Watermarks You Hate

[ding73ding]

EDRG-014, starring Aika!
...
The rip quality is horrendous unfortunatly, the audio is completly out of sync and the video is skipping parts constantly. Whoever is responsible for this rip should die, and not in the sexy way.

Ohh! Here is finally a concrete example of a specific vid getting a complaint and I have personal experience.

AFAIK, there's only one rip for this vid so Hans and I are watching the same rip. And his experience and mine are completely different. For me it plays back flawlessly, except (as usual) I like to splice up the rip into parts: first minute (or so) was the "casino" ad, to be discarded; then the movie proper, finally the trailers (in this case it's only 6+ minutes of trailers so it's not exactly so worthwhile to trim off the trailers). In quite a few cases, splicing off the trailers will shave more than 0.5 GB off a file.

The point is, on my gear this vid plays beautifully, fast start, perfect sound, no skip, random access, end-to-end. Resolution is good for an SD (480p), and a compact file (just over 1.1 MB/minute) with no detectable compression artifacts.

Really except for the (reasonably tolerable) watermark, it's a perfect rip! So... hope you can find a way to fix your playback (PC, graphics card? Or codec issue?) @Hans Kowalski

 

[chosun]

Another one: PGD-881 (2.57GB) with watermarks moving more centrally and audio out-of-sync by 500ms.

Nothing particular about my setup. Just running vanilla VLC and MPC-HC. They both play anything out of the box. I've been collecting JAV since JAVTalk days and I rarely, if ever, experienced any video/audio sync issues. With this casino group, I've experience more out-of-sync video/audio streams than the past 8-10 years combined.

EDIT: I would also like to add that these casino rips generally display awful picture quality. I don't care how efficient it is with respect to its size, which it really isn't different from SD rips in the past, when it doesn't pass the eyeball test. Either the rippers use crappy settings with their version of Handbrake or they are simply re-encoding on top of another ripper's encode, meaning they are adding their watermark over another's (it isn't uncommon to see two different watermarks these days). Two encodes -> decline in video quality; increase in compression artifacts.

 

[needs more loli]

Reviving this thread because I'm not really sure where to put this, but did anyone else notice this in MIAD-982?:
The first scene starts out with Rena Aoi accidentally walking in on her brother while he is jacking it to an AV.

It's an irrumatio video with Mikako Abe, MIAD-908. Great choice, can't blame the guy. After apologizing for interrupting onii-chan's fap sesh she gets her face plowed instead.

But wait a sec...


is that a watermark?... on the video he's watching??? Watermark-ception *bwong*

Pretty hilarious that even the studios pirate their own stuff.

 

[Hans Kowalski]

lmao that's just gold.

 

[Casshern2]

Great find!! That's insane! LOL

 

[Inertia]

YOU GOTTA BE SHITTING ME.

 

[Inertia]

AV experts: what is the movie he is watching on his laptop? What studio made it? If it wasn't a DMM-owned studio, this could be extra deep serious (and even if it was, it's still pretty bad!).

 

[Hans Kowalski]

It's in loli-dude's post. It's from the same series. It's basically from the direct prequel.

Maybe the pirated movie is supposed to show the immoral ways of the mouth-r**ist.

 

[princeali692]

Oh my god, lol thats pretty funny. But why?

 

[Casshern2]

AV experts: what is the movie he is watching on his laptop? What studio made it? If it wasn't a DMM-owned studio, this could be extra deep serious (and even if it was, it's still pretty bad!).

Why extra deep?

 

[Inertia]

Extra deep: b/c if it wasn't a movie produced by a DMM-owned studio, it would be pretty solid evidence that someone on the DMM payroll committed copyright infringement (though according to Hans, it seems like the movie on the laptop's from the same series).

 

[Casshern2]

Extra deep: b/c if it wasn't a movie produced by a DMM-owned studio, it would be pretty solid evidence that someone on the DMM payroll committed copyright infringement (though according to Hans, it seems like the movie on the laptop's from the same series).

Copyright infringement for showing the pirated movie of a studio DMM is not a part of. Okay got it. Have to say, though...that does add a pretty interesting level of realism. Kudos to the director for suggesting or allowing it...or maybe even being oblivious to what the prop people did.

