Revisiting Video Players

So a little over a month ago, I made a wonderful post about video players and the like. Funnily enough, after shuffling around the internet I happened to end up finding a video player that is perfect for windows. By perfect, I mean it's just a build of mpv for windows. From what I can tell, the build works about the same as it does on linux, but of course instead of just direct build of mpv, there is a front-end that you could use instead...

It's called Baka-MPlayer and although the interface is somewhat lacking, it's not like I usually watch my anime without it being in fullscreen anyways. All of the dead basic stuff are included, so sub tracks, chapters, hi10, etc. all supposedly work. Resource-wise, it's less hungry than my installation of MPC-HC (usually 15% of my cpu and ~300MB of memory), though for all I know, it could be due to the filters and stuff I have. The mpv player takes around 130MB of memory and 4~8% of my cpu with the baka mplayer front-end taking another 50MB, adding up to a little over half of the resources used by MPC-HC. It also has some strange other features that I have never seen in a video player before...like having microsoft Sam/Samantha say the ID3 tag title, and voice recognition of all things.

So pretty much, you could say "Baka Pause" while doing other stuff, or any of the other voice commands without actually needing to do anything to the player. It's hilarious for all of a couple minutes that you can further extend for another minute since you can actually customize the call name for the program ("Baka") to anything you want...*cough* "imouto" *cough*. Also, since it's a build of mpv, the idea is that your viewing experience would be just as badass as it would be on linux.

Anyways, it mega-simple to get running and doesn't require any sort of mucking around with filters and codecs, thus instead of MPC-HC, this video player now gets the top position in my book as the go-to video player for my anime needs.
The website and github for the project are below:
http://bakamplayer.u8sand.net/index.php
https://github.com/godly-devotion/Baka-MPlayer

Drawing Tablets are Fun

I have a tablet and it's amazing even if it isn't...but what can you do with a tablet?
Obviously you can draw with it and thus we get to look at applications that our tablet can utilize.
- Paint Tool Sai
- OpenCanvas
- MyPaint
- Gimp
- Krita
- FireAlpaca

So to go down the list, we'll start with GIMP because forget starting with the top of the list, we don't need to follow normal structure of thought. All of the screenshots are taken from windows or linux and most of  the self-drawn images were not exactly the most dedicated of drawings. The colored ones were just images that I happened to have already drawn and used for other things, but seemed to serve the purpose well enough.

GIMP:

 

For a free option, it's not terrible but granted it isn't exactly the cream of the crop in terms of use with a tablet. The interface is pretty standard and you can manipulate the tool windows to your liking (floating or single-window mode). The sensitivity and brushes can be customized and all, but being the lazy guy I am, drawing with gimp out of the box isn't spectacular.

In other words, GIMP should stick to being an image editor rather than a tablet drawing editor, but on the plus side, it is multi-platform.


OpenCanvas:

The not free or multi-platform alternative to the free and/or multi-platform programs which may or may not suit you more. Interface is kind of meh in my opinion. It's not lacking in features, but those window borders do take up space unless you hide the windows.

OC ends up being decent (moreso than GIMP), but those useless window borders are a real annoyance and it isn't free (there is a trial version to play with though). At least, they are still developing the program, so I guess your money could be worth it.

FireAlpaca:

With another free alternative, firealpaca is a relatively newer program available for Windows and Mac (no linux love unfortunately...even though it uses qt :/). Window management is...amazing. Pretty much the coolest I have ever seen with as much customization as GIMP. By default, pressure opacity is off for whatever reason, but it isn't hard to enable.

FA is still being developed and there is a suggestion box on their website (so you could always send in suggestions to the team), best of all it's still free, meaning it's totally worth a try...though that lack of linux love...requires some plugs into that suggestion box of theirs.

Krita:

The next logical choice in my illogical list pickings is Krita, the free, "kind-of multi-platform" program from the Calligra suite. It's window management is decent, though you can't exactly do anything you want like in FireAlpaca. It's a rather mature project though and of course is still being worked on.

In the end, there is nothing really terrible that I have to say about krita. It's well made and for the most part, does what it's supposed to, but if I had to nitpick, that right click circle menu thing makes no sense to me and is kind of an annoyance with my pen...since it has buttons and thus right-clicks. It's probably best used under a KDE/QT environment since it is a QT application after all, but I currently don't use KDE and LXQT isn't exactly out yet...Maybe one day I'll swap to QT stuffs.

