Inu Yasha
Inu Yasha is an anime show that Adult Swim has picked up and plays every night at 11:30 (right after the love of my life, ATHF). Typically I really hate anime, but Inu Yasha has totally been doing it for me.

The reason I hate anime is that often I find the animation to use tons of cheap cell tricks. They draw one character, then slide him slowly sideways, with a bunch of straight lines in the background indicating that this character has assumed some mystical or improbably velocity upon attack. Plus, when a character shows surprise, it's usually just a big, open mouth, with a single bead of sweat slowly running down the left cheek. I find this type of animation to just kind of be cheap.

Some anime is quite good, don't get me wrong. Akira, anyone? Stuff like that sets the standard, and most made-for-television anime is just garbage.

Inu Yasha, on the other hand, is quite good. I find a real dearth of animation techniques being used. The fights are interesting, the character development is excellent, and I enjoy the story (yes, even though it's totally contrived by splitting the Shikon jewel into a thousand pieces and, oh, we have to get them back).

So, since Adult swim is taking its sweet ass time in showing the episodes, I thought I would advance the cause and download a couple.

Doing a little research on the episode list for Inu Yasha led me to this site, which shows that there are 148 episodes. Wow. There is no way that I'm going to have the patience to watch 148 Adult Swims to get all of my Inu Yasha. Also, with a little more research, I've found out that Inu Yasha has been going on since mid-2000 and has three movies. Investigating an anime tracker discovers that there are currently 157 episodes. Double damn.

So I downloaded, let's say, a couple, just to see of course, and I get them in this crazy file format, ".ogm". WTF. That's one of the big problems when downloading any type of media from the internet--there will always be twenty caveats to using it. .ogm. WTF do I do with this?

Luckily for us, there is a Lazy Man's Guide to Ogg Media (OGM Files).
- posted by frank crist @ 7:14 PM