Ubuntu Reaching Out To 16,000 Anime Lovers 293
shadowmage13 writes "After months of planning, I am happy to announce finally that the Ubuntu Massachusetts Local Community Team will be preparing a booth at the upcoming 2010 Anime Boston convention. We need support from the community to secure a booth and print materials, including copies of the Ubunchu! manga. I really believe the Anime fandom is a perfect match for Ubuntu, as they are by nature very much in line with open source and remix culture."
Re:Whisky Tango Foxtrot (Score:5, Informative)
A booth.
Some news.
Every year Ubuntu reaches out to 450,000 fans of various alternative music - punk rock, folk and many others, at Woodstock Stop in Poland.
(they have a small tent where they give out CDs and leaflets, and talk about the system.)
Re:Ubuntu and anime? (Score:1, Informative)
Sounds great, but the situation is that anime cannot be watched with the default Ubuntu player. It lacks support for ASS subtitles and MKV linked chapters.
The only good approach to this problem now (for any distribution) is to build mplayer from git development tree (for MKV linked chapters).
Huh? Just install SMPlayer or VLC from the Ubuntu Software Center and you're good to go. Or "sudo aptitude install smplayer" if you prefer the command line.
Re:Problems for anime fans with Linux (Score:3, Informative)
Not really.
See, here's your problem. You're comparing competent players to an incompetent player. One that in particular has terrible support for ASS, by far the most popular subtitle format for fansubs. Try mplayer (or a GUI frontend if that's your thing) sometime.
For you, maybe. For most people it is a tiny, tiny issue though. And anyways, that's certainly not the case [mplayerhq.hu] anyway.
Plenty of them run well with Wine, but the amount that manage to make something as simple as a VN not work at all under Wine is certainly impressive.
The Touhou games all work fine under Wine, minus the occasional minor graphical glitch.
Re:Seems like (Score:2, Informative)
Lennart Poettering, the pulseaudio lead, is an Red Hat employee. Jaroslav Kysela and Takashi Iwai, the only two persons in the world who get paid for their work in ALSA, are hired by Red Hat and Novell respectively.
So where is Mark (and his money) when we need him?
And Ubuntu is known to have done a great deal of damage to PulseAudio's reputation by royally fsck up Poettering's work [0pointer.de].
Anime on Ubuntu? Seriously?? (Score:5, Informative)
I really believe the Anime fandom is a perfect match for Ubuntu, as they are by nature very much in line with open source and remix culture.
That is getting stupider over time - considering that out of box Ubuntu can't play 99% of anime found on say mininova.
And even after installing all possible drivers, applications and codecs, Linux video playback - especially as anime concerned - is still eons behind of CCCP [cccp-project.net] on Windows.
And what about the "remix culture" reference? Manga and anime fandom is interesting because there are more people who do new/original stuff - and few who rehash the old stuff. And even if they "remix" (what a stupid word lessig came up with) they still do it their own way, not some dumb copy paste like what many CC-lovers [wikipedia.org] do.
Ubunchu!
That is manga [wikipedia.org], not anime [wikipedia.org].
Re:Yeah, right! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Problems for anime fans with Linux (Score:3, Informative)
[blockquote]See, here's your problem. You're comparing competent players to an incompetent player. One that in particular has terrible support for ASS, by far the most popular subtitle format for fansubs. Try mplayer (or a GUI frontend if that's your thing) sometime.[/blockquote]
VLC gets it's SSA/ASS subtitle rendering support from the mplayer project. So except for being a step behind MPlayer's they are using the same code. Implementation, however, may be making a difference.
At least I can get sound to work on VLC.
Re:Problems for anime fans with Linux (Score:3, Informative)
Doesn't bluray have region coding enforced?
It does, but they abandoned the DVD regions for "zones", and Japan and the US now share a zone.
Re:Anime on Ubuntu? Seriously?? (Score:4, Informative)
considering that out of box Ubuntu can't play 99% of anime found on say mininova.
I clicked a .mkv, it said "I don't have a codec installed, shall I find one?", I clicked "yes", and it did, then it played. Not "out of the box" in the literal sense, but pretty close, and better than googling for codecs...
(Though after checking that it worked, I still went back to mplayer, which has so far played 100% of things I've thrown at it, and with hardware accelerated decoding now too :-P )
Re:Yeah, right! (Score:1, Informative)
Seems like you've never been to an anime convention. You won't find many metrosexuals there. Much of the fandom is still made up of guys and girls with bad hygiene, the opposite of metrosexuals. And this is from an anime fan who attends at two anime conventions each year.
Re:What? Why? Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
Granted their intentions are dubious, there's no need to illegitimate a fandom because you don't appreciate it. Anime is marketed for ages up to 35 and covers a wide range of genres not appropriate for children for reasons ranging from violence and sexual content (hentai gore etc) to slow moving plots and novel based stories which children would find boring or would not understand. I doubt that Grave of the Firefly's could be classified as a children's cartoon show, neither could Monster, Mushishi, and the Ghost in the Shell is really marketed at older teens to those in their late 20's.
You may not have even heard of most of these and that is probably because US TV doesn't think they should bother showing anime that is more for an older crowd that can appreciate serious themes. Part of that is because they know that people like you will turn on the tv, see animation, and immediately classify it as a children's show and switch. I'm going to guess that you're either someone in their late 20's or above and that you've only been exposed to things like Naruto, Sailor moon, Pokemon, etc and had an entire childhood of cartoons for kids.
I am not going to ask you to research or explore this beyond your exposure, but I will ask that you please not make an uninformed generalisation about a whole medium based on maybe filtered exposure to one of it's genres. It would also be nice for you not to be a dick.
Now get off my lawn kudasai