I can’t help but notice important stuff needs to get posted
FOR THOSE OF YOU FOOLISH ENOUGH TO TRY TO ADD YOUR OWN CONTENT
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steal it from YouTube
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host it on a Google Drive
1 is self explanatory. Find the video, queue the url, bam, video. 2 is kind of complicated.
ASK YOURSELF SOME QUESTIONS:
- Is my video huge?
- Is the cartoon I want to show dubbed or subbed?
- If it’s subbed, is it soft or hard subbed?
- If the file has multiple language audio, what is the order of the streams?
- Are you ripping a DVD or Bluray because you are a dinosaur/hipster who is married to physical media?
If your cartoon is dubbed or has hard subtitles, just upload it, you’re probably set unless it’s in a codec Drive doesn’t care for (like, say, newer ones like VP9 and h265).
Now, if your cartoon has soft subtitles or an inappropriate language as the default audio (read:not English), or if the thing is too big because you’re somewhere with bandwidth limits, you need to mess with it. Now, you could learn the arcane art of FFmpeg command line fuckery (seriously don’t do this please) or you can just download Handbrake and let it do things for you.
(honestly Handbrake is mostly just a fancy gui for FFmpeg but holy shit you don’t want to get into it, trust me)
Handbrake can read your file or disc, figure out what’s going on and give you options to do things
SO LET’S GO THROUGH THIS, TAB BY TAB
PICTURE
You probably shouldn’t mess with anything in this tab unless you’re deliberately downscaling the file or if Handbrake is being super aggressive with chopping off pixels. Do note that if you’re ripping a DVD with any kind of not 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio, the crop will probably take it under 480 vertical pixels, which means Google Drive will re-encode and serve 360p video
FILTERS
If you’re working from a file or Bluray, congratulations, nothing here does anything and you should turn all of these options off. If you’re ripping a DVD that you absolutely, positively are 100% certain contains dirty ass NTSC/PAL video and not a beautiful 23.976 fps encode, then you should turn on the deinterlacing and detelecining options to help make the video look better after encoding. Do note that these will increase the length the encode takes.
VIDEO
HERE’S WHERE THE FUN STARTS. Keep the codec at h264 because Google Drive likes that. If you’re using a file or Bluray as your source, you should select Same as source as your framerate. If you’re rippping a DVD that’s encoded at 23.973 fps, you want that too. If your DVD has NTSC video (29.97 and you told Handbrake to detelecine the video, you should pick 23.976. If your DVD has PAL video, you probably shouldn’t fuck with the framerate because odds are the video is already sped up to begin with and now we’re talking about AviSynth scripts to unfuck that whole nonsense and then you also run the risk of desyncing the audio but we’re talking about anime so there’s not much to desync and
Anyway, also check off Constant framerate. Also, unless you have CPU threads to throw around or time to spare, you should just keep the encoder at the Fast preset. As for the quality, 25 RF is a good sweet spot in my experience; to the left of it starts killing quality and to the right starts inflating file sizes.
More importantly, experiment with all of these until you find your thing
AUDIO:
OH BOY, LET’S TALK AUDIO STREAMS. So, even though Google Drive will preserve all audio and subtitle streams if you download the file, we’re obviously not downloading the file, we’re streaming it. As such, Google Drive just defaults to the first audio stream it sees, so we want whatever audio we want heard to be the only one. So, load up the file or disc in a video player and check the stream mappings (or just go by the languages generated by Handbrake) and pick that.
MOST IMPORTANTLY
don’t try to re-encode the audio, just tell Handbrake to pass it through, it won’t even save you much space and you guarantee that the audio is fine
SUBTITLES:
BURN IN THE SUBTITLES. JUST, BURN THEM IN.
If you’re pulling from a source with multiple scripts, make sure to select the proper script for the right audio track. For instance, a lot of DVDs had songs and signs subtitle tracks for dubs, but it’ll be marked English as will the full English dialogue track for the Japanese audio. So, open up a video player and make sure you have the right subs picked.
In files with only one sub track, honestly, I would manually select the track anyway because I don’t fucking trust the foreign audio scan and most people encoding don’t properly label that shit anyway.
So, about the forced only thing… Sometimes, VobSubs (DVD subs) won’t/will work if you have this selected and you just need to play with it (make use of the Live Preview option up top; you can do a quick 30 second snippet and figure out if you’ve got your settings right instead of re-encoding the entire file over again no I’ve never had to do this shut up)
Now you press the encode button and wait. Then you check the video, and I mean actually check more than 5 seconds. And then you upload it!
BUT NOW YOU NEED TO ADD IT TO THE QUEUE WITH A LINK
Right-click on the file you want to queue, get a shareable link and add it or have someone add it for you.
Congratulations, you cartooned. Enjoy your dumb pedophile drawings.