The Old School Otaku Lounge

(Courtesy of culturedoom on Twitter)

I really get a kick out of custom labels on VHS fansubs -- anyone have any favorites? How common was this practice?

I only have a handful of tapes from subbers/distros that put any work beyond pen and label. I don't remember it being a notability point (get tapes from them - they do fancy labels) but it is a nice touch.

I dug through Drew's Old Big Box O' Fansubs since I am still unpacking all my anime stuff (eventually, I've been meaning to post ITT for a while) to grab some pics of some tapes.



Colored tapes were the shit. I don't recall who did the yellow tapes, I'd have to pop them into the VCR to check, but the labeling is nice with the cool little pics from the show/series on them. I only have that first B'tX tape, so I don't know if each subsequent tape features different robot unicorns or pretty boys or what. I swear I still have a copy of Ami-chan's First Love(Date?) from the same subber. The purple tape I got as a loaner a while ago (and need to track down who loaned it to me so I can return it). The label is a nice inkjet print but no other frills. This is from Kodocha fansubs and the reason I know that is because of this snazzy thing:

How cool is that?! While the labels are neat (and topic of the thread), I think I like the cases the best: thin plastic that's durable without sacrificing real estate like with a clam shell. Speaking of ...



These are probably equivalent of Chinatown bootlegs (eh, that Dragonball tape is probably E. Monsoon/S. Baldric or CTennosaur but I bought that tape at an anime store) but they have the best labeling. The clamshell case is wrap-around and rips of JP or other packaging (The Macross one looks to be UK but could be some other European company, like Ireland) and the labeling on the top of the tape looks more professional. No spine labeling like one would find on your typical fansub.

The fanciest I ever did with any of my labeling was my personal tapes were labeled in Japanese (so I could practice reading and writing) and offered to do the same for anyone who requested copies of whatever I had. A few people who requested Yoroiden Samurai Troopers OAVs took me up on it but not really anyone else for anything else. But even that was all pen and label; no fancy printing, type-setting or design from me.

Hey mbanu wouldn't you know, I got a tape from the same fansub group you got

I got these from Gerald Rathkolb off twitter about 2 years ago i'd say when he was clearing out stuff in his house. The Arion tape is scratchy as hell for the first 30 minutes and then "mildly" clears up after that, but Arion was a pretty cool movie I thought. I think there's some tracking issues on the LOGH tape but it seemed fine from what I remember. These are the only fansub tapes I have other than a Zeta Gundam New Translation tape I got from a chinese store a few years back that is just a raw of the movie with no subs if im not mistaken.

Drew_Sutton wrote:This is from Kodocha fansubs and the reason I know that is because of this snazzy thing:

How cool is that?! While the labels are neat (and topic of the thread), I think I like the cases the best: thin plastic that's durable without sacrificing real estate like with a clam shell.

Wow! Great photos, thanks!

Interesting trivia: Kodocha fansubs was run by Justin Sevakis, who started the Anime News Network. (^_^) Here he is clashing with Stu Levy of Tokyopop over fansubs of Spring & Chaos: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/19 ... and-desist

Well, wouldn't you know, the site for soyokaze fansubs is still up, with a list of titles they have by different people, including Ctenorsaur.

http://www.soyokazefans.com/

DKop wrote:Well, wouldn't you know, the site for soyokaze fansubs is still up, with a list of titles they have by different people, including Ctenorsaur.

http://www.soyokazefans.com/

An interesting look at old-school fansubs right on the cusp of digital distribution... DVD masters showing up next to the LDs, taking payments via Paypal in addition to SASE, and offering VCD fansubs in addition to the standard VHS tapes. (^_^) I guess it's outside of the date range for the forum, but I am curious how long this semi-digital period lasted before BitTorrent and AnimeSuki became the norm...

mbanu wrote: Interesting trivia: Kodocha fansubs was run by Justin Sevakis, who started the Anime News Network. (^_^) Here he is clashing with Stu Levy of Tokyopop over fansubs of Spring & Chaos: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/19 ... and-desist

You know, now that you mention it, I remember Justin talking about running Kodocha Fansubs but always forget shortly thereafter. I am sure every time I re-read this post, I will go "Oh yeah, I remember that!" and then leave it to my goldfish memory.

