[pjladyfox]

*rubs eyes* Goddess, this was a long thread to get thru and rather enjoyable if random in some spots. ^__^ Let me first start by saying each and every one of you who posted to this and/or are directly/indirectly responsible for the fansubs I snag on a frequent basis deserve a hearty thank you. To say nothing of being pretty impressed with your knowledge of video and container formats would be an understatement with some of you. Heck, I remember when my friends and I considered our Amiga 1000 with a genlock cutting-edge subtitling equipment and it is amazing to see the progress to today.

I'm hoping this is the right area to post and/or ask this but this was the one thread where everyone seemed to have a good grasp of some of the questions that I was looking to find answers for. With that said here are my questions to those of you here:

1. I know for a lot of you that the thought of making two different releases, such as one in .AVI and one in .MKV, can give cold sweats and ulcers due to the time investment involved for very little return. I used not to really pay this much mind until I started to re-encode some releases into a format my husband's PSP and/or Zune would handle. On one hand I loved the high-quality .MKV releases but on the other hand I wound up having to keep a glass of scotch nearby just to get thru some of the fustration I would encounter where things would either fail to extract or would fail to re-encode. And after reading some of the "MKV is Rox00rs! RTFM nub!" or worse I would instead wind up having to scour for .AVI or .MP4 releases just to lower the fustration level. Do you feel that the .MKV container benefits outweigh the loss of being able to easily port to different devices?

3. As some of you may or may not know (or heck even care possibly) Microsoft is slated to release the Spring Update this week which will add H.264 video support (Up to 10 Mbps, Baseline, Main, and High (up to level 4.1) Profiles with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles) and MPEG-4 Part 2 video support (Up to 5 Mbps, Simple Profile with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles). Do any of you feel that by adding this support it may make things easier for future releases by widening the base of support available? Or do you feel that it provides no benefit at all?