The saga of Stretch and his unruly computer

No idea on the Avail as I don't use uTorrent, but all your other suppositions were right.

96 seeds (i. e. bittorrent clients regardless of their application name) for this file are visible to the tracker; 25 peers are downloading this file. That's 4:1 for the seeders, and your contribution in this particular case may not be needed, thus you aren't connected to any of the peers even though you seed the file (and of course you aren't connected to any seed because you don't need parts for this file any more). Your ratio is 0.962 for this file, meaning you contributed your fair share here already (almost as much as you downloaded); you're on the sideline of the playing field now, just in case the number of seeds would decrease significantly.

The individual ratios per file don't matter too much IMHO but your uTorrent should display the total traffic volume of all your uploads and downloads somewhere (Azureus does that in the main window's status line), and that ratio would indeed tell us how "good" a guy you are. ;-) Every byte you uploaded can be assumed to having been downloaded by a peer, therefore it was a "good" byte regardless of which file it was for.

"Avail 1.000" probably means that the seeds can offer 100% of this particular file's content at this moment (according to the seeds you can see, which in this special case is just your own client who has 1.000 copies of that file - you're not connected to other seeds, remember?), meaning the leechers can be confident of getting the complete file (instead of just a part of it). There may be torrent clients who don't even start to download a file unless they can see all parts of it available in the network (as an incomplete file would be worthless to them); in eMule you can configure this behaviour, I'm not sure how the torrent clients work in this aspect. Azureus has a similar "availability" display for each file, even showing a horizontal bar of all parts of that torrent's data so that you can see whether they are available in complete form. Compare that value to files you are downloading from many seeds, the "Avail" value should be a lot higher than 1 in this case.

I'm still trying to figure out why sometimes downloading works and sometimes it doesn't. I wondered if the speeds I'm uploading at might have something to do with the problem, and performed a speed test. The optimal rates I got back were 2513/367 kbps (306.8/44.8 KB/sec). I'm guessing the numbers before the slash are a download rate, because they didn't matter in the list of choices of upload rates. I tried 384 K which was closest to 367, but nothing happened. So I tried 64 K as closest to 44.8, but the result was the same. I gave up on that for the time being, and read "A port must be forwarded from your router to uTorrent to get good speeds. This port is used to let other peers connect to you". So, I pressed "Test if port is forwarded properly" and got "Error! Port 18645 does not appear to be open". Does this make any sense to anyone?

My DSL line in Germany is 2048 down/384 up kbps; your line's parameters may well be 2560 down/384 up kbps, these numbers look plausible to me (and you should know them from the contract you signed with your ISP anyway). Don't expect 100% of speed, the measuring system might just not be exact enough. If you can upload more than, say, 93% of your bandwidth when running 24 hours without interrupt, it's a decent result already (and a 24 hours measurement would be a lot more precise; my ISP offers lists about the daily traffic, just look at these and do the math from there in case you have something like that as well).

When you start your bittorrent client it will connect to whatever tracker/server is being used in your torrent files, telling them a number of one port (from 0 to 65535; 18645 may be the value you configured in your utorrent or possibly even a random value from session to session to make you less "vulnerable") where your client is listening for incoming connection attempts (there can only be one program on your PC listening to one particular port at a time).
If you run a firewall on your PC and don't allow incoming requests on that port number, your client will be "deaf" and won't learn about new seeders; if your internet connection is running via a router (additional hardware box on your side) you would have to configure that router as to accept incoming calls on that port and send them to the same port number on your computer (this is named "port forwarding"). If any of these two problems exists in your configuration then you have yourself denied making use of most seeds (with the possible exception of those seeds that you're uploading to, that would explain why you get more than zero download).
I configured my firewall to allow incoming calls to ports where my bittorrent client listens to... well, actually, an incoming call came and my firewall asked me: "This call will be listened to by Azureus, are you okay with that and do you want me to remember that?", which I replied "yes" to and had no problems with this ever since. If you run a firewall on your PC, try opening it for a short moment and watch whether this makes any difference for your torrent client - if so, then teach your firewall about what's "good" and "bad".

It was my father who handled the router, I know very little about it. My computer has always operated through a router, both before it crashed and afterwards. What I don't understand (well, one of many things I don't understand), is why the BitComet program didn't seem to have any trouble downloading after the computer was repaired, but uTorrent does. I'm starting to think that I should try yet another downloading program.

Oh yeah, my external hard drive has arrived, but I've been so busy lately that I haven't had time to hook it up yet.

Do your BitComet resp. uTorrent use the same port for listening to incoming calls? Maybe one application's port has been opened in the router but not the other one (in case they're different).

I don't know... how would I tell? I had never heard of "ports" until yesterday. Maybe my father would understand.

Usually you configure these port numbers in your Bittorrent client. Your father might then have to check about the configuration of these port numbers in the router.

By the way, when I returned from work tonight, I found that the fairies had returned and every fansubs I had been attempting to download was complete. What's more, when I began downloading some new ones, one began racing at over 200 Kbps and is already over half complete in the space of 15 minutes or so! Maybe because it's the latest episode of a popular series (Asatte no Houkou), and has just become available?

If there was any "configuring" of port numbers, it must have been done by default. Again, I'll ask my father about it.

AHHH .. there is nothing better than a glass of good port! Opps, wrong type of port.

(DD - I am going to keep this very simple and straight forward, so pls forgive me for any inaccuracies or over-simplifications)

Have you ever wondered how your computer can surf the net and read your email at the same time and not get confused. Well, your computer keeps track of different types of communications traffic by using port-numbers. Normally you don't need to worry about this, but it does help to understand what it is and how it works.

Current IP addresses are always a string of four number sequences (separated by a dot or period) - example - 123.123.123.123. (FYI, there is new standard for IP numbers - called IPv6 - that is being rolled out). Your IP address is your routing identity on the internet.

There is a fifth string of digits that appears at the end of your IP address, which is called a port number. This port number will range from 0 to 65,000. When written, it will appear in the following format (note the colon and 5th string of digits after the IP address) - 123.123.123.123:1280. Some port numbers are reserved and assigned for a specific program, and some programs will almost randomly borrow a port number for their use. Those nasty computer worms take advantage of insecure ports to attempt to sneak into your computer. Firewalls programs (and routers) will monitor and protect your computer ports. Blocking a port can prevent a program from being able to access the internet.

Pls see below for additional information

A general description of ports
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_port_(software)

A list of reserved or assigned port numbers
http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers

A summary of the new IPv6 standard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv6

I hope that this helps.

humm ... correction .. there is a better wiki PORT description at the following site -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_and_UDP_port

And pls do not ask what TCP and UDP is! It is something called a data packet protocol. Most of the information coming to and from your computer will be using the TCP protocol. Your computer will keep track of what protocol is being used, so the two terms 'can be considered' interchangable.

Just a little add-on: A "port" isn't "secure" or "insecure" by nature, it's just a number of a "slot" at first.

Then again, an application (program) running on a PC may request the operating system (Windows) to be informed about any incoming call that is being received at a particular port number, which is called "listening to a port". What this application will then do with that incoming requests's data is up to the application.

This is where the "insecurity" starts: Some applications have bugs, to the degree that certain incoming data is (mis)interpreted as a program to be executed on the PC. Which effectively means that if you run a buggy program listening to a particular port, and some evil person happens to find your PC and guess the correct port number, this person may try and send a particular string to that port on your PC hoping to find that buggy program listening to it and then executing this string as program. (The "guessing" is done by simply trying port numbers one after another, AKA "port scanning".)

So one should be cautious about allowing other computers to send data any port number of your own PC, and cautious about allowing untrusted programs on your own PC to listen to incoming ports. Then again, the latter isn't feasible in reality as Windows itself has to be considered the most untrusted program, and it runs quite a few obscure (and sometimes buggy) services listening to ports.

This is where the firewall comes into effect. A firewall simply allows/denies access to ports, in the most simple configuration it denies access to all ports. Which means you won't be able to receive any data then... so you have to treat your firewall as a "white list" for your application: You explicitly tell the firewall to trust certain applications, such as your web browser or your bittorrent client. This is no foolproof solution - but at least you're now aware of the programs that handle incoming data.

So, does this have something to do with the messages I sometimes get when I try to start up programs I've downloaded--I forget the exact wording, but they remind me that the program might not be "trustworthy" (or something like that), and ask if I want to procede?

The impression I'm getting is that someone as ignorant as myself shouldn't fool with things like Ports and would be best off to be patient and wait for the fansubs to take as long as they want to download.

As for that message, it depends on which program actually displays it (you should be able to see that from the message box). Do you start those programs from the Windows Explorer or from within your torrent client (who might then remember that you received the program from an "unreliable" source, and thus warn you about starting it)?

The firewall won't prevent you from starting programs - it will only inform you when anything happens on these ports, be that your application trying to send data to the outside or trying to listen to a port for incoming data (both might be dangerous in their own way, smuggling information to the outside can be as bad as letting a burglar in).

You should be fully aware of whom you allow access to your PC and which application you trust. Apparently you trust your Bittorrent client, so if you were running a firewall (regardless whether this firewall is running on your PC or on the router device itself, ask your father about this one) you (two) should configure it appropriately, or else it won't work properly and you have no benefit from that. We're talking about the equivalent of you lending the key to your home's door to other people - would you do that without knowing what you're doing? uTorrent is one of these "people", the port number is the "door", and the allow/deny configuration in the firewall resp. router would be the "key". (I know this network stuff sounds confusing, it was confusing to me as well when I first learned about it.)

I performed a search in Windows XP help & support for the keyword "Firewall", and yes, it seems to have one. I found the command which would allow me to turn it off, but I didn't do so because it strongly advised me not to.

I asked my father if he had ever done any port configuring, and basically his reply was no: "I never fool with it" he said. "Once it's up and running, you leave it alone" He was under the impression that my computer operated through just one "ethernet" port (located in the computer, not the router). "You're doing things I never tried to do" he said.

So, I guess the single question I would most like an answer to is this: Do you experts really believe that problems with ports or the firewall are seriously handicapping or endangering my computer? And is it something a not very computer-savvy person like myself could, or should, do anything about? Sometimes I'm reluctant to ask questions here because I get so much information that I only wind up more confused than I began.

On the bright side, I've noticed a few distinct improvements in the performance of my computer since it was repaired and re-programmed. For instance, a couple months ago I downloaded the "Sky Girls" OVA, but couldn't get it to burn onto a DVD. Now, it has burned, and plays just fine on the TV downstairs. Perhaps the K-lite codec pack can be thanked for this; or maybe the fact that there are fewer programs in general--I've only got about half as many desktop logos as I used to have!

I wouldn't advise you to run your PC without a firewall (Windows contains too many bugs and holes, even more so if you don't regularly patch the system). Then again, Windows' own firewall isn't the most clever or user friendly one - I'm using a different firewall instead.

Simply disabling your firewall would certainly endanger your PC; learning more about it might help to fix certain handicaps. After all, someone must have told your firewall to allow your web browser to access CAR, and (hopefully) someone told it to allow incoming connections to be handled by your Bittorrent client... who did that? Because if your firewall were configured to simply allow each and every application to send and receive data then it would be as useful as your home's door if that were open day and night. Your house's door is "up and running" as well, it's just that you expect it to do more than allow you to enter - so at one time you had to learn how to use a key for a door...

More about ports: Actually these ports are on your computer as well as on your router. Which means that during an "outgoing call" your computer opens a connection from one of its own outgoing ports to one of the router's incoming ports, and the router then opens a connection from one of its own outgoing ports to whatever computer you wanted to access; during an "incoming call" the remote computer opens a connection to an incoming port on your router (because your router is the only box visible to the internet - your PC is not visible outside your local network), and the router then opens a connection from one of its own outgoing ports to one of your computer's incoming ports. Both of which happen only if you tell your router to do so - if you decide not to "route" (i. e. forward) a call through your router then it simply won't get a connection.
Of course you can simply configure your router to forward each and every call in both directions (and perhaps that's what your father did to get it "up and running")... which would mean that the router wouldn't provide any additional security for your computer behind that box. A router can provide additional security by blocking all ports that you know you won't ever make use of but might be used by the "bad guys" - but only if you use it appropriately (i. e. use the router as a "white list" just like a firewall, and only allow those connections that you actually want).
If you don't do that then your router may still be useful if (and only if) your household has more than one computer connected to the same internet line (which was the original reason for creating routers: Simultaneously mapping several computers to one internet connection). Also, there are routers that can run their own firewalls, thus providing additional security (because a virus running on your PC with system privileges might be able to disable the Windows firewall but not the firewall on the router if this one is protected with a separate password).

As for the "flood of information": Even if you decide not to change anything about your current configuration it might have given you additional insight into how your PC (and your internet access) works. For example, port numbers are from 0 to 65535, so in theory you could have as many simultaneous connections to other computers as you have ports. In reality, your Windows system (and your ISP) will limit you to something of the magnitude of 1000 simultaneous connections. And in your specific case, your router might limit you to an even smaller number of connections (older routers often can't handle more than 255 connections at a time, modern routers would handle 1000 connections just fine). So if you're running a file sharing application like your Bittorrent client, communicating with dozens (if not hundreds) of other computers at the same time, and you experience any performance bottleneck in your internet connection, your router might be a good candidate to check first (the router's manual and/or the router manufacturer's homepage should give you information about how many simultaneous connection this box can handle). Just knowing that can be helpful - if you ever ask for help about your PC's communication problems, you should mention first that you're using a router (and perhaps the exact machine model) plus the Windows firewall.

If that "Sky Girls" OVA has been encoded with some codec you didn't have installed before getting K-Lite, and if by "burning" you mean "implicitly converting to some Video DVD format" (instead of just burning a data DVD), then K-Lite might be responsible for this improvement. If you simply burn AVI files onto data DVDs then K-Lite wouldn't have been relevant at all (because in this case you didn't try to interpret the data before burning it).

I guess I should have mentioned that there are two different internet-capable computers in the house, which (I presume) is why we have a router. I probably still sound like a computer baka to you experts, but I think I have learned a good deal about them since I became interested in anime--most of it through this discussion forum.

The Sky Girls OVA was burned onto an hour-and-a-half DVD, not a Data Disc. This particular show is an MP4 fansub, so I'm sure it wouldn't work on an ordinary DVD player, but it does play on the fancy MP4 capable one that I've got now. It used to be that only "avi" fansubs had any chance or burning successfully (i.e. being readable downstairs), but now MP4 ones are OK and maybe some other formats would work as well.

Okay, another problem: I thought the problem with MPC saving images had been fixed, but when I tried to save an image from an R1 DVD today I got the old "getcurrentimage failure, hr = 8000ffff" message. However, there doesn't seem to be a problem when dealing with fansubs. I tried to save images from three different fansubs, and all were successful. I tried to save images from three different R1 discs (from three different companies) and all failed. Some sort of security device within the DVDs, maybe?

I have only one computer in the house and thus no router - all my router related knowledge is based on reading internet boards about file sharing programs. In this aspect your father has more practical experience than I have. And yes, you learned a lot during this thread. IMHO the most important step about technical know-how is to be able to describe your problems using the appropriate technical terms so that the specialists can easily understand your scenario, and suggest solutions; that's why I am focussing on explaining technical terms such as "port" or "router". (And discussing with you makes me aware to use the most exact terms in my own postings as well, I mustn't be sloppy here. This is a good training for me as well.)

Burning only 90 minutes onto a DVD means you surely converted the MPEG4 video stream to MPEG2 in the process, so K-Lite might in fact have provided the additional codec for this conversion.

You mean you have a DVD player that is able to play videos in a *.mp4 container? Now that's cool. Does it actually play "MPEG-4 Part 10" video streams (also known as H.264 and MPEG-4 AVC)? (Wikipedia description of the .mp4 container: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_14)

No idea about the screencaps problem as I'm always using the ZoomPlayer and never had problems with it.

It's nice to know that you are benefitting from these conversations somehow--I was afraid you might be starting to consider them to be a nuisance. The DVD player I was talking about is the same one I mentioned back at post118#1092. I'm not familiar with the term "container" (even though you've probably already defined it at least once), and I didn't know there was more than one "part" to the MP4 format. I've never tried to download anything in H264 format, but I suppose I could perform an experiment...