 

[ding73ding]

Quick, what’s one plus one? Zero! (Almost) Try again? What’s yellow mix with white? Nothing! (Almost)

+ =

I was doing "research" at work, and try my itchy hand at image processing. I got two different rips of the same vid (Rion ) and finding the two rips are highly compatible (res, frame rate). A few hours of programming and testing later, produce the above demo. So far I've processed the first 3 minutes of the vid and encountered some hicupps in the later part of the vid:


Of course... the "white" group changes the watermark text several times in each vid, so the mask cannot be static. Means more work needed.

But before you get too excited, there are a number of gotchas, first you have to have two different rips with non-overlapping watermarks which both took from the same raw. What's the chance of that happening (and also that vid isn't available in watermark-free version)? Two it's 80% automated only, means quite a bit of human involvement (mostly for timing/synching) still needed. Three, it's pretty slow, mostly because I am not a pro at writing these kind of program. On my i7, I'm guessing it will take 17 hours to process the 2hr45m vid, (or it could even be much much longer, won't know until someone tries)

The biggest gotcha is that my program isn't completed yet, auto detection of changing watermark text isn't done yet. I'm posting this now partly because I want to put this "research" down and get on with real work for at least rest of the day (and then a few more days). And maybe by that time a watermark-free FHD version would appear an I can happy abandon this work.

What I'm saying it, don't count on me to finish it. But it sure is teasing isn't it?

 

[pikuseru]

The biggest gotcha is that my program isn't completed yet, auto detection of changing watermark text isn't done yet. I'm posting this now partly because I want to put this "research" down and get on with real work for at least rest of the day (and then a few more days). And maybe by that time a watermark-free FHD version would appear an I can happy abandon this work.

Perhaps the watermark-free SD version can tide you over until then:
http://btdb.in/torrent/2GDo1YNg65UA3QXxGgn3fdJ525g8p3i19QO.html

 

[ding73ding]

Perhaps the watermark-free SD version can tide you over until then:

Yeah... that will surely kill the project

I kinda suspected both the "yellow" and "white" group applied their watermarks on the same raw, otherwise my simplistic cancelation program wouldn't work so well.

 

[Casshern2]

Is it possible to use avisynth to use the two sources and crop where cropping is needed and combine into one image?

 

[SamKook]

Is it possible to use avisynth to use the two sources and crop where cropping is needed and combine into one image?

Yes it is, you can crop a section of one of the video and overlay it onto the other. The cropping border will likely be noticeable though since the encoding compression very likely won't look the same on both video.

 

[ding73ding]

Is it possible to use avisynth to use the two sources and crop where cropping is needed and combine into one image?

If you are asking if avisynth provides that functionality, then the answer should be yes. May take some tech skills to do it, but I'm pretty sure it's doable in avisynth.

But as SamKook said, the crop border (being one or more long straight lines) would be very noticeable. By making the mask from the watermark itself, being irregular shape, is slightly less distracting. Basically it's the same operation, just different degrees of care or effort to reduce the distraction. How much imperfection is tolerable and how much effort is justifiable is highly subjective.

I'm glad that I did waste that morning to try it out and prove that it's doable at least on those set of rips. I'm even happier I stopped it, take a look and check out the torrent posted by @pikuseru I end up not getting it because I'm starting to dislike ISO a little... and then bingo, I found the [thz.la] FHD on Sukebei. The torrent's a bit slow now... expect to finish today.

 

[nmercer]

Always waiting for thz.la releases, they seem to come out 3-4 days after the crappy yellow / poor quality releases. Can't bare to dl ABP-567 with those stupid yellow watermarks.

 

[Cepheiden]

But wait a sec...


is that a watermark?... on the video he's watching??? Watermark-ception *bwong*

Pretty hilarious that even the studios pirate their own stuff.

It's highly likely the studios themselves release those annoyingly watermarked versions.
First of all releasing the thing for free but pretending it's just some chinese will make it unlikely anybody else is going to buy the video just to put it online again without a watermark.
Second, the watermark is made to be that annoying on purpose, to make those that really want it more likely to actually pay.
Third, the watermark isn't completely ruining it but also the video is not HD quality either, so they get people to slowly get used to and enjoy their JAVs until they eventually consider buying those they want in better quality without watermark.

When you think about the production cost of a Video... just making 1 video takes time and you have to buy the equipment. But they make thousands of videos and they have experience and reuse the equipment, so the cost for a single video will be reduced dramatically to the point where they already make a profit if the average consumer watches 99 of them for free and just buy 1. Thanks to digital releases they don't even have any distribution cost.

So ultimately it makes perfect sense for them to follow a strategy that literally throws out 99% of their content for free while also giving the potential customers an incentive to actually buy something.