Oldest Online Fansub Group?

[NoSanninWa]

Originally Posted by Itachikun

Funny thing is, I don't think this will count and all, but when I checked the groups on animesuki, by putting different numbers, I found the first Animesuki "Official" first group....

http://www.animesuki.com/group.php/1.html

Since there were digital fansubs before AnimeSuki existed, it certainly doesn't count. They were merely the fansubbers for the first anime ever listed on AnimeSuki: Hikaru no Go.

[bayoab]

Originally Posted by Onibaba

AnimeOne worked with Infinite Ryvius, which was published in 1999...just because everyone puts AonE+Naruto in one thought doesn't mean it's where they started : )

Please continue with the old stories, they tend to pass time quite well.

Actually, we can go back another month (4/3/2002) with Animeone to the Argento Soma OVA episode according to envirosphere. That is the first release recorded from them.

I wish I still had my logs from before nov 2001...

Also... is himura_kenshin the same one from ~5 years ago?

[Kimura-sensei]

Originally Posted by Onibaba

AnimeOne worked with Infinite Ryvius, which was published in 1999...just because everyone puts AonE+Naruto in one thought doesn't mean it's where they started : )

Please continue with the old stories, they tend to pass time quite well.

1999? AnimeONE isn't that old. We formed on March 8th 2002, with 1,260 episodes released. And damn right, we're still kicking and alive.

-- Kimura-sensei
Vice president / Project leader / QC leader / Slave driver / Supreme Overlord / Tyrant / Etc. etc. etc.

[Onibaba]

Thanks for clarification. Am I just thinking of someone else? Or perhaps you just picked up the series long after it was released...

[Spyre]

This thread makes me kinda wish I still had logs from my early days.

For what its worth, Super5 WAS a digisubber, working on Dragonball GT. They video captured the episodes and digitally subbed the eps for release. They weren't genlocks, I talked directly with 'rich and Compn at the time. My memory is getting stretched here, but they were active in 1998-1999, which would put them before all the other groups that have been listed in this thread so far.

Has anyone mentioned AnimeMPEG? I kinda forget what their earliest projects were, but wern't they working on Ebichu and H2? And noone has mentioned kevp yet.... He was doing Inuyasha when ep 1 first aired, translating from korean scripts and doing them in divx. This was around the time of Love Hina, if not a bit later.

[Starks]

Is it fair to divide the history of digisubbing into 2 generations?

1999 (or earlier)-Early 2002 and Late 2002-Present

There is huge gap in knowledge regarding the nature of the digisubbing community prior to the Summer of 2002. Call it "Suki Syndrome" if you will, but the history of digisubbing prior is wholly contained within gigabyte-sized log files of no more than a dozen or so active community members.

Have we, as modern day fansubbers, done enough to preserve our legacy?

[himura_kenshin]

Originally Posted by bayoab

Also... is himura_kenshin the same one from ~5 years ago?

I've been using this handle since late 2000 ... so it's entirely possible.

John

[Kilian]

That surely brings back memories. The first animes I recall watching on the PC were Rurouni Kenshin and Kimagure Orange Road in the infamous rm format. Damn, it was barely watchable back in the days...
The oldest avis I've been able to dig up from my collection is this...

Dvix3 320x240, I burned it on CD in late 2000 ... Fansubbing has come a long way.

[FatPianoBoy]

I remember getting Love Hina way back in the day. Most of the episodes are less than 60 MB, and I've got the whole series (sans OVA's) on just two CD's. I don't remember the resolution, but it didn't look much better than that Inuyasha screenshot.

[el]

Original A-F encodes of Love Hina were 320x240 IIRC, with mainly 19-min long episodes due to the Op and Ed being cut out.

[Goras]

lol I have those burned somewhere and also the old eva in vivo format rolf

[raikage]

Originally Posted by Starks

Is it fair to divide the history of digisubbing into 2 generations?

1999 (or earlier)-Early 2002 and Late 2002-Present

There is huge gap in knowledge regarding the nature of the digisubbing community prior to the Summer of 2002. Call it "Suki Syndrome" if you will, but the history of digisubbing prior is wholly contained within gigabyte-sized log files of no more than a dozen or so active community members.

