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First off, a little update from my predicament with the Kiddy Grade DVDs which I couldn’t bear to watch because of interlacing.

I’ve been watching DVDs in Windows Media Player because for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to get deinterlacing working in Media Player Classic. I tried all sorts of MPC and ffdshow options, but nothing seemed to make a difference. I don’t know why, but I had another shot at it tonight, and things worked a little better.

So if you live in a country where the local anime DVDs (or any DVDs for that matter) are encoded and authored by a monkey (although Shiroi Hane was kind enough to point out that the Japanese DVDs had the same issue, blame Gonzo?), here’s how to get them watchable in Media Player Classic. WMP is less than ideal, because it would sometimes switch back to English (causing much pain in the case of Kiddy Grade — the interlacing may not have been FUNimation’s fault, but the bad dub sure as hell was) and I’d have to stop and restart the DVD to get deinterlacing.

Anyway, on to MPC.

Under the View menu, pick Options, then from the left-hand colum, pick Internal Filters. Source filters aren’t much use here, what we’re interested in is the Transform filters. DVDs are encoded in MPEG-2, so make sure MPEG-2 video is checked.

Now double click MPEG-2 video to open the properties pane. The only thing that really matters to us here is the Deinterlacing option. Just leaving it set at Auto should get a good enough result, but YMMV. Feel free to try out the other options, but I couldn’t tell much difference myself.

The end result? I can actually watch the DVDs I purchased without tearing my hair out.

Much better. And on that note, I noticed the R.O.D the TV R4 DVDs have the same interlacing issue. Anyone able to confirm if the R1 or R2 DVDs for this series are interlaced?

New Anime
It’s now into the summer season in Japan, and there’s a bit to look forward to. Apart from the KG2: Ignition DVD coming out on Friday (according to Wikipedia anyway), there’s also the final two episodes of season 1 of Code Geass on Saturday, and a few good new series starting.

Code E looks like one of the better ones, set in the year 2017. It revolves around a girl who has a condition that causes electronic devices to malfunction if she gets emotional. A little different, but the animation is good if you ignore the fact that most of the characters have no nose from a front on perspective. If you’ll pardon the Futurama reference, I sometimes get the urge to yell at the characters, “you have no nose! Your nose is gone! You have no nose on your face! Where it is I can’t say, but on your face it’s not!”

It’s produced by Studio DEEN though, of -R.O.D the TV- fame, which explains the similarities in the intros, not that it’s a bad thing.

Now, there’s an English learning book from Japan called Moetan, which will be familiar to anyone who has kept up with manga and anime for the last few years. It’s infamous for its use of Moe characters, hence the name. Well, it got turned into an anime.

I thought Lucky Star was the creepiest thing I’d see from Japan. In hindsight, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Jaymz should be having a field day with this one.

Funnily enough, there’s even 1080i H264 version of the first episode courtesy of FSH & MugiMugi. Loli never looked so good.