The "container" is the format of the file containing several streams (video, audio, subtitles, whatever); your player has to split the container into streams and then play all these streams, so it must understand the container format and provide codecs for all stream formats.

The file name extension would most likely show you which container we're talking about: ".avi" = Microsoft Audio/Video (oldest), ".ogm" = Ogg Media, ".mkv" = Matroska, ".mp4" = probably what you name "MP4 container".

The ".mp4" container may well contain a video stream of the H.264 codec (which is some MPEG4 variant after all), like many of the more recent ".mkv" containers do. Let the MediaInfo program read some of your *.mkv or *.mp4 containers to find out which video streams they actually contain.

I finally got around to trying out my Iomega HardDrive recently. It was far smaller than I'd expected--maybe 1/10 the size of the box it came in. Using the "Quick Start Guide" I plugged in the various cables and sure enough the main computer signalled that it had identified some new software. The instructions were extremely brief, and since the "troubleshooting guide" said that the Drive not appearing in "My Computer" was a problem I went and looked there. It was displayed there, and I opened it. This took me to a screen which listed the "Details" of the drive ("Free Space 298 GB", etc) but was otherwise completely blank. I'd expected some sort of message like "What files would you like to copy to the hard drive?" or something like that to come up. I fooled around for awhile without accomplishing anything, then asked my father if he knew what might be going on. He said maybe the page was blank because I hadn't entered anything into the drive yet. So that was it--you don't start from the drive and go to whatever files/folders/whatever you want to backup, it's the other way around. The things I most wanted to "backup" were the programs I'd lost when the computer crashed. I went through "My Documents" and "All Programs" sending programs to Iomega--stuff like K-Lite Codec Pack, Media Player Classic, uTorrent.exe, etc. I find that I haven't even put a significant dent into the 298GB of new memory--I wonder what I'll put there next...

Remember that programs are the most unlikely candidates for being backed up this way because a significant part of their configuration is stored in the Windows registry. Copying these files onto a new computer, for example, will most likely not work whereas restoring a damaged installation on a computer where said programs were already configured may work (if the damage wasn't done to the registry, that is).

The most likely candidates for large drives are of course large files, such as videos. Increasing video quality will call for increasing file sizes in the future (such as 25-50 GB for a single movie, that's what the new blue-ray resp. HD-DVD formats are meant for).

If I backed up everything from the "All Programs" page, would I have a fail-safe method of protecting my precious programs against my computer crashing again, or dying of old age?

I'm not sure what "page" you're referring to. If this page equals the content of the "c:\programs" directory where you most likely installed all your programs to, then the answer would be "no" because the registry isn't a part of that directory, it's an integrated part of the Windows OS. (Actually not even a file you can simply backup as such IIRC, it's several files and they are protected by the system.)

You can export and save the registry separately by invoking the "regedit" program; this procedure would create one text file of, say, 50-100 MB that you could later double-click as to let its content overwrite (more exactly: be added to) the registry's content.

But this "registry export file" might contain information that would only be valid for your particular hardware. Thus it would be an option for restoring a "crashed" computer (restoring this registry content PLUS copying your programs backup might in fact work) while it would probably not work on any other hardware if your computer died of old age. (Then again, I'm only guessing here, I don't know exactly what else is being stored in the registry besides configuration data for programs and Windows components. But you might well get problems when restoring this file on a different Windows version because there are different registry formats as well.)

Anyway, if you ever want to understand what exactly the installation of some software you're about to install is writing into the registry you can 1. export the registry, 2. perform the installation, 3. export the registry once again into some other file, and 4. compare the content of these two files. If they're identical you can be sure that removing the installed program from your harddisk will not leave any traces in the registry that aren't referring to an existing programm any more. (The installation may still have left other traces on your machine, such as copying some of its own files into the Windows directory... which would then again be files you didn't backup by your procedure.)

Reliably backing up program installations by just one routine is almost impossible given the chaotic nature of Windows.

I was going through my computer, looking for files to copy in the hard drive, when I came across a Nero Media Player icon. I wondered where that came from, since I thought that program had been wiped out when the computer crashed, so I clicked on it to see what would happen. Somehow I still have that program--maybe it's standard equipment and was on the disk I used to reload programs after the computer was repaired. No big deal, I exited and moved on. Later, however, I went to "My Documents" and found that Nero has appointed itself my primary Media Player program and every non-MKV fansub is now identified by the Nero icon! I really F-----g hate programs like this, especially since I (I mean we) went to so much trouble to make media Player Classic my primary program. I can still select Media Player Classic, but Nero is now the default choice. Does anybody know how I can undo this, and return things to the way they were?

Another minor problem: I keep finding that when I try to copy programs into the external hard drive, only the shortcuts got copied. I find plenty of shortcuts, but I can't figure out where the actual programs are hidden within my computer.

Right click on the file. Click Open With and Choose Program Find Windows Media Player Classic,then on the bottom click the box Always Use

That will reset the default file type back to MPC.

Humm ...Well when you originally installed Media Player Classic (MPC), it told your computer to automatically change all of your AVI/MKV/OGM file settings to use MPC when running.

You clicked on and installed Nero Media Player (NMP) ... and guess what it automatically told the computer to do? ...

The simplest solution would be to uninstall NMP - which (with luck) should change the settings back.

If that does not work - then you will have to uninstall K-LITE (which includes MPC), reboot your computer and then reinstall it - which should change all of the associated media player settings to MPC.

Pls remember when uninstalling a program ... ALWAYS USE THE UNINSTALL FEATURE located at...
(start)
(settings)
(control panel)
(add/remove programs)
Find and select the program and select the (uninstall) button

And then backing up programs - you can find them in the folder located at (my computer - C Drive - Programs), but there is also a 2nd important file that needs to be backed up - it is called a reg-file (or registry file)

What is a reg-file? Pls look here -
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/256986

How to back up a reg-file? Pls look here -
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756

Hope that this helps.

Forbin's method seems to have worked--on the second try, that is. The first time around it had no effect; the Nero icons were still there. I restarted the computer, but still there was no change. I was about to try Jan-chan's method, but I figured I'd try once more. This time I clicked Choose Program, then Always Use, then Choose Program again, and this time it did the trick.
Thanks!

...Maybe I spoke to soon. Although all but one fansub (Evangelion ReDeath, for some reason) have lost the Nero logo and have the MPC one again, when I look closely, they say "NeroMediaPlayer media files". But when I click "Open" MPC is used, so I won't complain (too much).

ReDeath might be a MPEG1 video (with the ".mpg" file extension), not an Windows Audio-Video container (with the ".avi" extension). As icons are assigned to file name extensions you'd have to do the same process (Choose Program / Always Use) for this file type (and for other file types such as ".mkv" or ".ogm" or ".mp4") as well.

Yes, ReDeath had a ".mpg" suffix, and after going through the same steps it now has the MPC logo, but also the "NeroMediaPlayer media files" description, like all the other files. Thanks again.

Wouldn't it be great if once a person specified "Always Use" for a certain media-playing program, it became impossible for any other program to take it's place (like that'll ever happen...)?

In principle Windows XP is a multi-user operating system. This means that you can create different user identifications and assign different kinds of "rights" to these, and the right to write data about certain system information (such as the mapping between file name extensions and visible icons) might be one of these. When you boot your PC you will be asked which user identification you want to use (and usually a password to identify yourself), and from here on you have the rights of this identity for whatever you do, including software installations.

But you would only profit from any such entitlement concept if you create one "system" user that's allowed to do anything, so you have to be very sure about what you're doing) and one "normal" user that's not allowed to install software at all, or in your case not allowed to overwrite the file extension mapping. And you'd have to switch this user in certain cases because sometimes you'll want the protection and sometimes you'll want the privileges. I'm also not sure in how far the concept of entitlement currently supported by Windows XP would already allow for that detail (allow/forbid changing file extension mapping) but you might ask your PC repairman for details.

Note that this would mean that certain installation processes that you might start under the "normal" user will then simply fail, and sometimes leave a broken installation behind (because the person who wrote the installation procedure might not have been clever enough to foresee that some of the "essential" steps in the installation might be forbidden by your system's entitlement concept). A more clever programmer might show you a box "sorry, I can't install my program on your machine because you denied me some rights that I consider essential for this installation" and then automatically uninstall the already installed parts of the software in question - but how many products will actually support this?

What's more, you don't actually want this information to be protected against any modification. What if you happen to find a better video player in the future and then were prevented to re-assign the file name extensions to this new program? Would you then want to kill your complete Windows installation and start again from scratch? Or bother to find the configuration element in Windows that protects a certain configuration element against being overwritten? That would require a system expert for installing each and every new software, something that's not feasible for a privately used PC (while PCs being used in office are actually rund in this mode, as their users are nor supposed to install software anyway and the admin needs to know the configuration of each and every PC as to figure out whether the next software to be purchased will run on all machines in question).

What you actually want is "software behaving nicely", i. e. not overwriting things you didn't ask resp. entitle them to overwrite. But asking isn't always feasible because the user might not understand the question ("I'm going to overwrite this very internal system library now because I shipped with a more fancy version of it, and I'm willing to risk that some of the older programs already being installed on your machine might cease functioning because of this; are you okay with this - YES/NO"). Some "nice" programs actually follow this path, and even though these messages might sound intimidating at times I still prefer answering those questions (and asking my search engine about its meaning) than my system being overwritten without getting a chance to say "no". But obviously Nero isn't "playing nice" - which is all we have learned about your situation this time. So you can either avoid Nero for being "arrogant" or use it and cope with the consequences... or try and search the whole Nero configuration for a setting where you can turn on/off this automatic "system pollution".

I think I'll just avoid Nero--Nero Media player, that is; I'm quite happy with the Nero DVD burning program (I bet the Media Player program was included on the disc I used to reload the burning program after my computer was repaired). MPC works just fine for playing fansubs; I haven't reloaded the Windows media Player program because I'd never use it and I want to minimize the total number of programs. I just think that I should have been given a message like "Would you like to make Nero Media Player your default program?" instead of the @#$%&! program just going ahead and doing it!

I entered my "BitTorrents Downloads" file, in which I store episodes of as yet incomplete series in a number of folders, and noticed that apparently all folders which have titles which start with letters from A to J have vanished (unless their titles began with brackets). 20 folders with titles beginning with the letters K to U remain intact. I performed a search for the missing Angel Heart folder (the first time I'd ever used this feature), and the computer located a file full of Angel Heart images in "My Pictures", but not the missing file full of the episodes themselves. I was reluctant to report this because I can't remember how many files have vanished and I suppose it's possible (but highly unlikely) that I deleted them by accident. I decided I'd wait and see if anything else disappears (so far, nothing has) and I copied all remaining folders onto my external hard drive. I mentioned this problem to my father, who said it sounded like a virus to him. I went to my AVG Anti-Virus program and performed a test. It scanned 46786 "things" (it didn't give a term) but reported "No threats found", which was a relief. So... does anybody know what might be going on here? Am I losing my mind? Is my computer just getting old?

P.S: my downloading via uTorrent has been moving at a crawl lately; could the two problems be related?

Is your AVG program regularly updated with the latest virus patterns? (My virus scanner software checks for this at least once a day plus with every new start of an internet line connection.) Your observation indeed sounds like a virus effect; your PC getting old wouldn't result in any such selective damage. And yes, a virus taking over your machine might well slow down your communication applications as well (because the virus' plausible function would be to hog your line capacity while attacking other PCs to further spread this virus...).

Is your Windows System upgraded to the newest level of patches? Microsoft releases new patches every second thursday of a month (IIRC), and I install the "required" patches as soon as possible because they might fix holes in the Windows code that allow other machines to attack your PC from outside. (Finding a virus is good, preventing it from entering your machine in the first place is better.)

If you're missing files and can't rule out that you deleted them by accident then I'd suggest you open your "trash bin" icon and check whether they're still around (some "delete" operations move the files into the trash bin to allow you to undo this operation). And the sooner you do this the better because the space occupied by the trash bin is limited and older deleted files are erased permanently to give way to newer deleted files.
You may also use the Windows Explorer to search your whole harddisk for files with a particular extension (you might have inadvertantly move those file elsewhere by a random mouse operation in the Explorer or whatnot... I am not doing all copy/move/delete operations via the keyboard so I'm always aware where the data go).

In general I move files (including those of series I'm in the process of collecting) away from the working directory of any filesharing program as soon as I receive the individual file complete, if only to minimize the potential damage that could occur in case the programmer introduced a bug (or a virus) into that program. For the same reason I am not using things like "My Pictures" or "My Videos" because these directories can be found easily via the Windows configuration and as such might be primary targets for a nasty virus; while unusual directory names (or even separate hard disks) by no means prevent a virus from deleting files there they give it the challenge of deleting something immediately important for the machine to function, thus uncovering the existence of the virus to the computer user and denying the virus to further abuse your machine).
Thus copying your anime collection (that you probably access sparingly, compared to Windows standard applications such as your web browser) to an external hard drive (that you might even detach from your PC when you're not using it) sounds a good idea to me. To make up for the ease of use with these "My Videos" directories I instead have mapped certain of my data directories to Windows drive letters. I have used almost every letter of the alphabet) so that my path names remain short and I can still easily access my data; Videos on drive "v:", music on drive "m:", text files including manga scanlations on drive "t:", incoming/collection files on drive "i:". (These are not drive partitions but simple path name mappings, specified in the "c:autoexec.bat" script of Windows: "subst m: c:datamusic" etc.)

The best protection of data still seems to be storing it on a device that's not connected to your PC and not easy to delete. In case of incomplete series you might prefer DVD-RW disks that you backup the incoming files to (like once a week or when 4 GB have arrived), and when one "collection target" is complete you read the files back to your harddisk and burn then on a DVD-ROM. (I'm not using that degree of security but I tend to burn complete series to DVD as soon as possible.)

It also might be that he developed a bad directory. I had that one, I had to run a full system scan to repair it and I lost about half of my files. :(

Ah yes, doing a directory consistency check might also be an interesting idea in this scenario: Open the Windows Explorer, open "Workplace" (or whatever it may be named like in English...), select the hard disk drive with the mouse, right click, "attributes", "extra", then there should be a "check" and a "defrag" option.

Yep .. I have doubts that Stretch has been running a defrag on his primary C-drive. Hard drives are broken up into small storage areas called 'sectors'. The process of creating (or downloading) and deleting files on a hard disk can result in a situation in which files can be widely scattered over the surface of the hard drive - resulting in the mechanical drive head to have to bounce around to collect the all of data that comprise a certain file. This situation is called file-fragmentation and will slow down the response time of a computer.

The process of defragging (or defragmention) is a canned-feature of all Windows OS'. When started, it can take from 30 to 60 minutes to run (depend on the size of hard drive) and will rearrange all of the data stored on the (surface of the) drive in a more orderly and organized manner - which can result in a noticable increase in the read/write response time of computer.

There is also another low level utility called 'error-checking' which can be run on a computer hard drive to see if there are any lost or hanging file fragments. You will mostly likely see an error-checking message popup when your OS software takes a significant crash and is trying to recover.

Both of these utilies are very safe to run.

The defrag utility should be considered part of the 'housekeeping' duties of a computer user. I (personally) run defrag about once a month on my two primary drives and I will run 'error-checking' about once every six months on all of my drives.

Forbin's description of having a bad (or unreadable) directory and having to run 'a full system scan', mostly resulted in him having to run 'error-checking' on his primary drive. But pls let me warn you - 'error-checking' can take a while! I remember it taking over two-hours on a big 300gig drive and I think that I got over 400 reported file fragments. But it was a major crash and in the end, I did get back some 99% of my important files.

Thank you for giving me such a detailed and helpful response--I was afraid you might take the attitude that "this is such a stupid question that I will not justify it with a response"! Anyway, I opened the AVG program and clicked on a "check for updates" option. The response I got was "Your AVG program already has the latest update installed and is fully up to date". I realise that this is no guarantee that the latest version of AVG is capable of dealing with the latest virus.