Paint Tool SAI:

The tool that many dA members seem to swear by, and not without reason. It's a fairly cheap buy or you could try it out with it's 30-day trial. Tool bar management is about the same as krita and you can set keybindings yourself. Supposedly the brush engine is marvelous, but I'm an amateur in this sort of thing so the best I can say is that I enjoy using SAI.

Paint tool SAI is windows only, which is really depressing, since it is a rather well made program (and then there is the part about it being not free...). It also doesn't seem to be in development anymore, with the latest version being released in...2008.

MyPaint:

Last but not least is the free MyPaint. It's a nifty little program that could be considered a decent replacement to Paint Tool SAI and is my favorite for linux at the moment. It even has a brush pack that mimics the SAI brushes. The windows are all floating, can be toggled with keyboard shortcuts, but there is the window border...though in linux that is more of a convenience (most window managers are fairly flexible).

To be completely honest, I enjoyed drawing with MyPaint more than the other programs available for linux due to simple annoyances with my pen and tablet...which probably could have been fixed if I cared to put the effort to it. The updates are kind of infrequent compared to krita or gimp (though it isn't like MyPaint has a huge team of people behind it...), but is totally useable as it is anyways so having updates at all is a plus.

It doesn't really matter what program you want to use (not like I'm the one who can make artwork anyways, so whatever floats your boat), but at the very least you can take a look at what each of the interfaces look like and some of what you can get from the program.

Music Players

So music players are kind of a thing, unless you use your media player as your music player, which works as well, but doesn't provide the nicer functions of a music player. Of course, we are going to have a separate music player, and it is going to need to have iPod support. This pretty much equates to an iTunes replacement.

The Windows music players that are pretty popular consists of Songbird, iTunes, Spotify, Winamp, Clementine, MediaMonkey, foobar2000, and a ton of other ones that I could really care less about.

Quickly surmising reasons not to use some:
iTunes: A terrible program with bloat and is annoying to use.
Spotify: Completely useless for anime music.
Winamp: It's not bad...and it's been around for ages...but I don't like it.
Songbird: Supposedly not that heavy, but there are lighter and simpler options available
MediaMonkey: Lighter than Songbird, both in size and usage, and kind of annoying to use.
Clementine: A nice multi-platform player, but a bit about equal to Songbird in my opinion (scanning seems faster though).
Foobar2000: One of the lighter players that does what I need, and can be about as full of features or minimalistic as you want.

In other words, foobar2000 is the program of choice, but Clementine actually isn't that bad of an option either. It's pretty feature-full, has some random extras, and best of all, you can search a couple of websites like soundcloud, google drive, etc (grooveshark and some others require a premium account) which sometimes actually have anime music. The only real problem I have with it is that I hate the side panel for being so uncustomizable.
Foobar out of the box doesn't have iPod support, so the plugin as well as some things from the iTunes installer is kind of needed (Apple Mobile Device Support and Apple Application Support). Just grab the iTunes installer and extract using 7-zip or something to grab them.
iPod Manager add-on: http://yuo.be/ipod.php

Moving on to linux players, I mainly look for the lighter applications that are fairly minimalistic, so cli is my preference for playing music, but I haven't actually seen a cli music player that has iPod support. Thus I use Quod Libet which does have iPod support (need libgpod and maybe other stuff...) which is fairly light as well and suits my tastes. Otherwise it's kind of a toss up between cmus or moc in terms of cli music players since I don't really need mpd.

There are a ton of music players out there, and a variety of them are decent. Search for another one if you don't want to follow my suggestions.

Torrent Clients

There are a ton of torrent clients, but we are going to simplify that list here. They may agree with your tastes, or there may be a torrent client that I didn't talk about. This is because I'm not going to go around testing all the torrent clients just to tell you that I like how a certain one looks because that is a waste of time.

So a long time ago, there used to be a torrent client called limewire which was forked to a new client called frostwire...both of them are now held nowhere near their old regard and nobody cares about them, and neither do I. Vuze used to be called Azureus and is terrible. It installs random crap and is annoying with stuff that I really could care less about. Thus we will visit BitTorrent and uTorrent. These two are the same program except for their color and icon (literally) and so there is no point in discerning the two, both suck and now have random bullshit that nobody cares about clogging the interface.

