrphanax said:

CatBus said:

Tyrphanax said:

Swazzy said:

Tyrphanax said:

I think I’ve fallen asleep during every one of the acclaimed Studio Ghibli films. So boring.

Tell that to Kanjiklub CatBus

PM sent.

I know this is a response to an old post, but this is exactly why I should browse all the topics more often. Should I just assume that this entire forum is brimming with brilliant jokes at my expense, or is this an exception? Either way, well played.

I’m mostly hilarious.

And the remainder is awesomeness.

Tyrphanax said:

Swazzy said:

Tyrphanax said:

I think I’ve fallen asleep during every one of the acclaimed Studio Ghibli films. So boring.

Tell that to Kanjiklub CatBus

PM sent.

I know this is a response to an old post, but this is exactly why I should browse all the topics more often. Should I just assume that this entire forum is brimming with brilliant jokes at my expense, or is this an exception? Either way, well played.

Thank you, that’s great news and I will.

Lord Haseo said:

The Prequels are more “offensive” than the Holiday Special but at least they’re somewhat watchable.

The Holiday Special improves with moderate drinking, which is a significant point in its favor. I don’t think anyone has yet been able to determine a suitable amount of alcohol required to watch a prequel, but it’s possible you’d need to jump straight to heroin. Or arsenic.

Trooperman37 said:

I would think:
-Star Wars (original cut)
-Empire Strikes Back (original cut)
-Return of the Jedi (original cut)
-Caravan of Courage
-Battle for Endor
-The Force Awakens

If you wanted to do an alternate-quality marathon, you could try:
-The Phantom Menace
-Attack of the Clones
-Revenge of the Sith
-The Holiday Special

Each set you’ll notice has its own flavor. Namely, one set is good and another is not so good, or rather, bad.

Your first set puts the best movies first, while your second set puts the best movie last. While I can appreciate the concept of a “worst of the worst” Star Wars marathon, you’ve got to put that sort of marathon in order of quality so that you can bail out at any point, knowing it would have only gotten worse if you’d kept watching.

So I’d recommend going straight chronological on that one too, so that you have the chance to hear Leia sing, but have the option to quit before the marathon hits rock bottom with ROTS.

PM sent.

If you want the best results, you’ll want to do a black drop shadow on almost-white text, and then blur the results a very tiny amount, and it’ll look just like the real thing. Good luck!

If you have Project Threepio, you’ve already got the fonts. In version 10, there’s a file in the resources folder called fonts.zip, and inside that there’s a file called P3POSWMatching.ttf and another called P3POROTJMatching.ttf. Some earlier versions of Project Threepio had these files too, maybe not in inside the zip file.

It’s not any existing digital font, although it’s certainly in the News Gothic/Franklin Gothic/Trade Gothic family, demibold or thereabouts. My own re-creation of the fonts is included with the project files, although it’s a reconstruction and not a perfect match.

Lots of HD broadcasts still have noise around the edges (it’s not noise, actually, it’s an alternate data channel stupidly embedded in the image), but it’s a tiny fraction of the screen. Broadcasts have certain defined values for title-safe and action-safe areas (how close you can put stuff to the edges of the screen). For HD it’s SMPTE ST 2046-1, and for SD it’s SMPTE RP 8. It’s not a matter of some crazy content creator deciding to put in unnecessary space around the edges, it’s a defined industry standard that some people simply follow more religiously than others. Not only that, but some broadcasters require that their HD content have extra-large SD-sized space on the edges. Heck, most content creation tools still use the SD-sized values. Why? Because some viewers are watching HD content on a 30-year-old CRT SDTV, and they get calls at the station when critical text is cut off. Add extra space and the phones stop ringing. There are still tons of old SD CRT’s actively in use in the world, and they are built to outlast us all. Skew the demographics to the 75+ crowd and you’ll see where there’s a perfect storm of old CRT’s, cable TV, low tech literacy, and irate phone calls.

Not all content follows these rules. Games for example like to make use of every available pixel. And that’s why most TV’s allow you to change overscan on a per-input basis. Turn it off for Blu-rays, games, and PC inputs, leave it on for the cable box. I hate that it’s on by default too, but I see why they do it. I’m just glad it’s so easy to turn off.

dahmage said:

So what new things are you going to tackle with all this new free time 😉

A serious answer is that most of my work requires some work from others before I can start. For Project Threepio, that means native speakers correcting translations or creating entirely new ones (there’s a few of these supposedly in the works, but I don’t have a timeframe).

However, I do have a few projects unrelated to Project Threepio, also waiting for victimsvolunteers. Are you fluent in Japanese? Does translating a couple hours of strange Japanese audio dialogue into English text sound like a fun time? Contact me. Or maybe you have an awesome radio voice, experience in radio or audio recording, and have an ability to talk for several hours without getting crazy dry mouth, or making any mistakes? (i.e. are you Sarah Vowell?) Ditto.

yhwx said:

What are all those scripts for?

Well, some are mostly internal use unless you want to edit or add subtitle files yourself. The most commonly-used ones would be to resync the subtitles against a non-GOUT-synced source (i.e. Puggo or Negative1), or to alter the existing subtitles to go with a preservation without burnt-in alien subs, resize them if you have a big projector screen and the default size is too big, etc. It’s all in the README.

EDIT: Although it’s not frequently used as such, this is designed as a “supply-side” project–the idea being that the people who make preservations use this project to ensure their preservations have global reach–and for everyone else, the “consumer-side”, it just works out of the box. So it tends to have lots of fiddly technical options, for the preservation-makers. I don’t really expect your average person to make much use of them.