Next, I tried to check whether or not my directory might be bad. I wasn't able to find the exact steps you listed, but through trial-and-error I went to "My Computer", "Local disk (C:)", "Properties", and "Tools", and there I found "Error Checking" and "Defragmentation" options. I ordered the computer to conduct an error check, but was told this couldn't be done until the next time I shut down the computer; I instructed it to do so. For the time being I was impatient to find some answers, so I conducted a Disk Defragmentation. When complete I got a report which didn't make much sense to me, but included the following figures:

Volume (C:)

Volume size = 149 GB<br>
Cluster size = 4 KB<br>
Used space = 93.70 GB<br>
Free space = 55.34 GB<br>
Percent free space = 37 %<br>

Volume fragmentation

Total fragmentation = 0 %<br>
File fragmentation = 0 %<br>
Free space fragmentation = 0 %<br>

File fragmentation

Total files = 53,433<br>
Average file size = 2 MB<br>
Total fragmented files = 0<br>
Total excess fragments = 0<br>
Average fragments per file = 0.99<br>

Pagefile fragmentation

Pagefile size = 1.50 GB<br>
Total fragments = 1<br>

Folder fragmentation

Total folders = 3,328<br>
Fragmented folders = 1<br>
Excess folder fragments = 0<br>

Master File Table (MFT) fragmentation

Total MFT size = 56 MB<br>
MFT record count = 57,077<br>
Percent MFT in use = 99 %<br>
Total MFT fragments = 3<br>

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Files that cannot be defragmented
None

So, I guess one file was fragmented (I wish it gave a name), but all have been defragmented.

I'm familiar with the Recycle Bin, and if the missing folders somehow got sent there they must have been lost long ago when the bin was "emptied". But I'm pretty careful to check that bin before I empty it.

Maybe I should save episodes on data disks, using the Multisession option; I've tended to not do this, and instead wait until I've accumulated the entire series before I burn them, because it seems that multisession disks don't play as well on the MP4 DVD player downstairs as non-multisession ones do.

So, if I created a new folder, and gave it a nondescript name which had nothing to do with BitTorrents or video or whatever, that might provide some protection?

I think new Patches are installed automatically, but I'll have to check.

So, that's where I am; no more files have vanished, and I've been assured that a number of my computer's features are working just the way they should be. If things don't get any worse than they are, I could endure. Thanks again!

I hadn't read Jan-chan's message yet when I began typing mine. I hadn't heard of either Defragmentation or Error Checks until now. My Defragmentation took awhile, but nowhere near 30-60 minutes; did I do it right? I'm about to sign off and shut down the computer, so that an error check can be performed.

Usually you do the error check before the defragmentation; in older Windows versions this was a requirement because the defragmentation could lead to increased damage if the file system already contained errors... maybe the Windows XP version doesn't have this problem any more.

Your disk was "0% fragmented", i. e. each of your files were in one contiguous place on the disk, which already is the best possible situation (therefore the process went so fast in your case; I conclude this disk is quite new and was never more than 95% full, or it was recently defragmentated by your PC repairman or whatnot). If your disk becomes almost full and you still try to copy a large file to it, then Windows can't find one contiguous place for the new file and instead has to find a number of positions on the disk to store these data to, and then link them together to a "chain of clusters". When you read that file again then Windows has to follow that "chain of clusters" to find all parts of that file - this is what "fragmented" means (and why it slows down your PC: The harddisk head has to move to all the positions of that cluster chain to collect the data of one file). I run defragmentation about 1-2 times a year, usually when my hard disk was very full and I have deleted a large amount of data (such as after burning a DVD for a series I have successfully collected).

Imagine that during the process of linking those clusters together your PC stopped working (power failure, bluescreen etc.). This can result in a situation when clusters aren't part of any file but not marked as "free" either, because the process of assigning them from one state to another simply wasn't completed yet. These clusters are then "lost", they occupy space on the hard disk that Windows can't be made use of any more. The "error checking" function analyses the whole hard disk, creates a map of all clusters and checks which clusters are occupied by files (therefore it will take a while) - this way it can detect those lost clusters and perhaps convert them back into the files they once were (if it can detect the original file name and find the whole cluster chain of said file, none of which must be overwritten by another file already - one more reason to do the search/repair as soon as possible after the loss, because normal operation of the PC might implicitly destroy the restore option of these data). By the way, the "repair" process of the "error checking" function is the reason why you had to reboot: Certain files on the disk are permanently opened while Windows is running, and this would prevent the repair function from write-accessing these files (in case their cluster chain was damaged and were to be modified).

Imagine that you were about to delete your while torrent download directory in one step and the PC stopped working this very moment - then the whole content of that directory might have turned into "lost clusters", and could possibly be restored... that's what Forbin experienced.

Humm ... You are lucky - you have a 150gig harddrive that is only 63% full (with about 93gig of data). I have a 300gig harddrive that is 97% full ... which of course will take 3+ times as long to defrag.

Defragmentating a harddisk that is 97% full doesn't make a lot of sense: On one hand it will be fragmentated again very soon, on the other hand it will be quite difficult to find contiguous places to move the most fragmentated files to (which means that creating these places will cost a lot of additional time). That's why for optimum defragmentation (speed & effect) the defrag program requires 15% of free space (which currently I don't have on any of my 550 GB of hard disks).

Arn't we both setting great examples for others. I have over a terabyte of drive space (or 1,000 gig scattered on four drives) and I am constantly having drive space issues.

Oh, my father reminded me that when Win2K first came out, Microsoftie was recommending that the HD be defragged once a week (which seems to be a bit too often for me.)

When I returned from work yesterday I started the computer up again and the error check began (I didn't get any messages about whether I should perform the error check or defragmentation first). Since this was taking awhile and nothing else could be done with the computer while it was in progress, I went downstairs to work on something else. When I returned, the computer was running normally--but there was no report of the results of the error check. I'm hoping this means no serious problems were found--or are the results displayed somewhere secret? So, no fragmentation or disk errors have been detected, my Anti-virus program is supposed to be up-to-date, yet folders are missing and downloading is taking place at a frustratingly slow pace; what might I do next? I'll check Windows Patches.

If the "error check" function were told to "repair" files I remember these files would be created in the root directory of the drive (i. e. in c:\ in your scenario?), with file names that contain numbers (remember that Windows might not know the original file name). Do you see any files there that you have never seen before?

If we assume that your impression of download speed is based on reasonable expectations (so that we can rule out scenarios like downloading files with extremely few seeds and the like), that your PC has no virus and the problems are not related, then my next questions would be about your network connection. Did anything change there recently? Are other computers share the same internet connection?

Apparently Windows likes to refer to "patches" as "automatic updates", and they do indeed take place automatically within my computer. No, there are two internet-connected computers operating in this household, the same as it has been for several years. My first thought when I started noticing that downloads were taking a long time was that maybe there weren't all that many uTorrent people who were into spring season anime. Or maybe a new version of uTorrent had come along and my version (1.6.1) had been rendered obsolete. I was tempted to uninstall uTorrent and try a different BitTorrent program. I guess I'd prefer a virus-free computer which just takes a long time to conduct downloads. At least I'm fairly familiar with Defragmentation and Error Checks now. So I guess the correct explanation is that yes, I am losing my mind!

You are doing everything correctly (based on your posted comments). These utilities will not tell you very much, unless it encounters a problem that requires human intervention (as in a human making a decision about a finding.)

I think that you are taking a prudent and through approach to attempting to identify potential problems with your computer - complicated by a learning curve in which you are having to learn some of the more uncommon and darker secrets to trouble-shooting the (often strange and funky) MS operating system (OS).

After checking on the MS-patches, I might want to suggest that you consider making a small offering of a wrist-watch or appliance in appeasement of the Computer Dieties.

Otherwise, I think you will have exaused most of the more 'standard' trouble shooting proceedures.

The only other possible utility that might offer some help would be some app (application or progam) to clean up (or optimize) your registry file. But this has some measure of risk and should only be done by someone who knows what they are doing (or who knows how to undo it) and has also backed up the reg-file.

I am offering a link for some shareware (free) reg-cleanup utilities, but I would not suggest that you do it (nor do I think your computer needs it.)

http://www.download.com/3120-20_4-0.html?tg=dl-20&qt=registry cleanup&tag=srch

However painful & troublesome this experience was, I think that you have learned some important things about computers. Two thumbs up!!!

Now that everything in the "virus department" has been checked but the PC indeed shares the same internet line with another computer in the same household (e. g. via a router they're both connected to), the next logical question would be: Did that second computer recently increase its activities in internet communication? Your internet line is a scarce ressource for both computers, so if one of them increases its use of that ressource it won't remain unnoticed by the other (potentially resulting in slower torrent downloads).
Are you familiar with tools for displaying the amount of communication traffic each of these two computers were causing, so that you could see whether there was a significant change recently? (These tools might be ISP specific, at least on my machine they are.)

Not to give you unnecessary worries, but... let's assume both these computers use the same internet line via some router they're both connected to. In this case if that second computer had a virus (causing it to use more communication connections in order to spread itself) it would indirectly affect your own PC's download performance.
And if there actually were a router involved, then this router itself might be the source of the download speed problem.

DD is concerned about your posting in which you reported a slow network speed (specifically regarding downloads.) His train of thought is that if the problem is not with your computer (which you already checked on) then it might be somewhere on your local network connection.

Let me interject and say - the most understandable and predictable explanation as to why your bittorrent program is not downloading is because the other peers on the network are NOT UPLOADING to you. Just wait a few minutes (or longer) and then see what happens. Everybody gets a turn in a peer-to-peer network, but just at the same time.

Peer to peer networks - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_to_peer

Bittorrent web site - http://www.bittorrent.com/
Wikipedia entry for Bittorrent - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent

I use a peer-to-peer program called BITLORD which is designed to support multiple consecutive torrent uploads and downloads and it works well for me. But it does have some problems and controversy (such as the embedded ads).

Wiki entry for Bitload - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitLord
Bitload web site - http://www.bitlord.com/

Back to DDs last posting.

(The speed of a network connection is also referred to as bandwidth.)

You mentioned that there is another computer in your house and it shares the same network connection. If the other computer is infected with a worm/virus, then it might be sucking up some of the bandwidth. And you already know how to trouble shoot a computer for updates, hard drive optimization and antivirus software.

There are a number of other things that can cause a slow network connection (outside of the computer). Such as.....

• Bad NIC (network interface component) in a computer.
  
• Defective or failing router.
  
• Intentional limiting of bandwidth by the network vendor (ISP).
  
• Interference with network cable (a newly introduced electrical device may be causing interference with the network connection.)
  
• And many many more esoteric and bizarre sources of interference....
  

I asked my father (the other computer is his) if anything had changed recently about how much communication he had been conducting with the internet, and what sort of protection from viruses his computer has. He said he hardly ever goes online, and therefore his computer should be much less vulnerable to viruses than mine (I know my niece sometimes plays games on that computer). he said he was supposed to be automatically protected from viruses by a service from our cable provider, except the program keeps saying it needs to update, but then refuses to do so!

I conducted the Bandwith Speed Test which Jan-chan suggested (it was surprisingly quick and easy, too). The results were:

Communications: 4.2 Megabits per second
Storage: 518.5 Kilobytes per second
1MB File Download: 2 seconds
Subjective Rating: Awesome

Well, that's very flattering but doesn't really explain the problems I've been having. Could it be that I just watch such obscure shows (stuff like Lucky Star and Lovely Complex) that there aren't many peers and seeders? I downloaded Code Geass recently, and noticed that it didn't take quite as long as the other shows I wanted.

Your network speed is great! You probably have a cable modem.

You are probably correct... some torrent links do not have many peers or seeders that are connected and consequently will only download at a slower rate and will not reach the download speeds of a more popular anime fansub.

Well, the only solution would be to run two or three concurrent torrent downloads - if only to maximize your bandwidth. I usually start up three or six torrent downloads each night before going to bed and they will mostly be done by the morning.

Yes, we have a modem. You mean I could add one or more additional BitTorrent programs, like Azureous, in addition to uTorrent? I had sort of assumed that that was either impossible, or a new one would automatically delete an old one, or more than one would interfere with each other.

humm ... grrr ... well, download and stash away (on your local hard drive) several torrent-links that you want to download.

Then start (or launch) your torrent progam (I think it is bittorrent) and start the first download sesion.

Then start bittorrent again and start a 2nd download session. Then start bittorrent again and begin a 3rd download sesson.

You will be running three bittorrent progams, each managing a different download session.

The microsofie OS will permit you to run multiple sessons of the same program (in this case - bittorrent). Each of the three or six concurrent bittorrent programs will 'share' the available bandwidth between them.

Hey Stretch! The PC that I recommened for you will actually support (based on the CPU and the 500meg or 1gig memory) up to ten or fifteen concurrent bittorrent download sessions. And it will actually have enough memory/cpu speed to allow you to watch new AVI/MKV/OGM fansub titles while downloading.

Using several applications to handle the same (torrent) protocol isn't likely to gain you anything because the (few?) seeds then have to split their upload bandwidth amongst the "different" leechers, resulting in the same speed for you as before. Splitting your bandwidth amongst different networks, on the other hand, may actually make sense as you could then possibly make use of more seeds. (Which is why hybrid clients such as Shareaza do exist: Really rare files may be accessible differently in different networks - and note that torrents are best for recent releases while older releases might be better supported in networks with a longer life span, such as ed2k.)

There's a simple test for your PC: Download some very recent release (such as, released this week) of a really popular anime that has > 100 seeds (let's say, Murder Princess episode 2 in Ayako's XviD release). If this file's download speed is still significantly below your expectation then evaluating your network situation might make some sense.

I added Murder Princess OVA 2 to my list at about the same time as you posted your message (in fact, I had already added it just before I read the message). When I got home from work I found it was listed as "downloading" but is in fact inactive (both a Down Speed and Up Speed of zero). under the category of "Seeds" for this fansub the figure is 0(0), and under "Peers" it is 0(555). I have yet to figure out what the numbers in parenthesis mean, but I suspect the fact that there seem to be no seeds and lots of peers would explain why no progress has been made. Every fansub I'd requested had a red icon (that's been happening a lot lately). Here's what uTorrent FAQs have to say about this:

"What do the red icons mean on the torrent status icons?
These red icons indicate that µTorrent was not able to reach the tracker. This could happen when the tracker goes offline, becomes overloaded, or when the domain simply doesn't exist anymore. Check Tracker Status on the General tab to see what the exact error message is.

In many cases, seeing this (especially if you see hostname not found in Tracker Status) and having DHT on but still having no peers to connect to may mean that you'll have to find another copy of the torrent on another tracker.

In some cases, this is normal because the tracker is overloaded or temporarily down. The torrent itself should keep seeding/downloading as long as you got some peers, and if the tracker comes back up or becomes responsive, you should have no lost ratio so long as you don't close µTorrent or stop the torrent."

The "General" tab shows only two figures for Murder Princess, "Downloaded" at 0.0% and "Availability" at 0.000

Unfortunately, said Ayako release in fact has 0 seeds right now (that's tough luck!), so this doesn't seem to be a problem of your PC.

DHT (distributed hash table) is a mechanism allowing torrent clients to directly communicate, simulating a server by distributing its functions amongst all torrent clients. This would allow you to bypass a failure of the torrent tracker (at the cost of some ressources for each PC but it's usually worth the effort). I have DHT activated, and I assume you do as well.

I just did a check on the Ayako's Murder Princess 02 torrent and it appears to be up-n-running. You might want to try to download and run the torrent again.

http://a.scarywater.net/ayako/

Murder Princess still has yet to begin downloading. I'll try to "Force Start" it, though that seldom seems to make any difference. There are still no seeds listed but 211 peers.

One thing which I definitely don't understand is that sometimes downloading does take place even when the particular fansub has one of the red icons on it.

Try deleting the old torrent and downloading a new one. I have had it happen that the torrent that I downloaded was corrupt or poorly written and I had to find a new one - which worked with no problems.

