Another solid episode, though once again I kinda feel like the manga did it better. All the same I find myself disappointed that we’ll have to wait and then go to movie theaters if we want more. Or read the manga. The manga is really good.

I mean, lots of people were and still are annoyed by frame gen too - especially with the deceptive way nvidia uses it in their marketing (claiming a 5070 will be as fast as a 4090 when it actually just makes more fake frames).

Referring to the slop filter as visual enhancement is being very generous. The AI doesn’t know shit about why things look the way they look. Can’t wait to play Deep Rock Galactic but with the lighting all fucked up, despite that being an extremely important game mechanic that the AI doesn’t know anything about.

Absolutely but it depends on what kind of DLSS we’re talking about, since nvidia uses the term to talk about multiple very different technologies. DLSS framegen can make things look smoother but increases latency and introduces visual artifacts. I would never turn it on for something like a first-person shooter, but I could maybe see myself using it in a game like Civ VII where a few extra milliseconds of latency isn’t a big deal.

The really important one though is DLSS upscaling. Back in the day if you ran a game at lower resolution (usually for performance reasons) and upscaled it it would look like shit. DLSS upscaling lets you do that and have it look almost as good as rendering it natively, as long as you don’t push it too far. It didn’t work super well when it was first released, but these days it looks great and can really improve performance.

The benefits of DLSS yassification are questionable.

I think you’re indeed being a little too cynical here. Enshittification happens because corps are trying to squeeze every cent they can out of everyone they interact with. It’s not like they’re going out of their way to make things worse; that’s just an incidental thing that happens sometimes when a guy with an MBA sees a cost he thinks can be cut. In this case I think the target was a relatively expensive development team; any changes to how much work is put into translation and localization would be a separate matter.

Also keep in mind that they have some terrifying rivals - Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+. Each of these rivals has solid offerings in the anime world, and each of them has a deep warchest they could pull from if they wanted to fight Crunchyroll for exclusives. Up 'til now one of the biggest reasons to have a Crunchyroll account over those others has been (believe it or not) the quality of the subtitles. For all of Crunchyroll’s mistakes, those others do it far worse. If Crunchyroll actually dropped their subtitle quality and got rid of features like typesetting I think they’d lose a lot of customers. Oh, and I guess HiDive also exists. They’ll need to make some serious upgrades such as “a video player that plays videos consistently” or “a next episode button that actually plays the next episode” before they can threaten Crunchyroll though.

My guess is they want to stop maintaining their own custom video player that supports all sorts of features for soft captions.

and allow for more creativity, like strategic placement, multiple colors or fonts, deliberate variation in font size/kerning etc…

Crunchyroll’s subtitle display system was actually really advanced and could do all this stuff anyways, making the move feel even stranger. My guess is they wanted to stop maintaining their own video player without dropping those capabilities.

It’s not ideal, but I’d agree it’s a lot better than nothing.

because I’m currently translating anime

How does this work if you don’t speak Japanese? MTL? How can you be sure you’re doing a remotely decent job of it?

Terrible title but good to know this service exists.