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I haven’t tried the “WMV Aspect Ratio Changer,” but the tool sounds like a useful one,
R00g; it was good of you to point it out. I have only downloaded one video from Agogo, and when I tried playing it on my favorite player, GOM, I was shocked to see the squashed effect. It took me a long enough time to download the video, as I self-righteously thought to myself, and so it should have been perfect!
I tried the video on another player, Windows Media Classic, and it played fine there. I tried a third player, UMPlayer, and got the squashed effect; I changed the Aspect Ratio (see under “video” for most players) to 4:3, set the view to Fullscreen, and the video played fine. The same with VLC as well. I tried with GOM again, and now the video suddenly became normal, for some odd reason.
I sent
Jswift255 a private thanks, as his having chosen to share this valuable secret was extremely gracious of him. I also tried to pick his brain on how to navigate through Agogo and its mirror sites. He replied that he generally checks out the covers.
The site is very buggy. I’ve noticed the same videos listed again on the same page, for example, and also when I try to click on the next page of a series, after a point I get unrelated returns, Worst of all, the search function does not work, or at least I have been unable to get it going.
You get three choices on the search bar at the top of the page, according to Google Translator;
Film Actor, Video Name, and the
Movie Barcode. The first two appear to be unworkable, since you probably need to put in Japanese lettering – although I have tried that as well, to no avail. The code is the best bet, but the returns one gets have nothing to do with the code one is looking for.
I hope your experience has been more fruitful than mine, but it’s almost as though Agogo anticipated this sly maneuver, and has thrown in all of their monkey wrenches to gum up the works!
I know I’m in the minority, as many of you love gigantic-sized files. Since there is so much JAV, I can’t justify spending the time for a big old 1.5 GB file (I’m a big fan of the smaller-sized RMVBs and FLVs, springing for the high quality only if the video proves to have repeat viewing value), but for Agogo, a 1.5 GB file is actually one of their miniature-sized ones. Very often you get 2 to 3 GB sizes..!
This is why, for my purposes, the site has become of great value for the films that I have failed to get anywhere else. If anyone else is in a similar boat, perhaps you can lend wisdom as to how one goes about zeroing in on that one elusive film, instead of having to wade through pages and pages of material. Maybe you’ve found ways to make Agogo your bitch.
Since Agogo is still acting like a wild and untamed bronco in my experience, here is the best way I’ve found for the site to behave a little, while going on the hunt for a certain film. I go to the left-hand column, the one that begins with the red box for fill-in of username and password, and scroll down to the fifth section, the one with the colorful icons. This is the manufacturers’ section, and you can identify the video suppliers by their logos. (The section expands to display a very long list of them, once you click on the red button at the bottom right of the section.)
So what you’ve got to do is dig up the cover of the video you’re hoping to snatch, and check out (usually} the back cover – in order to determine the manufacturer. Sometimes the manufacturer is obvious, other times not.
When in doubt, you can travel to a user-friendlier supplier site, such as
Javparadise, that has a working search function. Put in the video code, and you’ll get a no-sweat return, if they carry the film. The manufacturer is handily listed on the right hand side of the return.
This is a real grind, because you have to try and identify the manufacturers through their logos (yet luckily we are offered these graphics, instead of the names of the manufacturers in Japanese). Once you get the manufacturer locked down – and this is tricky, because some of the larger ones have subdivisions, like
Soft on Demand and
Madonna – then you’ll need to wade through the pages of that manufacturer and try to match the covers that come up with the cover of the one you have in mind.
While Agogo offers a whopping near-15,000 videos at this date – it’s an impressively massive collection – there is no guarantee that they will even be carrying the video you are looking for, given that “All That JAV” is simply endless! So be prepared for your time-consuming hunt to wind up being a bust.
One more tip: Jswift255’s wonderful secret did not work on one of the mirror sites,
yahoo.av2.tv, at least not on the few videos I checked out. (The second critical part is missing from the download URL.) I have not looked into the other two mirror sites, but when you lumber around these sites, it may be best to stick with Agogo.
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