Have we, as modern day fansubbers, done enough to preserve our legacy?

Depends on what you consider fansubbers' legacy.

I wasn't around for the VHS days and started watching during the earlier days of fansubbing (Vandread, Gundam X, Love Hina).

From what I understand, you had to be connected to the right people to get those VHS subs. They would mostly be aired for a multiple people at one time -- a college anime club would get a VHS copy and air it for the entire group. Unless you knew who to talk to, you probably wouldn't get anything better than a third- or fourth-gen copy.

Then digisubbing moved in, and I would imagine the earliest days were just ripping VHS'es to computer format. Again, though, without a strong Web presence, without BitTorrent (or heck, even without Kazaa or Morpheus) you had to know what channel to join in order to get your fansubs.

Also, even in this very thread there seems to be evidence of conflicts between groups/people in groups, so it's not like there was one, concrete grouping or timeline to create regarding digital fansubbing.

[Access]

In pre-digisub days you didn't have to be 'connected' to get tapes. There were pleanty of VHS distros out there, Kodocha, Sachi, etc. Originally distros worked on the 'SASE' or Self-Addressed-Stamped-Envelope principle and no money actually changed hands. But over time most distros shifted to a 'cost' model which charged $5 to $7 per VHS tape. Whether or not distros actually profited from the cash or were just breaking even as far as costs was the topic of much debate. Some distros were also pirate operations, offering licensed stuff or outright copies of commercial releases. Distros had been around since at least 1996, and others have told me 1992 or even earlier. Some distros were fansubbing outfits of their own.

The early digisubs from groups like elite-fansubs, animefactory, etc. were about halfway between 320x240 and 640x480. 512x384 was a common resolution.

If you look at the a-f-a document, here's a link: 3rd post in the thread.
http://forum.live-evil.org/index.php/topic,1046.0.html

These are what the author (not me) considered to be the 'main groups' at the time of its authoring, 16 Jan 2001. There were some newer groups around at that time, but none which the author considered important enough to ask them to 'sign' the a-f-a.

quote:

I'm hoping the following groups agree to the A-F-A and make it possible:

Main Groups:

AnimeMpeg: ----X----
Anime-Fansubs: ---------
Anime Factory: ---------
HQA: ---------
Anime-Heaven: ---------
Elite-Fansubs: ----X----

--------- = Not Signed
----X---- = Signed

As of: Tuesday, January 16th, 2001

end quote

One other thing to remember is that fansubbing groups didn't necessarily appear out of nowhere. Sometimes they were preceeded by, an active piece of, or split off from pirate outfits, anime music video makers, school clubs, chat channels, etc. The same goes for digisubbing groups. This especially goes for the older ones. Animefactory was a hotline site before it had an IRC presence and started digisubbing. The main person in Choco Fansubs also made a lot of anime music videos. Likewise many groups 'gave birth' to other groups, bakamx / soldats, anime-keep / conclave, elite-fansubs / [numerous groups], etc.

The same could be said for the people in specific groups. For instance, a certain character in elite-fansubs details his former involvement in the [infamous] AHLP / 'animehelp' channel in the above document, and how it had effected him at the time the document was written.

[Shounen]

EDIT: ---::::--- my fault for not noticing this, yes D.C did air back in 2003
A-F (and not Anime-forever) Anime-Fansubs doing Yume de Aetara (2001)

[bayoab]

Originally Posted by Shounen

we got AnimeOne and HQA doing Da Capo yes..back in 2001.

That would be absolutely impossible. Da Capo did not air until 2003.

And A-F has more before Yume. http://anime-fansubs.net:8008/Projects.php

[stfu]

My memory is hazy, but as I recall it, the first digisubs started coming out in the late 90's. AnimeFactory and possibly HQA are two of the more established digisubs groups to have started back then (around '99). After that, Elite-Fansubs, Anime-Fansubs, Anime-Kissaten, and BakaMX all began in 2000. Then 2001 and 2002 gave birth to a lot of big groups, many of which are still relevant today (Live-eviL, AnimeONE, Anime-Kraze, etc.). Lots of the groups during that time were also groups that broke off from another. That's about all I remember. Just keep in mind that the year a show aired doesn't always reflect when the group subbed it.