I tried that last night, and it seemed to have the effect of causing several torrents which were sitting idle with the red icons to "jump start" and do a little downloading; but Murder Princess itself wasn't affected. It didn't make sense, so I didn't mention it (until now). Practically every torrent (fansub) that I try to download sits idle for long periods of time with the red icon, then, if I'm lucky, eventually it comes to life and the downloading is completed relatively quickly (usually while I'm away from the computer--I get a message about the download being complete when I return). I deleted Murder Princess and re-added the torrent to my list. It briefly had the blue icon which signifies that it is downloading, then went red while still at 0.0% complete. I guess nothing can be accomplished while there are no seeders.

I wonder--how does the very first person who tries to download a torrent do so? There wouldn't be any seeds for him/her, would there?

It wouldn't make much sense for a releaser to upload a torrent file to some server (so that you were able to download this torrent file) and then not seeding this torrent (i. e. sharing a complete instance of the file[s]) for at least a significant amount of time, so the first person to download is in a very nice situation, getting data uploaded by all available seeds without competing against other leechers.

Currently the Ayako files do have seeds (according to their own tracker page) but this torrent list at animesuki (http://www.animesuki.com/archive.php) flags "Murder Princess by Ayako" with a yellow warning sign and the text "trouble with tracker", meaning that you might not be the only leecher experiencing problems with this particular torrent. Do you leech any download that isn't flagged this way by AnimeSuki? Does this download work?

Then again, the Murder Princess OVA 2 (XviD) torrent by Ayako works for me, I see 420 complete seeds of which 7 connected to my Azureus client within seconds and the download began to transfer data almost immediately.

I don't see any "yellow warning sign" on Murder Princess; Romeo x Juliet 4 has a yellow triangle containing an exclamation point, which causes the message "TrackerProblemPopUp" to appear at the bottom of the page when I position my mouse on it.

Should I just uninstall uTorrent and switch to a different BitTorrent program?

Ok, I really don't know what the problem is, but I don't think that it either your computer and/or your network connection.

I have already downloaded Monster Princess (some days ago) and I reopened the torrent to (1) check on the status of the torrent traffic and to (2) act as a seeding uploader. Right now I am seeing a total of 147-seeders and 247-leechers (using my torrent program, which can be different with other torrent programs.)

You might want to consider rebooting and then restarting your torrents (while this might have a low chance of fixing your problem, it is simple and takes almost no time)

I use a (what I consider to be) a simple and strong torrent program which has some good diagnostic tools and reports.

program at - http://www.bittornado.com/download.html

more info at - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTornado

Pls be aware that you can use two different torrent programs at the same time (but probably not on the same torrent link.)

You might want to consider using Utorrent for Monster Princess and Bittorrent for Romeo-n-Juliet, and then see what happens.

This is just some quick (and random) thoughts as to what you can/might do to trouble shoot your problems.

Gotta run.

For DD - here is an interesting wiki entry - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_software

Do you suppose my problems with slow downloading might have something to do with "Ports" and "Port Mapping"? I was looking through the uTorrent Connection Setup Guide, and it said a common mistake was failure to "Forward Ports", which would prevent me from "getting the most" out of uTorrent--that kind of sounds like the situation I'm in. When I performed a check to "Test if port is forwarded properly" I got a message "Error! Port 18645 does not appear to be open". I "enabled encryption" which the instructions said should be done if I was experiencing slow speed, but that doesn't seem to have made any difference. It seems it's possible to "Randomise port each time uTorrent starts"--would that be a good idea?

When I sat down at the computer this morning, I found that one of the long backlog of torrents I want to download had been completed successfully.

For some reason, when I added episode 1 of the a.f.k. fansub of Lucky Star to my queue, the entire torrent downloaded in about two seconds! Several other torrents have also downloaded successfully, though a sizeable backlog remains.

Do you mean the torrent file (which is small enough to download in two seconds) or the (video) file(s) referenced by a torrent file (which would then mean >100 MB within two seconds, something your line won't be able to handle)? Do the downloaded (video) files work, or are they broken (and contain supercompressible binary zeroes or whatnot, thus explaining a download of >100 MB within two seconds)?

(Protocol) encryption is used in file sharing protocols to hide the nature of the protocol in use from ISPs (who might be interested in giving torrent transfers a lower priority/bandwidth compared to, say, web browsing). If one of your seeds requires the use of encryption (which is configurable in the seed's client) but your client doesn't support it you wouldn't be able to communicate with this particular seed, thus enabling encryption (but not requiring it) is indeed a good idea.

Ports and port mapping are indeed an issue for every user of a router. Then again, once you (or whoever) configured your router appropriately so that your torrent downloads work, this should continue working unless someone modified the configuration of either the router or the port definition within the torrent client. As I don't use a router (because I have only one computer) I can only explain the basics: Your torrent client tells "the world" to contact it at port 18645 but actually it's not your PC that's connected to the internet, it's your router - therefore the router needs to be told that whenever a connection request at port 18645 arrives it's your PC (represented by the IP address and port number of this PC within your local network) that should be informed about this request, not any other PC in your house, and that only your PC is entitled to reply to requests on this port (so that several PCs communicating over the same router don't interfere with each other even when using the same port numbers). If the router doesn't "forward" this request to your PC then you aren't getting informed about seeds and other leechers, and perhaps can't even receive torrent data at all.

Having said that, it appears obvious that using random ports would cause problems for router users because every time your torrent client decides to use a new random port number you would have to change your router configuration as to forward this particular port number appropriately. For users whose PC is directly connected to the internet these random port numbers can be useful because using the same port number to transfer a huge amount of data over a long time might again cause the ISP to throttle down the traffic speed on this particular port number, and I am in fact using such a mechanism on my PC for exactly this reason (with eMule, not with my torrent client).

To make things even more complex, there are routers that can be configured automatically by your PC, and even by your torrent client. Does your router support UPnP? And does your torrent client support it as well? If both were the case then you would be able to configure your torrent client to tell your router about the port to be mapped via this UPnP protocol... but be sure to ask the other PC users in your house for permission before doing so (because your might inadvertantly overwrite some part of the router configuration that's mandatory for other PCs in your house).

Thanks to Jan-Chan for the Wikipedia page, but changing the torrent client wouldn't solve the main problem which appears to be the complexity of the network situation (including router and torrent client configuration), and if this torrent client once worked there shouldn't be a reason to replace it by another client whose configuration Stretch would have to learn again from scratch.

It was definitely the Video file which zoomed from 0.0% complete to 100% in the blink of an eye. But I think I know why--I already had that file in my BitTorrents Downloads file (I had started downloading it again because I thought the version I already had was from a different fansubber, but it wasn't). If the first copy had still been on the uTorrent page, I'm sure I'd have gotten a "This torrent is already on your list. Do you want to change it?" message. But since it had been moved elsewhere, I'm guessing it was copied back to the uTorrent page to fulfill my request to re-download it. Does that make any sense? Anyway, I had one definitely new fansub--actually, it had been sitting idle on the list for some time-- download in around ten minutes last night. At one point it was DLing at over 300 kB/s--I'm happy if a torrent is making any progress at all, even if it's just 0.1%! It seems that if all the torrents I've requested have locked up, sometimes if I restart the computer, then "Force Start" a torrent (assign it top priority, I think), it will come to life and possibly download in it's entirety.

I asked my father if the router supports UPnP. "I doubt it" he said. It was reconfigured (if that's the right word) when my computer was repaired after crashing. It's an older model router, he mentioned.

The Ayako fansub of Murder Princess episode 2 has finally finished downloading. I'm burning it onto a DVD right now.

If you have downloaded some video file, then re-download the torrent file and tell your torrent client to re-download the same video into the same file on your harddisk that already contains the data you want, then this video file isn't overwritten immediately (as there's no need for "initializing" its content). The torrent client will only overwrite individual sectors of the video file as soon as the corresponding data have been received via your internet connection.

With that in mind, any decent torrent client should be able to periodically check whether the file already contains the data it is expected to contain at the end of the download process as described in the torrent file, so that you are able to continue a download by using network B (which is the torrent network in your case) after it "dried out" in network A (be that the ed2k network, some chat community, or whatever) without having to tell your torrent client anything about this file's condition and without re-downloading parts of the file that you already have (I successfully used this feature a couple of times already).
This appears to have happenend in your case: You started the download anew, but only seconds later the feature of periodic content check kicked in and found out that this download was already completed.
As the content check is performed by computing checksums of this file's content part by part and compare these with the checksums in the torrent file (a process that will take 5-10 seconds for an average anime episode on an average PC) the screen display might in fact look as if the file were transferred with an incredible speed.

If you "moved away" the video file using your torrent client then this client might still have been able to understand the relation between the restarted download and the video file holding its content (and thus find out that you already have the data you want to download); had you moved away the video file using, say, the Windows Explorer then your torrent client would have had no choice but to perform the complete download one more time.

Thanks for the explanation. As long as it's not a sign of another new problem, I'm happy.

Well, I'm burning about a DVD a day lately full of newly downloaded stuff, so I won't complain too much. One secret I've discovered is that when everything locks up with the red icons, I don't have to restart the computer as a whole, just closing uTorrent then reopening it resets everything. "Force-starting" seems to help, too--I choose a torrent which shows plenty of seeders available, force-start it, and more often than not complete downloading takes place relatively soon. Believe it or not, because I've been pretty busy with other projects lately, and have ordered a good deal of R1 stuff, I've accumulated quite a bit of unwatched anime and am scrambling to catch up.

Lucky you... I can hardly count the unwatched animes piling up here since I've become more active in producing fansubs myself. I really need a couple of months for a break...

It took about as much time to download twelve episodes of Venus vs. Virus as it normally does to download just a single episode of one of the shows I like! So maybe the fact that not a whole lot of people are interested in most of my favorite titles really does have a lot to do with the trouble I've been having downloading.

This doesn't really have anything to do with anime, and I hope Rebecca doesn't mind me asking such questions on their website, but I can't think of a better team of computer experts who might be able to give me an answer. I've been trying to create my own website, and it is imperative that I be able to see the images I add to it, but I can't--the images aren't "rendered", all I get is the "Alt" caption. I've been searching various websites for an explanation of why this might be, and it was hinted that my browser (Internet Explorer) might be responsible. Does anyone know anything about this? Is Internet Explorer notorious for being poorly suited to work with HTML language? By the way, I've found the lessons I've learned here at Mikomi to be very helpful--often times I would read a lesson and say "I already know how to do that! I do it all the time while editing reviews!"

Oh, and fansub downloading is still going just fine.

Images have to be hosted somewhere (like Mikomi) do a 'view source' command on your browser and see the img command that is used.

And No I never had an image issue with IE before. I've had lots of image location issues, but not a image issue. Most of the issues I have had are my fault (Caps instead of lower case, wrong filename, didn't upload to my host) things like that.

Exact HTML code for referencing the images, please ("view source" etc.). Even better would be the URL of your site (provided it's already online) so that we can reproduce your problem (although I consider Forbin's idea a good guess).

When you get the ALT text of the images your browser will usually display some small icon where the image was supposed to appear. You should be able to select this icon with your right mouse and select "display image" from the context menu, meaning that you request this image alone (without the HTML document around it). What does happen? (I expect a "HTTP-404" error which might then confirm Forbin's assumption; the URL of your image in this error message would be informative.)

The Internet Exploder does have issues with everything, including images (e. g. not being able to display transparent PNGs as such) but not being able to display an image at all would be very unusual - MSIE's main flaw is being too tolerant against HTML code errors instead of being too strict.

Did you try to validate the HTML code of your pages?

It sounds like the problem I have is that the images aren't already "hosted" somewhere on the internet, rather at the moment they are stored within my own computer. What I'm trying to do is take photos with a digital camera, transfer them to the computer, then transfer them yet again to the website program (which is in it's infant stage). When I right click on the image icon within the program, one option I'm given is "Show Picture"--but when I click on this nothing happens. Another option is "Properties" which might be informative:

Protocol: Hyper Text Transfer Protocol
Type: Not Available
Address: http://c/Documents and Settings/Owner/My Documents/My%
Size: Not Available
Dimensions: 200 x 300 pixels
Created: Not Available
Modified: Not Available

The full name of the image I'm experimenting with is:

C:Documents and SettingsOwnerMy DocumentsFantastiques Blister Pack (front).Jpg

(the slash marks have been deleted by the program here at Mikomi)

I've also tried giving it the http:// prefix, which has the same effect: a blank frame (within which is the standard tiny box with a red letter X), appears within the program with the Alt caption.

Here is the line from the create-your-own-website program which deals with this image:

img src="http://C:Documents and SettingsOwnerMy DocumentsMy PicturesFantastiques Blister Pack (front).Jpg" width="200" height="300" alt="Fantastiques Blister Pack (front)"

I removed the < and /> symbols from the beginning and end so that the command would appear here--otherwise you got this:



I'm frustrated because everything about the website tutorial other than this problem with images was surprisingly simple and easy, and I could have been making a lot of progress. But without my images, it would all be pretty pointless. The tutorial I've been using is:

http://www.quackit.com/html/tutorial/

Thanks for all the help!

Well you actually have 2 problems.


First is you cannot have spaces in your picture title 'Fantastiques Blister Pack' should be renamed to 'Fantastiques-Blister-Pack' and


Second yes you need to host it (store it on a internet visible computer) outside, your personal won't work. Goto Imageshack.us and upload your picture there (free but requires registration), it will comeback with a full URL that you can use into your src command.

Where in the internet is your HTML document "hosted"? You told us that you're creating a homepage, which will have to be hosted on some server of the internet as well... all you need is to put documents an images together on the same server, and that's it.

You should use relative paths for images, not absolute paths. Example: You have document d.html and image i.jpg in the same directory - and you refer to the image via the path "i.jpg" (without anything else - no path, no protocol, really nothing). This will work in all cases when both files are in the same directory, regardless whether this will be your local computer or an internet server. (You don't want to rewrite all your pages when you put them there, right?=

If you want information about some broken website of your own, then MSIE is the worst possible browser to give that information to you (because it's too fault tolerant). Test your site with Mozilla instead; if that works it will most likely work with MSIE as well (but not vice versa), and if it doesn't work you'll get more meaningful error messages. (The path of your file was on Drive "C:" of your local machine, which proved Forbin's assumption correct.)

Slash marks can be used in posting by writing TWO slashes, such as "//".

The HTTP prefix doesn't change the fact that your images are on your local machine. If you were to request them from some internet server (such as Mikomi CAR), then you would use the "http://" prefix.

We still don't know the site in the internet where you're going to publish your HTML document(s).

Actually, your file names can have whitespace... but I strongly advise against that because it might cause all kinds of problems for you in other situations because you'd have to quote (embed into "") these filenames whereever you use them, and that might be tricky at times). Whitespace in internet URLs (unique resource locators, i. e. unique addresses of a file in the Web) can be written as "%20" to avoid problems. But... don't do it. ;-)

I acted upon Forbin's suggestion that I employ the ImageShack website, and that seems to have solved the problem. I did have a bit of a problem with my images turning out inexplicably small within the website program, until I figured out that I'd been using the miniaturized "Thumbnail" images instead of the full size "Hotlink" ones! But once that was done this logjam which had been holding me up had been removed and I made a lot of progress yesterday. Thanks!

Okay, here's my latest quandry: While downloading some fansubs recently I noticed an ad for a "convert MKV to avi" program (or some title like that). That would be very useful for me, since I strongly prefer to watch my anime on the DVD player downstairs, but MKV won't play down there. I don't like the idea of fooling around with my computer's programs when not absolutely necessary, but this program from SWREG Inc. was very tempting and came with a free trial version offer. I downloaded the trial version, and after a modest amount of swearing and head-scratching figured out how it worked. It turned out that the trial version would only convert one minute long segments, but I completed a couple of those successfully and paid for the standard version. Here's where the problems began; instead of the usual NeroMediaPlayer media files Icons which I got with the trial conversions, now I get just a "File" Icon and "Cannot render the file" when I try to play it. This never happened with the trial conversions. As I tried repeatedly to figure out what was wrong (attempting short conversions to save time), sometimes the program would seem to lock up and when I gave up and tried to shut it down I'd get the message that the program was not responding. The closest I came to success was when once I did get the NeroMediaPlayer icon, and it played--but the subtitles were gone and several minutes had been cropped off the end of the episode! Also, it seemed a little out of focus. Again, none of these problems ever occured with the trial conversions. This new program strongly recommended downloading the Divx Decoder, and I began to wonder if that might be the reason for my troubles, but I already have that as part of the K-Lite Codec Pack--and besides, if it was, wouldn't the trial conversions have had the same problems? So, in summary I got better results with the trial version of this program than with the full-fledged one! Does anyone know what might be going on here?

