This is a special release in many ways. From the technical perspective, it features 10 bit encodes (that means you need CCCP from July 30th or later installed for this to work or one of the latest mplayer 2 builds respectively) and editions (which I have talked about in an earlier post). Sorry, permalinks on this site are kinda broken right now, will fix it asap. Permalinks fixed, comments work again.

Anyway, editions are something really nice. You get to pick whether you want to watch To LOVE-RU OVA with our hardsubbed OP/ED, softsubbed or none at all. Episode 3 also has a special ending.

Thanks to editions it’s even possible to watch all 6 episodes in one file (see [Yabai]_To_LOVE-Ru_OVA_-_Play_All_Episodes_[BE53C26D].mkv). I suggest you just experiment a bit and you should get the hang of it fast.

So, this marks the end of another project we’ve been working on since forever. What’s next, you may ask. To be honest, we’re not so sure ourselves. Maybe that promised S&W2 batch, maybe some secret project. But for now, here’s the TLR you’ve been yearning for. Enjoy!

Torrent: [Yabai]_To_LOVE-Ru_OVA_[DVD_10bit]

IRC: #yabai@irc.rizon.net

Direct Download: [Yabai]_To_LOVE-Ru_OVA_[DVD_10bit]

Scripts: http://yabai.loginto.me/kaio-ken/Yabai/

Update:

Now we have batch for the series too: [Yabai]_To_LOVE-Ru_01-26_[DVD]

As pointed out in the comments, we might rework the series later. But not this year. Don’t wait–the releases in this batch are absolutely fine!

Update: Permalinks and E-Mail (aka Contact Form) don’t work yet, will get the operational later. Also, the comments from the past 12 months are gone. Maybe Google Cache can help out here, but :effort:

(Taken from cdjapan.co.jp)

23 episodes, aired 1971-1972

Starring: Yasuo Yamada as Lupin III, Kiyoshi Kobayashi, Chikao Ohtsuka, Yukiko Nikaido, Goro Naya

As mentioned in my previous post, all our future releases (and re-releases of older series) will feature editions. Let me take a few moments to explain what editions are in case you don’t know.

Before we get to editions, I’ll first explain how chapters work. There are two types of said chapters: “normal” chapters which link to a specific time spot in the same file, and “ordered” chapters, which can link to a time spot in a different file. This is what we did with To LOVE-Ru and some other series. We cut out the opening and endings, made them become separate files and then made sure there’s a chapter entry in every main episode that linked to those openings/endings.

Now, editions group a bunch of chapters together (either “normal” or “ordered”). You can have multiple editions, so you can have multiple groups of chapters. This comes in handy if, say, you want to choose whether to watch our anime with hardsubbed or softsubbed karaoke. We’ll just release two versions of the OP/EDs, one with hardsubbed karaoke and one with softsubbed karaoke. You then just open the main episode and can choose what you want your media player to play back by picking your edition of choice. Real world examples:

Picture #1 and #2: Open the episode, right click on the white icon in the task bar (it’s called Haali Media Splitter), select your edition! (click to enlarge)

Alternatively, in MPlayer you can just use this command: mplayer file.mkv -edition 0 (edition 0 loads the first edition, edition 1 the second one, etc…)

Specify the edition (set of chapters) to use, where 0 is the first. If set to

-1 (the default), MPlayer will choose the first edition declared as a default,

or if there is no default, the first edition defined.

We also included a third option that will make sure no OP/ED gets loaded at all.

These screenshots also show that each edition contains its own set of chapters (e.g. “No OP/ED” won’t load the Opening and Ending chapters).

We can still turn this a notch higher by creating a fake file that just has a few frames of black screen. The file itself weighs in at just a few kilobytes. By making use of editions, though, we can make it load all six episodes of TLR OVA for example. All episodes will get loaded, resulting in a timeline of more than 2 hours.

Picture #3:

Hitsuji did a really nice job on Haruhi in 2007 by the way, and they’re pretty much the only ones I know of that went this far with matroska and editions (yet!). Saizen did some nice things with their Soul Eater releases (which got dropped after episode 4). They joined together the normal TV airing and the late night show by using editions.

If i got you interested now and you want to know more about what is possible with Matroska, I highly suggest you check Fluff’s post on his blog.

