42 replies to this topic

[syockit]

I think it would be nice if there is an option to view pages in low quality mode, for people with limited bandwidth.
Take for example, this page:
http://vatoto.com/read/_/83827/tonari-no-kashiwagi-san_v3_ch18.5_by_u-prod-scanlations/3
The page height is 1600px, and size is 2.2MB. For people with slow connections, this will load up very slowly. People with limited bandwidth will quickly use up his quota.

Some people can tolerate lower resolutions such as 1200px height, which should result in faster load and smaller packet usage. Therefore I suggest, for black & white pages with file size >=1MB, a LQ version given as alternative.

Of course, this would mean more space needed to host one page.

[Weaper]

there are also ways for the scanlator to make the pages way lighter. saving as simple png is the heaviest possible. that page saved as png8 with 16 color (no loss of quality as it's a black and white page) makes it 500ko http://i.imgur.com/5iFad.png
you might want to tell them about it

I think such technique should be introduced to the scanlators not aware of it

as for a LQ option, I'm for it too but I don't know if it's hard to implement or not

Edited by Weaper, 12 February 2012 - 01:56 PM.

[syockit]

Oh wow didn't notice! I thought it was a 95% quality jpeg, but I doubted if jpeg can go over 2MB on that resolution… so that's why.

Maybe I can inform them, but some groups have their own policy. Maybe this group came up with their own raw, and wants to preserve it in PNG.

On a second thought, even if we have a "View in LQ" option, if they come up with a policy of "do not allow LQ conversion", then I'll be screwed again

[vimes123]

I think there are ways for the server to send a downscaled version without having to save it. I approve of this, I used to have slow internet for quite some time and its can be very annoying.

[Trebor]

Batoto's vision is to present the comic as the author / scanlator intended it. That's one of our main principles.

As a matter of aesthetic principle, we don't want to participate into something that will degrade the quality of the comic.

And as a matter of respect to scanlators and authors, we don't want to degrade their work -- even if it is the users choosing it, we don't believe that we should be complicit in this.

At Batoto, we do things a bit differently; we're not driven by the desire to make money at all costs or to have the largest user base at all costs. If we wanted to do that, we would host all comics regardless of what the scanlators want. We don't believe in acceding to every user request. We have a vision and believe in it.

We are a neutral content host. If you have problems with the content, we believe you should contact the scanlators directly. if your internet is slow, we believe that you should lobby your government or ISP to provide you with better options. There is no reason that you should have slow connections (or fast connections at very expensive prices) in this era.

[G@mes mani@c]

I'm not sure but I think there is a option which compresses the images and loads the web pages in Opera. So, if you really need to see LQ version to save your bandwidth I would suggest you to check it out.

Edited by G@mes mani@c, 12 February 2012 - 08:26 PM.

[Grumpy]

Well, bit contrary to Trebor's post, I do actually want to give an option to show LQ. Well... not LQ, HQ jpeg when ever pngs are detected. There are far too many badly optimized pictures out there like the said example. It's a shame not all scanlators pay a lot of attention to file size when it can be reduced without any notable loss. I bet 9/10 people can't even tell the difference without aid from tools the difference between HQ jpeg that's ~200KB and 24bit PNG that's 2MB.

[Trebor]

Well, bit contrary to Trebor's post, I do actually want to give an option to show LQ. Well... not LQ, HQ jpeg when ever pngs are detected. There are far too many badly optimized pictures out there like the said example. It's a shame not all scanlators pay a lot of attention to file size when it can be reduced without any notable loss. I bet 9/10 people can't even tell the difference without aid from tools the difference between HQ jpeg that's ~200KB and 24bit PNG that's 2MB.

I'm going to cry in the corner now.

[vimes123]

Batoto's vision is to present the comic as the author / scanlator intended it. That's one of our main principles.

As a matter of aesthetic principle, we don't want to participate into something that will degrade the quality of the comic.

And as a matter of respect to scanlators and authors, we don't want to degrade their work -- even if it is the users choosing it, we don't believe that we should be complicit in this.

