arch1t3cht's Ramblings

Hi Hello this Site Exists Now

2026-04-15T00:00:00Z

Until now, I tried to avoid having a dedicated blog because :effort:, but

The various pages and guides I've written are distributed across
- My GitHub gists
- One of my GitHub repositories
- The JET Guide
- The Fansubbing Wiki
- Pins in various Discord servers
This was getting a bit too insane even for me.
GitHub has kind of been going to shit recently^[1] so I felt like I should maybe prepare to put my stuff elsewhere.
From time to time I feel like writing something and ask myself where to put it.
Ryan tells me I need to have "a based blog with random insane posts on it" to truly be torch v2.

So, here we are. I'm not yet sure what to do with my existing guides, so for now I just made posts here linking to wherever the guides are currently hosted. That way, there's at least a single page listing all of my relevant guides. Maybe I'll move some of them to this page eventually.

Will this actually make me write more, or will it stay half-finished like half of my other projects? Stay tuned and find out!

Well, even more now than before, at least. ↩︎

What Every Typesetter Should Know about Renderer Internals

2025-12-29T00:00:00Z

After popular demand, I wrote a guide explaining how the libass subtitle renderer works internally, and what implications this has on the performance of different subtitle effects.

Link: https://gist.github.com/arch1t3cht/8cb1793beb72d30e334c7c46ff8c1080

What you NEED to Know Before Touching a Video File

2025-05-27T00:00:00Z

I wrote a guide explaining most of the basics of multimedia, in particular video encoding and remuxing, in order to try and help new users to avoid some of the many rookie mistakes one can make when it comes to working with videos.

Link: https://gist.github.com/arch1t3cht/b5b9552633567fa7658deee5aec60453

Karaoke Templater Idioms, Snippets, and Tricks

2024-12-15T00:00:00Z

A supplement or sequel to my karaoke templater guide listing various snippets and idioms for more advanced karaoke templater usage.

Link: https://github.com/TypesettingTools/arch1t3cht-Aegisub-Scripts/blob/main/doc/templaters_idioms.md

The JET Guide

2024-05-08T00:00:00Z

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for modern anime encoding in the past, but none of them was ever completed, and the existing guides got more and more outdated as time went on and encoding practices evolved.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/

Not to mention several additional started projects that never made it far enough to be released publicly. ↩︎
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). ↩︎
Which, incidentally, I might write something about soon, too. ↩︎

Encoding Resources

2023-12-14T00:00:00Z

As my first attempt for an encoding guide, I wrote a page collecting all the various encoding-related resources I found useful when learning about the subject. This then eventually grew into the JET guide.

Original Link: https://gist.github.com/arch1t3cht/ef5ec3fe0e2e8ae58fcbae903f32cfe5
Current Link: https://jaded-encoding-thaumaturgy.github.io/JET-guide/master/resources/

Miscellaneous Tricks with Karaoke Templaters

2022-11-15T00:00:00Z

A supplement to my karaoke templater guide explaining some uses of karaoke templaters outside of actual karaoke and dissecting the thought process behind writing them. Some of the code examples are a bit outdated now that better libraries (in particular ILL) are available, but the general concepts are still relevant.

Link: https://github.com/TypesettingTools/arch1t3cht-Aegisub-Scripts/blob/main/doc/misc_kara.md

The Math Behind Perspective in .ass Subtitles

2022-08-11T00:00:00Z

I'll be honest, I completely forgot about this page and only rediscovered it now when going through all my old ramblings so I could link them on this blog. I don't think anything in there is wrong, but it's fairly outdated at this point. (It was written after I got Zahuczky's old Perspective-Motion script to work correctly, but before I built Aegisub's built-in perspective tool or my own improved PerspectiveMotion script.) Still, I'll link it here for completeness.

If you're interested in the math behind the new perspective tools, I tried my best to structure and comment the code of both Aegisub's built-in perspective tool and my Perspective.moon module used in the perspective scripts as well as possible, so you should hopefully be able to read those for more insights.

Link: https://github.com/TypesettingTools/arch1t3cht-Aegisub-Scripts/blob/main/doc/perspective_math.md

A Programmer's Guide to Karaoke Templaters

2022-06-26T00:00:00Z

I wrote a guide explaining how Aegisub's karaoke templaters work by going through a simple example. The page also describes the major differences between the three big existing templaters and how to migrate from one to the other.

Link: https://github.com/TypesettingTools/arch1t3cht-Aegisub-Scripts/blob/main/doc/templaters.md

In hindsight, the name "A Programmer's Guide to Karaoke Templaters" may have been too intimidating. The thought process behind it (apart from wanting a catchy name) was that the guide only explains what a templater does, and not how ASS tags or Lua scripts work, so that the perfect target audience is somebody who is already experienced with typesetting and programming, but not with Karaoke templaters. But this made some users think "I'm not a programmer, so this guide isn't for me." Oh, well.