davemerrill wrote: ↑Tue Jul 28, 2020 12:48 pm
I'm pretty sure there was a window of time in which people would download a fansub and then transfer it to VHS for the club library or to screen at meetings. VHS was the format you could pretty much assume everybody was going to have access to up until 2002-2004 or so. A lot of times DVDs that had been authored on home equipment wouldn't play in commercial DVD players, so if people wanted to share a digital anime file they'd record it onto a VHS tape.
Yeah, I could see that. Being in college at that time and starting to really buy into DVDs heavily, most of us either had a laptop ("for classes") and club meetings/LAN Parties, someone would bring a DVD player (usually me because I had one of those DVD/VHS decks). I wasn't doing panels at conventions then, so I never needed to transfer to tape. But oh yeah - I remember and certainly don't miss the whole "home authored" discs not working in other players or even other computers.
davemerrill wrote:
VCD and S-VCD were sort of a middle ground between VHS and DVD for some markets, but they never caught on in America.
Yeah - I had a friend growing up from Macau and he had tonnes of VCDs from trips back to Macau, Hong Kong and the rest of China. The only VCDs I ever got was it was the most efficient way for me to get all of the Dragonball trilogy subtitled at the time. It's a unique time-capsule of anime fandom in its own right but takes up quite a bit of shelf space and I don't know if the last couple of BR players we've bought will play them or they're any good.
davemerrill wrote:
I have a few CDs and DVDs of video files from the early 2000s that simply won't read; either the file formats are too old or weird to be read by our programs, or the recording media is corrupt. VHS tapes still play, though.
Same - I can get the data read on a computer off of a few of them but "modern" BR players throw all sorts of errors. But yeah, for all of the degradation of magnetic tape, yeah, my tapes still play. The only tapes that I've had really go bad were a pair that I left in the trunk of my car for a Georgia summer.
Fireminer wrote:
Say, which is the first time you guy used BitTorrent for anime, and the last time you did so? And, are you aware of any series or particular fansub of a show that have been lost online because the Torrent link doesn't work anymore? Do you have any series you want to be rescued from the Torrent graveyard?
I first started using BitTorrent in 2002 and I was turned onto BT specifically for anime (and started using it for other things later). The last I used it was maybe a month or so ago, to get BluRay fansubs of
Blue Comet SPT Layzner. I'm with Dave though - as fansubs are moving into the territory or more obscure or older anime, BT is gonna be there as a distribution mechanism that is probably only beat by streaming.
As far as things that have been lost online - I wonder how much from the BitTorrent Heydey is
both really missing and actually worth saying "man, this should come back". A lot of the series that were being fansubbed at the time have been licensed, even a lot of the classic shows have been licensed. Those fansubs, coming back, are mostly for a "look at what this was like at this moment in time." Other shows that haven't been licensed, there are probably quite a few on YouTube or some other similar platform. If I had to pick something that I had a torrent but can't find anywhere else, it'd be
APO APO World Giant Baba 90-bun 1-ppon Shobu.