The initial label of Soyokaze made me feel like Obi-wan - there's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time. Thanks for that link, DKop, glad to see at least their site is still up. The titles, page layouts and some of the names listed there (of the groups) brought back a lot of memories of mis-spent youth on the Internet. I think I might have even had some of their later Kenshin subs! If you look through their titles that they offer, they would distro for other groups - I want to say that was pretty common practice, too. I never fansubbed to tape, so I always had other group's for distro, but even if you were part of a group that did sub, you could choose to distro copies of other group's tapes (w/ credit, etc.). I think in the digital days something changed culturally within the fansub community; not only would groups not distribute each other's work but if that was the case, they might duplicate effort and sub the same show themselves!

mbanu wrote:

DKop wrote:Well, wouldn't you know, the site for soyokaze fansubs is still up, with a list of titles they have by different people, including Ctenorsaur.

http://www.soyokazefans.com/

An interesting look at old-school fansubs right on the cusp of digital distribution... DVD masters showing up next to the LDs, taking payments via Paypal in addition to SASE, and offering VCD fansubs in addition to the standard VHS tapes. (^_^) I guess it's outside of the date range for the forum, but I am curious how long this semi-digital period lasted before BitTorrent and AnimeSuki became the norm...

It's probably poor form to double-post but I'll run with this. That's what I get for hitting 'Preview' instead of 'Submit' and walking away. And yeah, it might be a bit out of scope for the forum but there's a bridge that we can walk along without crossing, I think.

This period of overlap is one I remember fairly well as I was in high school, running an anime club and into computers/the Internet (with lots of geeky friends who were, too). It feels like it lasted a while but in actuality, it probably only lasted, at most, two or three years. Please also keep in mind, I was still pretty solid in the VHS camp for quite a bit of it.

Up until probably 1998, most Internet service was still over telephone lines (POTS) and only with advent of cable and (a)DSL service were you not only getting increased speeds but you were moving off of the phone system and providers started issuing non-consumption based plans, paying per month instead of per minute. Some of this varied by location or as premium expenses, like when home VCRs became first available or PCs hit consumer markets. Thanks to Anipike, you could find people who might have had anime video clips online or find IRC channels you might be able to get more. But they were just clips - a minute, maybe 1:30 at most - the format was RealMedia and the quality was all of the garbage that came with that. But hey, I can almost see Trunks punch that Cell Jr, I don't care how many hours I've been waiting. With flat billing, faster speeds available via cable or DSL, transferring files still takes forever but you can set it and forget it. It's probably between here and the end of 1999 of when 'digisubbing' starts.

The technical background behind getting the actual subtitles to the screen and saving the modified output to a file, I admit I don't know much of. I cannot imagine it being that different than it would be later, during the BitTorrent period, other than most of your source material still involved TV Tuner and Capture Cards. These were additional video cards you would need installed in your PC that connected to your TV/VCR/LD via RCA, or coaxial, or maybe S-VIDEO if you weren't a cheap schmuck like me. Simplistically speaking, you would play your physical media, render the video, add your subs, re-render and export the finished product. Now you've got to get it out there.

Digital savvy people would host in IRC or some explicit file sharing network like DC++ or Raspberry Heaven. Others might suffer the bandwidth costs and have direct downloads on their sites. Some might instead go the super easy route and share peer to peer through the likes of Kazaa or WinMX (later forked/became Winny, was popular in Japan and became the primo place to get your raws from Japan). Quite a few people; however, would take their subs and put them right back to tape and distribute them they way most people knew how - daisy-chained VCRs and tape trading lists/websites.

Tape transfers of digisubs could look weird - colors were a bit more pastel or faded, sometimes if the CPU was chugging during recording, that would be output to tape as well. I remember watching (or trying to watch) the Ah! My Goddess film from 2000 on a sub like this. Tape was; however, reliable as that if you could output a functional copy, it would work in any VCR that would read it. Video on the computer, on the other hand, was still a weird and wild mix of varying formats, so you could run into playback issues even on seemingly identical technology (hardware and software). If you wanted to show your digisubs in a club environment you did one of two things: 1) You hauled your rig with you or 2) You output to tape.

P2P and DDL were also a mixed bag as it was classic client-client connection orientation and speeds would negotiate to the slowest link - some kid with less than a 56K and no parents for the weekend would wreck your bandwidth and you'd have to serve the file forever. Storage could also be a problem - video files were in the hundreds of MB. While CD burners were affordable, you might only be able to get 3 episodes out of either a data or VCD (plus send them through the mail like tapes). Storage in the GB sizes didn't start to become trivial until the very early 2000s, nearly doubling every year. Eventually storage became dirt cheap, Internet speeds increased, the BitTorrent protocol was devised and written, fansubbers stuck with a standard set of codecs and formats for the most part and everything went digital all the way, even in so much that having DVDs of fansubs was weird.

The hybrid days straddling both analog and digital fansubs were weird and really brief times but I would argue that it was BitTorrent more than anything that pushed fansubbing away from it's tape-trading roots and into what many fans are familiar with a little over a decade ago.