At Batoto, we do things a bit differently; we're not driven by the desire to make money at all costs or to have the largest user base at all costs. If we wanted to do that, we would host all comics regardless of what the scanlators want. We don't believe in acceding to every user request. We have a vision and believe in it.

We are a neutral content host. If you have problems with the content, we believe you should contact the scanlators directly. if your internet is slow, we believe that you should lobby your government or ISP to provide you with better options. There is no reason that you should have slow connections (or fast connections at very expensive prices) in this era.

You don't realise how many people you piss off with a statement like that.

Edited by vimes123, 12 February 2012 - 11:48 PM.

[Trebor]

Perhaps I should clarify a bit. I don't mean to be insulting or make people angry intentionally. (Though, if you're angry with my ideas or disagree with me, well, I can't do much about that)

For the first bolded comment, I don't believe Grumpy is planning on resizing the comics; he just wants to get some better compression without impacting quality. I could be wrong about this. So, I'll wait for Grumpy to clarify this point before I say any more.

For the second bolded comment, I think I may not have said this in the best way possible. I did not mean to say that users are dumb for having slow internet connections. I realize that people have slow connections or can't get good connections unless they spend lots of money. I'm saying that these people should lobby their government / ISPs to offer them better service, because it is inexcusable (on the part of the government / ISPs) that good internet isn't a right and necessary utility like how electricity and running water is (at least by Western standards). And if the users aren't asking for change, then it just won't happen (or will happen a lot slower).

Similarly, with the bit about scanlators, they are the ones doing the comic. We're limited in how much we can do (or how much we SHOULD do.). I don't think it's insulting at all to say that you should take some issues up to scanlators directly.

Edited by Trebor, 13 February 2012 - 12:06 AM.

[vimes123]

Well, even with lobbying people are mostly impotent to change their situation and for many it won't change any time soon (more then 10 years or never).
So look at the situation from their eyes, they are already frustrated and the advice isn't helping them in the slightest, because these people know best about their situation anyway. Batoto won't be a big plus in their argumentation/negotiation either,
If you take a look at mobile internet (with a tablet), there aren't too many places with affordable rates for that kind of traffic either. With 2mb per image some gigabytes sum up quickly.
About the argument of presenting it like the author intended, well, the author intended you to buy it and read it on cheap paper. Instead we actually read it in a much bigger display size on a big screen making it superior to the print version. The overall quality depends on the original scan quality and cleaning, not so much the resolution imho.

edit: seems like I am still hurting from past bad internet times, I am taking this much too seriously ;-)

Edited by vimes123, 13 February 2012 - 12:33 AM.

[Alxandr]

May I suggest PNGGauntlet (or the library it uses which I forgot what was named)? It does losless compression of PNG's and can save up to 70%+ in some images (depends on the images though). Problem is it's slow and requires a lot of CPU to do this, but it could be "hinted" to scanlators (not as in use this or don't post, but as in simply telling them that it's a tool availible to shrink the filesize without loosing any data at all that they can use if they would like the images to load quicker). I always use this tool when designing web-pages to reduce loading-times, and typical web-pages with a lot of big area images can be drastically reduced in size. Never tried it with manga or other comics before though.

[Edit]
Hmm, don't know how much it will help. I tried it at a couple of png's I found at the page, and were only able to compress them to 99% of original size. Seems to be fairly optimized png's, but might just be me beeing unlucky with the images/group I tried on.

Edited by Alxandr, 13 February 2012 - 03:11 AM.

[Grumpy]

[Edit]
Hmm, don't know how much it will help. I tried it at a couple of png's I found at the page, and were only able to compress them to 99% of original size. Seems to be fairly optimized png's, but might just be me beeing unlucky with the images/group I tried on.

I've used it before too and never really found great performance with it. Even if you do get lucky, I've only seen like 70% of the original size, not so much of 70% save.
Something like jpeg2000 might also be awesome, but not many browsers support it. So, it kind of just leaves us choiceless with jpg.

