Note: New torrent with v2 files. If you downloaded the first release, the v2 patch for it is available here: https://nyaa.iss.one/view/1093539

Marmalade Boy TV (76 episodes) (1994-1995)

http://anidb.net/anime/356

Marmalade Boy “Movie” (1995)

http://anidb.net/anime/1259

Source: US/R1 DVD (Discotek)
Video: x264/AVC 10bit, 708x472 (TV) / 700x476 (Movie), 4:3
Audio: Japanese - AAC 160kbit/s mono edited / English - AC3 192/224kbit/s untouched
Subtitles: ASS Full Subtitles / ASS Signs & Songs

"Miki’s parents come home from their vacation to announce that they are getting a divorce. But what is more shocking is that they have switched partners with another couple! And to top things off, this other couple has a handsome son, Yuu, who Miki begins to develop feelings for. To make things more disturbing, everyone moves into one house. What will everyone think about Miki’s family lifestyle? " (AniDB)

The movie is actually a prequel, but is supposed to be watched after the series.

Video notes:

The recent xPearse release went with preserving max detail and pretty much all the noise, which is usually the road I’d prefer myself in a case this extreme, but as he already did it and I had already put too much work on the subs I decided to see if I could clean it up better than the BD disaster with as little detail loss as possible, and it sort of worked out, with caveats.

Regular denoising couldn’t remove this amount of noise (worsened by severe overcompression) without too heavy casualties, NLMeans however did an incredible job removing almost all the porridge from static scenes. NLMeans can’t really handle fades or fast moving scenes well though, so I added a little bit of traditional denoising but the fades still show a lot of noise, couldn’t be helped. Noise levels intensified even further from episode 39 onwards so both regular and NLMeans filters were cranked up a bit at that point, episode 43 is particularly bad and a lot of noise remains, but you’ll probably live through it and it gets better again especially in the 60’s.

Overall the detail loss is minimal IMO and acceptable to me. I decided not to do screen compares as they aren’t really fair to anyone in this case, being only static frames (even the BD can look good in some static frames), but you can try out a couple of my and xPearse’s episodes and see whichever you like more. His release is missing IVTC and has some leftover combing/combing artifacts, but if you don’t mind those it’s a fine choice.

Other video filtering: Screen shake stabilization, halo removal.

Audio notes:

This is a Frankenstein’s monster of sorts.

English audio tracks are untouched AC3. Japanese audio track was mono, which can’t be helped, but also had considerably worse sound quality for OP/ED in most cases so those were overwritten and the track was re-encoded to 160kbit/s AAC.

• OP from English audio track used in Japanese audio track of episodes 1-27 and the movie.
• OP from English audio track of episode 27 used in Japanese audio track of episodes 28-76. This was to keep the Japanese hardsubs in sync with the song, the unfortunate side effect is that the ASS softsub lyrics are slightly off sync with the English track.
• ED from English track used in Japanese track of episodes 1-36. After #36 the English track song actually got worse.

Subtitle notes:

I spent a couple hundred hours on the subs, hopefully someone appreciates the effort.

• Subtitle source for episodes 1-25 was Tokyopop DVD release, for the rest Discotek. This is because I happened to have the 1-25 subs pretty much ready from earlier work and didn’t want to redo them too much. The subs on both releases are actually 99% the same, the Tokyopop ones are slightly less localised at some points, so I added translation notes in a few places.
• Minor editing, typo fixes, line splitting/joining, the usual stuff
• Timing fixes in some episodes
• Sign stuff, logos, titles, animation etc.
• OP/ED lyrics, episode 32 concert romaji, lyrics to several insert songs where I felt like it (and lyrics were available).

The English audio track is actually missing some of the insert songs it seems, but the “Signs and Songs” sub track will still show the lyrics, so you’ll know when you’re missing something (if you haven’t already died to brain damage from the atrocious dub by that point).

tl;dr history lesson about MB releases for those who care:

Marmalade Boy has a sad release history. First we got the Tokyopop DVD’s, which had the video quality of something filmed with a video camera off a TV screen, also the Japanese audio track from episode 25 onwards was phoned in using two paper cups and a string. Then we got the Discotek DVD release which would have had light years better video (and audio), if only it hadn’t suffered some horrible analog transfer on the way which added a staggering amount of noise quite similar to a bad analog TV reception. That was of course combined with severe overcompression (up to 8 episodes crammed to each DVD) so the result was quite eyecancerish. Then, there was the SD Blu-Ray release, where they had obviously used the same bad analog source as the Discotek DVD’s, and “solved” the issue by “denoising” and sharpening heavily enough that everything looked molten and mangled, but still had plenty of noise left. So, horrible as it is, the Discotek DVD remains the least bad option.

-X