Free (unlicensed) anime downloads
This is the quick way of getting at the unlicensed anime we viewed over the summer, as well as a few other random shows. It’s all good, grab it!
A note on watching fansubs: despite our Vice-President’s blindly fanatical VLC fundamentalism, expending around two and a half minutes of effort now will allow you to watch any fansub, at the best possible quality, with the cleanest possible interface, without the slightest hassle, at any point in the immediate future. It’s just two steps:
First download and install the CCCP. (Combined Community Codec Pack, not USSR, you Communist!) Just download whichever version’s appropriate for your OS; the installation should be entirely self-explanatory. You don’t have to change any options; the only thing you need to remember is to uncheck the “players” box at the beginning of the install if you don’t want the unecessary clutter.
Next download and install The Core Media Player. This is the best player around, period. Again the installation should be a snap. (Don’t worry about registration; it’ll never bug you about it again, and it’ll do everything you need it to do anyway.)
That’s it. Now open up The Core Media Player, open your video file, double-click on the video to fullscreen it, watch anime (particularly newfangled great-looking H.264-encoded mp4 files like Tide-Line Blue Episode 1), and be very, very happy.
Downloads can be found HERE
(Thank Scaleddesign.net for hosting our anime)
June 2nd, 2006 at 10:50 am
if you want to view these with only downloading one file, and going through only one setup, check out VLC.
June 2nd, 2006 at 11:38 am
VLC is broken. The video quality is washed-out artifact-filled crap (because it uses the shoddy built-in decoders, not REAL ones), the interface is a nightmare–just try to use the time slider!–the program’s general stability is highly suspect, and it can’t even play Tide-Line Blue! It’s OK in emergency situtations on other people’s computers, when you don’t want anything going through the registry, but for your personal computer, when you care about quality and usability, it’s the Kiss of Death.
I am begging everyone in the Anime Club not to listen to this maniac…
August 3rd, 2006 at 4:33 pm
Surprise!
As everyone knows we are an anime club, and have a tendency to do little more than chat idly about manga. I’ll admit that that’s the way I like it, but every once in a blue moon there is a manga so wonderous, so absolutely beautiful that I can’t help but recommend it to everyone I know. There has been exactly one blue moon in my life, and its name is “Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.”
Some of you will remember that our first Anime Club X-tra show was the OVA series based on this manga, and that it was received with much pleasure and many sighs of contentment. Well, the manga is even better—naturally, as the OVA’s only covered a tiny chunk of it—and it’s completely unlicensed. Since it was just “completed” (of course YKK could never be “concluded,” only “ended”) in June, it seemed to me that if any manga deserved to be uploaded to our server, that was the one. So follow the downloads link, open up the YKK folder, and do try to restrain yourself from devouring the whole thing as quickly as I did (2.3 days)—it’s better if you take your time.
Usage note: although it seems like common sense that reading manga on a computer screen would result in headaches, delays, and frustrations, I have included a program called “CDisplay” in the YKK folder that makes the process faster and easier than flipping through a book. Just install it and use it open up the zip and rar files directly—no need to extract them! (Yes, CDisplay is meant to turn the whole screen grey when it first opens. Right-click anywhere to get to the menu. There’s some nifty customization options you should check out, too.) Remember to read right to left!
In the unlikely event that anyone wants to find out more about YKK before downloading it, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokohama_Kaidashi_Kikou, which does a far better job introducing the manga than I ever could. (Beware, when it says “spoilers” later on in the page it MEANS it.)
Now grab a cup of coffee, sit back, relax, and enjoy the calm twilight of the world…
September 5th, 2006 at 9:27 am
Okay, someone busted a link.
Also, it appears that CCCP is not Mac friendly. As it in, I could not find an OS X version. So VLC works for me.
But someone seriously needs to fix that link…
September 5th, 2006 at 11:14 am
Funny how using th latest version of VLC I get almost NO ARTIFACTING whatsoever. And, also, system-based directshow decoders are seldom as good as their application based counterparts.
September 5th, 2006 at 12:22 pm
Aaah, it’s a conspiracy and even the new people are in on it!
Welcome to our friendly yet impassioned debate, Thaddeus…
OK, I admit that newer versions of VLC may be getting better on the video quality issues. However, it’s still got plain old clarity problems, and when VLC is playing certain kinds of video files–particularly, for some reason, files in OGM containers–it’ll not only artifacts in nasty ways, it’ll fill any black or close-to-black area of the screen with junk. (I have several files with unreadable credits in VLC.) And when playing slightly damaged files, the Core Media Player blows through with maybe a skip or two; VLC, on the other hand, will go completely ballistic for about 20 seconds, producing various kalaidoscopic colors and patterns, before either conking out altogether or coming back without audio. Furthermore, no matter what you may say about anything else, VLC has a nigh-unusable time slider and the pause function can take up to half a second to react. It’s simultaneously brilliant and badly programmed.
I also have to point out that the CCCP is the best decoders. Period.
I WILL admit that there’s nothing like VLC for playing partially-downloaded bittorrent files, however. And when you’re on someone else’s computer and you don’t want to make a mess, it can be very handy (as well as being easy to set up). And babada, you’re probably right that it’s the best option for OSX (actually, I think that it works better on that system). But do what I did and run the two next to each other for a while–I guarantee that (possibly after a bit of fiddling with the options) you’ll be won over to the CCCP-Core Media Player combo.
—
The downloads should be working again, by the way, and a be a little bit better-arranged. Enjoy (no matter what your player is)!
September 5th, 2006 at 9:25 pm
Woot for VLC!! Anyways like Matt said the downloads should be working now so download to your hears content.