[Nicholi]

Originally Posted by hooliganj

Nicholi, I did not say that "fansubbing is only ethical if its low quality", I only said that fansubbing loses one potential legal protection if releases are consistently of the same quality as the original releases.

Fansubs have no legal protection. End of story. When/If the japanese copyright holder wants to shut you down, they could. However much like the companies in the US which own the licenses, they do not have money just laying around to deal with such legal fees abroad (aka stopping DVD rips, in their native country). This is not legal protection. Unless you have respectively asked the copyright holder if you could fansub their material, you have no legal protection at all.

Originally Posted by hooliganj

I don't have direct evidence, because I run it just fine. I can even run most MKVs to an acceptable standard of quality. A lot of the errors I personally encounter in the format can be attributed to lazy encoding. However, I am also aware of the resources consumed by the format, and of the fact that not everyone who wants to watch fansubs meets the requirements imposed by the format.

Perhaps you could enlighten us to the mystery of the unreasonable requirements Vorbis puts upon the user? To my knowledge the difference is quite inconsequential. As compared to using H.264, which is certainly not. Randomly comparing totally different encodes when one happens to have Vorbis does not really make any sort of universal conclusion about the format. As the video in the files you "compared" could have a completely different resolution and bitrate which would totally change the CPU usage for the file as a whole, which is what you seem to be measuring. Can I play the file at all? The most accurate way to find Vorbis's difference in usage would be to decode Vorbis by itself, compared to decoding MP3. Yes, there is a slightly higher requirement for decoding Vorbis, but anyone not on a 600MHz machine is unlikely to note the difference. And I've played plenty of SD encodes with Vorbis on an old 733 MHz Athlon Thunderbird. Pretty ludicrous claim of Vorbis being the thing bringing us all down. You'd have a much better troll arguement using H.264/AVC.

Originally Posted by hooliganj

If you need some kind of 'evidence' to reach such an obvious conclusion, I can offer anecdotal - if I try to bring fansubs to watch when I visit my parents' house, I have to make sure that they're divx or xvid AVIs - their 600 mH machine won't run much beyond that. Soft or hard subs or audio formats don't even matter at that point - the MKV container itself is too much. Basically it boils down to this: I don't believe people should be punished for owning slow computers.

The Matroska container itself poses no playback restrictions on your parent's computer. You could remux those same DivX/Xvid AVIs to MKV and they would still play on that computer. If you would like to test Vorbis's ability to play on that computer, take the encode with DivX/Xvid + MP3, and re-encode the MP3 to generally the same bitrate in Vorbis. Try and play the file.