Ruminations on digital fansubs
Jan. 20th, 2003 03:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterWell, today's been spent downloading anime fansubs on giFT and watching them. Some time ago, I downloaded the first episode of .hack//SIGN, the anime in the same universe as a forthcoming PS2 RPG port from Japan, when I heard a friend say good things about it, but had never gotten around to watching it. Well, I got around to it. And then I started downloading more episodes as fast as I could pull them down, watch them, and erase them to free up more hard-drive space. Wow. I got up through #11 of #26 before I had to knock off because the high-bandwidth source of episodes went-offline so I won't be able to get new eps before tomorrow.
Also on the viewing agenda, the first episode of Eatman '98, which I pulled off of an anime binaries newsgroup...and the first Macross Zero OAV. Eatman was decent, but Macross was...wow, wow, and double-wow. Kawamori's still got it. Does he ever. And a few days ago, I downloaded the fansubbed first eight episodes of the new Ghost in the Shell anime, Stand-Alone Complex, and an episode of an interesting-looking show called Licensed By Royal.
It's funny...just a few years ago, anime fans were bemoaning the death of the fansub, as anime companies were more and more often licensing anime (and thus putting it off-limits) before it even came out on DVD, let alone could be translated and subtitled. But it seems that with PVRs, DivX, and peer to peer, even a TV series can be taped, translated, fansubbed (with no generation-loss from source to copy), and sent out by binary group and peer-to-peer in a surprisingly short amount of time. And I'm able to watch new anime fansubs for the first time since I stopped trading tapes back in college.
Also on the viewing agenda, the first episode of Eatman '98, which I pulled off of an anime binaries newsgroup...and the first Macross Zero OAV. Eatman was decent, but Macross was...wow, wow, and double-wow. Kawamori's still got it. Does he ever. And a few days ago, I downloaded the fansubbed first eight episodes of the new Ghost in the Shell anime, Stand-Alone Complex, and an episode of an interesting-looking show called Licensed By Royal.
It's funny...just a few years ago, anime fans were bemoaning the death of the fansub, as anime companies were more and more often licensing anime (and thus putting it off-limits) before it even came out on DVD, let alone could be translated and subtitled. But it seems that with PVRs, DivX, and peer to peer, even a TV series can be taped, translated, fansubbed (with no generation-loss from source to copy), and sent out by binary group and peer-to-peer in a surprisingly short amount of time. And I'm able to watch new anime fansubs for the first time since I stopped trading tapes back in college.