What did old-school fans think about digital fansubs?

[Drew_Sutton]

I did a lot of copying and trading of VHS fansubs, and helped out on a few of the CPF releases. In terms of the scarcity of fansubs, or the ability to replace lost fansub tapes, well, generally you got that fansub from someone you knew. If a dog ate that tape of the Patlabor movie fansub, or if you loaned the tape to somebody and they lost it, or you took it to a convention screening and it got lost in the shuffle, well, you could get another copy from wherever you got that copy from originally.

Aha! I think maybe that was the piece of the puzzle I was missing. By the time I was watching a lot of digital fansubs, the most common way to get them was almost completely anonymous- maybe I knew the person who showed it to me (if I saw it at an anime club or a friend's house) and the fansub group name and some user handles in the credits, but if the group went away, all the middle rungs of the ladder were gone because of how it was distributed using torrents or third-party hosts, so it wasn't that I got it from one person who got it from another person who got it from the third who made it, where I could ask at each level, "OK, you don't have a copy anymore, who else did you give copies to?" In hindsight, it seems all the more surprising that I was able to maintain a "Somebody will always have them up-" mentality back then...

It sounds like while an old-school fan might take for granted that there would always be another way to get a copy, it was because they could find out where the other copies had gone?

There was still that old-school, going-to-your-human-network ability to replace a lost fansub. If you knew friends or clubmates who'd downloaded the same subs you did, you could replace stuff from your dead hard drive with copies from them. Though, the weird hangup I had at this time was that the storage size of a CDR was approximately 3 fansub episodes when an SP video tape was 4 fansub episodes and I'd gotten accustomed to counting volumes in multiples of 4. When burnable DVDs got their plusses and minuses sorted out and came down in price, that made things better as far as getting more episodes per disc.

If you didn't want to worry about burning a bunch of discs, with a little bit of know-how and equipment, you could always do a LAN and share files over that. I was active in running LAN parties in high school and college and while they were primarily for playing games, a lot of us (being high school and college kids) would do all sorts of file sharing, which in the early 2000s digital fansub boom times certainly included sharing fansubs with each other.

There are some fans who genuinely think that I have a responsibility to preserve everything I can, and also a responsibility to make everything I have available to everyone, everywhere, forever. I mean, they have told me this in exactly these words. And that is... absolutely not the case. I'm not a public library, I'm not a universal archive and distribution service, and if some 80s cartoon isn't potentially in front of their eyeballs 24/7, that is 100% not my problem. I don't know who's problem it is, but it's not mine.

I'm with you. On the one hand, I can understand "preserve everything" because who knows what will be popular to some audience many years down the road. Like "Live Action Anime Girl" Apollo Smile - those intros she did for the Sci-Fi Channel when they had their summer anime fests. At the time I thought they were a cringe inducing cheap gimmick and I still feel that way 25 years later. But other than an odd curiosity for the anime fan history B roll, I think there are people that are genuinely interested in that dot on the timeline. There is a bit of kicking myself for stuff I didn't save or preserve. Those broadcast dubs that I watched because they were anime I'd never seen before? Those tapes got re-used pretty quickly. But you never know who might want something at some point.

But it's not my job or my problem, or yours, or anyone's really, except for the people looking for that thing. There's a bit of "well, that sucks. anyway." feeling that I can commiserate with. Their hunt can continue and I wish them well. But by the sounds of it, it won't because they might just give up. At the risk of sounding like a gatekeeper, the idea that everyone needs to not just preserve but share at their own expense everything is something talked about by some fans who would bitch about if you used a particular service they didn't like. Just like people who'd get mad at fansubbers for not releasing "on time". Or mad at the convention that pivoted due to an unexpected circumstance.

"YOU OWE THE ANIME COMMUNITY YOUR STUFF BECAUSE YOU HAVE IT, BECAUSE I WANT IT AND IM THE ONLY ONE ASKING AND THE ONLY PERSON TO ASK YOU IN THE HISTORY OF FOREVER! WHEN YOU GONNA DO IT DAVE, HUH?"

Yeah, we know the same folks

In terms of using video for panels at conventions, we spent a good ten years wasting time at the start of every single panel trying to figure out how to get the panelists' laptop connected to the projector and then connected to the room audio, and then more time wasted trying to get the files to play using whatever software was on the laptop. Sometimes I'd see panelists sitting in the hotel lobby downloading new software using the free hotel wifi because their computer had decided that morning to have critical errors and corrupt their media player. Meanwhile, there I was, starting on time, having put all my panel materials in sequence onto a VHS tape a week before. Later I started burning everything to DVDs. Now I make an MP4 video file out of my panel visuals - which will play on every PC or MAC or UNIX box anywhere, it will probably play on your car stereo. My motto is "keep it simple, stupid."

I've been that guy on the wifi in my room because, yeah, the single point of failure was the whole OS. I've been the guy at the bar, putting the finishing touches on editing a clip for a panel in a couple hours. I've been the guy, or with the guy, with tech issues that caused me to start a few minutes late.