Drew_Sutton wrote: Up until probably 1998, most Internet service was still over telephone lines (POTS) and only with advent of cable and (a)DSL service were you not only getting increased speeds but you were moving off of the phone system and providers started issuing non-consumption based plans, paying per month instead of per minute. Some of this varied by location or as premium expenses, like when home VCRs became first available or PCs hit consumer markets. Thanks to Anipike, you could find people who might have had anime video clips online or find IRC channels you might be able to get more. But they were just clips - a minute, maybe 1:30 at most - the format was RealMedia and the quality was all of the garbage that came with that. But hey, I can almost see Trunks punch that Cell Jr, I don't care how many hours I've been waiting. With flat billing, faster speeds available via cable or DSL, transferring files still takes forever but you can set it and forget it. It's probably between here and the end of 1999 of when 'digisubbing' starts.


Digital savvy people would host in IRC or some explicit file sharing network like DC++ or Raspberry Heaven. Others might suffer the bandwidth costs and have direct downloads on their sites. Some might instead go the super easy route and share peer to peer through the likes of Kazaa or WinMX (later forked/became Winny, was popular in Japan and became the primo place to get your raws from Japan). Quite a few people; however, would take their subs and put them right back to tape and distribute them they way most people knew how - daisy-chained VCRs and tape trading lists/websites.


P2P and DDL were also a mixed bag as it was classic client-client connection orientation and speeds would negotiate to the slowest link - some kid with less than a 56K and no parents for the weekend would wreck your bandwidth and you'd have to serve the file forever. Storage could also be a problem - video files were in the hundreds of MB. While CD burners were affordable, you might only be able to get 3 episodes out of either a data or VCD (plus send them through the mail like tapes). Storage in the GB sizes didn't start to become trivial until the very early 2000s, nearly doubling every year. Eventually storage became dirt cheap, Internet speeds increased, the BitTorrent protocol was devised and written, fansubbers stuck with a standard set of codecs and formats for the most part and everything went digital all the way, even in so much that having DVDs of fansubs was weird.

The hybrid days straddling both analog and digital fansubs were weird and really brief times but I would argue that it was BitTorrent more than anything that pushed fansubbing away from it's tape-trading roots and into what many fans are familiar with a little over a decade ago.

It's so wierd to think that the early digital age of fansubs and P2P sharing is now that far into the past when in my mind I still think it happened yesterday.

Once I got a CD burner on my rig that I had, you only had 700 mb to put files on, and that took maybe at most 3 episodes of an anime that was at best 360p format, which was high quality grade A pure s**t for its time. My max HD space for my old parents gateway was 20gb, which is so laughable that a standard high def series caps at roughly around that amount in todays files for just a standard series.

Yea those real media anime files maybe might work on my VLC player if I try running them, other than that they wouldnt hardly run. I still have my data files from the early 2000's that were on multiple dvd's and cds that those discs surprisingly still work today. Im curious if you still got your stuff. I have a handful of clips that are in 96p or something rediculously small that only pull up as a small block on my computer when i play them, and I have to squint to see what they are, its really something. It's the only way I got all of Victory Gundam in Real Media subbed in chinese on 4 cds back in 9th grade from a friend of mine, and those files still work to this day.

I didn't even know about IRC till much later, which if I did that would have saved me time getting files from Kazaa and WInMX if I knew i could find what I wanted without it being the lottery to try and find whatever for that day. IIRC WInMX stopped and I had to swtich to eMule, which then became eDonkey, which then eventually got shut down.

The thing with my digital "collection" is that while it is a collection of sorts, I do not rank it with my physical anime collection, even if those series or movies are on data cds/dvds. I had a somewhat moral idea that any anime that I purchased on physical media through legal means is what I would constitute as my real collection, where as the anime on data disks and hard drives were sort of "rentals" for me to check out to phyiscally own one day. Some I can own and others its harder to do because if they're not licensed then I wouldn't be able to physically own them.

Wow! Great info! (^_^)

Drew_Sutton wrote:"The hybrid days straddling both analog and digital fansubs were weird and really brief times but I would argue that it was BitTorrent more than anything that pushed fansubbing away from it's tape-trading roots and into what many fans are familiar with a little over a decade ago.

I agree -- BitTorrent was the engine that powered a generation of anime fans. (^_^) On the other hand, though, I think that era is mostly over now, at least for English-speaking fans. AnimeSuki has shut down, and many newer fans have either never heard of fansubs or don't understand what makes them different than bootlegs, since not many groups are doing their own translations anymore. Most things that a new fan might think to want are available through a legitimate streaming site; most fans never reach the point where they are starting to run up against the wall of knowing something exists but being unable to find a legal translated source for it.

There's still torrent-based distribution, but I get the impression it is mostly folks from that generation of fandom doing what they are used to and non-English speakers who without good access to simulcasts are stuck in the position of English-speaking anime fans of a decade ago.