How to watch fansubs

If like me your an avid anime fan downloading tonnes of anime (and lets face it you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t), the hardest tasks we face are playing the latest encodes, and finally archiving them.

Here I’ll go into just what i use for playing the releases.

Playing them is these days relatively easy and painless. Firstly a warning, do not use the K-Lite codec pack, it’s evil and harms your computer in the long run. Here’s an explanation of this:

Why K-Lite is a bad idea

The following rant was taken from a post by TheFluff on the Anime-Planet forums.

K-Lite? nothx.

Even the STANDARD pack is bloated. It installs two MP4 splitters (as if more than one would ever get used), and the alpha version of CoreAVC. God alone knows if they turn off h.264 decoding in ffdshow by default – if they don’t, having it is almost completely pointless.

What the pack actually installs

The full pack… we shouldn’t even talk about it. The developers seem to subscribe to the policy “redundancy is awesome”. It’s just the fact that in DirectShow, it’s NOT. K-Lite Full installs (and I’m just looking at the feature page here):

  • three separate (and by default conflicting) MPEG4 ASP decoders
  • two different and incompatible VP* decoders
  • no less than FIVE different (and conflicting) MPEG1/MPEG2 decoders – God alone knows which one will actually get used
  • three MPEG4 ASP encoders, x264 VfW, three mutually incompatible VP* encoders (3, 6, and 7)
  • three or four Intel Indeo encoders (depending on how you count) – versions 2, 3, 4, and 5
  • two MPEG4 SP encoders, namely Divx3 and MSMPEG4
  • three different and incompatible AC3 decoders, two of which are actually the same (AC3filter, but two different versions, one being a leaked beta never intended for public use)
  • various mp3 de- and encoders (the decoders being utterly pointless since Windows comes with one)
  • two different AAC decoders
  • two conflicting Matroska splitters, two conflicting Ogg splitters (one being the ancient evil crashing OggDS) and two likewise conflicting MP4 splitters
  • no less than FOUR different and subtly incompatible MPEG splitters
  • TWO different versions of VSFilter, 2.33 and 2.37, the former known for being extremely buggy – also, since these two are basically the same filter, I’m far from sure that Windows even LETS them both being registered at the same time
  • at least two utterly pointless and in many cases downright HARMFUL directshow filters (Morgan Stream Switcher and Matrix Mixer)
  • … and as icing on the cake, ffdshow. WITH all the plugins AND the VfW interface.

Why installing all the above components is a bad idea

Now… let me try to explain why this is an exercise in futility.

First of all, there are several filters installed by K-Lite that are known to be buggy if not downright harmful (Morgan Stream Switcher being one example – it used to be, and probably still is, one of the buggiest directshow filters ever).

Second, in directshow, redundancy is pointless. If there’s more than one filter that claims to be able do something, the one with the highest directshow filter merit will be chosen. When choosing a decoder, in 95% of all cases, this WILL be ffdshow if it is installed, since it has a ridicoulously high filter merit. This is normally a Good Thing, since many of the separate decoders installed by K-Lite are FAR from capable of doing everything they claim to be able to do. DivX, for example, will happily try to decode almost any MPEG4 ASP, but last time I checked, there was still lots of things it could randomly fail on. In any case, ffdshow makes, in one stroke, about 75% of the filters installed by K-Lite Full COMPLETELY pointless if not downright harmful. Directshow does NOT, contrary to popular belief, have some sort of error recovery. Once a filter accepts input, directshow will NOT try to use some other filter, EVEN IF THE FIRST FILTER CHOSEN CRASHES. This means that only ONE filter, the one with the highest merit, will be used, despite how many others are installed (unless the user does manual tweaking of the merits and/or the player graph building, that is).

Third, some things K-Lite does are VERY questionable. It installs two versions of AC3filter and two versions of VSFilter – and as far as I know, Windows will not allow that, but instead just register the newest one (as in “the latest one installed”) and forget about the older.

Fourth: as mentioned above, most stuff K-Lite installs is completely pointless since it’s never going to get used. There are, however, some filters that WILL get used even though they are completely useless. Morgan Stream Switcher is the prime example of this. It’s designed to make audio stream switching work with splitters that doesn’t have it built-in (i.e. OggDS with “Enable all streams” or Microsoft’s AVI splitter with dual-audio AVI’s) and a player that doesn’t have built-in audio stream switching (i.e. Windows Media Player). Nowadays, this is completely pointless since the scenario is pretty much nonexistent, and people who use WMP should just be told to go use a better player – but the filter is still there, and it will still try to insert itself into every single graph!

If you’re actually going to USE K-Lite for anything, you NEED to know what you actually need to install (hint: five or six things at the most), and if you did that, you could just as well install the few components that you actually want manually instead of letting K-Lite do God-knows-what.

Conclusion

In conclusion: the makers of the K-Lite pack don’t seem to have any clue about what they’re doing. It seems they just slapped together a large collection of random filters, the more versions of them the better. The ironical thing is that this might actually work, since ffdshow pretty much takes over everything with its default settings, and because MPC has built-in filters for a lot of stuff, that takes predecence over the directshow filters. In fact, 90% of K-Lite’s playback functionality and a part of the encoding functionality could be replaced with ffdshow and MPC alone.

Verdict: DO NOT USE K-LITE.

Retrieved from “http://www.cccp-project.net/wiki/index.php?title=K-Lite“

So, what do we use instead? Personally i recommend the Combined Community Codec Pack. It’s the only codec packed aimed at the anime community, their release is predefined to play everything. That said for some people they may find difficulty in playing H.264 releases, especially if they have older computers. In this case its better to use the CoreAVC codec. Sadly this isnt free, its $10, but it’s worth investing in.

A few releases have been encoded into .rmvb format, while you can download the codec from RealMedia, I don’t reccomend it. Your better of getting the RealAlternative Codec.