Although unofficially existing for days, weeks, and possibly a month before today’s date, LA projects officially came into existence five years ago today on August 29, 2003. It should be acknowledged that my co-founder and I are still active in this project we started five years ago. Our project began solely as an IRC channel back in 2004 with the purpose of commuting and having good relations with a small group of friends. It eventually turned into a haven to share various entertainment and multimedia files with each other, on top of being a place to hang out with our circle of friends.

A few months later we started sharing our very own exclusive content with everyone (at that time new Saturday morning cartoons), and that sparked the growth of many new users looking for and sharing their own personal collections of cartoons and anime shows. We stuck to this path to ultimately arrive at the place we are today; constantly providing a shared interest in various files, focusing primarily on anime and cartoons.

These past five years have not been without their devastating setbacks though. There have been many people that have not appreciated the work and dedication of my co-founder and me (the ones who have provided you with nearly all of the unique content up to this point). In relation to the previous statement, we have also seen and experienced a recess in users in the IRC channel throughout many of the years of existence. Still, we do what we do because we find it fun and enjoyable; not to please a certain crowd or demographic.

The same five years have also brought forward many great moments. There have been many great users who I have had the privilege of enjoying communication and fellowship with—primarily only users on the IRC channel. Unfortunately, there have been many characters that had such a big impact in the channel’s existence that have mysteriously disappeared without a trace. It is great however to see older users returning just to see how things are, or just to say hello. It’s those users that really make what we do seem special, and we can’t thank them enough for their interaction and involvement.

It is quite alarming comparing the download count on our files to the amount of “thank you” messages we get. To be honest, we receive about one “thanks” for every 200 downloads. That doesn’t really make us feel the greatest, but we still crank out new releases because others enjoy them, as well as ourselves. It would truly be great to see a change in the attitudes of the users who download our files ungratefully in the future.

While the service we provide you on this website is free for you to download as much as you want, it unfortunately is not free for us. We pay for this webhosting, and the file hosting that you use to download these files from. It goes without saying that it can be pretty burdensome to acquire adequate funding to provide many users with this option of fast downloading. We appreciate user contributed donations to help pay for the costs of running and maintaining this wonderful little place. With all that said, I ask anyone with the ability to contribute a few dollars to our server funding to please click the donate button in the right column. Any dollar amount is appreciated, and all funds go directly to paying the monthly invoices.

I have taken a small time out of my day to write all this up for you, I hope you can take a small time out of your day to read and appreciate everything you see here. With all that said, I wish LA Projects a happy five year birthday!

Last week I posted some terrible news regarding the new Jetstream video format. I have tried various ways of converting these .flv files to different formats including .wmv and .avi all to no avail.

Although I had success converting to .avi, the audio goes out of sync immediately upon seeking. No matter what FPS settings I use (the native .flv seems to be 30fps) the audio always goes out of sync with the video.

A commenter suggested the following:

Just drag and drop the FLV file into the program window and it’ll automatically split it into audio and video files, which you can then easily rejoin through a program like mkvmerge (http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/downloads.html) I’m sure there are others, and you may want to search for one as, from my tests, re-merged files come out as the slightly-strange .mka format, which plays in VLC media player but might have difficulty in others.

I would prefer to keep the files a more popular video codec that most people would be able to play without any external codecs or players required for download. I also have a deep desire of hate for VLC media player.

I have uploaded the episodes of BoBoBo and Blue Dragon(Note: Blue Dragon 5 is missing. These episodes are only available for 7 days, rather than the usual 21+ days for every other show. I unfortunately did not get another backup of these parts.) to a temporary folder on our server for you guys to download and experiment for yourselves and try to convert them to a single common video codec, or if you just want to download and archive these .flvs, you are more than welcome to. I appreciate any more help or suggestions you may have.

Click here for a directory listing for these files.

The start of last week, Toonami thought it would be a good idea for their Jetstream site to be more MAC friendly. Thus they have switched the streaming video format from the standard WMV to the flash video codec FLV.

This is terrible news for me. Although grabbing the actual parts off the website isn’t any difficult (with a change in programs used) the merging and output is considerably more difficult. I have tried converting each .FLV part to a .WMV codec but to no avail. I have tried numerous programs, all with the same result of failure.

I am not entirely sure what I am to do now. Do I continue to painstakingly try dozens of programs only to result in failure? Honestly, I do not think I have the tolerance level to come to a working conclusion by myself. The only other option there seems to be until then is to release the raw .FLVs and direct people on where to get an FLV Player.

I will consider doing this, but I would like to somehow stick to a more common video format with more features. If you have any ideas or suggestions as to what I should do regarding the future of our releases, please please please email me or leave a comment.

Edit: I will provide temporary links to the the raw .FLV parts (of last weeks, this weeks, and all future weeks), and  hopefully sometime later be able to convert them to 1 file  to a different format/codec. As commenter will said, it is better to have the  parts available in another format, than no other parts at all. Check back here tomorrow evening for more news regarding this.

Thanks.

This week brings the release of a new show entitled, Blue Dragon! This 51-episode anime is an adaptation from the popular XBOX360 series of the same name. This show also airs weekly on Cartoon Network’s Saturday evening lineup at 9:30PM. I just thought it would be better to release as many sources as possible to fill the needs of the desiring fans. Post your comments/feedback of this series after this post!