Now for the ones that are nice enough in my opinion that serve well enough and are fairly light (unlike Vuze which is like a fucking brick). Transmission, Deluge, rTorrent, and qBittorrent are all rather decent and light torrent clients that all serve their purpose without any extras attached. As an added plus, only Transmission doesn't have an official Windows client, while the rest are multi-platform. These can also be automated to make your life easier, which leads us to the next topic that will eventually arrive, "Automating your Torrent Client". Due to me being lazy though, that isn't going to happen in this post, and possibly not until maybe even a couple posts from now.

XBMC Served Anime pt.2

With the second half of XBMC short how-to, we get to look at actually scraping websites among other things that are also of some importance. Even though XBMC management is split into these two posts, this post probably isn't going to be quite as large due to XBMC supposedly handling the bulk of the work.

Currently there are three scrapers that can be used for regular anime series: tvdb, anidb, and anime news network. As far as I can tell, nobody really cares to use ANN for scraping and mainly stick with tvdb or anidb. Both have slight differences in their scraping results and how they will end up showing the anime list that you have. For use in a couple examples, we are going to use Bleach and Dog Days.

In the case of tvdb, it follows the western format of a single television show. The format is shown with the season number followed by the episode number within the season, so people who want to keep the seasons of a series together in a single sort of entry like Dog Days and Dog Days' under a parent folder of "Dog Days" should probably be using tvdb. Renaming your anime to follow something like "anime seasonxepisode.mkv" makes scraping actually work (unless you go with tv show matching, which also can work), so our Dog Days episode would be "Dog Days 01x05 [Hiryuu-HiNA].mkv" and you can add some other additional information if you wanted (ie. [Hiryuu-HiNA][Hi10p][720p][BD+Flac]). This causes some issues with anime like Bleach which use absolute order and thus have episode numbers that are continuous until the end of the anime. TVDB separates Bleach into 16 seasons, each with episodes restarting from 1 until the end of the season, and thus isn't optimal since although Bleach can be split into seasons, who actually watches Bleach by season? When you talk about Bleach or Naruto, it's not "oh did you watch season 8 of Bleach?" but rather "did you see the soul society arc?" 

With the tvdb organization of things, it gets hard to find specific arcs of longer anime like Bleach, Naruto, Blood+, but for actual seasonal anime (Oreimo, Dog Days, Angel Beats, etc.) it works fairly well. 

AniDB is slightly different in that each season could be treated as a completely different series depending on if the season actually has a specific name, such as Dog Days and Dog Days' getting two separate entries when shown on your XBMC setup. For some people that is ok, as you would be able to access any episode from Dog Days, Dog Days', and Bleach without having to search through seasons. One thing to keep in mind though is that for the most part, anime series keep the same banner, poster, etc. artwork for each season, so if you use a view where you only see like the banners or posters, you won't be able to quickly tell seasons apart since you can't actually see the name. Another thing to keep in mind with AniDB is that it has listings for not only the anime episodes, but opening and ending credits, and OVAs etc. that aren't present in tvdb since they aren't exactly considered specials or part of the season.

For my own personal setup, I am currently interchanging between tvdb and anidb based on the anime series. So anime that have only a single season are scraped from anidb and anime with multiple seasons (like Oreimo or Dog Days or Haganai) are scraped from tvdb. This also has it's downfalls as any anime with multiple seasons won't have the OP/ED scraped, but for the most part, it is my preferred setup.

An optional idea is to go in after scraping the large majority of your anime and modifying/creating .nfo files for the other videos that require it (so my setup would mean making .nfo files from AniDB for the OP/ED of the series that have them). 

Now on to other things...XBMC may or may not be able to play your anime with the amazing perfection that you could have with all of your filters or mpv or w/e. Luckily enough, the XBMC devs are amazing badasses and have you covered. You can actually have XBMC use external players to play your videos OR in Windows, you can optionally try using XBMC DSPlayer which is just a build which allows the use of direct show filters. The wiki probably can explain better than I can and so to be lazy, I'll just redirect to there instead: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=External_players

As a sidenote, the Aeon Nox skin is pretty nice in terms of customization as well as available views.

XBMC Served Anime pt.1

There are pretty much three ways to get XBMC and anime to work together in a way that actually uses XBMC's ability to scrape websites like TVDB or IMDb to present your anime with beautiful eye candy.

Path of Renaming: Manually go and rename ALL of your anime to comply with the standards used in XBMC.

Path of Convoluted Thought: Utilizing regular expressions to recognize your anime so scraping works and thus, possibly the least amount of thought AFTER figuring out the perfect universal way to recognize any anime from any series by any fansub group despite how they might attempt to name the file.

