Daiz (u/Daiz) - Readit News

Daiz commented on Show HN: Typed-FFmpeg 3.0–Typed Interface to FFmpeg and Visual Filter Editor github.com/livingbio/type... · Posted by u/lucemia51

Daiz · 3 months ago

If you're going to do script-based video processing in Python, I would highly recommend just going straight for Vapoursynth[1] instead. It's built for the purpose from the ground up, is actively maintained with a decent commmunity and tooling, and isn't tied to ffmpeg's CLI.

[1] https://www.vapoursynth.com/

Daiz commented on Show HN: I Built ImgFiber-Better Image Optimizer. Free No Limits imgfiber.com/... · Posted by u/iambavith

Daiz · 5 months ago

Lossless compression means the pixels of the output image are 100% identical to that of the output image.

This site is clearly not doing that, and should thus not be called "lossless compression". The industry term for lossy compression that appears to be basically the same as the source is "visually transparent" or just "transparent". Though this doesn't seem like that either, especially when you're compressing large PNGs into JPGs while naming the output as PNGs. That's just outright deceitful, and not a good look.

Daiz commented on Creative Fansubbing Techniques: Part 2 md-subs.com/blog/creative... · Posted by u/TheAceOfHearts

Daiz · 6 months ago

As someone who's done made use of most of the techniques listed in these posts, some comments...

First of all, it's nice to see them receive attention outside the fansubbing scene! Anime has long made use of on-screen text in ways that most other mediums don't, and with the limited animation the medium is famous for, it tends to be extremely amenable to localization that aims to replicate that on-screen text presentation as closely as possible. With fansubbing, this is largely due to the power of the ASS (Advanced SubStation Alpha) subtitle format, and the Aegisub editor's capabilities for making use of that power (none of which is a coincidence - ASS was effectively developed for subtitling anime, and the same goes for Aegisub). Of special note is Aegisub's Automation features, which allow users to write Lua scripts to extend its capabilities, even building various extra GUI bits and bobs to make them usable for any non-coders.

To comment on one of the techniques in particular: it's always kind of fun to see people be impressed by masking, because technically speaking it's one of the more simple tricks that people do with ASS. The format includes basic vector drawing capabilities, which can be used to also make clipping masks for subtitles. How masking works is that usually the typesetter will be simply drawing vector clipping masks to clip the subtitles properly, frame-by-frame. Due to the limited animation, this usually doesn't take all that long. If the covering object remains static in shape, you could also just draw the mask once and then use motion tracking and an automation script to move it for the duration of the masked line. So all in all, not very complex, just a bunch of manual effort :)

And speaking of which: one of the biggest innovations of anime fansubbing happened around 2011-2012, when fansub groups started making use of motion tracking en masse. The popular program for doing the actual motion tracking was Mocha[1], and then various tools were used to apply its After Effects -compatible motion tracking data to typesetting lines in Aegisub. This development eventually culminated in Aegisub-Motion[2], which has been the de-facto motion tracking script for Aegisub for quite a while.

Motion tracking is also the main thing still lacking when it comes to typesetting in official anime releases today. This mostly comes down to the fact that while fansubs can have fancy motion tracked typesetting completely softsubbed since they expect their releases to be watched on reasonably powerful PCs, the same doesn't really apply to the much more limited and less powerful subtitle render used by official services. But honestly speaking? That's mostly just an excuse for the official services to not even try. You could have the fanciest on-screen text presentation in the world if you just burned your on-screen text translations into the video (hardsubbing, as opposed to softsubbing). Yes, this approach would work just fine even for multiple languages - modern video streaming is already based on short segmented chunks, so all you'd need to do is develop a system that will make multiple hardsubbed variants of only the segments where on-screen text is actually present. With this, for the vast majority of video, you would only need one variant. I developed the bones of a system like this myself for some official anime streaming I worked on some years back (unfortunately no longer available), and it very much was extremely feasible. This kind of segmented hardsubbing is even possible on Blu-ray, so the technique is disc-feasible too.

In conclusion, I completely, 100%, concur that I'd love to see a lot of these techniques be used with official anime releases. Especially since it would be very much possible to apply just about all of them as long as a publisher was simply motivated enough to make it happen.

[1] https://borisfx.com/products/mocha-pro/

[2] https://github.com/TypesettingTools/Aegisub-Motion

Daiz commented on Show HN: @smoores/epub, a JavaScript library for working with EPUB publications npmjs.com/package/@smoore... · Posted by u/smoores

Daiz · 9 months ago

As someone who has built custom EPUB authoring scripts in Node.js for work and also quite likes the EPUB spec: cool! I expect I'll still keep using said scripts for work, but I have some side project ideas which would involve actually reading EPUB files too - I'll probably give this a spin for those.

