A bundle of anime

You don't realize how hard it is to come up with titles until you can't. This is a lame titled post, but nobody reads this anyway so what does it matter. This week, along with the freakishly warm weather for 1 day here (it got my hopes up with its near 60 degree high, then dropped my hopes down with the temperature to below freezing), I got not 1, not 2, but 3 animes I've been anticipating!

First arrival was RahXephon, which was on backorder from RightStuf. This was followed by Noein, which I picked up from Best Buy, and today, the critically acclaimed 5cm per second, also previously on backorder from RightStuf.

All these DVDs have made me realize one thing -- either I'm more discriminating than most people, my computer isn't configured properly, computers suck for watching DVDs, or no anime company encodes their DVDs correctly. What the hell am I talking about? Interlacing. Mplayer, the app with the most debug information, continually detects a switch from progressive to interlaced content, with the result that the pullup filter doesn't work that well. DVD players that use my supposedly awesome video card's deinterlacing hardware, also fail for the same reason (ATI cards, and I expect nVidia as well, have something called vector adaptive deinterlacing). I can get bearable results using bob or blend-type filters, but those just blur the interlacing lines and are generally lame. So at this point, I have to settle for crappy DVD playback from my computer :(.

This week I also finished True Tears, Shigofumi, Dragonaut, and Banner of the Stars. True Tears was epic and surprisingly realistic until the end, but you can read some other blog entries from other people with more interesting writing styles than you'll find here. People just seem to love it. I'd say it's a buy for me if it ever comes out as a DVD boxset or at least cheaper than Bandai Visual's supposed pricing. As for Shigofumi, well, the very end was kind of eh, but I enjoyed it, as did this person and this other person. I'd only get this in a cheap boxset though. Dragonaut was pretty bad, I don't want to waste my time on talking about it. Banner of the Stars is a few years old, but it's an amazing sci-fi story, but works best if you can watch it in one sitting. You can read another opinion.