TV-Nihon

Woot, first time watching this show and it's really good! I like how Kouga has a cold personality. Funniest part was when he said that Kaoru was "surprsingly heavy" lol.

Guys, no offense, but this is still really awful quality. For an older Rider series with a lower budget and simple designs it would be acceptable, but I don't think this is much of an improvement on the original. It's certainly less blurry but at the same time it looks grainier and the artifacts are just as jarring.

I know I have a lower level of tolerance for some, but I find it really difficult to watch this.

I don't understand why the quality is so low. This isn't DVD quality, it's sub-VHS quality. Many 480p vids on youtube are easily clearer than this. I'm guessing the problem is to do with the re-encoding, but if you have the original DVDs you should have a better source image. The file size is also too small, even for 640x480, to be of reasonable quality. Again for anime you can go pretty low, but not for this. Some of the episodes are barely over 200 megs, that might be alright for something simple and clear like anime, but Garo is dark and has a lot of detail, something encoders have a lot of issue with so you need to use the highest quality possible.

The audio encode is also a little on the low side at 128kpbs.

I wish you could just release an .ass as there are better quality raws out there and while I appreciate the work put into this it's frustrating that I have to take a hit in quality that makes it unenjoyable to watch just for some fancy text effects. There really is no reason why the quality couldn't be a little better if you're going to the effort of resubbing it. Also, if they had been .ass to begin with there would have been no effort involved. [snip]

For now I'm going to play with my Gamma settings a bit to make the most of it, but otherwise I'm just going to have to hope you rethink this stuff.

It's a DVD source. If you want something higher quality, feel free to buy the DVDs yourself

Its called distributed bit rate across 4 episodes that come on a DVD
128kbit audio isnt low given its the rate we use for everything, oh and its very prevelent in the source material tv rips that you find out there
as for the softsub side of things, were not a softsub group, we never have been, never will be, we prefer hardsubs to make it easier on playback instead of farting around trying to get the softsubs to play, not all of us sit at their PC 24x7 watching stuff, alot of us prefer to just playback on devices other than PC's, most of which dont support softsubs.

Also for the file size of things, not everybody has unlimited internet so we have to make compromises on size.

Also Original Film to DVD transfers are not always great, so saying its DVD does not always equate to a good transfer, heck even Blu-Rays sometimes have bad transfers, it all depends how much effort the rights holders put into remastering the Original footage.

Areku The O.F. wrote:I also noticed some translation changes (I was always confused as to why Makai was translated as "magic" in the original instead of "hell" or "netherworld" as in this one) but nothing too radical.

Funny you should mention that because I finally found an old thread where I asked about this and:

takenoko wrote:Sorta. I guess I should have double checked the kanji
I thought it was 魔界, which would mean underworld (literally demon/magic world)

Turns out the Makai used is 魔戒. This kai means guard/commandment. So it'd be magic/demon watchout/discipline. It's kind of hard to tell because it's a made up term. I'll have to watch out for that in the future. Good question!

(Link: viewtopic.php?f=216&t=7852&p=129433#p129438)

So what I understood from this is that Makai when referring to a knight is spelled to mean something like one who guards against demons; though I'd assume that the Shin Makai, the home horror dimension and other references of "makai realms" probably would be spelled to mean netherworld.

Well, as I suspected, the remaster isn't true HD, but it is an improvement over the DVDs, so I'll take it.

It's fascinating watching this now, and being reminded of how weird and experimental this show felt at the beginning. The later series lose that as the setting became more fully formed, mysteries would be solved over time, and the show became cemented into a sustainable franchise. Not saying it's bad, just that the show has gained and lost some things as it grew, as most shows inevitably do. (I guess a similar thing happened to Doctor Who. It starts out with you not knowing what the hell is going on, and over the years they do answer most of your questions, but you might look back and think it was a little more fun being in the dark.)

I guess one thing that was interesting here was Kouga saying, "It's been awhile" and that he had to get warmed up for fighting Horrors. Makai Knights don't seem prone to taking breaks, Kouga least of all, so I wonder what he's been doing up to this moment.

I think we see the answer to that in a later series. When Makai Knights aren't on a hunt, they go around destroying objects that could become potential gates to the Makai.

takenoko wrote:I think we see the answer to that in a later series. When Makai Knights aren't on a hunt, they go around destroying objects that could become potential gates to the Makai.

But what happens when they destroy all the objects in their district or is there an unlimited horror supply store? I wish there was a season of Garo where they actually address the actual origin of the horrors and try to stop it for good.

New objects are always created because of evil Ki. As long as evil exists in human hearts, Horrors will always exist.

What happened to the Garo S1E1 "HD Remaster" thread? I answered someone in that thread (Areku) and my reply also quoted something from this thread and somehow my post landed here instead of that new thread which now seems to have vanished....

I don't think we had a HD remaster 01 thread?