So then, after many many hours of struggle through the source and the resolution, the widescreen is done. Yay! 
h.264 uses ordered chapters for both 720p and 480p, XviD is the usual complete piece of bitrate wasting trash it always is.
720p for K-On IS a station upscale. However, when played fullscreen on a 1280×720 monitor, a 720p upscale will look better than a 480p upscaled by the media player. However, the reverse is also true in that an upscale will look worse at 480p than one that started as 480p. So, we released both so you can choose.
720p: Mio
480p: is
XviD: moe.
April 28th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Hooray for WS!!!!
April 28th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
I love it thx
April 28th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
umba lumba bumba thankz
April 28th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Thanks pals, I was waiting for your release.
April 28th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Mio is Moe Weeee
April 28th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Awesome Chihiro!! This is one of the only 3 series I like from this season so of course I’ll DL the 720p files, with my 1440×900 19″LCD this will look great.
April 28th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
“Awesome Chihiro!! This is one of the only 3 series I like from this season so of course I’ll DL the 720p files, with my 1440×900 19″LCD this will look great.”
Looks even better on 32″ Hd-ready tv. 19″ is way too small screen for movies
April 28th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
awww it isn’t as sharp as fullmetal alchemist
April 28th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
moe moe KYUN!
April 28th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
w00t I was waiting for this, thanks
April 28th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
nice thx again guys
btw kristen, u ppl are subbing hatsukoi limited too right? just wondering
April 28th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
@cypher
they are.
April 28th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Thank you very much!
Are you planning on doing WS versions for all eps?
Please say yes. ; ;
April 28th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
“Looks even better on 32″ Hd-ready tv. 19″ is way too small screen for movies
”
Spoiled leecher is spoiled.
April 28th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
XD in that case I would watch it on my pops Full-HD TV ¬¬ The case its that I’m thanksfull to Chihiro for subbing this show on HD.
April 28th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
HD-tv:s are pretty cheap nowdays, a good jummer job for a moth and youll have enough money for one.
Leecher as in?
probably more if you only count chihiro-sub torrents.
overall upload ratio 1.5
April 28th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Kristen is so moe!
April 28th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
How does that little hat stay on her head?
April 28th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
less Mio, more Mugi-Wugi
April 28th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
“How does that little hat stay on her head?”
Her moe power is what’s keeping it from not falling off.
April 28th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
Thanks for the XviD bitrate wasting trash! You might not like it much, but I love it… and I like you a lot for releasing an XviD version.
April 28th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
sad to say.. but… in my Sony Bravia the 720p looks crappy.. but 480 performs better…
im telling you its like in 720p ohh fuck what is that… its like there some parts were been stretched…
and on 480p.. there are black part on top and buttom but the quality is good…
i played my files using WD TV HD Player….
April 28th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
“HD-tv:s are pretty cheap nowdays, a good jummer job for a moth and youll have enough money for one. ”
I wouldn’t mind one, but I have nowhere to put it. D=
April 28th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
Hmm. According to Media Player Classic, the video on the 480p version is 720×480.
April 29th, 2009 at 12:19 am
^ 720×480 anamorphic. It’s an encoding thing that saves bitrate, to make terms simple. It’ll play back at 853×480 so long as you have it configured correctly and actually play the episode.
April 29th, 2009 at 12:46 am
Thanks for the release.
April 29th, 2009 at 1:23 am
Yay, wide screen. Now I can collect Chihiro’s K-On! instead of a certain other rival fansub group’s
April 29th, 2009 at 3:00 am
“sad to say.. but… in my Sony Bravia the 720p looks crappy.. but 480 performs better… ”
Maybe you have a Zoom or image adjustment issue. I can connet my Lap directly to the TV so I don’t have problems as long as the video plays ok on the Laptop.
April 29th, 2009 at 3:57 am
Thanks. Updating MPC did the trick.
April 29th, 2009 at 4:33 am
What are the “correct settings”? I’m using the latest K-Lite Codec Pack with Media Player Classic-Home Cinema. Disabling the ffdshow H264 filter (thus falling back to Windows 7’s WMF codec) gets the video to play at the right aspect ratio, only to be resized to 720×480 once I pause it. Other anamorphic MKVs (such as E-D’s Air) seem to play fine for me.
April 29th, 2009 at 5:31 am
Yay, wide screen release…awesome chihiro^^. But torrent is very slowly in my countryT_T, i hope someone can provide MU link for 720p release. Thank you.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:13 am
Is it just me or does Mio almost look pregnant in that picture?
April 29th, 2009 at 6:52 am
Thank you very much Chihiro for wide screen version. Now I can see more! Hehehe.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:53 am
Do the OP and ED have the resolution data? MPC keeps switching to back to 720×480 when it reaches them.
April 29th, 2009 at 9:15 am
@fortmax, yeah I have that problem too
And I don’t know how you toke that screenshot of the upscale… My upscale (SD) looks much better then yours…
http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/3779/afbeelding3.png
(but still the 720p upscale looks better, altough not as much as you have shown
April 29th, 2009 at 10:26 am
I don’t suppose I could talk you into releasing 720p MP4 versions right? :<
Stupid 360/PS3… Play mkv’s already.
April 29th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
You guys forgot to set the aspect ratio to 16:9 on the 480p OP and ED, so they display at 720×480 instead of 853×480. Which, in turn, makes the entire episode display at 720×480 in MPC-HC unless you override the aspect ratio. I’m using the latest CCCP, by the way.
