Oh, hey there. Long time, no see (unless you’re also a toku fan, in which case, you know I’m still around). The short version to explain my absence is simple: I lost any interest in encoding anime whatsoever and just couldn’t be bothered anymore. Sure, there was stuff that I wanted to do, like finishing the 3rd Mobile Suit Gundam film’s dub cut, finally finishing Digimon Adventure, and getting back to recutting SEED, but the drive to actually do any of that was gone. In all honesty, that drive hasn’t been fully sparked again yet either, but I do still intend to finish those projects at some point, but don’t ask me when. Thanks to some job opportunities that pay better than encoding anime (which doesn’t pay at all), my time has been better spent on that. The toku encoding takes about 75% less time than the anime work too, so my focus has been there for the past two years.

Anyway, despite all that, my passion for Gundam hasn’t died, but thanks to RightStuf’s fantastic support of Gundam on BD, I no longer saw a need to spend time on encoding releases like G Gundam or even my favorite, Gundam X, when they were likely to get a BD within a year or so of their Japanese release. I’m patient enough to wait. But now, we have 4K UHD BD.

I know what you’re thinking. “OZC, you dumbass, there have been 4K Gundam discs for over a year, with Thunderbolt December Sky!” Yes, you’re right. But, that release had the dub and subs, and since UHD BDs are region-free, there was no problem with importing it. Plus, other than using an HDCP stripper and HDMI capture card, there was no good way to get the 4K material. But several months ago, a method to decrypt 4K BDs was discovered, and I happened to have the right kind of BDXL drive to decrypt discs. While some discs are now on ADC, I personally purchased the 4K release of Gundam 00: A Wakening of the Trailblazer and got the decryption key produced so I could dump the disc. Because Nozomi/RightStuf have stated they have no intention of supporting UHD BD at this time, I decided it was time to un-retire.

There’s a LOT of technical bullshit behind this UHD encode, and I’ve detailed that in a UHD+HDR post in the navbar. All of this is almost certain to apply to future UHD encodes I’d like to do, including the upcoming releases of CCA, F91, and Ghost in the Shell. I’ll be getting GitS 2, but, well, Funi, so that one’s gonna likely stay a private encode. I’ll also warn now that since I have gotten DMCA takedowns on Gundam in the past, there is a possibility that I’ll have to remove the release post for this movie at some future point. As in the past, these are only being done because we can’t get them in the same quality here in the US with dub and subs. As soon as that changes, the encodes will not be needed and we’ll pull them. I understand how those of you not in the US feel about this policy, but keep in mind, I’m based in the US and so that’s the market I’m paying attention to.

I’m not gonna bullshit anyone here. I know that there are a lot of people that don’t like my encodes, don’t like my choices for subtitle settings, and hell, probably don’t like me. And that’s fine. You can either download what I’m putting out there or move on. To those of you that are sticking around, I’m not going to pretend I’ll be back to the same level of releases I was at before. Those days are gone. But when the mood strikes and I have something I want to work on, I’m still here.

By the way, drop in on our Discord because I barely use IRC now.