Hi guys,

We’ve been working hard this week trying to get the video quality better. We were finally able to get the raws for Naruto Shippuden 90, so we re-encoded it and replaced the old videos. To the Anime Members, please give me some feedback for the HD versions! Since we have the raws, we’re able to use better telecine cadence detection to minimize blended frames and made the animation smoother.

We’re currently working on tonight’s simulcast, Episode 93. Hopefully we’ll have it encoded in the same way before the launch tonight! If we don’t finish encoding with the raw, we have a lower quality version as a backup (until the better version is ready of course).

A quick look at the 480p stream of today’s Naruto shows much improved quality with much less frame blending (and such). Though my Eee PC struggles to play it (^^;; Hopefully this week’s Shugo Chara! will show the same improvement. I appreciate that they’re working on things and keeping us informed of what’s going on.

For comparision, here’s my usual raw source:

I believe you can see the problems here. Some kind of chroma (the color component of the image) ghosting along with lower image quality than the raw. What you can’t see is the frame stuttering probably caused by a bad deinterlacing filter and frames dropping during certain sequences. (The badly upscaled non-720p “720p” doesn’t apply in this case since Shugo Chara! isn’t broadcast in HD)

What makes this worse is that the sample video provided by Crunchyroll exhibits none of these issues. It’s generally not good business practice to deceive your customers. Many are already complaining on the forums of the same issues and demanding a refund, but that seemingly won’t happen since the TOS doesn’t allow for refunds.

Now, with a new service, and certainly one gathering as much attention as this, I would expect there to be bumps in the road. I appreciate that Crunchyroll seems to be taking some steps to correct some issues such as site slowness. However, first impressions count, especially since this involves a high-profile companies like TV Tokyo and others offering access to shows legally. One would expect the quality of videos and subs from the producers of shows themselves to be better than that offered by fansubs, but that hasn’t been the case here so far. People won’t put down money for an inferior product, especially when they’re used to paying nothing for the alternative.

It really is disappointing since I would like to see Crunchyroll and its partners succeed in this experiment and prove online distribution (through a subscription model or otherwise) can be profitable. Anime fans get the shows they want right after they air in Japan, the creators and producers of the show get paid, everybody involved benefits. I am hoping that Crunchyroll and its staff will get their act together and take some action on these concerns soon.