What is the first anime to be fansubbed on the internet?

[Access]

Originally Posted by getfresh

The fact the love hina was .rm though and Pilot Candidate is .avi pretty much says it is older though.

If you have a file that was a .rm, I'd say it's probably a re-encode and not the original release. You might have the lunaarts one or something like that, very common since they were web-downloadable. They were basically half-episodes, a 22-minute episode was split into two files 10-15mb apiece if I remember. I think I remember love hina being put on that site at some point, as was vandread. If you look at the archive, keep in mind most of his stuff was captured VHS tapes, not digisubs.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://...rts.com/anime/

You also had other people re-encoding stuff for a variety of different reasons.

The best I can find for the actual release time of love hina is 'mid-2000'.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/sub-culture/2000-11-17

If you look at the above link, he says it was one of the most easily available (on irc) by then.

[Access]

Someone asked me to take another look, so I did, and here is the absolute earliest stuff I can find.

Wedding Peach DX by e-f. Note the semi-transparent watermark in the upper left corner. Most of the work for this ep. is credited to ruzuka or devilray.


Inuyasha #1 by Fivestar. Fivestar wasn't in any larger group, I don't think (if I remember correctly).



Love Hina 1-3, Gate Keepers 1-3 by animefactory. I'm guessing it's probably a better quality re-encode made b'cos better raw sources or better encoding tools became available.


Probably the third is the most significant. File dates may not actually be the real date that the real date the file was actually released.

[Starks]

I'm curious to see how far back we'll be able to turn back the clock.

[Shinji Sama]

lol

the first anime was prince of tennis ----> old days

& my first realese was shit xD

no karaoke no typesetting nothing at all :B

just a crap translate xD

but now im better :P

thanks dude 4 this beautiful thread

[exedore]

You had a couple of pre-2000 digisubs which were RM caps + SMI softsubs. A number of Legend of the Galactic Heroes episodes had been distributed in that way since 98/99. There were some similar Blue Gender releases as well.

[Shounen]

Sorry for the necro but as far as I can remember, those Lova Hina raws/fansubs were in divx3.11alpha @ 320x240 at around 70mb~ each, they didn't contain the OP nor ED so they were around 20min each.

You also got dark<insert the rest here> whatever fansub. I remember them using SSA, but I think those were R1 rips back then I'm not sure... They had that pesky logo as well. Most "major" digi-fansubs started around mid- 2001. AonE and HQA, AF and so on.... boy remember the 2nd internet war? :P

[exedore]

Some people are missing a memory or two - there were digital fansubs of real media + SAMI subs as early as 1999. Love Hina also had a couple episodes done that way.

[Access]

Originally Posted by exedore

Some people are missing a memory or two - there were digital fansubs of real media + SAMI subs as early as 1999. Love Hina also had a couple episodes done that way.

If you find something concrete/specific, document it like I did in my last post.

[getfresh]

Originally Posted by Shounen

Most "major" digi-fansubs started around mid- 2001. AonE and HQA, AF and so on.... boy remember the 2nd internet war? :P

AF & HQA were first gen (groups started between 1999-2000). The "major groups" that started around "mid-2001" and were a big deal at that time, were Soldats, Anime-Empire, NewLifeAnime, ANBU, Hikari no Kiseki, and A.F.K. (just naming the ones I can remember off the top of my head being popular and known). I don't remember AonE being "Major" until late 2002 when they started jointing with A-keep and ANBU.

"boy remember the 2nd internet war?"

I have no clue what that would refer to. But from 1999-2003 there were 5 main networks used as hubs for fansub groups. efnet, dalnet, etg, a bit later aniverse, and a bit after aniverse mircx. Each major migration of groups was pretty much always because of DDOS. I think the only really major event in digital fansubbing that caused rapid, drastic changes was the advent of bittorrent and the intensity level of competing that ensued there after. There was competing before, but it was no were near the level that we saw right after bt caught on.

Originally Posted by Access

If you find something concrete/specific, document it like I did in my last post.

http://md5.blogspot.com/2003_04_01_archive.html

http://gk2.gau.hu/~anews/news.htm

not a ton of info, but at least more than before.