April 29th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
essiw, media players will add additional filters to all files. Mine are taken from AVSP, which will not add any additional filters.
April 29th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
MKV support for consoles and standalone players is very unlikely. Open source format used by mainly “pirates” doesn’t really bring the format it to a good light. Not to mention that Mp4 already is very similar yet officialy noted format which is pretty widely used too.
But you might try to convert and hardsub the file yourself or look for encodes.
April 29th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
@Kristen, ok that explains
April 29th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Awesome! Can’t wait for the blu-rays when they come out!
April 29th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Gregory: Mystery solved—a friend of mine has one of those little side-hat things! It’s connected to a headband (same as the ornament on Ritsu’s head), which would be hard to see on Mio because it’s as dark as her hair… and now I have an awesome new cosplay idea for my friend, who probably has all of the appropriate gear in her wardrobe already. Muhaha. >;)
surasshu: Try the FUPPES, MediaTomb or tversity UPnP media servers. If you set them up right (which is, I admit, the tricky part), your console will find them on the network, and they can transcode the video (complete with styled subs!) on-the-fly, straight from your media server to the best your console can support. In theory, at least. In practice, I’m trying, at length, to get that working myself (and may have to contribute patches for ordered chapter support!), so good luck.
Viper7: Two words: Popcorn Hour.
Kristen: I heard/saw the BS-TBS .ts was a bit… uh… questionable, so congratulations on Chihiro being able to work with it, and thanks very much for this! And thanks for still doing an oldschool XviD (for all those who still play from XBMC on an original Xbox)!
April 29th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
“Viper7: Two words: Popcorn Hour.”
Have never heard about that kind of device before, and after doing some google it seems its not even that widely available. But personaly Id just buy a new PC instead of device like that, just because it sounds fishy, but has potential as a nice media device gotta admit that. Hopefully it will get more attention and bring on some heat for other mediadevices to support mkv
Many just prefer these new consoles (X360 and Ps3) nowdays, its hard for any mediaplayer to come even close to the 50m total sales of these machines. Not to mention that these are often plugged in to a HD-TV (and its way easier than with pc, took a day for windows(thanks to awesome powerstrip) and 2 days for ubuntu to figure out how to get my HD-tv show decent resolution) for Ps3 it took less than a minute.
If both of these consoles would start to support mkv it would be pretty awesome, but somehow i just doubt it. It took them what? 5? 10? years to get Xvid support?
April 29th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Can you just make the scaling to 1920×1280????? I would REALLY, REALLY be a happy camper then =] (its a joke)
April 29th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
Myoukochou: I have tried TVersity before but was unsuccessful in getting it to work properly. I’ll definitely try those other suggestions though, thanks!
I also did try GOTsend which does work… but I’d really rather not re-encode for obvious reasons. I thought it might be worth the long-shot of requesting a MP4 encode~
April 30th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
Looks great. Thanks!
April 30th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
BTW, that’s in SMPlayer, Mandriva 2009, AthlonXP 2100+, NVidia GeForce 5200, 1gig of RAM . With XP, this machine would cough up blood playing this file, but in Linux, 1080p is a piece of cake.
May 1st, 2009 at 10:17 am
What Desbreko said. The OP and ED of the 480p don’t have the correct aspect ratio.
Viper7: Microsoft is deader than dead. Nobody cared about the crap called Vista, nobody’s going to get *indows 7. SONY? I can has rootkit?!? No fangs.
YES, there are super-cheap stand-alone players that support MKV with soft-subs and H.264 in HD resolution. Get your head out of your arse.
May 3rd, 2009 at 2:24 am
^^ EVERYbody’s going to get WINdows OVER 9000!*
*FYI it’s just XP with media optimization and chan-related stuff worked in (fukken saved button etc.)
May 4th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Awesome release, cant wait for the next episode.
Looks swell on my TV, and I’ve grown strangely addicted to the ED.
May 5th, 2009 at 10:52 am
@surasshu: I’d suggest PSPVC, that’s the conversion program I’ve been using lately. Converts to .mp4 files for the PSP, and I believe it has settings for PS3 and Xbox 360 specifically as well.
Here’s hoping I can watch this series without letting Mio convince me to trade in my lefty guitar for a lefty bass. Fingers crossed.
May 23rd, 2009 at 6:29 pm
thank you geo, will check it out!
May 27th, 2009 at 10:02 am
So, why the f**k this doesn’t have an Opening and ending?
A good fansub and bandwith wasted…
May 27th, 2009 at 10:24 am
all right. my bad.
bandwidth well invested after all. XD
June 7th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
thank you for this release.
question; why is it you first release a 4:3, then a 16:9 version? shouldn’t the original source from jap tv be 16:9? why is it you even bother the pan-and-scan for a 4:3 release in the first place?
thanks for clarifying.
June 9th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
@Posix
I don’t really know the reasons for this, but I believe the initial airing of the show is, for some arbitrary reason, butchered down (pan&scan) to 4:3 aspect ratio. The widescreen version is then aired about 3 weeks later.
If anyone knows more, feel free to explain further.
June 9th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
hey Acedia,
that would make a lot of sense.
i’m very impressed that chihiro are taking twice the effort for this season by double-releasing all the episodes.
thanks very much!