Anime4K VS mpv_sponsorblock

I watch AI enhanced movies and/or shows every day when I use Anime4K, a real-time ML upscaler for anime https://github.com/bloc97/Anime4K

If you give shit-tier blurry DVD messes, it turns them into nicer blurry messes.

If you give it the usual bitrate starved streaming quality show, it looks almost as nice as a blueray.

If you give it a blueray... It basically comes out looking exactly the same. I'll usually still add its "darken lines" filter since I'm a fan of strong linework.

> Can you explain what mpv offers over vlc ?

People have complained about VLC's decoding quality in the past (no specific source but lots of google results). I'm sure there's valid bugs that have been patched over and some still there, but I'd take it with a grain of salt since VLC is super popular and therefore more noise when it drops the ball.

That said, there's a few MPV-only features I absolutely love. One is that you can display multiple subtitles at once (for learning foreign languages) and another is that you can drop in upscaling / sharpening filters like [1].

[1] https://github.com/bloc97/Anime4K

If you want to avoid manual processing, Anime4K runs in real time as a GLSL shader you can load into MPV (or Plex or something called IINA according to the readme) and still gives great results.

https://github.com/bloc97/Anime4K

I came up with some shaders (here) that I want to load on the Android MPV. I copied the shaders in my Android phone. According to what I found, I edited the mpv.conf with the locations of the shaders as below:

Players like VLC do much better and let you make your own arbitrary adjustments via GLSL :)

In particular, I like the anime4k shader pack, which is ML-based but runs in real time in mpv (and I think VLC as well). While it is tuned for anime (as is obvious from the name), it has decent denoise and deblur which often make YT content more watchable and a restore step that does a really good job with compression artifacts but is a bit too tuned for anime so may not always work, or even make things worse. See https://github.com/bloc97/Anime4K/releases

I know of https://github.com/bloc97/Anime4K that can do real-time upscaling of anime.

Anime 4k

You can start with the Anime4k setup guide: https://github.com/bloc97/Anime4K/blob/master/md/GLSL_Instructions_Windows.md

Personally, it's not really any better than mpv filters like NIS [0] (Nvidia Image Scaling, which does not use AI but is somehow more sharp than these filters) as well as Anime4k [1] (which does use AI but only in the training phase to create the initial glsl file which then does not use AI inferencing but plain old image filters).

Combine mpv with its yt-dlp [2] and SponsorBlock support [3] and you have a competent way to upscale your own YouTube (and other types of [4]) videos.

[0] https://gist.github.com/agyild/7e8951915b2bf24526a9343d951db...

[1] https://github.com/bloc97/Anime4K

[2] https://www.funkyspacemonkey.com/replace-youtube-dl-with-yt-...

[3] https://github.com/po5/mpv_sponsorblock

[4] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/supportedsites....

mpv_sponsorblock

Personally, it's not really any better than mpv filters like NIS [0] (Nvidia Image Scaling, which does not use AI but is somehow more sharp than these filters) as well as Anime4k [1] (which does use AI but only in the training phase to create the initial glsl file which then does not use AI inferencing but plain old image filters).

Combine mpv with its yt-dlp [2] and SponsorBlock support [3] and you have a competent way to upscale your own YouTube (and other types of [4]) videos.

[0] https://gist.github.com/agyild/7e8951915b2bf24526a9343d951db...

[1] https://github.com/bloc97/Anime4K

[2] https://www.funkyspacemonkey.com/replace-youtube-dl-with-yt-...

[3] https://github.com/po5/mpv_sponsorblock

[4] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/supportedsites....

You might also want to grab the Sponsor block MPV script which will automatically skip/bypass ads.

sponsorblock.lua: skip sponsors in yt videos.

acompressor.lua: compressor. blur-edges.lua: fills the black bars on the side of a video with a blurred copy of its edges. createchapter.lua: self-explanatory. crop.lua: crop video in a visual manner. encode.lua: make an extract of the video currently playing using ffmpeg. reload.lua: reloads videos if an online video stops caching. seek-to.lua: go to timestamp. simplehistory.lua: stores whatever you open in a history file. skiptosilence.lua: skip past "previously on...". smartcopypaste_ii.lua: copy/paste links sponsorblock.lua: skip sponsors in yt videos. streamsave.lua: save looped section to a separate file. subit.lua: download subtitles to playing video. uosc.lua: feature-rich minimalist proximity-based ui (my fav!). webm.lua: similar to encode.lua but with more features and no external dependencies. webtorrent-mpv-hook: enable mpv to stream torrents using webtorrent. youtube-quality.lua: change quality of currently playing yt video.

It still isn't perfect though. Scripts like mpv-sponsorblock won't work if you play a video this way.

I started using SB with the Firefox extension, then eventually moved to FreeTube and then to MPV. I copied my user ID and display name to the MPV script that is responsible for skipping and submitting. When I close MPV and reopen the same video - my segment is skipped. Now, when I go to the extension to check my work - it still shows submissions while I was using the extension, not the ones from MPV. Also, when I open a YT video in the browser that has a segment submitted by me - it doesn't skip. With this one I might need to wait 6 hours (script default time to refresh SB database) or edit the script.

SponsorBlock for mpv