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The fuuuuuuutuuuuureee
Sunday, 12 April 2020 21:49I convinced my friend Bri to give Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood a try with their parents, and while I was looking for the torrent for my preferred fansubs, it reminded me of all the hoops I had to jump through to watch anime on TV before, and it's making me feel weirdly privileged for my current circumstances.
Like I used to only have an old CTR and a laptop with only a VGA out (and later one with a VGA and a HDMI outs). Back then I didn't own a VGA-to-composite cable, and also even after I got a new TV, that one also only had SCART and no HDMI in. So, what I used to do was take my 480p video files (my laptop couldn't comfortably run HD video so I very rarely even had 720p files available) that were usually soft-subbed, and convert them from MKV to either AVI or MP4, depending on whether they were movies or anime episodes, and play them through my Xbox 360.
Except I didn't have any big flash drives back then, and the 360 couldn't read my 640GB storage drive (which -- fun fact! -- is a spinning HDD that requires two USB ports to power up enough to be written into) because I had had to format it into a type the 360 couldn't read, and also the 360 would randomly not work if the files were too big or had too high a bitrate, and this was back before I had gone to art school and learned about file types and video encoding and shit so I was working out on my own what filetypes had what properties and how I could make files small enough to fit on my flash drives and play back and not be horribly bitcrunched.
Oh and eventually I had to get an external memory device for the 360 b/c holy shit remember how huge save files on the 360 used to be??? Which I then started to use to store some of my anime, and then started to use those SDDs to watch anime on my laptop, which only had about 500gb of memory, most of which was taken up by programs and art and stuff for school and work.
And now I have a 1TB hard drive on my laptop which has two different HDMI outputs and a separate HDMI extension cable I can plug into my 44'' TV to directly watch stuff and also PS4 can play soft-subbed video files natively now. That's a level of convenience I legitimately thought was impossible once upon a time, although luckily the effort made chilling with a friend on my couch watching Fullmetal Alchemist all the more sweeter.
Like I used to only have an old CTR and a laptop with only a VGA out (and later one with a VGA and a HDMI outs). Back then I didn't own a VGA-to-composite cable, and also even after I got a new TV, that one also only had SCART and no HDMI in. So, what I used to do was take my 480p video files (my laptop couldn't comfortably run HD video so I very rarely even had 720p files available) that were usually soft-subbed, and convert them from MKV to either AVI or MP4, depending on whether they were movies or anime episodes, and play them through my Xbox 360.
Except I didn't have any big flash drives back then, and the 360 couldn't read my 640GB storage drive (which -- fun fact! -- is a spinning HDD that requires two USB ports to power up enough to be written into) because I had had to format it into a type the 360 couldn't read, and also the 360 would randomly not work if the files were too big or had too high a bitrate, and this was back before I had gone to art school and learned about file types and video encoding and shit so I was working out on my own what filetypes had what properties and how I could make files small enough to fit on my flash drives and play back and not be horribly bitcrunched.
Oh and eventually I had to get an external memory device for the 360 b/c holy shit remember how huge save files on the 360 used to be??? Which I then started to use to store some of my anime, and then started to use those SDDs to watch anime on my laptop, which only had about 500gb of memory, most of which was taken up by programs and art and stuff for school and work.
And now I have a 1TB hard drive on my laptop which has two different HDMI outputs and a separate HDMI extension cable I can plug into my 44'' TV to directly watch stuff and also PS4 can play soft-subbed video files natively now. That's a level of convenience I legitimately thought was impossible once upon a time, although luckily the effort made chilling with a friend on my couch watching Fullmetal Alchemist all the more sweeter.
