Here, I will show a few example screenshots from the original subtitled MKV file of Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo from roxfan (Played and captured screenshots using Media Player Classic) and the output from our 46" Samsung DLP Widescreen TV using my repositioned version of the roxfan script (Using the highly technical process of playing the movie on the TV and capturing screenshots using a digital camera). The widescreen TV was using an older version of my original adjustments (The "TV" subtitles were actually placed too low; I had fixed that in the attached file, but didn't get pics of it).

Well, I had managed to show off Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo (using roxfan's subs) to a few people using my housemate's 46-inch Samsung DLP widescreen (I forget the exact model at the moment). Now, this wasn't as easily as simply following the directions on my MKV to AVI guide as the Samsung TV has between 5% to 10% overscan, and subtitles and the karaoke would lie halfway off of the screen, making it difficult to read the dialog. In the past, with hard-subs in AVI files and many fansub groups that do not position their subtitles to adjust for this (This is not meant to be a slight against any fansub group, as they doing the much harder job of translating and timing these subtitles in the first place at no cost to us), there would be nothing I could do other than slightly windowboxing the video as to make sure the subtitles appear properly on screen. Now, though, thanks to MKVs with their soft-subs, I can at least do something about it when converting it to an XviD AVI file to play on the big screen.

I would normally put this kind of post in my other blog, but since it does relate to anime, I'd figure it would be of more interest here.

I was recently invited into the Joost beta and am pretty impressed with how it's setup. Created by the people that created Skype, Joost is a very ambitious project to provide paid-by-ads Internet TV. The setup is broken up into different "channels", which include several programs that can be played on demand. For example, there is a Ren and Stimpy channel, which I can pick an available Ren and Stimpy episode to watch (which I was doing yesterday). While the program is playing, at certain points (Usually at the appropriate spot in the program), the client will play a 30 second commercial, then continue on with the program. Some of the channels available are listed here. Click on the "More channels..." link at the bottom to get a larger list of what channels are available and in what region they are available.

Note as of Jan 16, 2010: It's been several years since I've had to convert video using the methods in this article. A couple years ago, I had purchased a Popcorn Hour A-110 set top box which can play MKV files with H.264 video and any of a large number of audio codecs (and with 720p or 1080p resolution, too). Asking for help from me on any aspects of this guide will be pretty fruitless as I haven't had to deal with converting video files in such a long time.

Really, I won't be providing support for this guide, though I'll leave it up as it still seems useful to people. You'll be much better off going to an audio/video codec and conversion tools site.

As I promised earlier, I will post about how to convert an MKV container file with an H.264 encoded video and AC-3 encoded audio to an AVI container file with an XviD encoded video and, optionally, 2-channel MP3 encoded audio.

The MKV format makes a very good distibuting format, with the ability to have multiple audio streams and multiple subtitling streams, combined with the H.264 codec for high quality video. Unfortuntely, if you're like me, you have a DVD player that isn't able to play such files but can play XviD or DivX encoded video in AVI files (like my OPPO OPDV971H Player ) hooked up to a big-screen and an home theater audio system, but would wish to watch (or invite others to watch) that greatest and latest video that you've found on the internet, that's only available as an MKV file!

(I may have some errors in here. Feel free to comment to help with details or ask questions)

In the last few days, I had found that my favorite animation studio, Studio 4