I would also like to thank the two people that donated to our site/server funding this past week. The combined donations were enough to secure at least one payment for our services for the next month(s). We encourage everyone who enjoys the service that we provide, and people who have a few extra dollars to donate, that they do so to help fund us and our services. These donations, and all future donations are greatly appreciated!

Hey everyone, how’s it going? I know, I keep saying that I will update more often, but my life schedule just doesn’t allow me to do the things I would like to do as often as I would like, and I’m sorry for that. I still have tried to update the direct downloads page with links to the latest releases on a somewhat regular basis. There are a few episode releases out this week, and you can see them in the title of this post. There are also some new torrents on the tracker. However, I feel there is something more important to talk about this week.

I have been so very busy the past few months, I have failed to keep track of the website’s financial expenditures. Our website/direct download server transmit quite a bit of data very quickly on a daily basis, thus our server costs are quite high sometimes. But without these services, there would be no site or downloads for anyone to enjoy. I have been paying for these services almost entirely by myself, and it gets tot he point where I don’t know how much longer I can support this project.

I’m asking everyone who enjoys the service that I provide donate a little bit of money to the server to help keep it running. We accept all dollar amounts and every little bit helps. If you can donate, please, please, please, help me out. If you are interested in helping out, click the paypal donate button on the right and follow the onscreen instructions. Thanks a lot.

I thank the 2 people who donated during the last 5 months for a cumulative total of $20.

The past few weeks I have been quite busy with some personal issues and I have not had the time to update this site as frequently as I normally do. My absence has not affected the weekly releases entirely. I have still managed to upload the weekly episodes to our direct download server, but probably very few people knew/know how to get the new episodes without me updating the DDL page. Our bittorrent releases have seen a rather unfortunate decrease in activity however. I’m going to try to update the site, the DDL page, and the BT page alot more regularly again.

Mine as well fill everyone in on what has been released during the past couple of weeks. MAR 50-51 and BoBoBo 14-17 were/have been released. Along with those new releases, I have put out a few new torrents; there is now a batch torrent for MAR 41-50, MMSF 1-13, and Eyeshield 21 1-5.

Go to the DDL/BT pages and download and SEED all the releases that you can to help out. Thanks to everyone for their continued support and kind comments the past few weeks.

A few of you may have noticed my absence last week; the reason being that I was just too busy to keep up with this site at that current time. The only new episode last week was still ripped and uploaded (albeit a little late) by Tezuka. I hope to not have to miss too many days of uploading/maintaining this site, but sometimes it is just inevitable.

Here is a brief up to date episode release informational list.

Prince of Tennis / 50 of 178 released
Marchen Awakens Romance / 49 of 102 released
Mega Man Star Force / 13 of 55 released
BoBoBoBo-Bo BoBo-Bo / 13 of 76 released
Eyeshield 21 / 5 of 137+ released

Many people are aware that there has been no new episodes of Prince of Tennis, Mega Man Star Force, and now Eyeshield 21 for a number of weeks. I am not sure what the situation is with PoT, but apparently production on episodes 14+ on MMSF were halted. There have been numerous petitions floating around the web for the continued work on MMSF, but I have yet to hear any positive word on what’s going to happen with this series. Eyeshield is another question mark. For the past 2-3 weeks there has not been a new episode; I don’t want to jump to conclusions too fast, so I will assume that the people at Toonami Jetstream are withholding them for a later date, which will hopefully be soon.

Because of MMSF’s halted production at episode 13, I have decided to release a new torrent batch for this series including all 13 episodes, rather than just 1-10. It is very important that you know that support on the 01-10 batch torrent will be halted, and all resources are to be re-assigned to the new torrent. If you were in the process of downloading/seeding this torrent, you can resume your activity with the new torrent.

Remember to try and show your appreciation with your thanks in a comment, or if you are feeling extra appreciative and generous, feel free to donate to our webhosting fund. It takes a lot of storage space and bandwidth to store and share these episodes for the public masses; and all contributions and donations are greatly appreciated.

Yay, triple release again.

Torrent for MAR48 will probably be out tomorrow, until then, I hope the DDL is enough for most of you.

I have not really announced the batch for BoBoBo publicly in any large places yet, so it has not gotten many hits. I do plan on doing that soon.

I think with MMSF being halted at episode 13 for the time being, I am going to re-release a batch torrent with 1-13 instead of just through 10.

In about 4 weeks there should be a MAR 41-50 torrent, and closely followed by a Eyeshield 01-10 torrent.

That is all.

This week brings the fourth episode of the Eyeshield 21 series and episode ten of BoBoBo. The latter prompting us to release the much anticipated BoBoBo 01-10 bundle!

If you would like to download BoBoBo episode 10, without re-downloading episodes 01-09, use our DDL link, or use a BT client that allows selective downloading such as uTorrent or Azureus.

I request everyone that has downloaded and archived our previous BoBoBo episodes, that you hop on the torrent anyway to help seed. Any and all seeding speed is greatly appreciated.

Still about 6 weeks until Eyeshield gets it’s batch.

Due to the holidays, this week’s episodes are a bit delayed and released on an awkward date. But I got ‘em now and they are ready for download!

I appreciate a few of you leaving comments about the new episodes being up. Next time there is a very slight delay, do not go post comments alerting me they are up. I am well aware when they are up, and if it takes me a little longer to get around to releasing them, deal with it. I am not going to shuffle my schedule so a few people can download these episodes a couple hours faster. If it has been days and I still haven’t released anything, then would be an appropriate time to leave a comment asking about them.

Look for a batch of Bobobo next week as episode 10 should be out!