Notes

Hi Ryan, I hope the tutorial yesterday helped with getting all that very legal anime. However, one important thing to note is that these videos are 99% of the time in the MKV format which I mentioned last time. What's so important about this? This is significant because these videos are "softsubbed". What this means is that the subtitle words are basically just drawn over the video, sort of like a snapchat thot filter.

Now if you just plan to watch the files locally on your computer this is completely fine as this preserves the quality of the video stream. However, let's say you want to watch it on your phone. Well, you'd have to upload it to Google Drive or Dropbox or something to get it on the phone in the first place. Unfortunately, many video players (including Google Drive or basically any mobile device) don't actually support MKVs, meaning videos will not have the subtitles drawn over them at all. Also, MKVs are much more foreign in general to most video players, so they have a hard time playing and actually crash pretty often.

So what's the solution? We must "hardsub" the videos, or burn in the subtitles so that it becomes part of the video stream itself, and Google Drive doesn't have to draw over anything. There are two ways of going about this with some pros and cons to each, let's start with the program Handbrake.