Starting with next release, all future releases will have full support for editions. Editions are awesome. More people/groups should use them.

Now, before we hit the next batch release, there’s some stuff that might or might not interest you. We’ll publish articles in the course of the next two to three weeks about following topics:

1. Matroska Editions
2. Why You Should Use CCCP Or Mplayer2 To Get Your Anime Fix
3. The Many Curses of Quality Subbing
4. Fixing Non-Fixable Interlacing (aka Why The TLR OVA Batch Will Be Delayed)

So be sure to check back. Oh, and spoilers, TLR OVA will be delayed (mainly due to a slow TLC, slow editors and 4.)

On other news, there’ll probably be some site updates too. Those updates will mainly include a separate page that lists all files ever released (all versions) which should serve as some sort of archive in case you need to identify your version of the file or whatever.
Secondly, we’ll see if we can get some sort of DDL server up and running (done). Or at least some links to One-Click Hosters. (Which one would you prefer?)
Last but not least, some sort of FAQ page. Stay tuned.

I’d also like to use this post to ask you guys how you like the idea of our roadmap. Any kind of feedback is appreciated!

And here it is, the last, the final batch of To LOVE-Ru (the series). We’ve fulfilled our duties, now it’s Rito’s turn:

Nimmerliefde
Please never again (Actually, the only episode I really disliked was the one with that Captain Afro and Magical Girl Sets-Everything-On-Fire)

Chandalen:
To start, I’m not going to bother with anything witty so don’t expect it. To begin with, I asked jama a question about typesetting and all I got was this qc position out of it. I’ll admit I was pretty confident that I’d be fine, since I was assured nothing ever got done here. I should of realized this was all a lie when the shrubbery requisition I put in upon joining was later denied. Many lies and deceitful smiles later I ended up qc’ing the last 4 episodes in 2-3 days. That’s about all I have to say about things thus far, so here’s a final fairwell from the newest slav…member. Happy leeching.

Juggen:
I’d rather be t-bagged than do more tlr

mild_even
It’s been a pretty productive 5 months for us. That’s the time it took us to release the final 14 episodes of this troublesome fantastic series. Governor Ishihara would be proud of our work in spreading wonderful Japanese culture to the world. There were lots of strange things to see, and I’m not sure I want to ever see them again. With that said, this won’t be the end of Yabai’s work with perverse animu spectacle To LOVE-Ru. It just wouldn’t be Yabai without Trouble. So, there will be more underboob, sideboob, nipples, areolae, groping, pinching, pantsu shots, and erotic bestial alien sm3x! TLR OVA will be done by the end of March! Thanks for all the support and stay tuned!

Aurix
Coming into this project half way through has lead me to a simple conclusion: filler contenting is fattening, will ruin your health, and will cause you to have bouts of delirium. TLR’s fatty content is best handled like nuclear waste; let it decay, hidden away from the light of humanity.

Hmm. I think we should stop this, it’s counterproductive…

So it just took us nearly two and a half years (first release in September 2008) to finish this series. What’s up next? As mild_even mentioned, it’s going to be the To LOVE-RU OVA, which I’m not really sure we can meet the deadline for (but we’ll try anyway). At least I can promise you that the batch is going to have some new fancy functions included. We’re working hard to set an even higher level of standards than we already have this time around.

But for now, we hope you can enjoy the last few episodes of To LOVE-Ru!

Torrent: [Yabai]_To_LOVE-Ru_23-26_[DVD]

IRC: #yabai@irc.rizon.net

Scripts: http://yabai.ulrezaj.com/public/To LOVE-Ru/

Edit: In case you were wondering about the file size of episode 23 (it’s nearly twice as big as most of the other files), this is due to the filter the producers decided to apply to nearly all of said episode. It just doesn’t compress well (and we didn’t want to get a smaller file by sacrificing video quality)

We actually just promised four episodes, but we decided to add a fifth one due to a ripping mistake (for like half the time we worked on episode 22 thinking it was 21). Consider yourself lucky. :P

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This batch includes:
18) A pregnant cat assassin — Yes, it sounds bad, and it is really bad. In fact, it’s so bad we couldn’t watch this without facepalming and laughing at the stupidity all the time. That makes it arguably a good episode (we were laughing etc.).