[Justice]

i am a guy with a slower internet .. a page require 10 minutes or more to load .. and sometimes it crash .. and i had to refresh and wait it again from the start .. and 1 chapter can take hour to read .. i dont understand what u guys saying but if that can make me read faster then please do it.. maybe something wrong with my internet that make the images crash .. and maybe i need to change it ( if it were that easy i wont be posting this reply and i wont even sign up ) .. maybe u can at least do something that makes it load faster like mangareader.net ?.. that way the reader that suffering like me would be happy .. perhaps u dont even care about the readers from what i observe.. and u put the scanlators good which is great cause i think highly of the scalantors ..any way .. just do anything to end my and others readers suffering.. maybe i should make my own thread ... lol..

[Loki]

i am a guy with a slower internet .. a page require 10 minutes or more to load .. and sometimes it crash .. and i had to refresh and wait it again from the start .. and 1 chapter can take hour to read .. i dont understand what u guys saying but if that can make me read faster then please do it.. maybe something wrong with my internet that make the images crash .. and maybe i need to change it ( if it were that easy i wont be posting this reply and i wont even sign up ) .. maybe u can at least do something that makes it load faster like mangareader.net ?.. that way the reader that suffering like me would be happy .. perhaps u dont even care about the readers from what i observe.. and u put the scanlators good which is great cause i think highly of the scalantors ..any way .. just do anything to end my and others readers suffering.. maybe i should make my own thread ... lol..

something is really wrong with your internet , if mangareader loads fast for you and batoto doesnt , at worst when i'm with shaky connection the difference is no more than 1 second

[vimes123]

Well, with a low end dsl (768 kb/s or 1Mbit/s or something alike) a 2mb file takes about 20 seconds to load.
Now a 400kb file that looks very nearly similar, at a resolution normal hd displays use, takes only 4 seconds (your browser resizes it anyway, and there goes all that quality).
I think most people would be ok with up to 5 seconds loading time, anything longer would make more sense to download instead of reading online.
Anyway.grumpy already said he plans something like this, so there's not really a need to debate ;-)

[syockit]

While I think there should be an LQ option, I don't think batoto itself should handle the downsampling, at least not without prior agreement. Give the choice to the scanlators: if they want to allow LQ, then give them choice of (a) uploading own LQ, or (b) use batoto's downscaling script.
But (b) is a big hit to cpu resource of server, I don't think it's feasible.


BTW if uploading of b&w png like above is honest mistake, then maybe you can make it so that when too many pngs are uploaded, then a page asking for confirmation that "Are you sure that want to upload as PNG without compressing to JPEG?"

Of course, the chapter above probably would pass that confirmation as it doesn't have that many pages…

Edited by syockit, 13 February 2012 - 07:11 PM.

[Weaper]

While I think there should be an LQ option, I don't think batoto itself should handle the downsampling, at least not without prior agreement. Give the choice to the scanlators: if they want to allow LQ, then give them choice of (a) uploading own LQ, or ( use batoto's downscaling script.
But ( is a big hit to cpu resource of server, I don't think it's feasible.


BTW if uploading of b&w png like above is honest mistake, then maybe you can make it so that when too many pngs are uploaded, then a page asking for confirmation that "Are you sure that want to upload as PNG without compressing to JPEG?"

Of course, the chapter above probably would pass that confirmation as it doesn't have that many pages…

jpeg isn't that good of a format as it doesn't save that much from a png when saved as max quality. the option is to "save for web and device" > png8 with 16 or 32 color.
like that you'll have almost no quality loss, at least not to the naked eye and like I showed on that pic, a 2mo png turns into a 500ko png with the same quality.

that should first come from the scanlators.

[Grumpy]

jpeg isn't that good of a format as it doesn't save that much from a png when saved as max quality. the option is to "save for web and device" > png8 with 16 or 32 color.
like that you'll have almost no quality loss, at least not to the naked eye and like I showed on that pic, a 2mo png turns into a 500ko png with the same quality.

that should first come from the scanlators.

Maybe you shouldn't use max jpeg then. lol

[Weaper]

yeah but anything lower then max jpeg show jpeg artifact.