Now that YouTube has put more of an emphasis on commercial videos I decided to have a look around and see what was what. Of course the fist thing I checked out was the Animation & Cartoons category. There is a mix of old and new, American and Japanese shows in the category. With only 30 shows in the category there is a good mix with stuff as new as Gundam 00 and as old as Astro Boy, shows as well known as Jackie Chan Adventures and as obscure as Here Comes the Grump.
What is nice about the service is that some of the Japanese show are available in both english dub or subed. The player can be either standard standard YouTube screen sized, a larger 800px wide screen, or full screen mode. If you are viewing one of the non full screen mode and don’t like all the bright white around the edges you can ‘Turn out the Lights’ which dims the everything around the player. To pay for the bandwidth there is a 30 second ad before the video starts. I don’t know if longer shows have ad breaks like Hulu.
So to test it I watched the first episode of Gundam00 subtitled. All in all I would have to say it’s ok it could use some improvement though. Now I don’t think I can put the blame on all the problems on YouTube as I’m not sure how the deal works out between them and Bandai and Sunrise. First off video quality, I would have to say that over all it is very good, not a good as the fansub that I downloaded but still not bad for a stream, no major artifacting or picture softening. But, even thou I let almost the whole episode buffer and had it in High Quality mode there was still video jumps and jitters even in non action segments. The subtitles are not hard coded subs but closed caption text so you get the white text on a black box look and the timing was off in some segments.
The subs were also off in term of translations at a couple of points, not they translated wrong but their choice of english sentence structure made it so that the subs were no where close in matching the english spoken by the charters. The most obvious example of this was the closing line. Setsuna subtitled line is “Because we are the Gundam Meisters of …Celestial Being.” The thing is the audio has him clearing saying “Gundam Meisters” when “Celestial Being” is on the screen and vis vera. I don’t know why they did have the subs say “Because we are Celestial Being’s Gundam Meisters”. Same meaning and the audio would match the subs. There is a couple more examples of this in the episode.
Over all I would say the YouTube service is a good way to have an intro to to a series or if you want cheap way to get your TV fix while on the road. But for the best experience rent or buy the DVDs.
