Gambling sites are more profitable, that's why many fansubs was dead.

Greetings, it appears there are several misunderstandings that we would like to help clear up. These values you are seeing here are objective measurements of quality that you get when comparing 2 images. Compare every encoded video frame to every source video frame and you end up with what scientists like to refer to as "an absolute ton of data." The metrics used here are called SSIMULACRA2, which we often shorten as ssimu2 or some other variation. They are indispensable when used in the context of an automated script such as the one used here. If you are curious and capable, as we believe you may very well be, you may peruse the method itself here: https://github.com/cloudinary/ssimulacra2 . For a rudimentary understanding of the results, images are scored from 0 to 100, where 0 is the worst score and 100 is the best/perfect score. The difficulty of achieving a near-perfect score increases non linearly as you approach 100. In other words, these are good scores, great even considering the bitrate. On their own, these values are merely an honest portrayal of the average image comparison results over all the frames in the entire video. We can understand and forgive the unfamiliarity with these metrics as a typical user but failure to understand them and further mistake and declare them as a ploy for "driving you to their site to make money" is foolish and embarrassing.

On that last remark, we will say this: We have no means of monetization from the likes of users such as yourself. Certainly not with any website or hyperlink mentioned anywhere. Checking the description, the only non-Nyaa link Lumen posts is to Discord as a means of getting into contact with them. This is very common and a helpful courtesy extended by many members and encoders/uploaders. With that out of the way, we would like to help you avoid this embarrassing predicament in the future and perhaps become quite knowledgeable yourself.

So let's shed some light on the "special script" mentioned by Lumen. We can confirm that it is inspired by our very own "Normal CRF Distribution Multi-Pass encoding" setup. We'll further refer to this as the Normal-Boost algorithm for brevity. In short, Normal-Boost aims to improve consistency of the quality between scenes towards a target CQ/CRF by using the aforementioned metrics, SSIMULACRA2, to adjust CQ/CRFs on a scene-per-scene basis. For ours, we adjust based on 2 ranges, minimum to average, and average to maximum CRF and our adjustments are based on standard deviations away from the average or normal, hence the "Normal" in "Normal-Boost". From our conversations with Lumen, we understand their adjustment is based on a different range but the underlying principle is the same. We are still experimenting with these methods and have plans to improve upon and evolve them. As we have been sharing our knowledge and code freely with not just Lumen, but all AV1 Anime Discord members and developers adjacent, we expect improvements to Lumens script scripts in the future as well.

If you would like more information on this algorithm you can look at the Nyaa descriptions for our [Sav1or] Seijo no Maryoku wa Bannou desu and [Sav1our] Uchuu Senkan Yamato 2199 releases which used the described algorithms, particularly the more recent 2199. And no, we are not insinuating Lumen took this script from us. In fact, all the code to perform the algorithm was written by them in a different language, Python, and also adjusts differently than ours. Ours was instead written in Typescript, which transpiles into Javascript but that's out of the scope of this discussion. This is not "some script" acquired or downloaded in way, shape, or form. If you are curious, would like to learn more, or just make wild speculations as we (Sav1or) most often do, feel free to join the Discord server linked in either Lumens releases, our releases, or rather any of the regular AV1 encoders releases. Again this goes without saying, but none of the aforementioned parties are doing anything to receive monetary support from users. We simply do and share what we enjoy, whether that is our releases or knowledge.

Have a wonderful and enlightened day,
-Sav1or