I have a love/hate relationship with modern fansub web encodes. The biggest reason why I hate them is that their existence discourages encoders from doing proper Blu-Ray encodes. Nowadays, web fansub encoders all use a particular method of smushing together a bunch of sources (like Crunchyroll, Amazon, Abema, etc.) to create something that looks better than any individual one of them. Different sources will encode different frames and parts of frames more faithfully. Oftentimes, a badly encoded (bitstarved) image will be blurrier than a properly encoded image. Therefore, it makes sense to try to take the most detailed parts of images from all the different sources and put them together. This is done by applying a filter to the image that removes detail, seeing what was removed, and prioritizing sources where more detail was removed. Yeah, that was probably hopelessly confusing. Let's give a specific example. Imagine you have a source that somehow preserves fine textures well but not scenes with heavy grain, and another source that preserves scenes with heavy grain but not fine textures. If you simply blur both sources, that will wipe the fine textures from the first source and the grain from the second source, and the idea is to take the parts of each source that were "wiped more," so to speak, and put them together (pre-wipe, of course). This is known as "frequency merging" or "lehmer merging." What you use to remove the detail from each source is pretty important. The way we first did it was to apply a simple blur. This did the job it was supposed to, but it had some strange side effects. Specifically, it increased the contrast in backgrounds and nuked detail around lines. But actually, the nuking is more like a bonus than a side effect, since there's often a lot of artifacting around lines in web sources, and nuking them takes care of that. The problem is the background contrast ([example](https://slow.pics/c/1yX53wo1)). Doesn't the wakuwan encode look better in that example? The sky and cloud "pop" more. The fact that it looks better is something of a problem, though, since when it comes time to encode Blu-Rays, you're competing not against Crunchyroll, Amazon, etc., but against your WEB encode that has all this good-looking (but fake) background contrast. You'll look at your Blu-Ray encode and perceive it as "losing" to the WEB encode, which would be embarrassing if anyone pointed it out, or if not that, then at least difficult to explain. This has led at least two fansub encoders to use the detail merging technique for their Blu-Ray encodes—merging the Blu-Ray with one or more web sources, in other words—in cases where, in my humble opinion, it was completely inappropriate and only possibly justified by a desire to hang on to that precious background contrast. There's a third instance where an encoder declared that they wouldn't do Blu-Ray encodes because WEB was good enough... even though when you compared the Blu-Ray and, say, Crunchyroll, the BD blew CR out of the water. But again, that encoder's WEB encode had that extra contrast, and a straightforward BD encode wouldn't replicate that. All this is to say: Don't compare Blu-Ray encodes to WEB encodes. Compare them to WEB sources if you'd like, but not encodes. WEB encodes are the product of so much black magic and annoying compromises that trying to beat them in every aspect shouldn't be the goal. Is this blog a thinly-veiled attempt to get people not to rag on me for having a Blu-Ray encode that [looks worse than my web encode in some ways](https://slow.pics/c/NoNrozMr)? Well, yes, but hopefully I've sufficiently explained myself. That extra detail in the WEB version is fake! The Blu-Ray version is how the studio intended it to look! [Video quality comparisons](https://slow.pics/c/rox78pNI)