Path of Hardcore Manual: Possibly the LEAST productive way to go about dealing with your anime by adding a .nfo file for EVERY SINGLE EPISODE of EVERY SINGLE ANIME that you have.

In-depth Renaming:
So renaming isn't quite the most amazing way to do things, but it's currently my chosen method of tackling the problem and of course, I'm not alone in my plight. Thus comes the issue of how exactly are anime lovers supposed to rename their forever expanding archive of anime with the least amount of hassle?
For this problem, batch renaming is obviously the key to solving the issue and so here comes some file renaming programs that may or may not suit your fancy.
- Anime Batch Rename (http://sourceforge.net/projects/animerename/) from jigglyslime
- AnimeBatchRename (https://github.com/Deathspike/AnimeBatchRename) from Deathspike
- FileBot (http://www.filebot.net/)

Now the above list is in no way exhaustive and there are multitudes of other batch renaming programs available, or there is also scripts and such that can be used (though the same issue occurs as the path of convoluted thought). I currently use the renamer from Deathspike (Windows only) because I just happened to like how it looks and there was an optional registry edit to add the program to the right click context menu, but to be honest, FileBot really looks to be the way to go. It's the most feature-full of the three programs and is meant to be used in conjunction with a media center (and of course, there are versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux).
The only real drawback is that the fansub group has to be added to their database before it can be detected by the program (so currently EveSenshi doesn't work). The program from Deathspike is a little more concrete in its formatting so you can't really rearrange anything, but at least you should be able to trust information you add in personally.

In-Depth Convoluted Thought:
So this is kind of the issue with importing anime, there isn't like a set defining way to label anime releases. Some of them have the resolution, others don't, or some are released as joint releases and others not, but still utilizing subs from other groups (like re-encodes). It's almost a mess as it is without counting the retarded titles of some of the sequel anime series like...Dog Days'...K-On!!...or even Oreimo.  (yes, the period designates the second season). And then there is stuff like Black Rock Shooter that actually have a fucking star in their title. All that stuff kind of has to be taken into account and then you supposedly make a batch script or bash script, etc. in order to automate the process for you. In my opinion, if there were an all-encompassing script that could take all of that into account and then you choose to toggle on or off certain bits of information, it would be the superior option...but otherwise, I'd rather like to just go through and make sure things are correct the first time around without having to go back and rename the odd ones. I think XBMC also allows for tv show matching...but that doesn't change the main issue above.

In-Depth Hardcore Manual:
You would have to be either fucking insane or fucking dedicated to want to do something like this. This would literally mean pretty much doing the scraping manually for every episode and every anime which defeats the whole purpose...though if you export your database via XBMC after importing everything, a couple of tweaks to specific .nfo files that strike your fancy is always an option.

Video Player Standoff

So video players are kind of just a trending thing maybe...at least until the next amazing video player gets released into the world. Currently there are an enormous number of video players available for both windows and linux (and I don't care about Mac so w/e), but for the anime lover that we all are, there are a couple requirements that must be satisfied in order to be a decent video player.

The staple of all anime lovers should be either MPC-HC or PotPlayer/DaumPlayer in windows and mpv or mplayer2 for linux. Everything else is stupid. And that includes VLC. Yes VLC can handle pretty much any format, but so do the stuff I just listed. Media centers are also an option, though there are some issues with dealing with anime stuff in particular, but stuff like XBMC or Plex are what I looked at.

KMPlayer used to be one of the "cool" video players, but as of late, it now has random bullshit like ads and bloaty stuff that nobody cares about and thus is now considered shit. On the other hand, PotPlayer is literally like the exact same program with some aesthetic changes of the icon and without the useless bullshit, so if you are going to pick one, pick PotPlayer.
MPC-HC is just kind of the defacto player. I don't really give a shit about it because it is like the one true back up that will forever be awesome and thus, there is nothing wrong with choosing it over other players.

mpv and mplayer2 are kind of up in the air in terms of choice. It's one of those situations where mplayer2 is a fork of mplayer and mpv is a fork of mplayer2 due to views of the developers not aligning. The mpv devs are more willing to add changes and merge stuff, thus there is more active development on mpv than mplayer2. Honestly both are more than usable for anime, though I personally use mpv because who doesn't want to use actively developed projects.

As for XBMC and Plex, adding anime into those libraries for all of the eye candy goodness is a bitch if you have accumulated a decent amount of anime prior. Being the mess that it is, dealing with XBMC is going to be in a completely different different post.