Experience teaches lessons but I am also glad that there is such a widespread adoption of MP4 and HDMI that most modern equipment can support anyone walking up with any laptop can give their presentation. KISS is a beautiful thing.

Software wise, I never learned Premiere either. Panel presentation has been VLC for playback. What lightweight editing I've done has been in Kino and now Shotcut and I am pretty happy with them. I have some old TV tapes from before we had cable of garbage I taped as a kid that are kinda snowy so I've got to check filters now to see if I can reduce some of that noise without saturating the picture too much and making it somehow worse. We'll see how Shotcut can render AegiSub transcripts as I have a couple small fansub projects I am working on.

[chibiboi]

I was quite young during the 90s and 2000s so the concept of time didn’t apply to me. My first introduction to fansubs was actually Real Media encodes of Sailor Moon, and while I knew links could die, it never occurred to me that files could disappear forever. I definitely regret deleting stuff, like stuff that I’ve personally fansubbed and put onto the Internet, especially since I was from a smaller group.

Right now I’m collecting both VHS fansubs so I can rip them onto the Internet Archive, as well as old encodes of digisubs. I started doing that partly for nostalgia, and also partly because I got an email a few years ago from someone asking about a VHS rip I had done of Sailor Moon that got put onto the Internet but a chunk was missing. And I thought “Oh I have that on a hard drive somewhere.” Turns out, I didn’t LOL

BUT I’ve been super successful rediscovering old fansubs using anidb.net because it keeps a database of users who have ever had each fansub from each group. And I message these users in the off chance they still had their files. I’ve had luck finding old Ranma 1/2 and InuYasha episodes this way because I know specific groups I wanted. In a lot of ways, it was similar to the old days because people would pick and choose which encodes they wanted to keep on their hard drives.

Also some old fansubs are available on XDCC still and on BakaBT.

I’m still on the hunt for VHS tapes though even if I already own the show on Blu-Ray so I can continue my project. But I think a lot of people are surprised to see some people out there are not only still trading tapes, but also trading digital encodes of very old files! It’s really crazy to me when I watch an old AnimeForever and FangirlFriday fansub of InuYasha that they released it 20 years ago! But what’s even more crazy is that I’ve had luck finding people who still had those files on working CDs and willing to upload them for me!

Even after all this, just now as I typed this, I think I still live with the concept of “it’ll always be there” in my head. Because just now I thought about uploading InuYasha fansubs from obscure groups onto the Internet Archive, but I thought “I don’t need to upload Anime-Kraze’s fansubs because that will always be there since it’s the most popular.” But who knows, maybe one day those will disappear too.

[Fireminer]

I was quite young during the 90s and 2000s so the concept of time didn’t apply to me. My first introduction to fansubs was actually Real Media encodes of Sailor Moon, and while I knew links could die, it never occurred to me that files could disappear forever. I definitely regret deleting stuff, like stuff that I’ve personally fansubbed and put onto the Internet, especially since I was from a smaller group.

Right now I’m collecting both VHS fansubs so I can rip them onto the Internet Archive, as well as old encodes of digisubs. I started doing that partly for nostalgia, and also partly because I got an email a few years ago from someone asking about a VHS rip I had done of Sailor Moon that got put onto the Internet but a chunk was missing. And I thought “Oh I have that on a hard drive somewhere.” Turns out, I didn’t LOL

BUT I’ve been super successful rediscovering old fansubs using anidb.net because it keeps a database of users who have ever had each fansub from each group. And I message these users in the off chance they still had their files. I’ve had luck finding old Ranma 1/2 and InuYasha episodes this way because I know specific groups I wanted. In a lot of ways, it was similar to the old days because people would pick and choose which encodes they wanted to keep on their hard drives.

Also some old fansubs are available on XDCC still and on BakaBT.

I’m still on the hunt for VHS tapes though even if I already own the show on Blu-Ray so I can continue my project. But I think a lot of people are surprised to see some people out there are not only still trading tapes, but also trading digital encodes of very old files! It’s really crazy to me when I watch an old AnimeForever and FangirlFriday fansub of InuYasha that they released it 20 years ago! But what’s even more crazy is that I’ve had luck finding people who still had those files on working CDs and willing to upload them for me!

Even after all this, just now as I typed this, I think I still live with the concept of “it’ll always be there” in my head. Because just now I thought about uploading InuYasha fansubs from obscure groups onto the Internet Archive, but I thought “I don’t need to upload Anime-Kraze’s fansubs because that will always be there since it’s the most popular.” But who knows, maybe one day those will disappear too.

Thank you so much for your work. There is just so much of the old fan sub disappearing right now, given how many people and websites just stopped seeding torrents. Wish the best on your endeavor!

[mbanu]

I'm with you - the preservation game is strong, though right now I am not sure I am preserving too much beyond my own sentiments and nostalgia. I mostly agree that companies aren't really up for straight-up preservation, at least for preservation's sake, unless they can make some money off of it.

I know some fans for whom it seems like they archive everything they possibly can, even to ripping their DVDs and BDs to digital files, which are on a server somewhere they can access through a media server program. And that's just a lot of work.

