Шепот сердца / Mimi o Sumaseba / Mimi Wo Sumaseba / Whisper of the Heart (Кондо Ёсифуми) [Movie] [RUS(ext), JAP+Sub] [1995, романтика, повседневность, BDRip] [1080p]

Just a quickie on current 10bit H.264 support:
- ffmpeg/libav have now had it for ~months (made by irock, they now have asm optimizations by Jumpyshoes)
- mplayer(2) has had support for some time now ( <a href="http://mplayer2.srsfckn.biz/">these builds</a> recommended, can be used with smplayer if you need a front-end )
- VLC will have it in their next release ( you can test with nightlies from <a href="http://nightlies.videolan.org/build/win32/last/">here</a> )
- Lord patched it into FFDShow-tryouts (and I undumbed its swscale usage flags so that RGB output wouldn't look like crap). It should work fine'ish, although we are still scratching off some rough edges. Like the fact that it seems like we've stumbled onto a bug in VSFilter not really having as correct color conversions as possible inside. Of course, whether or not the effects of this bug are visible to people is a whole separate affair. Regardless, we're working on it.
What is this whole "10bit" affair? higher-than-8bit colorspaces are part of the H.264 standard, usually until now only used in the "professional" zone. It's not really anything new, and there actually was at least one DirectShow decoder for it available on the internet before libavcodec got one (trivia: MainConcept's broadcast decoder). It just wasn't picked up by the media companies for the masses, where the choice went towards Blu-ray just hitting the source with immense amounts of bitrate paired with 8bit (and thus no open source entrepreneur had yet taken it into his or her TODO list until irock developed 10bit encoding routines into x264 during last year's GSoC program).
Unlike what would probably come to your mind first when thinking about "higher bit depth in color", its biggest merit for most of the people is not in the capability of actually having a way to keep 10bit things 10bit (as most people pretty much have no way of getting such content originally), or in the fact that you could use hyper special rendering straight onto a 30bit display or whatever. It's compression.
Even if your source is originally 8bit, encoding it in 10bit (in case of lossy compression, of course -- otherwise the "redundant" data will actually start biting us. Although the output of course wouldn't be identical compared to the 8bit source either in such a case, either) will have the merit of making the output suffer less from various compression artifacts. In layman's terms, this means that lossy compression will be more efficient in leaving things pretty, leading to smaller files looking better in the end (Ateme's <a href="http://x264.nl/x264/10bit_02-ateme-why_does_10bit_save_bandwidth.pdf">PDF</a> on this).
Not to mention that even if one converts the 10bit picture into a 8bit one to make it easier to deal with (for such stuff as playback etc.), the difference is usually miniscule (after all, we are in the same 4:2:0 colorspace), or might even look better as some ways of conversion use dithering in the process.
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What are the cons of this? Slower decoding and encoding, as well as loss of the capability of using hardware decoders to handle it for you. Dark_Shikari has measured a slow down of around 35-40% compared to 8bit decoding. This mostly means that 1080p will be a problem to a bigger amount of people, but not like we haven't been there already -- and passed it (not to mention that most anime is not worth 1080p, if even 720p).
What are the pros of this? The encoder will have less things to worry about, and will be able to compress the result more than before, while keeping the quality level -- not to mention the several reports of better quality attained with 20-40% smaller file sizes. Depending on the source, this also leads to the encoder having to spend less time tweaking encoding settings that do the least possible visual damage to the source (banding and such are often a problem to an encoder whom tries to do "visually lossless" encodes).