Daiz commented on Sony, Ubisoft scandals lead to California ban on deceptive digital goods sales arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/BuildWithMason

Daiz · a year ago

Extremely welcome legislation, especially since it has an exception for "permanent download that can be accessed offline", ie. DRM-free downloads. It's about time someone actually calls out Big Media on their deceptive practices. As I've been saying for years, it's not "buying" with DRM-encumbered media, merely "renting for an undefined time period".

In fact, it'd be even nicer if the legislation explicitly required rental terminology to be used for anything DRM-encumbered, but well, even as-is, this is an extremely welcome development and I hope legislators worldwide are taking note and plan to follow suit as soon as possible. This kind of victory for digital consumer rights has been long overdue!

Daiz commented on New WebKit Features in Safari 15.5 webkit.org/blog/12669/new... · Posted by u/feross

lilyball · 3 years ago

What spec? I just looked up what the issue is with vh on mobile and the very first resource I found talked about how the spec isn't clear on how it's supposed to behave in the presence of movable chrome, like the address bar on mobile browsers.

It also says that Safari's initial implementation updated `vh` when the address bar changed visibility and this caused a bad jump in layout, which is why they changed it to ignore the address bar so it's a fixed value instead. And it says Chrome mobile followed suite as well, which means it's not just Safari that thinks the "fixed value" approach is better on mobile.

Daiz · 3 years ago

I've yet to meet a single developer who likes what Apple did with 100vh. And it's why all my projects to date that want to use viewport height in CSS have ended up adding a JS snippet that sets a --vh CSS variable to window.innerHeight on resize, because I have no interest in dealing with Apple's special boy CSS behavior. And really, even Apple itself admits that their 100vh solution is troublesome - they wouldn't have introduced all these new units otherwise! Even if the saner solution would have been to just change their idiosyncratic 100vh behavior to what developers actually expect from it.

Daiz commented on New WebKit Features in Safari 15.5 webkit.org/blog/12669/new... · Posted by u/feross

Daiz · 3 years ago

Gotta say, really disappointed with the fact that instead of Safari making 100vh actually mean 100% of viewport height like it's supposed to, they instead present us with all these new viewport units, all to fix a problem that was caused by their own deviation from the spec to begin with. And of course they're not going to do anything about 100vh even with all these new units, because how else are we going to force developers to use our special units to cater to our browser's quirks!

Daiz commented on Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription · Posted by u/BasouKazuma

BasouKazuma · 3 years ago

Thanks for the constant feedback, Daiz, brutally honest as it always is ;)

We're tracking all of the reader issues and feature requests like the ones you mentioned, but of course with a small team handling everything from development to licensing (our five founders are the only employees) we have to be really careful about what we prioritize.

As for image quality, we'll look into the specific issues you mentioned to see if they're present in the source files we get from Kodansha or not.

Re: Kaiten exclusivity, what we can say publicly right now is that our partnership goes deeper than just exclusives, and we're working on some projects that we'll hopefully be able to talk about soon. One visible thing it has helped us do is collaborate with Kaiten on cross-promotions for their titles without worrying that our efforts will push people to competitor services.

In terms of the calendar feature, we put out a release calendar a little while ago! https://www.azuki.co/release-calendar If you have more features you'd like to see from it, just let us know.

Azuki was always intended to be cross-platform. We believed really strongly that web had to be there because it's so accessible via links and search engines. But a lot of manga fans also look for places to read in the app stores, and we have competitors in those stores, so it was important to be able to compete there as well. You're right that cross-platform development is a challenge, but we get a significant share of our readership from Android and iOS, so we think it was the right call. We will continue to improve all platforms and everyone is free to decide when is the right time for them to use Azuki based on the features and content we have available.

Daiz · 3 years ago

I did see the beta calendar. It's a start for sure, but most back catalog titles still have zero information in terms of when to expect new chapters for them, so there is definitely still work to be done in that regard. And on the calendar itself: entries should ideally be grouped by day. Multiple entries for the same title on the same day should get grouped to one entry (so eg. "Again!! c74-76" rather than "Again!! c74" "Again!! c75" "Again!! c76"). And this one's especially important: if a user is logged in, the calendar should highlight titles in My List by default, and you should also be able to filter the calendar to only show My List titles. For an external reference, I can recommend taking a look at J-Novel Club's release calendar, as it covers basically all of these points and then some: https://j-novel.club/calendar

On the subject of apps, I'm not saying you shouldn't have apps, I'm just saying that there are certain things you should share across the web and apps, like the reader. Basically, you could have the reader running in a web view inside the mobile apps, and this way you could have just one reader codebase that gets reused across all the platforms. You could take this even further and build your mobile apps with web tech inside web views as well. You probably wouldn't do that at this point, but I would still recommend looking into using the reader in a web view at least, as that's no doubt the most complex frontend component in the entire system.

