Lots of responses inbound!
The problem is that there isn't one, ideally. With good enough (actual good enough, not whatever the isp assumes they can get away with) bandwidth, you could download episodes as fast as you could stream them, so you could do either whenever with minimal delay. Instead, it makes more sense to either entirely stream the series (since you can watch it as it loads instead of waiting), or stream a bit of it as an interest check and then download it overnight to watch later unless you knew ahead of time you'd like it.
Ah, I didn't realize throttling like that was in play, since it's illegal in both the USA and EU. What country are you from, if I may ask?
Illegal != not done by companies. And without any competition and no real oversight in most places most US ISP's get away with at least some pretty regularly.
anything better than 1280x720
Why would you want to download an upscale in the first place?
Most blue-ray shows are coming out in 1920x1080p now, which means that the 1280x720 is actually a
downscaling of the "official" release.
3 hours+ on the fastest connection available in their area), during which time you won't be able to do anything else with your internet either.
If you're in that remote of a location, isn't streaming going to be rough too? Wouldn't that be exactly the case when you would rather queue some downloads overnight? By my math, if 720p takes three hours, then using your entire connection would struggle to give you 420p even with a greatly reduced bitrate.
At that particular friends house 480 can be done pretty regularly, though you need to give it a minute or two to buffer ahead right at the start of the episode. Personally where I live I can pull a 480 stream just fine, but a 720 means I've got to have the internet basically to myself to pull a stream (or give it 10 minutes or so of buffering at the start). My general track where I'm at is to alternate episode streams in 480 and 720, immediately starting the next one buffering once the one I'm currently watching finishes loading all of the way, meaning that I don't need to wait between episodes and I can watch maybe 2/3rds of them in 720p even with someone else on the internet.
(And that doesn't even touch the bandwidth caps that many people have nowdays, which could be a totally viable reason to watch episodes in a lower quality all by itself).
If you're watching anime on your phone, of course you have a different set of limitations. In that case, I would still recommend downloading normally and just moving it temporarily to your phone.
Currently Comcast, AT&T, Cox, Charter, Cable One, Cablevision, Mediacom, Suddenlink, Frontier, and CenturyLink (though they only sometimes actually enforce it) have data caps, and those are just the big names from a much longer
list. That means that 9 of the 12 ISP's in the US with over 1 million subscribers have some form of a cap, and that's amplified by the fact that some 50% of the US only actually have access to 1 or maybe 2 of those big names. I know that at least in the vast majority of my state you usually have two different options, and both of them are part of that capped list. If you don't want a cap here in Arizona, your choices generally boil down to either:
1) Pay hundreds of dollars a month for business internet/fiber that you will be locked into for a few years.
2) Have internet that is so slow it isn't good for much more than simple web browsing.
-Music-
I guess we just have differing tastes in music. Though to be totally fair a few of the cooler pieces of music (Such as Gilgamesh's theme) essentially repeat themselves in remixed form in UBW.
UBW does lose the fact that because they don't have as many solid contenders for the throne they can't utilize the idea of a leitmotif quite as well as F/Z does.
As for visuals, FSN has nothing on FZ. Just about the only visually worthy things in FSN are the design of Archer's reality marble and Heracles' fights. In FZ, Saber's beam attack on the giant eldritch abomination was grander, Iskandar's Ionian Hetairoi awesome as f*ck, Berserker's fights were just as good as Heracles', Gilgamesh's use of Ea much more impressive than its use in FSN, etc. Even FZ's VCR thing with Emiya was done much better from a visual point of view than FSN's Archer flashbacks. And honestly, FSN has nothing that matches the sheer atrocities that FZ's Caster commits. Crucified children is simply a more visually striking image than some asshole becoming a giant lump of flesh.
I will give you that there were more top moments in F/Z, but UBW just has a huge amount of little details (wood grain, rubble, etc.) that show up and then stick around even during the fights, such that even in the midst of an intense battle you can pause the episode and it will still be near still picture quality despite it just being a 3 second throwaway shot of the two characters over a particular patch of ground. I also feel that while F/Z managed to build a much better story, UBW manages to throw in much better "symbolic" moments (which kinda makes sense since so much of it's story is about ideals clashing).
Compare Heracles' and Shirou's fight against Gilgamesh and you'll notice that about halfway through each there is the exact same shot of their foot taking a step towards Gilgamesh. In Heracles' case he is driven back, while in Shirou's he manages to keep stepping forwards, which hints at the similarities between the two as both of their sets of ideals come into conflict with Gilgamesh's ideals. This also shows up in a modified form in the Shirou v Archer fight as well with the steps near the end, once again representing a conflict of their two differing ideals through combat.
If you look for them you can find tons of little symbolic moments like that in the fights, which I think is really awesome. It's those little bits of symbolism scattered throughout and the parallels between different fights to draw out the representations of the clash of ideals plus that always continued preservation of the little details that really sinks the visual aspect of UBW as topping F/Z for me, personally.
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Topic: I like anime, do you like anime? (Read 3123066 times)