19) An (Underground) hot spring episode that spends more of half of the time showing us Lala & Co. digging around. But the rest is worth it (I guess?).

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20) A whole episode featuring Magical Kyouko! How cool is that??!

21) Yuuki and Lala setting up an inn for aliens. There’s not much fanservice in this particular episode, but fear not, you get to see Yami and Mikan in uniforms (see above pictures). That should make up for everything!

22) Culture Festival. Animal Coffee Shop. Lots of Cosplays. (And lots of painfully typeset signs.)

Since I have taken so many pictures from these episodes and want to share them all with you, this is going to become a long article.

Back in early December I promised to document our work on TLR 18-22. So here’s a short summary:

Step 1) Premux
At first, we rip the video files, index them, then use YATTA, and get a basic .avs file (click to see how it looked like at first.)
After the basic .avs file is done, next we look for all the signs that need to be typeset (click the link to see the picture — 10 signs for episode 18 alone). Once the signs are spotted, we cut out the scenes where they’re in and create LAGS clips. These are needed so we can typeset the signs using Photoshop and After Effects. Once the overlays are done, they’ll be included in the .avs file. The final .avs file will look considerably different from the original YATTA one.
The video can now be encoded, the audio will be cut (OP/ED songs cut out cause of ordered chapters) and then we’ll use mkvmerge to put together the pre-final .mkv (no subs yet).
There’s some other work that needs to be done like adjusting ordered chapters.
All these steps need to be redone for every episode. It’s not uncommon that it can take like 10 hours (effectively) to get step 1 done, most (80-90%?) of that time spent on typesetting. Yes, typesetting is that much of a bitch.

Step 2) Timing
As we switched to official subs starting with episode 14, we need to OCR the subs from the DVD using SubRip. Then we will retime and restyle the script. Additionally we have to do some detail work like adding honorifics (the official subs leave those out).
This usually takes about 3 hours for one episode.

Step 3) TLC & Edit
We have someone to check the dialogue to make sure it’s translated accurately. Everyone talks bad about official subs, but they seem to be mostly fine for To LOVE-Ru. Maybe it’s cause of the simple dialogue the anime got. :P
After that there’ll be 2 editors who go through the scripts (1st and 2nd pass).
It heavily depends on the quality of the scripts on how long this will take, but it’s mostly something between like 3-5 hours.

Step 4) RCs
The script is now ready for the first round of QCs. So it’ll be put into the premux and make it become the Release Candidate 1 (RC1). There’s a couple of QCers (between one and four) going through every RC. They note down all the timing, editing, typesetting, encoding and other errors they find and we fix them. We usually have 3 RCs, one round of QC & Apply takes roughly 1 week. People are busy during the week and somehow try to get 4-5 episodes QCd till Friday/Saturday. On Saturday/Sunday the reports will be applied and the new RC will be uploaded, which will then be QCd the following week. QCing alone takes about 2-3 weeks!
We also try not to have anyone QC the same episode more than twice — or else they would probably go insane.

• Here’s one of TLR18′s RC1QC reports. (Not too many errors)
• The TLR22 RC1 report notes some more errors.

QCing one 20-minute episode can take 30 minutes or up to three and more hours, depending on the quality of the muxed in files; usually early RCs take longer to QC (cause they still have more errors duh!)

And once we’re happy with the RCs, we’ll release the final episodes!
Fun fact: Writing the news posts takes up time too. This one surely took like 2 hours to write!

Next month you’ll get to see the last 4 episodes of To LOVE-Ru (if everything goes according to plan)!

Till then, have fun watching 18-22.

Torrent: [Yabai]_To_LOVE-Ru_18-22_[DVD]

IRC: #yabai@irc.rizon.net

Scripts: http://yabai.ulrezaj.com/public/To LOVE-Ru/

Last year we brought you the two final episodes of Himawari!!, this year we double the fun with four episodes of To LOVE-Ru! (Let’s see if we can manage 8 episodes next year :P)

I think our new strategy (batch releases instead of single releases) works much better (see S&W 2, see this release). If everything goes well, you’ll see another four episodes at the end of January released. Hopefully we’ll be able to complete another secret project around that time too.