[complich8]

Ahh, the wandering of old topics... I guess I'll meander back through memory lane again

I first wandered into the fansub world in spring 2002 ... a female friend of mine asked me to track down episodes of X TV for her. AnimeInc's and I think anime-factory's releases of that series... good times.

Some animeone history I remember: around mayish 2002 (not long after being created, I think it was about a 250-300 population then), someone or another guessed the channel founder's password, transferred ownership of the channel to themselves, kickbanned all the ops and tore down the access list, put themselves as the only op, devoiced everyone, and tried to convince the people serving and leeching to go on as if nothing had happened... and just about nobody was having any of that. Founders brought it to dalnet staff, dal's response was to say "well, that sucks" ... then promptly lock #animeone and strip all the access from it, leave it locked for a month. That was apparently their policy in any channel services dispute: don't get involved, just unregister it, close it, and lock it for a month.

The group re-convened in a temporary channel, #animeone-aone ... drew a couple hundred people again. I've got a screenshot of me doing massive serving in that channel, e-f distro, and a channel that was the fragments from when anime-fury fell apart for a while (my goal was to make the most of the unlimited 10mbit bandwidth that summer, since they were implementing a HORRIBLE rate limiting policy in the dorms the next semester and friends working for resnet gave me the heads-up).

Anyway, the group leaders eventually got control of the original channel back, and shifted back to it.

About August of that year, angelic_layer and silentvoice had a bit of a ... err, personality conflict, I guess, and aone split in two -- about half the staff went off with sv and made a new group (I want to say honobono, and I seem to remember it taking the entire Tokyo Mew Mew staff with it), the other half stuck around and remained aone. I happily missed out on all the drama, 'cause I was at home for two weeks between classes and didn't have a net connection at the time... was surprised when I came back and there was about half the staff and 2/3 of the channel population.

Over the course of a year or two after that, as I did more distro work for animeone (courtesy my ecn-hosted azumanga-bots) and shifted into the fansubber mode (picking up QC a bit more frequently, then moving towards editing) and ended up opped. I remember dealing with a couple of random channel attacks (bot floods and whatnot) that it turns out were one old member who held a grudge. I was totally lost, 'cause in the time I had been there (and most of the rest of the staff too ... by that time, I'd say it was about 70% post-split people). Had no idea what his motivation was or why we were being attacked, and it turns out it was an old beef with a founding member who wasn't even IN the group anymore.

Sort of amazing, looking back at that old history. If I forget about the random splashes of color there, it's easy to discount that whole time as completely wasted. Also amazing that I'm still in the same degree programs, same school, etc -- man, were my priorities jacked up. I dunno how Kimura-sensei made ANY progress in his education, with all the fansub tasks he's been through the last couple years .

[getfresh]

I have found the oldest. It's a tossup between super5 and slowashell. they did analogue sub to rip then rm encode and release. this was in 98

[Starks]

Originally Posted by Shounen

EDIT: ---::::--- my fault for not noticing this, yes D.C did air back in 2003
A-F (and not Anime-forever) Anime-Fansubs doing Yume de Aetara (2001)

For something made in 2001, that looks pretty damn good...

[raikage]

Originally Posted by Access

In pre-digisub days you didn't have to be 'connected' to get tapes. There were pleanty of VHS distros out there, Kodocha, Sachi, etc. Originally distros worked on the 'SASE' or Self-Addressed-Stamped-Envelope principle and no money actually changed hands. But over time most distros shifted to a 'cost' model which charged $5 to $7 per VHS tape. Whether or not distros actually profited from the cash or were just breaking even as far as costs was the topic of much debate. Some distros were also pirate operations, offering licensed stuff or outright copies of commercial releases. Distros had been around since at least 1996, and others have told me 1992 or even earlier. Some distros were fansubbing outfits of their own.

Not exactly what I meant by 'connected', as in I didn't mean you had to know someone or else they wouldn't send you the tape.

You did have to know who Kodocha, Sachi, etc. were, and to what address to send your SASE -- something that, if you didn't know anyone in an anime club or something, might have proven rather difficult.

Or maybe I'm wrong. But I can't see someone randomly wandering into the VHS fansub scene the way they can the digisub scene these days.