Daiz commented on Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription · Posted by u/BasouKazuma

Daiz · 3 years ago

I've done a couple impressions threads since your initial launch last year[1][2], and it's nice to see that there's been some improvements in regards to matters brought up in them, though there's definitely still room for more. The reader in particular is still rather janky and lacking in options (I would really like to see more fitting options than just forced fit to height as well as manual control over image quality) and the controls aren't great either - for example, trying to rapidly click forward with mouse works poorly because the click regions are image dependent rather than constant so the animated page transitions makes clicking in the same area unreliable. And speaking of transitions, it would be nice to have control over the speed of them, including making them instant. The current speed is slower than I'd like and it's a constant source of annoyance.

And while you've increased the image resolution since launch, there are still notable problems with the overall image quality. Some series have horrible looking screentones (like Domestic Girlfriend as a random example I just found) while others have incorrect black levels (black isn't RGB 0,0,0 but instead something like ~36,31,33)- The World of Summoning being one recent example. I know that in some cases you might have screentone issues at source level but manga is something where you have to really know what you're doing in terms of image scaling to not mess things up further, as screentones are incredibly fragile and easily turn into an ugly mess when resized.

One thing that I'm decidedly not happy with that you've done after launch is the exclusive streaming deal you made with Kaiten Books a while back. The manga distribution market has generally been one of the few bright spots in the area of Japanese media where things are not exclusive by default and customers can actually have real choice and preference in terms of where they get their manga from. In other words, competition that's actually beneficial for consumers, the same which can't be said for eg. anime streaming services where the only difference is in which service has what shows, which does not benefit the consumer in any way. I would be more understanding of exclusivity if Azuki actually did in-house licensing and translation, but signing exclusive distribution deals with a third-party publisher just comes off as trying to pull up the ladder after yourself to the benefit of no-one but yourself. This is a sincere plea from me: please keep any possible future exclusives to in-house licenses at most, please. The world does not need any more anti-consumer exclusivity than what it already has.

Seriously, it's not a problem especially for manga subscription services to share the same content. If there's multiple places to read the same things, then I can choose the one that offers the best service, and while Azuki has issues, I do think you have potential too. The only real problem with shared content isn't the sharing itself but rather Kodansha, the publisher that shares its content the most, and their goals in sharing, which seems to be to primarily selling ebooks rather than letting consumers actually read their series in full via subscription services. That's really the primary problem for the subscription services to tackle - actually having series to read in full. This is why I also see the calendar features I talk about in the Twitter threads as so important - if a back catalog series isn't fully available, then it's really important to be able to see when I could expect it to be, because I sure don't want to be stuck as a subscriber for months only to see new content for a series I like come out once in a blue moon, if ever.

Going back to more technical matters - I do have to wonder, what made you decide as a small team that you'll build entirely separate versions on three platforms? Having built a web-based manga reader professionally myself, I know that it's not an easy task to develop an actually good one, and you've essentially made that three times harder with separate codebases for every platform. At the very least, I would recommend only focusing on the web tech reader and reusing that across the platforms, as right now the burden of 3x development is really showing with how a web can get a feature and then we'll have to wait months and months for one of the mobile apps to get them and then even longer for the other to get it too.

Anyway, that's all that I can bother to write for now. I do intend to make another Twitter thread on the service at one point - maybe in three months at the one-year mark?

[1] https://twitter.com/Daiz42/status/1409670066925228035

[2] https://twitter.com/Daiz42/status/1428413172516544512

Daiz commented on The global streaming boom is creating a translator shortage (2021) restofworld.org/2021/lost... · Posted by u/donohoe

missedthecue · 3 years ago

I mean at the end of the day there are only so many translators, and streaming did not exist on this level even 5 years ago. That's a lot of new demand while the old demand is all still there.

The idea that there can never be a labor shortage, only a pay shortage seems a bit odd. Would you say that there isn't a housing shortage? Only a shortage of people willing to pay up for it?

Daiz · 3 years ago

There absolutely isn't a labor shortage with translators. There's plenty of talent out there, it's just that many are not willing to work for the peanuts that big companies are offering so they end up doing something else to get by instead. If the companies tripled or quadrupled their current rates, many who have abandoned the field in the past due to poor compensation would jump right back in.

We had a good demonstration of the above here in Finland a while back. There's been a lot of talk here about a "nurse shortage", but the reality is that most places just aren't willing to pay nurses well. When an individual company announced an opening for nurses with way higher pay, they were flooded with qualified applicants - many which came from people who had quit nursing previously due to poor pay.