Project files have been updated to version 10.0 (codename: “Pango’s not a man, it’s a system”), first post has been updated, please PM me for temporary download links until the files are available at some more permanent locations.

Rough summary of changes from 9.2 to 10.0:

• Created a new subtitle rendering script, using ImageMagick+Pango, which fixes a lot of the shortcomings and kludges inherent in the previous process. Also removed a load of scripts and utilities (the aforementioned kludges) that are no longer necessary. The results are designed to closely resemble subtitles created with the old process, so the end result is not much different.
• Fixed Hungarian typos and character-substitution issues (thanks to B2D2)
• Improved French translation for Star Wars (thanks to MalàStrana)
• On Windows, the subtitle rendering script requires ImageMagick 7, so I ported over all scripts to ImageMagick 7 and made that a requirement.
• The remaining Perl utility scripts have been migrated to Python, fixing some minor bugs in the process. Python scripts have been pre-compiled into Windows executables, to remove the Python runtime requirement on Windows. This change was not intended as an editorial comment on the relative merits of Perl vs Python – I’ve simply never really been that good with Perl, that’s all. Also, I found out Python was named after Monty Python, so that pretty much settled it as far as I was concerned.
• Native subtitles are now provided for German, French, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish, to accompany preservations of the international theatrical versions with translated title/crawl/alien subtitles, although some of these preservations may not yet exist.
• Reconstructed 35mm alien subtitles are now provided in French, for both Star Wars and Jedi (thanks to marvins and Yotsuba)
• I am no longer attempting to create a single unified “international” matching font, even though all of the fonts for Jedi seem to be derived from the same Lucasfilm-provided font. There are just too many minor differences. Star Wars appears to have used a subtitle font chosen at the whim of the international distributor, so the differences from country to country are obvious.
• BiDi subtitles (e.g. Arabic) used to exist in a dual environment, where subtitles were edited in one SRT format, but then those subtitles were converted to another “compat” SRT format using a somewhat dubious conversion script, and those converted SRT subtitles were the ones actually used for rendering and playback. This dual environment still exists, but graphical subtitles are now generated directly from the edited subtitles (hooray for Pango!), so they are free of potential conversion-related errors. The conversion utility has also been rewritten to be a bit more coherent, so that the “compat” SRT files are also less likely to have conversion-related errors than before, although that’s still a risk.
• Added a few more troubleshooting-type entries in the README file. For example, “What to do if the SRT files aren’t working properly” offers more advice than just “use the SUP files instead”, although that advice is still offered 😉

The new rendering script is a very big deal, albeit pretty much entirely behind the scenes. The old system was based on a utility called easySUP and a customized version of DirectVobSub/VSFilter, both of which are discontinued and had lots of problems, including really bad BiDi support, reported bugs with Indic scripts, limited formatting options, no OpenType font support, and no cross-platform support. Some of these things I was able to work around using scripts and hacks (I was quite proud of my customized VSFilter DLL, but I’m happy to see it go), some I couldn’t, and for some I didn’t know enough about Arabic or Indic scripts to even be sure how I could know if it was working correctly. On top of this, I’d never scripted this part at all before, so it was a manual process–I had to babysit every single subtitle file I rendered.

Now we’re using Pango, a modern text renderer without any known limitations that would hamper Project Threepio’s further language expansion – and it’s scripted, so I can render subtitles while I sleep (and wake, and sleep again… it’s a very slow process). That’s not to say there might not still be bugs, but it should now be much more possible to fix them properly, and to have a bit more confidence in the results.

Someone threw a Hentai party and I missed the whole thing? Typical.

towne32 said:

Needing to wait a week before being allowed to post. (not friendly to new users, but I would argue that they and we would be better off if they lurked and read other posts for a week anyway)

Of the suggestions, this is the only one that seems off to me. No images, sure, no links, great, but no posts? Not sure about this one.

Keep in mind that many of the people in my thread are the “good” sort of hit-and-run account. Someone who is totally down with our preservations, community goals, etc, but sees no need to join the forum per se, except that they need to ask one question about Project Threepio, so they make an account, post, get their answer, and we never hear from them again. Add to this the fact that many of the posters do not communicate in English very well (which may be the number one reason they weren’t already on the forum), and it wouldn’t take many roadblocks to make this process too hard for them. Heck, I even had to save one of my Russian counterparts from a temp-ban here once because his command of English just makes him sound like a bot hijacked his account.

Most of the suggestions here are pretty neutral in this scenario, though, so I’d say go for them. Waiting a week for any posting at all might really be too much if you really have no intent to join the forum long-term, and you’re pasting all of the forum messages into Google Translate and trying to make sense of the results.

Just download the project, they’re in the SUP format only. I’ll PM a link.

VLC may add this ability, I’m hoping. They have other issues I’m hoping they also address in 3.0, to have feature parity with MPC.

Yup, to clarify, only the SUP files included with Project Threepio support positioning, and they are the recommended format for that and other reasons. If you just got the SRT files, such as are included with some preservations, I’d recommend downloading the whole project. The SRT’s will do in a pinch, but it’s really not the best way to go.

I’ll PM a link if you haven’t found it yet.

EDIT: SUP files are supported by all software players I’ve tried, if you mux them into the video (instructions for this are included in the README). Without muxing–i.e. just specifying an external subtitle file, like you do with an SRT–I’d recommend MPC-HC.