Your general problem is nontrivial, that's why a solution out of the box isn't that likely.

MKV is a container format, not a stream format. So what a MKV to AVI converter has to do is:
1. Split the MKV container into streams (video, audio, subtitles, whatnot).
2. Select the streams you want to be in the AVI (remember the MKV can hold more than one audio and more than one subtitle stream which AVIs that your DVD player will be able to handle cannot, so "convert" is underspecified).
3. Convert the streams to formats that are allowed in AVI containers (usually MKV hold streams that aren't allowed in AVI, such as H.264 for video or Ogg Vorbis for audio, that's why MKV is necessary in the first place), which means that you need the codecs for each and every stream you want to convert, which includes codecs that weren't even invented when the out-of-the-box solution was released, explaining why your converter cannot possibly ship with all required codecs. So in case some codec were missing your converter ought to tell you that it wasn't able to read the input stream and that you have to go and install the codec for a particular "FourCC" value (which is the internal name of the codec used for some stream).
4. Hard-code the selected subtitles into the video stream, because MKV can hold softsubs and AVI cannot, for which you have to specify which codec you want to use for the recompression of the video stream (hopefully a codec that your equipment for playing the AVI container supports already), again by selecting the subtitle stream you want to use and the codec format you want your video stream to be encoded into.
5. Deal with the problematic situation that MKV converters can hold several different video parts in different frame rates (main parts of an anime may be in 24 frames per second while OP/ED songs may be in 30 frames per second due to more movement) while AVI can hold only one video stream in only one frame rate.
6. Video streams in modern codecs may use screen sizes larger than your DVD player is able to play (most DVD players can't handle more than 720px per line while Japanese HDTV airings of animes may well be 1280px per line which H.264 encoded streams in MKV containers can handle), which would mean you'd have to downscale the size of each and every image of the whole video stream during the recompression (which will cost a lot of quality while the resulting video may even grow in size as DivX/XviD are less efficient than H.264). What's worse, AVI can hold video sizes larger than 720px per line that your standalone player may not be able to play, so again "convert to AVI" is underspecified.
7. Both MKV and AVI allow audio streams to be stored within the container with a time offset, which means that the converter must be able to read any potential offset value from the MKV container and insert the audio stream with that same offset value into the AVI container, otherwise both streams will become asynchronous.

Did I scare you? ;-) Your actual problem may well be on the simple Windows level where your file manager once again doesn't show you the exact file names, as icons are mapped to file name extensions. Then again, if you can't play the conversion result even by using "Send To" to your preferred video player (doubleclicking may fail due to a weird filename but "Sent To" should still work) then the converter output would appear to be broken.
Are you able to open the MKV container as well as the conversion result with MediaInfo (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=86862&package_id=90341) and post the result here? ("View" / "Text" and "Debug" / "Details - 0", please.)

By the way, modern fansubs may well be using other containers such as MP4, so even solving the MKV problem isn't the end of your potential conversion tasks.

Well, you didn't really "scare" me, probably because it's not the smooth operation of my computer as a whole which is on the line this time, just $30 of mine. 'Looks like this will not be as easy as I had hoped. I guess some more fooling around (trial and error instruction) is in order, or maybe contacting SWREG support. There is a FAQ feature of the program, but none of the questions seem to address problems like mine. Let me see what I can do with MediaInfo...

I've downloaded MediaInfo and I'm trying to figure out how to bring the fansub to it. Here are the basic specifications (copied by hand) of the fansub I've been trying to convert:

Type: Matroska File
Title: Kaibutsu Oujo 17: Princess Maturity
Duration: 0:24:29
Dimensions: 640 x 480
avc1, Vorbis, ASS, SRT/UTF-8
Size: 170 MB

Okay, I think I've figured out how MediaInfo works. Now, how to post the results here at Mikomi... Okay, this oughta work:

General #0 Complete name : C:Documents and SettingsOwnerMy DocumentsDownloads[Anonymous] Kaibutsu Oujo - 17 (h264) 31C4E5B8.mkv Format : Matroska File size : 171 MiB PlayTime : 24mn 29s Bit rate : 975 Kbps Movie name : Kaibutsu Oujo 17: Princess Maturity Encoded date : UTC 2007-08-03 22:27:19 Writing application : mkvmerge v2.0.2 ('You're My Flame') built on Feb 21 2007 23:40:55 Writing library : libebml v0.7.7 + libmatroska v0.8.1 Cover : Imported font from Kaibutsu Oujo - 17.ass / Imported font from Kaibutsu Oujo - 17.ass / Imported font from Kaibutsu Oujo - 17.ass / Imported font from Kaibutsu Oujo - 17.ass / Imported font from Kaibutsu Oujo - 17.ass / Imported font from Kaibutsu Oujo - 17.ass / Imported font from Kaibutsu Oujo - 17.ass / Imported font from Kaibutsu Oujo - 17.ass / Imported font from Kaibutsu Oujo - 17.ass

Video #0 Codec : MPEG-4 AVC Codec/Info : MPEG4 ISO advanced profile PlayTime : 24mn 28s Width : 640 pixels Height : 480 pixels Aspect ratio : 4/3 Frame rate : 29.970 fps Title : Kaibutsu Oujo 17: Princess Maturity

Audio #0 Codec : Vorbis Bit rate mode : VBR Channel(s) : 2 channels Sampling rate : 48 KHz Title : Vorbis Language : Japanese

Text #0 Codec : ASS Codec/Info : Advanced Sub Station Alpha Title : Advanced SubStation Alpha Language : English

Text #1 Codec : UTF-8 Codec/Info : UTF-8 Plain Text Title : SubRip Language : English

Chapters #0 Language : English 1 : 00:00:00.000 Opening 2 : 00:01:39.974 Kaibutsu Oujo 17: Princess Maturity 3 : 00:22:19.923 Ending 4 : 00:23:49.971 Preview

That wasn't so hard. Does any of this make sense to you?

'Looks like MP4 is definitely involved here. My DVD player is supposed to be MP4 capable, but my experience is that there's about a 50-50 chance of an MP4 fansub playing satisfactorily.

Your MKV container holds
1. one Video stream encoded with the H.264 codec (bad news: needs to be converted to something your player can play, most likely XviD) and using 640x480 px (good news: doesn't need to be sized down so conversion will not lose a lot of quality) and 975 kBit/sec data volume (you will probably need 1400 kBit/sec in your XviD conversion result to get about the same quality as the H.264 version - does your converter allow you to select this value?).
2. one Audio stream encoded with the Ogg Vorbis codec (bad news: needs to be converted to something your player can play, most likely MP3 CBR; I'm surprised to not see the quality of this stream but I guess that's of minor importance for you, 128 kBit for the MP3 CBR stream should do in most cases).
3. two Subtitle streams, both as text files but in different formats (ASS = Advanced Sub Station Alpha, i. e. high quality with colors and positions etc.; SRT = SubRip, i. e. text only, no colors, no positions), so you'll probably have to tell your converter which one of these subtitles should be hard-burned into the video stream during the conversion to XviD. When you play your video on your PC then your player program should give you the option to select between the two subtitle streams, therefore you can see the difference before you decide which one to use for the conversion; then again your converter might not support each and every subtitle format, as interpreting SRT is a lot simpler than interpreting ASS.
4. one Chapter description section so that you would be able to position this MKV container directly to OP, main part, ED and preview part of this episode (like you would be able to do so with a commercial DVD); you'll lose this ability during conversion to AVI because AVI can't hold this kind of information.
You have a rather typical case here, as neither the video nor the audio codec or the soft subtitles can be stored in a (standard compliant) AVI container, so none of these streams can be used without transformation; then again, the screen size of 640x480px is so small that I would probably have released this video as XviD/AVI file in the first place as the superior quality of H.264 doesn't make that much difference here.

Side note: MPEG4 is a class of codecs, including DivX, XviD, H.264, WMV9, and whatnot. MP4, on the other hand, is a container format invented for the Apple Quicktime player but used by a small number of fansubs lately. If your player can split MP4 containers into streams then the playability of your video will still depend on the codecs being used for the streams inside this container - you'll most likely not be able to play a MP4 container with H.264 video data while you'll probably be able to play MP4 containers with XviD video data. Again, you can use MediaInfo to check the content of your MP4 container before burning it to some CD/DVD.

Hmm... so I guess a quick-and-easy conversion program was too good to be true. It sounds like I would need to download a myriad of additional programs to make other conversions (like H.264 to Xvid). But that still doesn't explain why the trial program worked just fine. I sent the company an E-mail but I'm not holding my breath waiting for an answer.

My posting didn't intend to imply that you need a myriad of additional programs, it intended to imply that the converter should ask you a number of questions about the conversion result you want to get (as "AVI" might or might not work on your standalone player depending on its content).
Converting H.264 to XviD actually means a) being able to read H.264 (i. e. having this codec installed) and b) being able to write XviD (i. e. having this codec installed) and would be part of the conversion process, not a separate step (even more so as merging subtitles into the video stream should be done during this very process).

A decent converter might actually handle most of this by a clever logic for default behaviour, such as: 1. Automatically convert the video stream to XviD if it isn't already XviD or DivX (or if there's a subtitle stream), use the same bit rate as the input stream (probably losing quality this way but keeping the file size constant), shrink the pixel area to 720px per line if necessary (and perhaps increase the bitrate to compensate for this). 2. Automatically use the first one of the available audio streams, and convert it to MP3 CBR 128 kBit/sec in any case (can't be too bad unless you select the wrong stream in case of multi-language releases). 3. If there's a subtitle stream, then automatically select it and burn it into the video during conversion; out of several subtitle streams, select the one with the "best" quality that this converter is able to handle (it might actually understand ASS). Such a logic wouldn't be too difficult to implement and might work in about 90% of your download cases even though you might be able to get better results in about half of these cases by manually fine-tuning certain parameters. Does your converter allow you to configure anything at all?

Do you still have those results of your test version? You might want to investigate their content using MediaInfo as well.

The program allows me the following options:

Resolution: "Custom Size" by default (I was using the default settings), "Original Size", or a number of different ratios.

Frame Rate: 23.976 was chosen by default; otherwise "Original Frame Rate", "Custom Frame Rate", 24, 25, 29.97, or 30.

Resize Mode: "Preserve aspect ratio" by default, otherwise "Stretch" (ha!)

Video Compressor: "DivX 6.4.0 Codec (1 logical CPU)" by default, otherwise a choice of 11 others.

Audio Compressor: "Microsoft ADPCM" by default, otherwise a choice of 14 others.

Here's the MediaInfo data about one of the successful trial conversions (the first minute of an episode of Umisho). The detail may have suffered a little but subtitles were preserved:

General #0 Complete name : C:Documents and SettingsOwnerMy Documentsoutput.avi Format : AVI Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave Format/Family : RIFF File size : 7.38 MiB PlayTime : 1mn 19ms Bit rate : 1020 Kbps

Video #0 Codec : DivX 5 Codec/Family : MPEG-4 Codec settings/Packe : Yes Codec settings/BVOP : Yes Codec settings/QPel : No Codec settings/GMC : 0 Codec settings/Matri : Default PlayTime : 59s 976ms Bit rate : 654 Kbps Width : 704 pixels Height : 400 pixels Aspect ratio : 16/9 Frame rate : 23.976 fps Resolution : 8 bits Chroma : 4:2:0 Interlacement : Progressive Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.097 StreamSize : 4.67 MiB Writing library : DivX503b2086p

Audio #0 Codec : ADPCM Codec/Family : ADPCM Codec/Info : Microsoft ADPCM PlayTime : 1mn 19ms Bit rate : 355 Kbps Channel(s) : 2 channels Sampling rate : 44 KHz Resolution : 4 bits

Most defaults look reasonable, with the exception of "ADPCM" for the audio stream, so perhaps change that to "MP3 Constant Bitrate (CBR) 128 kBit/sec" or something that sounds similar. (Your successful conversion used 355 kBit/sec which is about two times more than necessary.)

As for the video quality, 654 kBit/sec in DivX is a bit too low - your converter wastes file size for superb audio quality at the expense of poor video quality (using 872 kBit/sec for video and 128 kBit/sec would be more reasonable). Which video quality did the MKV version have? If your converter simply uses the same quality for DivX5 output that your MKV container had for H.264 input then you'll always lose a lot of video quality.

"Resolution" is the number of pixels per line/row of your screen, you'll want no more than 720px per line here. (Your successful conversion used 704px per line - good choice but the exact 16:9 ratio would actually be 704x396px instead of 704x400px.) You'll need different values here for 16:9 videos and 4:3 videos, so you might have to fine-tune this value for every conversion. Did you already try to convert a video that is larger than 720px?

I'm missing options for subtitle handling. You say the subtitles were "preserved" for Umisho - are you sure there weren't already hard-coded in the Umisho video stream? (MediaInfo would tell you that, by showing whether separate subtitle streams were in this MKV container.)

Here's the list of choices for Audio Compressor:

Nero Audio Encoder
IAC2
IMA ADPCM
PCM
Microsoft ADPCM
ACELP.net
DSP Group TrueSpeech (TM)
Windows Media Audio V1
Windows Media Audio V2
GSM 6.10
Microsoft G 732.1
CCITT A-Law
CCITT u-Law
AC-3 ACM Codec
MPEG Layer-3 (Could this be the one?)

Here's the MediaInfo data on the original, MKV episode of Umisho:

General #0 Complete name : C:Documents and SettingsOwnerMy DocumentsDownloads[Ayu]Umisho-0535E8D2D4.mkv Format : Matroska File size : 140 MiB PlayTime : 25mn 30s Bit rate : 769 Kbps Encoded date : UTC 2007-08-08 02:18:20 Writing application : mkvmerge v2.0.2 ('You're My Flame') built on Feb 21 2007 23:40:55 Writing library : libebml v0.7.7 + libmatroska v0.8.1 Cover : Iam.ttf

Video #0 Codec : MPEG-4 AVC Codec/Info : MPEG4 ISO advanced profile PlayTime : 25mn 28s Width : 704 pixels Height : 400 pixels Aspect ratio : 16/9 Frame rate : 23.976 fps Title : Do you want mine, too?

Audio #0 Codec : A_AAC Channel(s) : 2 channels Sampling rate : 24 KHz Title : 2ch Audio Language : Japanese

Text #0 Codec : ASS Codec/Info : Advanced Sub Station Alpha Title : Engilish Subtitles Language : English

If I'm reading this correctly, it looks like the video quality was 769 kBit/sec. Higher than 654, but less than 872. Was 128 kBit/Sec your recommended figure for audio? One MKV fansub which I tried to convert had dimensions of 848x480, another (the semi-successful one) was 640x480, a third was 704x400. The ASS Codec would be indicative of softsubbed subtitles, right?

By the way, thanks for taking the trouble to help me out!

Yes, MPEG Layer-3 is "MP3". (I wonder what quality setting they'll be using... but it will be more reasonable than the current setting as MP3 can't be better than 320kBit/sec.)

The relation between audio and video quality in terms of space within a fansub file should be between 1:5 (for "5.1 audio" with 6 channels and high-compressing video codecs such as H.264) and 1:10 (for "stereo audio" with 2 channels and low-compressing video codecs such as older DivX versions), so I suggested to split the ca. 1000 kBit/sec of the AVI container (180 MB per 24 min for 1 episode to burn 24-26 episodes on 1 DVD) into 128 kBit/sec for audio and 872 kBit/sec for video (1:7). In your test encoding the relation is closer to 1:2, i. e. the audio is too high in quality (almost commercial DVD quality, i. e. 300% of what you would need) and the video is too low in quality (1/12 of commercial DVD quality, i. e. 50-70% of what you would want).