Anyways, we don’t want to strain your attention too much! The staff hopes you will have a good time watching some more To LOVE-Ru and wishes you happy holidays!

Torrent: [Yabai]_To_LOVE-Ru_14-17_+_ED2_[DVD]

IRC: #yabai@irc.rizon.net

PS: You can find the scripts for these and all the other episodes and projects on our scripts page.

Thanks to everyone who answered the questions in the last news post.

Some changes have been made to the website:
- Most notably there’s a Scripts section now which will redirect you to http://yabai.ulrezaj.com/public/
- A roadmap has been added. Don’t take the dates too seriously though.
- The RSS Feed for this site should finally be working properly
- Even though both Projects and Staff page stay the same (for now), I’ve at least updated them :P
- Some other small changes
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Some other noteworthy stuff:
- The final S&W II and TLR batches will have editions rather than xdeltas and .bat files so you can easier switch between credited and creditless OP/ED
- I’ll document our work on TLR 18-21 18-22 and will release the article at around the same time that batch will get released (Jan 2011). Should make for an interesting read I think.

This has got to be the shortest project in Yabai’s history! Actually, it started out as a Mazui project: As we (Mazui) weren’t going anywhere with that planned batch torrent of S&W2 (TV raws with QCd scripts), I decided at the end of July to redo Spice & Wolf II completely by doing BD rips. I set my deadline to be August 31, and what do you know, after one month of hard work I got all episodes ready on August 30. Due to various circumstances this didn’t get released on August 31 under the [Mazui] tag though and instead became a Yabai project. Basically that meant more QCing and editing were going to be done. Among other things consistency in the scripts has improved a lot thanks to that. Staff credits look somewhat like this:

Original scripts: 00 (Frostii), 01-12 (Mazui)
TLC: Ulrezaj
Editing: desolo
QCing: jama, mild_even (big thanks for doing so much so fast!)
Encoding: jama (thanks to Mandarinka and tyroz for advice)
Special thanks to Daemon404 for providing the encode of Sp02.

In case you didn’t know, Yabai and Mazui were pretty much the same group in the beginning (Mazui = just the fast staff)(Hint: similar group names), so it goes without saying that we use Mazui scripts, which are–by the way–pretty high standard (and we polished them up even more!). We also decided to go with official names, so it’s Holo (instead of Horo), Kraft Lawrence (Craft), Dian Rubens (Dean), Fermi Amati (Amarty) and Eve Boland (Abe).

We even have fancy stuff like ordered chapters and bat files that switch between the Credits and Creditless version of the OP/ED as default for you. And all episodes are pure softsubs, we didn’t hardsub a single sign or the karaoke.

Actually we had planned to release the batch torrent with special 3 and 4 included (which nobody else has subbed so far), but we figured why wait with the release if everything else is ready to go? Once we’re done with sp3 and 4 we’ll re-release this batch with those two files included. The specials are audio dramas and their story is about the “Black Wolf’s Cradle“, which is included in Spice & Wolf Vol. 11 (entitled “Side Colors II”, see Wikipedia) and split into two parts.

Batch torrent: [Yabai]_Spice_and_Wolf_II_00-12_[BD_720p]

IRC: #yabai@irc.rizon.net

PS: We have a few questions! Feel free to answer them in the comments section below:

1. Do you prefer single releases (1 release = 1 episode) or batch releases (1 release = whole series in just one batch or 1 release = 1 DVD/BD)?
2. Do you want a page where you can download all of our scripts?
3. Do you find these .bat files to be convenient and that we should keep on including them in our torrents?
4. Do you want updates on the status of the projects? (I could think of updates in the IRC channel or maybe Twitter if we’re not too lazy…)
5. Do you wanna read more articles about fansubbing on this site (see Articles page if you don’t know what I mean)? In case you do, is there something you always wanted to know about fansubbing which I could write about? :>
6. Do you want polls back?
7. Do you care about the Projects section? If yes, want it to stay that way or add/change something? (I know it’s not up2date)
8. If you notice any errors in our releases, feel free to post them in the comments section below. We would be glad to fix anything we missed for the re-release of the batch.
9. Anything else you always wanted to tell/ask us? :P