Which video player do you use to watch anime?

I've been using MPC-HC for the longest time, but seeing as it's not under development since 2017 I was thinking about switching to something else.

I remember MPC being the go-to for weebs back in the day (₂₀₁₀) but what do the cool kids use these days?

malmon wrote

Haven't watched anime in quite a while ^_^', but otherwise mpv is my favourite

Thanks, I'll go with that! I now remember seeing it recommended before, so it seems a solid choice.

I'm curious about the "upscaling" etc. features for better video quality. Have you ever used that?

I also checked out MPC-BE (a MPC fork), which was very nice as well and a bit easier to set up compared to mpv.
In the end the ability to simply drop a link to some anime stream into mpv and have it play from there (with noticeable better quality) sold me on it. ^_^

Dontmindme wrote

mnl wrote

Thanks, I'll go with that! I now remember seeing it recommended before, so it seems a solid choice.

I'm curious about the "upscaling" etc. features for better video quality. Have you ever used that?

Chiming in for mpv, there's usually a /mpv/ general on /g/ with answers to all your questions. Doesn't seem to be up currently but you can find it in archives, here's a start: https://rbt.asia/g/thread/80968593/#80968593
The youtube-dl integration plus the no-video mode are what sold me on it. On Windows you also have the great mpv.NET frontend (https://github.com/stax76/mpv.net).

Thanks alot! Once I have some free time I'll dive into optimizing everything for my setup. I have some old rips of Cowboy Bebop which I'd planed to watch this week and those are at a pretty terrible resolution and quality. Let's see what can be squezed out those quality-wise.

Wow, using a HQ neural network shader for resolution upscaling made a ton of difference. Looks as great as it will get, I guess.

Backlash wrote

mnl wrote

Wow, using a HQ neural network shader for resolution upscaling made a ton of difference. Looks as great as it will get, I guess.

Fancy~... Mind sharin' the name, mnl-kun? I know Waifu2x is a thing... ^_^

There are several to choose from, I think these are the most popular ones: FSRCNNX, Ravu and NNEDI3, Anime4K

I tried FSRCNNX, Ravu and NNEDI3 and I personally found NNEDI3 to have the best results for really low res anime (_360p) even though FSRCNNX is supposed to be better. It's very GPU intensive though. Also, I haven't tried Anime4k yet, but it seems pretty cool too.

One thing to keep in mind is, that most of these NNs seem to upscale by a power of 2. For example, I have a 1080p monitor, so if I use these on a 720p Anime it will upscale to 1440p and then needs to downscale to 1080p again, essentially wasting resources and (possibly) making the picture look worse. In short, what shader to use very much depends on the (resolution of) the source material.

Here is a snippet from my 'mpv.conf' with the shaders I use for upscaling _360p anime:

....
glsl-shader="~~/shaders/noise_static_luma.hook"
glsl-shader="~~/shaders/noise_static_chroma.hook"
glsl-shader="~~/shaders/nnedi3-nns256-win8x6.hook"
glsl-shader="~~/shaders/SSimSuperRes.glsl"
glsl-shader="~~/shaders/KrigBilateral.glsl"
scale=ewa_lanczosharp
dscale=mitchell
cscale=ewa_lanczosoft
glsl-shader="~~/shaders/adaptive-sharpen.glsl"
...

I'm still not sure if I'm understanding everything correctly but my thinking was that this would 1. Remove static noise 2. Upscale 360p -> 720p using the best NNEDI3 network, 3. Upscale 720p -> 1080p using SSSR 4. Chroma Upscaling via 'KrigBilateral' (not sure if that's even usefull but w/e) 5. Sharpen the image using 'Adaptive Sharpen'.

Maybe someone with more experience can chime in, if that's actually correct.

Backlash wrote

I've been using the Smooth Video Project for a couple years now to interpolate anime to 60/120/144 Hz depending on my hardware. It'd be really interesting to see which one I like more.

I've been meaning to check out SVP~ Does it make a noticeable difference?

Dontmindme wrote

tfw waiting for Anime4K on Kodi Android
So far Shield TV AI upscaling works okay but it's mostly a sharpener, nowhere near what Anime4k or other NN filters can do. Wonder how it'd work with a Tegra X1, if at all.

Backlash wrote

I've been using the Smooth Video Project for a couple years now to interpolate anime to 60/120/144 Hz depending on my hardware. It'd be really interesting to see which one I like more.

How does interpolation work for anime? Always heard that interpolating gave pretty weird results.

I've heard that SVP has dedicated settings for Animation these days. I might have to check it out soon :3

Rocky Thanks, good to know! By now I'm pretty happy with my mvp setup though, so no real need for me to switch back.