The 769 kBit/sec displayed by MediaInfo in the "General" section is the sum of all streams in this container (perhaps 654 kBit/sec video + 115 kBit/sec audio?). Side note: Streams are interleaved within a container (a piece of video, then a piece of audio, then a piece of video, then a piece of audio etc.) so that your player can play it smoothly (whereas fetching video and audio data from different parts of the file and merging them together on the fly might be too slow for real-time streaming); therefore it isn't easy to find out the bitrate of individual streams without splitting the whole container into streams (which MediaInfo doesn't do as it would take a while). Apparently MediaInfo can display the individual stream qualities for DivX but not for modern codecs such as MPEG-4 AVC (which is an alternate name for H.264). Note that 654 kBit/sec video encoded in H.264 might have about the same quality as 900-1000 kBit/sec encoded in DivX or XviD, so your converter should "boost" the quality value (and the file size) in this particular case.

ASS is a text description language for subtitles (well, a "codec" for subtitles if you want to name it that way; subtitles can only be "[en]coded" but not "decoded" again once they have become part of an image). Your converter uses a filter component to transform text description into text as pixels and then overlay the video images one by one with these pixels for the subtitle information, like "painting" the subtitles over the video images. When you play the MKV container on your PC then this subtitle interpretation is done on-the-fly by the MKV container splitter (of which that filter is a component); you should see a small icon of this splitter in your Windows task bar while playing MKV containers. Your standalone DVD player has neither this splitter nor this filter (and probably would be too slow to perform this complex task in real-time anyway, even PCs can have problems here when certain complex 3D transformations for the subtitle text are being used).
Good news: The MKV container for Umisho did hold a subtitle stream (and even an ASS stream!) so your converter (at least the demo version) appears to be able to handle this format. Then again it contained only one subtitle stream so I am not sure what the converter will do when a MKV container holds more than one subtitle stream (hence I was asking for a configuration setting for this case). The same goes for MKV containers with more than one audio stream.

The information that you successfully transformed 848x480px would only be helpful if you check that the result of this transformation was smaller than 721px per line because creating an AVI with a 848x480px video would be possible but lead you nowhere in terms of playing it on a standalone player. (Given the settings for "Resolution" and "Resize Mode" your converter is obviously capable of doing this job.)

All in all your converter appears to handle most cases of the conversion correctly (while lacking the settings for fine-tuning quality/bitrates); your problem might in fact be the existence of more than one subtitle stream per container and the missing (?) feature for telling the program how to handle these cases. Does the full conversion work for the Umisho video?

I was virtually certain that I had attempted a conversion of the entire episode at one time (and failed), but I attempted it again just to make sure. I did make one change: I switched Audio Compressor to MPEG Layer-3. The conversion process took only around ten seconds, which was unusual. The file which had been created had the same icon as all the unsuccessful ones, so I was sure I would get the usual "Cannot render the file" result; but to my surprise it played, complete with subtitles! But there was another, not so pleasant surprise: it only lasted around ten seconds (the first ten seconds of the show, that is--no problems otherwise)! I guess that might explain why the conversion process went so quickly. I thought at first that somehow the conversion made with the trial program had been copied, but that one was a full minute long. I switched Audio Compressor back to Microsoft ADPCM and tried again, and this time I got "Cannot render file". So, using MPEG Layer-3 definitely seems to help, but why was the converted file a mere ten seconds long? I swear, I didn't change any other settings! Here is MediaInfo on the new, ten-second file (actually, it says 20 seconds here--I wasn't exactly using a stopwatch):



General #0 Complete name : C:Documents and SettingsOwnerMy DocumentsDownloadsUmisho 5 Format : AVI Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave Format/Family : RIFF File size : 1.73 MiB PlayTime : 20s 20ms Bit rate : 697 Kbps StreamSize : 141 KiB

Video #0 Codec : DivX 5 Codec/Family : MPEG-4 Codec settings/Packe : Yes Codec settings/BVOP : Yes Codec settings/QPel : No Codec settings/GMC : 0 Codec settings/Matri : Default PlayTime : 20s 20ms Bit rate : 614 Kbps Width : 704 pixels Height : 400 pixels Aspect ratio : 16/9 Frame rate : 23.976 fps Resolution : 8 bits Chroma : 4:2:0 Interlacement : Progressive Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.093 StreamSize : 1.46 MiB Writing library : DivX503b2086p

Audio #0 Codec : MPEG-2 Audio layer 3 Codec profile : Joint stereo PlayTime : 19s 609ms Bit rate : 56 Kbps Bit rate mode : CBR Channel(s) : 2 channels Sampling rate : 22 KHz Resolution : 16 bits StreamSize : 134 KiB Writing library : Xing (very old)

Converting a video stream from one codec to another will definitely last about as long as watching the whole episode (assuming you have an average PC), i. e. 10-20 minutes (depending on the screensize of your MKV video, downsizing will cost additional time). Anything shorter will be a failure. If you needed 10 seconds to convert 20 seconds of video material then expect 12 minutes for converting a 24 minutes episode on your PC.

According to MediaInfo, this AVI container seems to be okay. This time you can see the individual quality values for each stream: 697 kBit/sec for the whole container, 614 kBit/sec for the XviD-5 video, 56 kBit/sec for the MPEG-2-Layer-3 audio (which I consider a bit too low compared with my suggestion of 128 kBit/sec; does this setting have any configuration sub-dialog for the quality?). The values don't exactly add up to 697 because the container itself need a bit of file size that doesn't belong to any particular stream.

I have no clue why the conversion fails (the "cannot render file" might be caused by a missing ADCPM decoder on your machine, the ADCPM encoder may be part of your converter and not accessible for your video player program). But the comment "very old" for the audio stream and its poor quality makes me wonder whether you should download and install a more recent MP3 codec (such as LAME) to encode audio data. (Windows comes with a MP3 decoder but not with an encoder.) Then again this will most likely not solve your problem (but allow you to get better audio quality in case the problem can be solved).

Does your converter have any option for "logging" during the conversion process? Maybe it writes the reason for its problem into some file, or at least could do that if you tell it to do so...

Of your available audio codecs, you may try two other values, merely for checking whether the problem depends on the audio encoder: "Windows Media Audio V2" should lead to a result that you can play on your PC (but not on your standalone player), "PCM" should lead to a result you might even be able to play on your standalone player (but use the insanely high value of 1440 kBit/sec for the audio stream, this is the uncompressed format being used on commercial audio-only music CDs).

The converter program listed the following "Basic Requirements":

Basic Software:

Microsoft Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003
DirectX 9.0 or later (download from here)
MKV codec pack: http://www.matroska.org
Appropriate decoders for video and audio stream.
Free DivX codec is recommended, or access http://www.divx.com/divx to find the latest DivX products.

I assumed that since the trial version worked, I must already possess these.

Here's an interesting comment from the instructions:
"4. Most audio compressors may not work well. Even they make the program crash. The program sets Microsoft ADPCM as the default audio compressor."

I don't see any option to change the number of kBits/sec devoted to audio, or any mention of "logging".

I tried some more conversions using MPEG Layer-3, this time on Kaibutsu Oujo episodes; one lasted 24 seconds, another 18 seconds; both had no subtitles. I wish I had some idea what determines how many seconds the conversion attempt will last...

"Appropriate decoders" means "those that have been used in the particular MKV file you're about to process", i. e. be prepared for surprises in the future.

I have become sceptical about your "MP3" encoder because MP3 is "MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3", not "MPEG-2 Audio Layer 3". Using ADPCM as default audio compressor may "work" as not crashing the program - but your goal is playing the result on "your DVD player downstairs", and does this device support "ADPCM audio"?

As for the requirements:
1. Windows is obviously necessary because your converter program runs only unter Windows.
2. DirectX 9 is the system interface used by the converter to read streams.
3. The MKV codec pack is used by the converter to split a MKV container into streams.
4. "Appropriate decoders" are used by the converter to transform compressed streams into uncompressed streams (that will then be resized, overpainted with subtitles and recompressed).
5. Free DivX is the suggested codec for video compression; you might as well use XviD as your video compresser if your standalone player runs AVIs with XviD as well.

I wonder whether the conversion crashes in the very moment when it tries to paint the first subtitle line into the video - this would likely be after 20 seconds of the episode... you could check this by playing the MKV file on your PC and check what happens at the position where the conversion crashes. Perhaps the converter supports only a subset of the subtitle language, or is more vulnerable to syntax errors in the subtitle file than other subtitle interpreters?

Well, the 20-second Umisho conversion contained lots of subtitles right from the start, and played a good deal of them before quitting. The Kaibutsu Oujo conversions played no subtitles at all, but kept playing for awhile after the first one should have appeared.

While surfing the Web for something vaguely related to your issue I stumbled over the following project:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=156812
I can't make any comment about features or quality, just wanted to tell you there's a free Open Source project for your task already, therefore I would test this one first before spending money.

Thanks! I won't invest any more money. I've been rather busy this week but haven't given up altogether on the possibility of finding a way to convert from MKV to avi.

I finally got a day off from work today, and downloaded "convert ogm, mkv to avi with subtitle". Like I've said, I'm not too keen on downloading new programs if not necessary, what with all the computer trouble I've had in the past, but I mustered my courage and began the downloading process. The fact that characters from Mai-Otome appeared briefly in the download file was encouraging! Surely this program was created by a kindred spirit who wouldn't betray a fellow otaku by including a virus. It soon became clear that this is a really slick program, with attractive graphics (including favorite anime and video game characters of the author decorating the pages), music, helpful notes, and best of all, a manual! In every way, this seems a preferable program to the much more crude one which I had paid $30 for--it's hard to believe this one is being offered for free. I was advised to read the manual, but could only get the first page to run, apparently because my computer is suspicious of this new program. "Internet Explorer has restricted this webpage from running scripts or ActiveX controls that could access your computer" I was told. I was brave enough to proceed after one warning, but another immediately appeared: "active content might also harm your computer". I decided I'd skip the manual for now, and see if I could figure out this neat looking program without instructions--that's the way I had to do it on the last program, anyway. I selected an episode of Kaibutsu Oujo for conversion and immediately got a message "H264 Detected!"

I've run out of time and will have to continue this later...

Beneath "H264 Detected!" was the question "Do you want AlltoAVI to switch to more restricted special mode? (Recommended)". Since it was recommended, I said Yes. This caused the following message to appear: "H.264 mode require the use of No Skip Option. Please choose a frame rate for details please read the FPS selection window". I clicked "OK", which caused two windows to appear, the "No Skip Option Window" and the "H.264 (and others) Special Convertion (sp) Process". The No Skip window wanted a frames per second (FPS) figure; it recommended 29.97. The thought occured to me to use MediaInfo to find out what the figure was, and indeed 29.97 was correct. I also instructed the program to "Use Normal No Skip (if conversion does not complete then come back and try another one)" (whatever that means--it sounds like a good idea). On the H.264 window a box was highlighted calling on me to select a video bitrate. According to MediaInfo the Bit rate (not "video bitrate", just Bit rate) was 722. However, there was a note saying "the idea here is that you should enter a very high video bitrate (say 1200) to retain original quality, then convert the resultant files again to a proper AVI". I went with 722 for the first try. I don't remember all the details, but I pushed the "Convert" button. It had said that H.264 conversions would take a long time, and the estimate of how many minutes it would take increased rather than decreased with time. The last I checked, it was saying 16 minutes to go--and then it just quit without warning, just like the last conversion program would do. It had left a AVI conversion file, and I began playing it. Quality wasn't great, but there were no subtitles and it was exactly 7 minutes long, not the 24-odd minutes it should have been. I tried again, and found that there was a default subtitle setting of NONE, which might explain the lack of those. I tried again, using the high bitrate that had been recommended. The results were the same (a length of exactly 7 minutes) except this time there were subtitles--but they were out of sync with the audio.

It's a pity that this out-of-the-box solution didn't work either on your machine, although it's nice to see how it asks you the questions it should and how it gives you the options I was looking for (such as whether to include subtitles, and which bitrate to use for the compression result - 1200 sounds like a good idea as it would be 150% of the one used in the H.264 stream that compresses better than XviD does). I also like how you're already familiar with using MediaInfo.

The main problem seems to be that H.264 isn't available (for free) as "codec" in the way we know it (i. e. as compressing / decompressing module for the Video for Windows interface), that's why any program reading H.264 content must get it from the only interface that can likely serve it, and that's the stream splitter that splits MKV containers into streams so that video player programs can play the individual streams. (The one I'm using is the Haali matroska splitter, in some older version than the one currently offered for download; these discussions always give me a motivation to update my video software to the most recent versions. ;-)
Having said that, there actually is a H.264 codec - just not for free, it's a commercial product: CoreAVC. I haven't tried this one myself so far but it's said to be faster than the splitter-internal solution and thus would work better on older/slower PCs.

When I am to convert H.264 content (or WMV9 content or ASF content or whatever, anything that a player based on DirectShow can play but I don't have a true codec for) then I'm doing something similar to what a converter would do: I'm simulating a normal video player program (by using a small AviSynth script) and then use VirtualDubMod to read the input from what the AviSynth script produces as output (uncompressed video and uncompressed audio), using it to compress it into an AVI container with XviD video stream (and manually post-process the PCM audio stream to MP3). Once you've understood how that works it is easy to handle but it is a script language after all, so you don't have a guided dialogue and have to know what you're doing - that's why I didn't offer this to you as your likely preferred method... it does have the advantage that you can do most everything in this language (such as resizing the picture size with one command, even chosing the resizing method of your choice...) but the disadvantage that you have to learn this language, and install certain modules in case you want to do certain video postprocessing tasks (such as removing noise from the video so that it compresses to a smaller file size without losing quality etc.). AviSynth is the "Swiss Army Knife" for video processing; technically it is a codec by itself, just one that you can tell what to do by writing scripts, and you can "open" the result of these scripts the same way you can open AVI containers, i. e. you can "play" the output of an AviSynth script with Zoomplayer without having to store it to a file first.

AlltoAVI is such a neat program that I really want to figure out how to use it. Do you think if I purchased CoreAVC that would do the trick? I would gladly pay any reasonable fee if it works. Do you think it would be dangerous to authorize the ActiveX controls that seem to be part of the instruction manual? AlltoAVI strikes me as such a well designed and user-friendly program that the manual might just contain explanations and solutions to the problems that have been holding me back.

Did you look at the AlltoAVI tutorial forum? Some of the threads there sound quite promising for your scenario, I think (one even says: "Incomplete conversion (known issue)").

In general I expect from an Open Source project like Allto AVI that the developer is willing to improve his/her program for the mere sake of showing that it can be done, not for money; these tools tend to be a bit short on documentation (for who would write it? The coder is busy coding, you know) but at the same file powerful as well as flexible. Maybe the programmer himself will listen to your problem?

