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Re: The first instance of sharing anime online

Posted: Fri Jul 24, 2020 4:37 am
by Fireminer
davemerrill wrote: Wed Jul 22, 2020 6:47 am I'm not any kind of video game person, but I remember the serious PC gamers having "LAN parties" - everybody would bring their own PCs to somebody's house, they'd network them together, and they'd play games that way. Of course, internet service still is different depending on who your provider is, the condition of the network where you happen to live, any number of factors, and in the 90s and 00s this was even more so, things weren't standardized at all.
What about MMO then? How fast your Internet needed to be to play, like, Runescape or EverQuest? And I heard that people have been sharing commercial games on BBS since the mid-1990s.

Anyway, someone mentioned in another thread that you needed a special rig to rip raw anime from VHS and hardcoded subbing it, right? By the early 2000s, was it easier to do so (did anyone have a VHS player that could connect to a computer), or people just ripped from DVD?

Speaking of which, what was the last Laserdisc anime you remember to be released? Or the first series to be distributed on CD/DVD? That applied to both Japan and America.

Re: The first instance of sharing anime online

Posted: Fri Jul 24, 2020 9:08 am
by Prog-Knife
Fireminer wrote: Fri Jul 24, 2020 4:37 amSpeaking of which, what was the last Laserdisc anime you remember to be released? Or the first series to be distributed on CD/DVD? That applied to both Japan and America.
Regarding DVD this Answerman column covers the first DVD released in the US.

For LaserDisc, this site here has a lot of missing information on stuff, but it has LaserDiscs continuing in Japan until 2000-2001, though only a few of them. And the last US-tagged release was the episode 7-12 LaserDisc release of Kimagure Orange Road.

Re: The first instance of sharing anime online

Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2020 4:52 pm
by Drew_Sutton
Fireminer wrote: Fri Jul 24, 2020 4:37 am
davemerrill wrote: Wed Jul 22, 2020 6:47 am I'm not any kind of video game person, but I remember the serious PC gamers having "LAN parties" - everybody would bring their own PCs to somebody's house, they'd network them together, and they'd play games that way. Of course, internet service still is different depending on who your provider is, the condition of the network where you happen to live, any number of factors, and in the 90s and 00s this was even more so, things weren't standardized at all.
What about MMO then? How fast your Internet needed to be to play, like, Runescape or EverQuest? And I heard that people have been sharing commercial games on BBS since the mid-1990s.
What little I did game online then, you could usually get by with 56k dial-up speeds. I played CounterStrike and Doom on both 56K and Doom on the slower 33.6; friends would play StarCraft and EverQuest on 56K, too. But Dave is right, LAN Parties were where it was at! I went to a lot of LAN parties in high school and university (I even hosted a few). Getting everyone on the same local network, you didn't have to worry about being subjected to public Internet routing. Plus you could share files over that network and have a much more reliable and faster connection. While a lot of online gamers have complained about network lag as long as there's been a network to lag on, I would say that the baseline need of broadband internet didn't start until later, like with World of Warcraft.

Internet access was a pretty fractured thing in the 90s and is still that way. More rural parts of the country are getting broadband access at decent speeds but a lot are still stuck with aDSL or third party dial-up or worse, satellite. Cities typically lead in network access and speeds, but even that is fractured by a lot of reasons (like economics). In the early 2000s and before, most high-speed Internet access came to students via University or people who worked where the business had some internet presence.

Downloading games (and other software) via BBS etc. - yes, that was a thing. Some games would do partial releases via shareware that were free to download, give you a sample of the game and to encourage you to buy the full product. My dad would occasionally use his company's T1 at the end of the day to download shareware games because that was faster than the home connection we had. Full on software piracy was often carried out on "warez" sites or file sharing networks.
Fireminer wrote: Anyway, someone mentioned in another thread that you needed a special rig to rip raw anime from VHS and hardcoded subbing it, right? By the early 2000s, was it easier to do so (did anyone have a VHS player that could connect to a computer), or people just ripped from DVD?

