Yoku Wakaru Gendai Mahou Web Special

Long story short, a LOT of effort and voodoo magic was put in to make this work, so you’d better appreciate it or else!

(Ads at the start were left in so that you can get the authentic web streaming experience. If you don’t wait it, wait for the Blu-Rays/DVDs)

Big thanks to waffo and his team for the translation, no thanks to them for the dodgy timing. I editted the script to fit the terminology that we used for the rest of the series.

Encoding technobabble:

Basically, since the source (150MB .wmv) was so shit anyway, I decided to not encode it, but to mux it straight into .mkv. However, mkvmerge doesn’t support the container, so I had to use GDSMux to mux it to .avi, then use mkvmerge to put that into mkv, but then the mkv didn’t load into Aegisub properly, so I had to use mkv2vfr to mux it into avi (yet again) and then load it in Aegisub with the timecodes file. At the end I muxed the 2nd avi along with the timecodes file and the .ass into the final .mkv.

What a mess, but in the end, well worth it to be able to keep the source video and audio without re-encoding.

.ass technobabble:

The video had black bars with some informational (read advertising) text at the top and bottom of the screen. If you demux the script, you will see that I used AssDraw to cover up that shit then display the subs on the bars. Additionally, for the standard bottom of the screen text, I use “8” alignment with a massive vertical margin, so that the text would “hug” the edge of the actual video and extend downwards when there were two lines.

Also, if you decide to seek, the black AssDraw covering would disappear, so I wrote a Python script that does a loop and the black covering is refreshed every second. (Once again, demux the script and look at it).