(This post is very long, sorry)
Almost there...

It's currently re-encoding and then needs to go through one more round of QC. Like an EA Games product it's missing some previously announced features, but here's an abbreviated list of what you CAN expect to find in the release:

• Clean OP: Yes, no text anywhere to be found with the exception of the translated show title (which I omitted last season) and The Triad's credit for me stealing their translation as well as our group name appears in the last 5 seconds (carefully integrated with the title so as not to look stupid (yes, it probably will still look stupid)).
• 95% softsubbed: No more hardsubbed karaoke! Lyrics in romaji and their english translation are simple timed lines and can be turned off if you so desire. The only hardsubs are complicated ones like the show name and various signs scattered through the episode (things that fade or zoom which wouldn't work right in a certain portion of viewers without special configuration).

• Multiple subtitle tracks: Related to the above in that there are TWO styled subtitle tracks. For the first episode the default track will contain both the OP/ED lyrics and the regular show dialogue. The second track will contain only the show dialogue for those that like things clean (like me). Starting with episode 02, the dialogue only track will become default so if you want to see the OP/ED lyrics, you'll need to switch to the second track in that case. ALSO there is an unstyled SRT subtitle track for you jerks trying to watch quality releases with the crap known as VLC. Please consider the CCCP http://www.cccp-project.net/ for playing back any anime in general. You'll be amazed how much more awesome styled subs look than the crap you see now in VLC (e.g. the lines of text layered atop one another with no regard for position tags). If you don't like CCCP you can achieve similar results with:

  • Any DirectShow based media player. I like (and test with) Media Player Classic.
  • MKV in general: Haali's Media Splitter http://haali.cs.msu.ru/mkv/MatroskaSplitter.exe
  • Video: FFDShow http://mirror01.x264.nl/x264/ffdshow_rev497_20061104_clsid.exe , CoreAVC(my favorite), your favorite H264 decoder here.
  • Audio: FFDShow (same link above), CoreAAC(maybe), your favorite AAC decoder here.
  • Subtitles: VSFilter 2.37 (not much choice here, eh?) http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/guliverkli/vsfilter_20051125.7z?download

  You linux folk would probably like MPlayer as I think with the very latest version they introduced a significant improvement to styled subtitle decoding.

• Chapters: MKV supports that nifty feature so I might as well use it. These are the same layout of chapters as on the DVD, nothing fancy. Just a quick way to skip the OP, skip to the second half of the episode, the usual.
• Translation edits: All of the character names as well as the Asura remain spelled the same way for consistency with season 1.
  Missile Form became Rocket Form. Without getting into a serious weapons discussion here, a rocket is unguided where a missile is self-guided. In this case, the rocket is only guided by the person physically holding onto the device and besides, every dictionary I could find says that the german "rakete" = "rocket"
  Also, where the spoken non-japanese was terribly different from the japanese subtitle, I used the translation of the subtitle as provided in Triad's notes pages. They switched to this method a few episodes later, I might as well do it right away.
• DVD Edits: Raising Heart doesn't glow that godawful bright pink when speaking. That's pretty much it for changes since the TV airing for this episode. Also the "nanoha.com" thing is missing from the next ep preview.

That's all I can think of for now. Hopefully you'll find a torrent in this thread in the next couple days!

Thank you! OMG i cant wait! woot!

Just an update during our QC experiments tonight. MPlayer 1.0rc1 which came out recently has styled subtitle support integrated. In order to take advantage of it you need to run mplayer with the command line:

mplayer -embeddedfonts -ass /path/to/nanoha.mkv

And you too will be able to enjoy the deliciousness your Windows using anime counterparts are already having. MPlayer needs to be built with Freetype (2.1.8 or newer) and fontconfig support. I can tell you for sure that the win32 binary does not come with such support and it simply substitutes the default font for everything (but it still looks better than the unstyled crap VLC and older MPlayer spit out). The image attached to this post is an example of what happens when fontconfig is missing from your build of MPlayer. You can see it still applies the formatting and colors, it just uses the default font face.

You can read the full post I got my command line info from at http://forums.animesuki.com/showpost.php?p=612090&postcount=9 which also explains how you can enable this by default.

It's that time again! Let the new season of awesome begin with a bang!

http://damagedgoodz.net/torrents/mglna01.torrent

For goodness sake! I've been looking forward to this... I'm so excited... thank you! THANK YOU!

AWESOME
I wish more groups were this dedicated and released stuff in this way.

For those wondering exactly what's different between DVD and TV versions, I just found this on 4chan:
http://lolipuni.com/list/review/nanohaAs/nanohaAs_DVD1.html
The DVD images are on the left and TV on the right. The link contains comparisons of all the DVD volumes and may contain spoiler scenes for those who haven't seen the series yet.

hmm the _ mind games is a serious anime cliche that can sometimes really really annoy me attack dammit get it over with i say talk talk talk. being dedicated to a show is great the product that is turned out in the end is something that we as watchers always strive to find and enjoy. also this isnt a anime that is done over and over by 10 groups all changing a little bit so they can call it there own after 1 poor slub does allt he work. so we know here they will only be able to make theres less watchable. "smile"
The Olin

Nice and looking forward to it =).

About the "Rakete" thingy... well, you might want to know that in german there's only one word for missiles and rockets in the first place, so neither "rocket" nor "missile" would be wrong... well, if you don't wanna loose yerself in discussions about the targetting system that is, but that's really only possible in english ^_^, trust me i am german ;).

Oh... and to talk about the pros of unstyled subs: They're much easier to change to your personal tastes in matters of size and especially colour :P. Seen so many ill chosen white subs already...

Anyways, keep up the nice work b^_^b.

Awesome. Just. Awesome

yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yea, as mentioned above CCCP is really the only thing you should watch subbed anime with, it's much easier with subtitles and audio tracks. Also, with certain players the subtitles tend to run off of the screen cause they use their own font rather than the styled font in the coding. But yea, CCCP ftw!

Come on, you can do better than that. =)
With 132 kb/s for audio, you can retain much more than just 16 kHz.

Please give Vorbis a try.

---
(CCCP is redundant. ffdshow + Media Player Classic for the win!)

>>13
You're far too obsessed with upper frequency limits. The goal of these codecs is to throw out the information you wouldn't be able to pick up anyway.
Here's the spectromagnoarticulatorized analysis of ep 2 encoded with vorbis at Q=4 (same filesize as current AAC). If that extra 1.5khz of nearly inaudible fuzz is that important, I don't mind switching the drop-down box to vorbis instead of aac (actually I saved 3mb at Q=4). We're getting down to squeezing blood from a turnip here.

For the record, CCCP = ffdshow + mediaplayer classic (or zoomplayer). There is no redundancy there, it's just a convenient package of the two (and VSFilter which you really should be using instead of the version built into MPC, and Haali Media Splitter which you REALLY should be using instead of MPC's built in mkv splitter).