Speaking of which, what was the last Laserdisc anime you remember to be released? Or the first series to be distributed on CD/DVD? That applied to both Japan and America.
LD seemed to fall out of favor with a lot of more mainstream North American film fans; I had some Star Trek The Next Generation movies on LD, which was surprising that those LDs had to be from the late 90s. In Japan, LD remained popular into the early 2000s; the last ones I remember seeing were the Turn A Gundam movies in like 2001.

There was special equipment needed to do VHS fansubs and in the early days of digital subbing, you needed some of that same equipment. More often, the early digital days, folks in Japan would be recording from TV via capture cards in a PC, encoding, and sharing the file on digital p2p file sharing networks and later, BitTorrent. People wanting to sub would then download the file and modify it with subtitles then release that new file. DVD ripping was around but in anime circles, it came about later.

Re: The first instance of sharing anime online

Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2020 4:56 pm
by Drew_Sutton
Meant to add on my last post -
davemerrill wrote: I was still trading & acquiring non-commercial copies of anime titles on VHS up until about 2002 or so; it was still the easiest way for the average nerd to take a piece of video, duplicate it as needed, and take it anywhere and show it to others.
There was a point, around this time, that I remember renting a few fansubs (Ah! My Goddess movie, DigiCharat TV) that were some early digital subs that were transferred to VHS tape. I didn't see a lot like that, just due to the sheer number of fansubs that were available on tape compared to what was being done digitally, but enough that they stuck out in my memory. Anyone else experience these or are these on-offs from just where I was renting tapes?

Re: The first instance of sharing anime online

Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2020 12:48 pm
by davemerrill
Drew_Sutton wrote: Sat Jul 25, 2020 4:56 pm Meant to add on my last post -
davemerrill wrote: I was still trading & acquiring non-commercial copies of anime titles on VHS up until about 2002 or so; it was still the easiest way for the average nerd to take a piece of video, duplicate it as needed, and take it anywhere and show it to others.
There was a point, around this time, that I remember renting a few fansubs (Ah! My Goddess movie, DigiCharat TV) that were some early digital subs that were transferred to VHS tape. I didn't see a lot like that, just due to the sheer number of fansubs that were available on tape compared to what was being done digitally, but enough that they stuck out in my memory. Anyone else experience these or are these on-offs from just where I was renting tapes?
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. VCD and S-VCD were sort of a middle ground between VHS and DVD for some markets, but they never caught on in America.

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.

Re: The first instance of sharing anime online

Posted: Mon Aug 03, 2020 7:39 am
by Fireminer
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?

Re: The first instance of sharing anime online

Posted: Mon Aug 03, 2020 3:36 pm
by DKop
Fireminer wrote: Mon Aug 03, 2020 7:39 am 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?
First time I used Bittorrent for anime would've been about 2003 or 2004, and it might've been for episodes here and there that I was keeping up with. I mostly stuck with FTP programs like winmx, emule and kazaa. The last time I used it for anime was a few days ago with a site im part of, and it was for Adult Swim TV rips from the mid 2000's or so. I happen to share my own rips with other people as well.

In terms of series one comes to mind, F. F (or if you search Formula 1 anime on google) was done by someone who took the Italian DVD releases (which they called it Motori en Pista) and did a rough translation of the material. I'm not sure if the torrent is still active, and I think the person who had his own wordpress or blogspot account that site doesn't seem to be no longer available. I'd hate for that series to get lost, I should make a backup of it. That's all I got for right now, I can't think of another series at this time.

Re: The first instance of sharing anime online

Posted: Wed Aug 05, 2020 2:18 pm
by davemerrill
I think my first time torrenting anime was around 2004 as well. The the most recent time I torrented anime? I found a torrent for "Comet In Moominland" a couple of weeks ago. There are still some fansubbers working the vintage end of the street, and most of their releases are via torrents; I will have a look around on a regular basis just to see what older shows have turned up. Eventually somebody will get around to fansubbing Sasuraiger and the rest of Baxinger.

Re: The first instance of sharing anime online

Posted: Fri Aug 07, 2020 6:33 pm
by Drew_Sutton
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.