Let's talk about hardsubbing. No one hardsubs nowadays, except for Germans maybe. That's kinda weird, isn't it? As typesetting standards increase, you'd think that some groups would experiment with hardsubbing and the increased TS options it provides. But no one's taken the leap because the disadvantages are just too great. Let's break down the pros and cons of hardsubbing typesetting: **PROS** - Your TS appears the same to every viewer. - Your TS will never lag someone's player. - You can accomplish certain TS that is impossible with softsubs. - You can deband the TS! - May result in substantially reduced filesize, especially in the case of dual tracks. **CONS** - No one can take your TS and quickly slap it on a release with better video. - With softsubs, a fix to TS can take 30 seconds. With hardsubs, any fix requires you to reencode the release. - As a result, it's much less likely that TS fixes will be applied at all, bringing down the quality of releases. - In the case of After Effects typesetting, you've got to spend time coordinating the work of the encoder and the typesetters somehow. - Chroma subsampling means that TS will never perfectly match the softsubs it's encoded from. If we look at the above pros and cons, one thing that jumps out is that it makes a lot more sense to hardsub a BD release than a WEB release, since the benefit of portability isn't nearly as strong and the chance that something will need to be fixed is also lower. All this is to prepare you for the information that the TS in this release is hardsubbed. I like Eizouken a lot, and I like GJM's release of it a lot (partly because I'm proud of the work I contributed to it), but I haven't rewatched it because I watch anime on MPC-HC and I know that the typesetting will often break my player. And I'm not alone either—the viewer survey I did a while back showed that a lot of viewers are not using mpv. (Heck, GJM's TS even crashed mpv in at least one instance.) But even if one wants to hardsub, it's kinda hard to do correctly. FFmpeg is no good since it assumes TV.601 for the subtitle color matrix/range with apparently no option to change it, so the colors of the subtitles will be noticeably off. (When I was young and stupid, I made and released a hardsubbed version of Your Name that suffered from this problem.) One could just convert the subtitles to TV.601 before feeding them to ffmpeg, but that would result in slightly wrong colors at the "edges" of the colorspace. None of the vapoursynth subtitle renderers are any good either—assrender is completely broken, and subtext has subtle problems that are most apparent during slow zooms. Though it needn't be said, none of the vsfilter-based solutions are acceptable either, primarily because of vsfilter's own inferior behavior during slow zooms. **2023-11-24 update**: I learned that [this version](https://github.com/AmusementClub/assrender) of assrender is good for hardsubbing in vapoursynth. The only working subtitle renderer/encoder I could find, in fact, was mpv. So my workflow ended up being: encode lossless-ish x264 with vapoursynth filtering applied and use that to make TS fixes / blur changes, then encode lossless-ish x264 with mpv to hardsub the TS, then finally do the x265 encode. This is an extremely stupid process, but it results in hardsubs that are actually accurate to how the softsubs would display. Anyway, tl;dr -- when is MPC-HC going to finally add libass? [Comparisons of hardsubs vs softsubs](https://slow.pics/c/hS8twE8N) - perfect for luma, not perfect for chroma. [Comparisons of WEB vs BD](https://slow.pics/c/URhREU5j)