Well I'll be damned! I seem to have completed a successful MKV to AVI conversion! I took a look at the tutorial page above, and found this:

Some files may only get converted partially, the program terminates before the whole file is finished. The file maybe playable, and sound maybe off sync.
(Yeah, that sounds just like what was happening to me)

This is caused by "Too many audio packet in buffer"



It will be fixed in v4 Final version


A fix is now in place with the release of v4 r53.93


To fix this error:
- Chose Forced No Skip
- Select the correct framerate

I decided to attempt another conversion using this advice. The problem was, I couldn't find any mention of "Forced No Skip" (maybe the "No Skip" I was already doing was the same as this?), and I thought I already had selected the correct framerate. Actually, I couldn't find a way to enter the exact figure of 29.97 fps, but I could check a box indicating that I wished to use "fps 29.xx - 30.xx 30000/1001", which sounded like an approximate figure which might work. For some reason I got a message saying that the title of the file I wanted to convert was too long--I was using the same file as last time, and I hadn't gotten this message then. I couldn't progress without solving this problem; more than once I got so confused that I shut the program down altogether and started over from scratch. Eventually I shortened "(Anonymous) Kaibutsu-Oujo 18 (x264 640x480)(AAC)(565C433B).mkv" to just "(Anonymous) Kaibutsu-Oujo 18.mkv" and that finally fixed the problem. I began the conversion process; since I hadn't really done anything major to apply the advice I'd been given by the tutorial, I didn't really expect it to succeed. I calculated that the seven minute mark at which the last try had given up would be around 30% of the whole, and was encouraged when the program continued to operate beyond there. I didn't dare touch as much as a key for fear that the slightest diversion of the computer's resources might ruin the conversion attempt. The graph showing how far along the conversion was disappeared from the screen (I wish the program would give some sort of "The conversion has been completed successfully" message). I feared that it might have quit just before completing the task, but the new AVI file contained the entire episode. At first I thought that no subtitles had been included, but then I remembered that the Anonymous fansubbers don't bother to translate the OP song! In fact the subtitles were there, and properly synchronized with the audio and video. I immediately began a conversion of the next episode as well, to see if this was just a fluke. Fortunately the settings I had selected the first time around were still there--figures like Video Bitrate of 1000, and subtitle 0 eng (English?). The second attempt was successful as well! Now to see if the converted episodes can be burned onto a DVD and played downstairs. At one point a message appeared asking if I had enjoyed the program, and suggesting that I make a donation. I'm in such a good mood just now that I think I will!

Donations are a good thing - but real programmers will be even more happy when you stumble over a file format their tool can't handle already and report them a good description of the symptoms (including technical data of the video, such as the MediaInfo report ;-), and perhaps a (torrent?) link to the file causing the problem. For that's what the feedback pages of these Open Source projects are for: The eyes of many users will always see more things than the eyes of one programmer. So the best thing you can do is: Use this program for as many different releases as possible, as it's apparently still in a stage where it can be improved easily, given enough information about arising problems.
For example, if that box (make a screenshot of it to be sure) really says the file (and not the filename!) were too long then this would be something you should report to the programmer (along with your way of bypassing the problem). Even if the programmer wouldn't bother to answer, the next visitor at the forum might read your posting and thus find a solution for his own problem... this is how communities are forming.

If you're going to convert a complete series for burning it onto a DVD, remember that the file size of the conversion result will depend mostly on the Video Bitrate, so that's the wheel to fine-tune the process as to produce a maximum of quality exactly filling up your DVD.

Yes, the Kaibutsu Oujo episode plays just fine on the DVD player downstairs. Complete success!

I have sent Genesis Kiith, the author of AlltoAVI (he describes it as a "Product of boredom and not wanting to study") an E-mail. It's largely the last four posts I made here, tweaked a little. Perhaps he'll find a first-time user's impressions useful.

I've done some converting of non-H.264 MKV fansubs. In a way, these seemed even more complicated, in that more choices have to be made. I needed to select a video encoder, and I went with XviD. I also needed to select a Video BitRate, and I chose 1330 based on what MediaInfo told me about the episode of Lemon Angel Project which I was working on. As for Audio BitRate, the program notes said 128 should be plenty, and so I entered that figure. As for subtitles, I could choose "-2 External Sub" or "-1 No Sub"; I definitely wanted subs, so I chose the former. When I clicked on "Add Job" I got a message saying that I hadn't selected a "Software Scaler" (whatever that is). The notes recommended "Bi-Cubic", so I agreed. I began the conversion process and it went surprisingly quickly (and was successful).

As luck would have it, now that I've got episodes of Kaibutsu Oujo to watch downstairs, I find that the TV set down there crops part of the subtitles off! One of these days I'm going to need to get a new TV...

The software scaler is resizing (shrinking) your image format (from, say, 1280x960px to 720x480px so that it can be played on a standalone player), by calculating the pixels of the smaller image by "somehow" deriving them from the pixels of their environment in the larger image. There are several algorithms for doing so, Bicubic interpolation being one of them.

Most people don't hear significant differences between audio formats using more than 128 kBit/sec and (your source material in the MKV container probably isn't better anyway, MediaInfo would tell you).

If you re-encode XviD material and add subtitles then the resulting bitrate of the video stream should be about 5-15% higher than in the raw material to get about the same video quality as subtitles (depending on the "noise" of those subtitles, including Karaoke).

The cropping isn't a problem of your TV set but of your standalone DVD player. My standalone DVD player allows me to configure the video settings, offering to align the video to the TV by its height, width, or "somehow" (which usually results in a cropping of about 30px on all sides). When I encode animes for fansub releases I leave about 30px space on all borders unused because of that very problem (which all MKV encoders obviously ignore as their releases can't be played on standalone devices anyway); if you show me the subtitle script (which you would have to extract from the MKV container, edit, and then probably use as "External Sub"...?) I can tell you where you can make that setting (but note that this might result in text being wrapped awkwardly and using more space on the screen when not downscaling the font size of the subs as well... that's the "fun" of writing these scripts... ;-).

I had always thought it was the TV set that was responsible for "cropping". I got the DVD player User Manual, and found that it is supposed to be capable of 16:9, 4:3 Letter Box, or 4:3 Pan Scan displays. But no matter what I do, I can't get it to switch from the present display mode to a new one; I follow the instructions exactly but nothing changes. Maybe the TV set really is only capable of one method of display? Actually, I have two DVD players, and I tried to change the aspect display of the second one as well. But the results were the same--I followed the instructions exactly, but nothing changed. So I think it must be the TV set which can't operate in more than one aspect mode.

As for the converted fansubs, I've already deleted the original MKV versions, so all I have are the AVI ones which I believe are now hardsubbed, and I presume can't be changed. I'll start re-downloading the MKV episodes.

Besides the "aspect ratio" setting (16:9 vs. 4:3) my standalone player has a setting named "view mode", with the options: "Fill", "Original", "Height Fit" (which I'm using to avoid subtitle cropping), "Width Fit", "Auto Fit" and "Pan Scan". This is what handles the cropping method in my (Philips) DVD player.

Be forewarned that your precious out-of-the-box method might not work any more if you want to influence the process half-way through (by adding some border offset to the subtitles) - I only say that it can be done, not that it won't be a lot of work. (One way of making it work would be: Split the MKV container into individual streams, edit the subtitle file, re-unite the streams to a MKV container, then use your conversion tool. Which of course means that you have to know how to split and form MKV containers...)

I don't see any mention of "View Mode" in the User Manual of my DVD Player (which is also a Philips player, a DVP642/37). Nor do I see it in the manual for my second player, an "Insignia" combination DVD/VCR. So, I guess it will have to be done the hard way. I'll get back to you once I've studied the concept of MKV containers, and decided whether I can handle it.

Which is not to say that this exercise in converting from MKV to AVI hasn't been highly successful anyhow. Some MKV fansubs do play just fine once converted. I'm "cleaning up" my files, so to speak, i.e, watching episodes of series which I never finished because although some episodes were fansubbed in AVI mode, others were only available in MKV. Thanks for all the help--somehow communicating with a real live person makes solving these problems much easier!

My player is a Philips DVP3040 from 2006 (in Europe), a more recent model than your player from 2004.

It looks like a refurbished DVP3040 can be had for a mere $45. Does anyone have any experiences/opinions about "refurbished" appliances?

Before you purchase this thing on one attribute you should test it with some of your own DVDs. It does support QPel in XviD (which my previous player did not) but plays GMC3 in XviD with broken images (huge artefacts in certain scenes, the video is usable but looks quite ugly and subtitles might not be readable in these scenes), i. e. the XviD implementation is still not perfect. Your converter apparently doesn't make use of these two XviD options but certain fansubbers may do so. I also was unable playing Conclave-Mendoi's ef subs despite these not using any fancy parameters, and I have experienced problems with certain MP3 audio streams using a variable bitrate.

It sounds like the DVP3040 still has a number of problems. The reason I bought a Philips DVD player in the first place was so that I could hopefully play MPEG 4 Data Discs on it, but only about one-third of the Data Discs I burn play successfully. Most of the stuff I watch is in MPEG 3 mode, which could be played on pretty much any player.

I converted an episode of Seto no Hanayome, but the audio was out of sync with the subtitles. It got so annoying that I muted the TV and watched the episode without audio at all. It occured to me that the Tutorial Forum had mentioned problems like this, and I went back there. I was instructed to go to the FAQ section of the Manual, but as you'll recall my computer doesn't like the manual and I've never completely opened it. Instead I went looking for something to change within the instructions I enter before beginning a conversion. I noticed an option called "Force no skipping frames"--normally when the page on which I enter instructions appears, this is out of view beyond the right side of my monitor screen, so I hadn't noticed it until now. It sounded like the "Chose Forced No Skip" recommendation, so I checkmarked it. It worked! The audio is back in sync with the subs. One problem solved all by myself!

What exactly do you mean by "MPEG4 data disc" (Google returns 0 hits for this query, Wikipedia doesn't know this term either)?

I guess I jumped to the conclusion that Data Discs are encoded in MPEG 4 mode. The reason I bought the Philips player was because someone suggested that an MPEG 4 player would be able to play Data Discs (and I have a lot of those, thanks largely to Jan-chan). Therefore, I assumed that Data Discs must be done in MPEG 4.

The format of the disks describes how data objects and their meta information/structure are arranged on the disk. The ISO 9660 format, for example, allows for subdirectories and files with names on CDs resp. DVDs; the format of audio CDs only allows for a sequence of blocks without names. But none of this has anything to do with the data inside these objects; you may burn WinWord documents on a DVD together with fansubs and still play the fansubs on your player (just don't expect your player to support the interpretation of WinWord "containers").

A DVD player has to understand 1. the physical disk format (CD vs. DVD vs. BlueRay etc.) as to convert physical effects into a stream of binary data, 2. the logical disk format (various file system formats, hybrid disks, audio-only disks etc.) as to find the location of the containers within these data, 3. the container format (AVI vs. MKV vs. OGM vs. MP4 vs. MPG etc.) as to split a video into streams, and 4. stream formats (XviD vs. DivX vs. MPEG1/2 vs. MS-MPEG4 vs. WMV9 vs. H.264 etc.) as to interpret these streams as video, audio, subtitle etc. data.

Well, I'll be damned! (Good News). As I've mentioned, one problem with converting MKV fansubs to Avi form and then playing them on my DVD player is that the player trims a bit from the bottom of the screen, and sometimes subtitles are lost. The AlltoAvi program has an option for manually repositioning subtitles, but I was never able to get it to work--until now! On a whim, and not really expecting to succeed, I gave it another try. To my surprise, a box appeared asking me to enter a percentage figure (how far from the top of the screen should the subtitles be, in percent). I typed 80(%) and began the conversion process. It worked! 80%, however, was far too high on the screen and I started over at 88%. Although still a little high, this is satisfactory. I'm guessing that the reason the reposition subtitles option worked today had something to do with this not being an H264 fansub.

Another observation: In order to predict whether fansubs burned in Data Disc format will play on the DVD player, I've been using MediaInfo to examine their characteristics. I've never had any trouble with Hayate no Gotoku, which has the XviD Codec and the MPEG-4 Codec/Family. My conclusion is that any fansub with the same characteristics should play OK as well. Not exactly rocket science, but better than trial-and-error!

The video codec should not matter for the repositioning of subtitles. What's actually happening is this:
1. The tool uncompresses the video stream from its encoded form (H.264, XviD, whatever) to uncompressed video.
2. The tool computes the layout of the subtitles, depending on the screen size of the video, the alignment rule of the subtitles, and the positioning commands within the subtitles (if any) - that's where it has the option of modifying the subtitle positions by giving them some offset.
3. The tool writes the subtitles over each single video image by actually replacing pixels.
4. The tool encodes the modified video stream using the target codec of your choice (XviD).

As for playability of XviD/MPEG4 streams on your player, the mere usage of XviD (which is part of the MPEG4 codec family just like many other codecs, including H.264) may not be enough. When you display the video attributes with MediaInfo, the interesting line will be "Codec settings" that will display values like BVOP, NVOP, QPel, GMC3, or combinations of these. These are parameters that allow/disallow the XviD codec to make use of certain additional frame formats within the video stream that can be used to improve the rate of video quality per file size, i. e. make smaller files of the same video quality (and thus require a more or less complete implementation of the XviD interpreter in your DVD player to decode the resulting video stream whose format contains these additional information types). BVOP and NVOP (packed bitstream) are fairly common and no player should have problems with these nowadays; QPel and GMC3 are more tricky and not yet perfectly supported even by some of the most recent standalone players (e. g. my Phillips player can handle videos with these features but GMC3 leads to display errors so that the images get unreadable for a few seconds; my previous player didn't even start XviD videos with QPel, reporting "wrong codec" for these, and videos using GMC3 were hardly watchable).
I just checked all EngSubs I'm currently collecting and found all of them using neither GMC3 nor QPel (fansub encoders tend to "play it safe" nowadays when they produce AVI releases, reserving the high quality fancy features for their MKV/H.264 releases; the same goes for your MKV-to-AVI converter that probably won't use these features, at least not by default... does it provide a configuration section for the XviD codec?). Then again you can't be absolutely sure nobody will use them (for example, I use QPel in my own releases ;-), so if you happen to own some XviD encoding that uses QPel and/or GMC3 it would be interesting to play this one on your player and see whether this works as well.
One more parameter my be the frame rate; some XviD files (most notably certain early raw releases, i. e. unsubbed material) use 119.88 frames per second as opposed to the usual 23.976 frames per second. My standalone player is able to start these videos but usually hangs at the first scene change.

Hayate no Gotoku's Codec Settings are as follows:

Codec settings/Packe : Yes
Codec settings/BVOP : Yes
Codec settings/QPel : No
Codec settings/GMC : 0
Codec settings/Matri : Default

So, I guess the Codec Setting in use here is BVOP (or Matri by default?).

All-to-Avi has a "Choose video codec" question (provided H264 hasn't been detected), with the options of DIVX50 (DivX 5.0), XVID (XviD codec), PSP (Require PMP Mod 2.02 on PSP), or PSP (normal MPEG-4). Once you choose XviD, I don't see any way to be more specific about the configuration.

Once I was trying to convert a fansub which had a 119.88 FPS rate ("Kujibiki Unbalance" TV). That was the end of that project, because only 23.xx or 29.xx are options.

Here are some that do not play satisfactorily on the DVD player:

Episode one of Code-E (Formula fansubs). The word "Play" appears on the DVD player, but nothing happens--the screen remains black.
Codec : XviD
Codec/Family : MPEG-4
Codec/Info : XviD project
Codec settings/Packe : Yes
Codec settings/BVOP : Yes
Codec settings/QPel : Yes
Codec settings/GMC : 0
Codec settings/Matri : Default
Seeing as this is an XviD/MPEG-4 fansub, I would have thought that this one would play OK; does it have too many Codec settings? I see QPel listed, which you described as "tricky".

Episode one of El Cazador de la Bruja (B-I fansubs). The player says "Searching Titles" (I think) and goes through each episode without playing anything.
Codec : XviD
Codec/Family : MPEG-4
Codec/Info : XviD project
Codec settings/Packe : No
Codec settings/BVOP : Yes
Codec settings/QPel : No
Codec settings/GMC : 0
Codec settings/Matri : Default
The only "Yes" Codec Setting here is BVOP, which shouldn't be a problem, should it? So I haven't a clue what is wrong here.

Episode two of Dancouga Nova (Shinsen-subs). Episode one seems to play OK, but when I try to select episode two I get the white hand (Don't do this!) symbol. Wait a minute, I get it--episode one has the XviD/MPEG-4 codecs while number two has H264. How did that happen? Did the fansubbers change codecs in process?

Given your report, "Hayate no Gotoku" has both NVOP (=packed bitstream) and BVOP enabled but nothing else (no QPel, no GMC level above 0 where the "tricky" level is "GMC level 3", and the XviD default matrix for encoding scene changes). This is what I consider today's standard fansub setting for AVI releases, and most likely the setting your All-to-AVI converter uses as well.

