arch1t3cht's Ramblings

The JET Guide

There have been multiple attempts (guide.encode.moe and the silentaperture guide[1]) at making a guide for modern anime encoding in the past, but none of them was ever completed, and the existing guides got more and more outdated as time went on and encoding practices evolved. I threw my own hat in the ring myself with my encoding resources gist, but of course that, too, was a long way from an actual guide.

After the topic of starting another guide project had come up a couple of times in IEW's and later JET's chat[2], I eventually just spun up an mdbook guide repository and moved my encoding resources gist to it. My reasoning being that it's better to at least have some info available online, no matter how incomplete or badly structured, than to spend months privately working on the perfect guide that never ends up being published.

Moreover, trying to learn from the problems that the old encode.moe guide had (where contributions were not reviewed or merged for a long time, which resulted in the project dying out), I adopted a very liberal contribution policy, stating that any and all contributions would be merged fairly quickly provided that they are factually correct and remotely intelligible (even if they were, say, incomplete or redundant with other pages). I'm one of the biggest defenders of bikeshedding in the contexts where it matters (namely, when backwards compatibility is relevant or where precedents are being set for the future), but when it comes to simply collecting information, the slogans "Perfect is the enemy of good" and "Just make it exist first, you can make it good later" definitely apply.

It's been two years since then, so, did this work? Well, the guide still has much less content than I'd like it to have. Which, of course, I myself am just as much to blame for as anyone else since I also haven't contributed too much content. My biggest pages, the descale guide and the page on codecs and containers are still unfinished, and many other pages I'd like to write one day haven't even been started yet. The guide is also fairly poorly structured overall - some content is redundant and the formatting and structure is wildly inconsistent between the pages.

But this was exactly what I signed up for with this policy. The bottom line is that this content is now available online at all, instead of only floating around in various Discord servers. Having a poorly structured guide is better than not having one at all. And maybe one day I'll finish all of the pages I started. Writing good guides is hard.[3]

Note: To clarify, I am of course not solely responsible for the JET guide. I'm the person who kicked off the project and wrote the first few pages, but big parts of its content have since been written by other people (thanks!).

Link: https://jaded-encoding-thaumaturgy.github.io/JET-guide/master/

  1. Not to mention several additional started projects that never made it far enough to be released publicly. ↩︎

  2. While a Certain Person whose name shall not be named kept insisting that they were working on their own guide, which they will definitely release next weekend! Needless to say, that guide has still not been released even today (in 2026). ↩︎

  3. Which, incidentally, I might write something about soon, too. ↩︎