encode-scripts VS VSMPEG

This'll be long-winded excitement to talk about the weird little community, but I think a lot of that depends on the circles you run in and the content you consume.

There is surely a lot of low-effort GUI handbrake encodes online. But most of the """well-respected""" piracy groups put a surprising amount of effort into filtering and such to correct artifacts, both due to the compression and due to the source material itself.

A lot of these people are using tools like VapourSynth with a variety of scripts they've put together and x264 or x265 directly rather than ffmpeg. You can see a couple of guides written about some of the processes they perform:

- <https://silentaperture.gitlab.io/mdbook-guide/introduction.h...> (all video content)

- <https://guide.encode.moe> (anime-focused)

And some links to the kinds of filtering code pirates write for movies/tv/anime:

- <https://git.concertos.live/OpusGang/EncodeScripts> (MANY VapourSynth and AviSynth scripts for both live-action content and anime)

- <https://github.com/Beatrice-Raws/encode-scripts>

And while not directly related to the encoding side of things, but if any of that is interesting, in addition to the encoding side of things, pirate fansubs also get pretty complex, particularly for anime since, unlike the unstyled SRT subs most people come across for foreign movies online, anime fansubs tend to use ASS [1] subtitles with lots of styling to accomplish things like cleanly replacing Japanese text in a letter someone is reading or adding non-distracting subtitles for background text (e.g., signs on buildings, etc).

To do a lot of that, though, these subtitles often pack fonts into the video container to allow the media player to render things as expected without resorting to "hardsubbing" (i.e., pre-rendering the subtitles into the video itself)—which is one of many reasons container formats like Matroska (MKV) is so popular in those communities.

An interesting thing to see come out of that is that I have noticed some fansubbing groups move to proper build tools, like Gradle, to automate portions of their workflows. As an example, SubKt, a Gradle plugin, allows them to essentially have CI/CD for their subtitling projects by doing integrity checks on the fonts, linting the subtitles/fonts to ensure the selected fonts actually have glyphs for all the text, templating and merging so that different team members can work on things like the script/timing while another does styling, and then packaging and publishing tasks to bundle everything up into an MKV at the end and upload the result to torrent sites.

If any of that is interesting, here are some links to SubKt + some real-world finished projects making use of it:

- <https://github.com/Myaamori/SubKt>

If you are comfortable reading a bit of instructions I recommend setting up VSMPEG (https://github.com/rlaphoenix/VSMPEG, which is my own project btw) as it takes care of generally everything, and even if you dont end up with 16 FPS due to being able to ignore RFF flags, doesnt mean your out of luck as VSMPEG can help you figure out how to get 16 FPS thanks to decimation or by setting d2v_vst_vfr_mode to True, and if that doesnt work you can have VSMPEG decimate for you.