"Code-E" uses NVOP, BVOP, and QPel (which is exactly how I am encoding my own releases ;-). Yes, QPel is "tricky" - and it may be the reason for your player not to play this video. Try recompressing this video with your converter and check the result.

"El Cazador de la Bruja" uses BVOP, but no NVOP. There have been certain standalone players that can handle XviD videos better with "packed bitstream" and others that showed problems here, so it's not easy to tell the consequences in general; as most fansubs do use NVOP nowadays the "missing" NVOP setting might in fact cause problems with your player. Try recompressing this video with your converter (that will probably use NVOP) and check the result.

The complete series "Dancouga Nova" has been released by SHS (Shinsen Subs) as H.264 encoded video in a .MP4 container, only episode 1 is also available as XviD encoded video in an .AVI container (but SHS probably dropped the .AVI release when they observed that the leechers requested the .MP4 release a lot more often). The file size of episode 1 (AVI) should then be 244.377.600 bytes, the file size of episode 2 (MP4) should be 182.589.001 bytes... right? (H.264 compresses better, thus the smaller file size.)

Nowadays quite a few groups are releasing animes in two formats simultaneously, especially when the anime aired in HDTV screen sizes (which AVI and XviD can't reasonably handle so that the AVI release must then be converted to a much lower quality); True Tears would be a perfect example for this, with H.264 releases in 1280*720px and XviD releases in 704*396 px. If you have a powerful PC no older than two years (playing H.264 without delays requires a fast CPU) and a large PC monitor that can handle resolutions like 1280x960px easily, go for the high quality release and watch it on your PC - otherwise stick with the good old AVI that plays on your standalone player. (My Pentium 4 3.0 GHz PC plus 19" flatscreen monitor would be able to play such stuff if I stopped every other program running on my machine...)

You can convert a video from 119.88fps to 23.976fps with VirtualDubMod alone: Load the video, select "Video" / "Frame Rate", set "Frame Rate Conversion" to "Decimate by" and enter "5" (which means "only take every fifth frame of the video and drop the rest"), click "Okay", select "File" / "Save As"; the process should only take a few seconds. Can you play the resulting video? (There are better procedures than mechanically selecting every fifth frame but they would require you to install AviSynth.)

How were you able to tell whether these fansubs included NVOP? Does "Codec settings/Packe : Yes" mean it has NVOP (since you mentioned "packed bitstream")?

Yes. MediaInfo 0.7.2.1 (don't let the German language file confuse you...) displays these informations like this:

Therefore I was a bit surprised about the format of your report.

Both Code E and El Cazador had identical codec characteristics after being converted using AlltoAvi:
Codec : XviD
Codec/Family : MPEG-4
Codec/Info : XviD project
Codec settings/Packe : No
Codec settings/BVOP : No
Codec settings/QPel : No
Codec settings/GMC : 0
Codec settings/Matri : Default
They no longer have BVOP, NVOP, nor QPel. I guess what I need to do now is burn them onto a DVD and see if they play OK downstairs.

Dancouga Nova episode one had a filesize of 233 MiB, while episode two had a filesize of 174 MiB. When two versions of a new fansub come out, I've always tended to go for the Xvid or Avi one, and avoided ones with H264 or MKV suffixes whenever possible, in order to keep them burnable onto DVDs.

If an MKV fansub started out with the H264 Codec, even after it is converted to Avi, MediaInfo still lists H264 as the Codec. In fact, this is the only information it gives me about codecs:
Codec : h264
There is nothing about the codec family or settings, just this. I've got a feeling this isn't going to play on the DVD player.

I've recently collected all eleven episodes of Moyashimon, and thought I'd perform a little experiment while burning them. Episodes 1-6 had come from BSS fansubs; then they had given up the project, and recently "Kiki Delivers" fansubs released the remaining episodes in MKV.

Episode one of the unaltered BSS fansubs had NVOP, BVOP but not QPel; episodes 2-6 had all three. The unaltered episode one played OK on the DVD player, the others would not (I got the message "Reading Index" for each episode, but nothing played). I had suspected this might happen, so I also ran all six of these episodes through AlltoAvi. They came out with neither NVOP, BVOP nor QPel--but they played just fine. Episodes 7-11 had been converted from MKV to Avi using AlltoAvi. They also wound up with neither NVOP, BVOP nor QPel, and I expected them to play acceptably--but they didn't (I got "Reso. not supported", whatever that means). The reason must be because whereas all versions of episodes 1-6 had the following codec characteristics:
Codec : XviD
Codec/Family : MPEG-4
Codec/Info : XviD project

Episodes 7-11 had these:
Codec : DivX 4
Codec/Family : MPEG-4
Codec/Info : Project Mayo DivX 4

The Project Mayo DivX 4 codec isn't the problem, that's compatible enough to DivX5 or XviD.

"Reso. not supported" refers to the screen resolution of your playing devices (both TV set and DVD player, the weaker one is the relevant bottleneck, in your case most likely the DVD player), of which the maximum number of lines and columns is specified by the technical standard being used: NTSC (the American/Japanese TV standard) supports up to 525 pixel lines (486 visible); PAL (the European TV standard) supports up to 625 pixel lines (576 visible). That's why a 4:3 video that plays on your devices must not have more than 640*480px; for wide screen material the occasionally used format 720*404px will probably be the playable maximum on your devices. (Actually 720*405 is exactly 16:9 but all MPEG4 codecs require the pixel count of both dimension to be divisible by 4 without remainder.)

Now let's look at your Moyashimon releases: BSS released 704*400px (should have been 704*396px for an exact 16:9 but oh well) in AVI and 1280*720 (16:9) in MKV, the latter being way too large for your devices; Kiki Delivers released 1024*576px (16:9) which is again way too large for your devices. (Don't just believe my words as I'm only citing sources, double-check the values with MediaInfo.)

So you need to tell your All-to-AVi converter to scale down that format to 704*396px while re-encoding it to Xvid (reducing the resolution from 1024*576 = 589824 pixels per image to 704*396 = 278784 pixels per image, i. e. reducing the video quality by 53%, ouch). Prepare for this process to take a while... scaling down a video and still preserving a maximum of details isn't an easy task. (And thank the BSS encoder for doing that work for you by providing two releases of different resolutions - his source was the Japanese HDTV rip with 1280*720px!)

You see, modern formats provide higher quality... given your devices can handle it. DVD players capable of playing HD formats are still quite rare & expensive because the video resolution on purchasable DVDs (they use anamorphic 720*480px, i. e. 3:2 and tell the DVD player to dynamically resize that to the actual video format, be that 4:3 or 16:9) is still low enough to play on older equipment; HDTV capable players will surely become the standard once a large percentage of users moves on from DVD to BlueRay discs.
At the same time, HDTV with much higher resolutions is already quite common in Japan so the latest TV rips (being used for English speedsubs as no DVD material for these shows is available yet) are already in the next generation video quality and only playable on your PC.
And considering that the current flat screen TV devices support "1080i" (actually 1366*768px) and the "Full HD" devices support "1080p" (actually 1920*1080px), the available DVD players are able to support a mere 13% (!) of the latest TV sets' display quality.

I double checked the Kiki Delivers episodes 7-11, and sure enough, got these dimensions:
Width : 1024 pixels
Height : 576 pixels

I went back to AlltoAvi to see if there was any way to adjust these dimensions (among all the features which I had always left in default mode). Sure enough, there were two boxes containing these figures which were entitled "Screen Size" plus a check-marked box entitled "Locked Aspect Ratio". According to MediaInfo, episode 7 had an Aspect Ratio of 16:9 which would mean changing the dimensions to 720 x 404px. I unchecked the Locked Aspect Ratio box and entered these figures. Then, I rechecked the box--the new figures remained, so I figure this is OK. I needed to select a Codec. The Kiki Delivers episodes had DivX 4, but the only choices within AlltoAvi are DivX 5, XviD, PSP (Require PMP Mod 2.02 on PSP), or PSP (Normal MPEG-4). I've never used the third and fourth choices, though I wonder if "Normal MPEG-4" might be useful at times. Anyway, I chose XviD. "Subtitle" were set by default at -1 No Subs, which obviously would not do. I selected the only other option, -2 External Sub. This asks for an "extension of the subtitle file"; sometimes MediaInfo lists this, but most times (like now) it doesn't and I OK the default extension, which is "srt". Normally I tend to check the option "force no skipping frames", but I wondered if this might interfere with downscaling the resolution. Probably not, but just to be safe I left it alone this time. I clicked "Add Job" and "Convert".

An estimate of the percentage of the task completed and the time until completion appeared, which proved that the Job had been accepted. Once completed, MediaInfo showed that the new version did indeed have dimensions of 720 x 404px. It plays fine on the computer and I don't detect any significant loss of quality. Now I'll give episodes 8-11 the same treatment then reburn the disc (fortunately I hadn't deleted anything after burning the first DVD). I'm hoping that since the resolution was very high to begin with, sacrificing a good deal of it will still leave me with fairly good quality. Personally, I've never felt any dissatisfaction with the amount of resolution I was getting from my TV shows, and certainly have never been eager to convert to a whole new generation of discs and DVD players and TV sets; but then I was slow to give up on VHS tape, too! (I still haven't, altogether).

When recompressing a video, it's irrelevant which codec has been used for the original encode in terms of selecting a codec for your re-encoding. After all, the video will first be decoded (to a "neutral" uncompressed format) so that your converter can apply changes (like adding subtitles, resizing images and whatnot) before finally being encoded to your target format. Therefore all that matters for your choice of target codec is what your target device can play, so it's fine to use XviD all the time once you know that 1. XviD works and 2. your device doesn't support anything significantly better.

And yes, the quality after your resizing operation won't be noticeable lower than the quality after the very same resizing operation that had been performed by the encoder of the BSS group (he might be using a slightly better - and more time consuming - procedure but then again encoders are geeks ;-).
It's just that more and more leechers move away from standalone players to using PCs for their anime fansubs because of the increasing amount of new anime shows airing in HDTV quality (and especially for the action genre the visual quality does matter a lot, right?); consequently you will see more and more releases in MKV containers and with HDTV resolutions in the future, and probably a few animes released only in HDTV (depending on the demand of leechers for old formats and the popularity of the show), thus having to use your converter more frequently.

"PSP" seems to refer to the Sony Playstation Portable so that's not the most likely candidate to be supported by your DVD player (then again, you never know). Probably the only reason for DivX5 being the first item on that list (instead of XviD) is that more DVD players support DivX5 than XviD, thus DivX5 is the better bet for complete noobs (while later entries in the list are for more specialized devices).
If you're interested in the best choice for your particular DVD player then you can try encoding the same video in 1. XviD, 2. DivX5, and 3. MPEG4, then compare file size, quality and Mediainfo reports for the three encodings, finally play all three versions on your DVD player - it won't be that much of a difference though.
I stick with XviD because its Open Source software, because I fine-tune some of the XviD parameters, because I'm a drama fan where story and character development matters more than visual quality, and because I encode fansubs based on Japanese DVD sources that aren't HDTV anyway. Then again, THW-Sprocket does Clannad in MKV/H.264/1024*576px... even dramas get their visual quality nowadays.

In case you already had deleted the original input for your conversion you would still have been able to apply your converter to the file on your DVD (though the quality slightly suffers from running repeated lossy compression operations as opposed to just one transformation), i. e. downscale the AVI file with the too high resolution. After all, the name is All-to-AVI, not MKV-to-AVI. ;-)

As for the subtitle format, once again MediaInfo would tell you what's inside the container. SRT is the most simple format out there, i. e. the lowest possible quality; if there's an alternative in SSA or ASS available you should prefer this one (fonts, colors, positions, angles, karaoke, anything you can imagine... SRT supports none of these).

Success! All eleven episodes play normally on the DVD player. I guess from now on I'll need to check the dimensions of fansubs before burning them. The only imperfection left (as far as I'm concerned) is that the subtitles of episodes 7-11, which were originally in MKV mode, are incredibly small and I almost need a pair of binoculars to read them from across the room (this is not a new problem, they've always been like this). I tried increasing the font size (options range from Arial 14 to Arial 28), but the end result seems unchanged. Better not complain too much!

One interesting thing: if I type in the width dimension 720 with "Locked Aspect Ratio" still checked, the figure 405 automatically appears for height. Another: changing resolution must not require nearly as much memory/whatever as switching from MKV to Avi, because the music that AlltoAvi plays doesn't get messed up nearly as badly once to convert process begins!

Thanks for the help!

"Locked Aspect Ratio" means that the source and target aspect ratio will be identical (16:9 in your case), so your converter simply calculates: (576 / 1024) * 720 = 405 (but remember that MPEG4 requires dimensions to be divisible by 4 without remainder, so your resulting resolution will most likely be 720*404px as MediaInfo will tell you).
If you disable that "locking" then your converter would even allow your to repair a video that has been encoded with wrong dimensions (say, 4:3 when it should have been 16:9, making all characters look short and fat)... not that fansubbers were likely to make such stupid mistakes (while the locking prevents you from making any such mistake by accident).

As long as the video stream remains unchanged, merely changing the container is a very simple operation (almost the same as a file copy) that would require only a few seconds (most of it being hard disk accesses). Both resizing and encoding (which is necessary whenever the source codec was H.264 and/or soft subtitles are to be added to the video material) are way more difficult and time-consuming as more than 30000 images per episode have to be restored from their compressed version, modified and compressed.
Being an additional computation, resizing of 30000+ images requires a lot of additional CPU time but reduces the amount of video data to be compressed afterwards, thus it may actually speed up the process by a small percentage.

Obviously All-to-AVI adds the subtitles first and resizes the modified video later (thus shrinking the subtitles along with the video material) which would spare the converter from modifying the subtitle scripts in the process (they may contain their own font and font size informations and fancy stuff that's beyond the knowledge of this converter), resulting in a font size for the subtitles that wasn't meant to be this way be the releasers.
As mentioned before, if the subtitles were in SSA/ASS format you could extract them from the MKV container, edit them (such as increasing the font size, changing the position of subtitles etc.) and then tell your converter to use these "external" subtitles instead of those from the MKV container (remember that your converter asks you where to take the subtitles from - now you know why). SRT subtitles contain nothing but text (no font name, no font size) so the converter's font size option (the "Arial 14-28") should have an effect there (and perhaps only there!) in any case.
But my source tells me that Kiki Delivers does in fact use SSA/ASS subtitles for Moyashimon (as almost every encoder will do nowadays, SRT is just not acceptable anymore for fansubs and will only be used for R1 DVD rips these days)... so you probably shouldn't select "SRT" in that particular situation. Who knows, your converter might even be able to do the suggested "font size boost" when you order him to do that... then again, if the converter "blindly" rewrote subtitle scripts then the whole typesetting would become horribly messed up in the process (wrong positions of subtitles for traffic signs etc. - advanced typesetting is a lot more than just writing subtitles for the dialogs); on the other hand there are in fact specific fansubbing tools that are able to automatically convert a given typesetting to another resolution. So it may be worth a try - even if you might end up having to manually rewrite the subtitles script in order to get a decent font size for your shrunk video resolution as you're the only one to know which subtitles you want to be upscaled and which ones you want to be left as they are. Don't let the thought scare you - if it ends up this way then the changes in the subtitle script will be very subtle.

Again, your advice spurred me to take action. I tracked down the original MKV version of Moyashimon episode 7 and entered it into AlltoAvi. I made certain to reset the dimensions like yesterday. This time I also specified that I wanted External Subs with ASS as the extension ((I have made a habit of using a third option , entitled "0 und" (I think), whenever it was available, since it didn't ask for an extension when I wasn't sure what the purpose of such an extension was or what harm it might do)). I then selected Arial 24 (the second largest size) for the font, and began the conversion. I'm awaiting the results at present...

Thread break - this is getting a bit long - PLS continue postings to - http://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=259&posts=1

Here's a problem with this latest version: there are no subtitles at all! Somehow, trying to change the font size had the effect of removing the subtitles altogether. According to MediaInfo, ASS is no longer listed after the conversion; could it be that it got wiped out before the font resize took place?