Could this be from having a record-collector mentality? DVDs and BDs can be played again and again without the quality going down, but if they scratch, they might not be playable at all. If someone's past experience with media has been mostly, "Every time you play it there's a risk-" maybe the idea of playing a copy instead of the original seems appealing?

From what I can glimpse of the new-school perspective, people like the convenience of streams, but are frustrated by the way things can just disappear when they personally don't have a copy, sort of like the second iteration of the world of TV right before the invention of the VCR.

[davemerrill]

I'm with you - the preservation game is strong, though right now I am not sure I am preserving too much beyond my own sentiments and nostalgia. I mostly agree that companies aren't really up for straight-up preservation, at least for preservation's sake, unless they can make some money off of it.

I know some fans for whom it seems like they archive everything they possibly can, even to ripping their DVDs and BDs to digital files, which are on a server somewhere they can access through a media server program. And that's just a lot of work.

Could this be from having a record-collector mentality? DVDs and BDs can be played again and again without the quality going down, but if they scratch, they might not be playable at all. If someone's past experience with media has been mostly, "Every time you play it there's a risk-" maybe the idea of playing a copy instead of the original seems appealing?

From what I can glimpse of the new-school perspective, people like the convenience of streams, but are frustrated by the way things can just disappear when they personally don't have a copy, sort of like the second iteration of the world of TV right before the invention of the VCR.

I'm from the LP record/cassette tape generation and the only media I ever felt really cautious about playing was 8-track tapes, which always seemed to give you one or two plays before becoming snarled. Cassettes would get eaten as well, everybody had a favorite tape get chowed by a boom box. VHS tapes definitely had a lower percentage of failure. But every once in a while, a tape would snap off the end of a reel, or it would get tangled up somewhere inside the deck. CDs and DVDs and BDs you have to really work at to render unreadable. (not that I haven't done that).

My impression with the media-archive-everything people is that they enjoy building digital archives of media, they like having everything assembled into servers they can access easily, it's a fun part of the hobby for them. There were guys back in the 90s ripping all their music CDs so they could listen to everything via Winamp, now there are guys ripping all their BDs and watching everything through their Plex servers at home.

[Drew_Sutton]

I'm with you - the preservation game is strong, though right now I am not sure I am preserving too much beyond my own sentiments and nostalgia. I mostly agree that companies aren't really up for straight-up preservation, at least for preservation's sake, unless they can make some money off of it.

I know some fans for whom it seems like they archive everything they possibly can, even to ripping their DVDs and BDs to digital files, which are on a server somewhere they can access through a media server program. And that's just a lot of work.

Could this be from having a record-collector mentality? DVDs and BDs can be played again and again without the quality going down, but if they scratch, they might not be playable at all. If someone's past experience with media has been mostly, "Every time you play it there's a risk-" maybe the idea of playing a copy instead of the original seems appealing?

From what I can glimpse of the new-school perspective, people like the convenience of streams, but are frustrated by the way things can just disappear when they personally don't have a copy, sort of like the second iteration of the world of TV right before the invention of the VCR.

I'm from the LP record/cassette tape generation and the only media I ever felt really cautious about playing was 8-track tapes, which always seemed to give you one or two plays before becoming snarled. Cassettes would get eaten as well, everybody had a favorite tape get chowed by a boom box. VHS tapes definitely had a lower percentage of failure. But every once in a while, a tape would snap off the end of a reel, or it would get tangled up somewhere inside the deck. CDs and DVDs and BDs you have to really work at to render unreadable. (not that I haven't done that).

My impression with the media-archive-everything people is that they enjoy building digital archives of media, they like having everything assembled into servers they can access easily, it's a fun part of the hobby for them. There were guys back in the 90s ripping all their music CDs so they could listen to everything via Winamp, now there are guys ripping all their BDs and watching everything through their Plex servers at home.

Yeah, to piggy back off of this - while most folks knew that quality would degrade over time of something like a video cassette, the fact that it took how many untold thousands of plays for it to be noticeable, it was certainly not really considered a risk like a tape being eaten, not timing your VCR appropriately for what you're recording or recording a bad transmission (which was also pretty far down the list of concerns).

Also agree that a lot of the media-archive-everything is that once they have their Plex server or whatever set up, it's there for ease of access where they don't have to get up to get the shiny discs off the shelf when they want to watch something.

[davemerrill]

I still have VHS tapes I recorded in 1983 that are playable and haven't noticably degraded. Of course, I also had tapes I bought and recorded in the 1980s that died after three plays; sometimes they'd get chomped by a deck, sometimes the tape would snap right off the end of the reel after rewinding, sometimes the oxide would just flake right off the plastic. This is why we always recommended people purchase name-brand quality VHS tapes from brands like Maxell, Fuji, Sony, and TDK and avoid the house brands, the cheap bargain brands, the generic look-alike brands, and "Laser" brand videotape.

[runesaint]

While tapes did degrade, it was MUCH more common to see the degrading of copy of a copy of a copy (etc) than a tape 'wearing down'.
Then again, you couldn't do much about tapes degrading... and if you had copies of a copy of a copy...it was likely the best that you could get of that show.