[Quarkboy]

A sort of corrolary question: Was the first digital fansubbing actually done in English?

Weren't there rm + SAMI subs in chinese earlier than anything in english? Or Korean?

[bayoab]

Originally Posted by getfresh

I have no clue what that would refer to. But from 1999-2003 there were 5 main networks used as hubs for fansub groups. efnet, dalnet, etg, a bit later aniverse, and a bit after aniverse mircx.

It was efnet and dalnet until efnet got ddos'd in july of 2001 at which point people moved to etg. AC and maybe NLA were the only groups on ETG prior to the efnet ddos.

[Access]

Yeah the moving around was mostly out of necessity, or evolutionary (for certain groups). On efnet of the time, if your channel got taken over, it was much harder to get back. Bots could protect channels, to some extent, but they could also be used to attack channels. A rogue op who knew what he was doing with bots could wreak havoc, and then there were other avenues of attack like ones that involved causing or waiting for net splits, targeted denial of service, and such. A channel that was taken over might take days or even a week to get back, and back then that basically meant no releases, negative PR, and so on for the group.

So groups like AC wanted little to do with the channel wars, nor waste time setting up the safegaurds to ensure channel control. Naturally it was an evolutionary approach to move to ETG (some people knew the admins) which was both passively and actively policed. While not all the ETG admins agreed with this policy, in the end they were willing to host fansub groups provided they did not participate in outright piracy. Those other networks like efnet got even less stable, and a mass exodus to ETG (primarily) followed. ETG downtime was low, no more than a few days a year if that, and the policing was effective. Channel wars were practically nonexistant, there wasn't much a rogue could do against a group on irc other than try to target their distros.

I do remember some of those other servers (post-ETG) and I think the move to them by some (far from all) groups was primarily for two reasons, that those other servers were pretty much anime-exclusive (some of the ETG admins still had significant misgivings about hosting non-gaming, fansub groups), and that they were simply willing to look the other way when outright piracy was involved. It wasn't necessarily that fansub groups where heavily into outright piracy, more that a good portion of the distribution network was. And sure you could send those distros away from your channel, but then it would be harder to get your stuff out...

[TheFluff]

Originally Posted by Access

outright piracy

as opposed to piracy spoken of using an euphemism?

[zhurai-tsuki]

Originally Posted by bayoab

It was efnet and dalnet until efnet got ddos'd in july of 2001 at which point people moved to etg. AC and maybe NLA were the only groups on ETG prior to the efnet ddos.

just wondering, did the people who ddos'ed efnet and the other networks ever get found?

[DryFire]

So ETG admins were ok with people distroing fansubs but not tv shows?

Copyright infringement doesn't change with intent...

[Quarkboy]

Originally Posted by DryFire

So ETG admins were ok with people distroing fansubs but not tv shows?

Copyright infringement doesn't change with intent...

It does change with jurisdiction though. If I run an IRC server that's located in the US, I face domestic lawsuits only from copyright violation of the works of local US companies. In the case at hand the Japanese would have had to file basically an international complaint, it's a lot more difficult and there are complex treaties involved.

depending on where you are in the world, your actions can be considered different levels of criminality, and the same could be said with copyright violation. Intent is not what the reason was, it was feasibility of culpability.

[Access]

Originally Posted by DryFire

So ETG admins were ok with people distroing fansubs but not tv shows?

Copyright infringement doesn't change with intent...

Their network, their rules... that's basically what it came down to. I think this policy is still in effect even today.

The crux of the issue was that back then many fansub distros (primarily IRC fserves) would also host DVD rips of local DVDs, and fansubs that had since been licensed, both of which ETG did not want.

If you want to make the rules, you started your own network. If I remember AC actually had its own network at some later point, irc.animeco.com or something similar. Though this wasn't really b'cos of ETG's restrictions.

And Quarkboy is probably right, at least in part to their reasoning. It's not like all the ETG admins wanted to let on the fansubbers, there was some general disagreement among them. Just that, in the end, fansubbers were allowed to come on regardless. Myself, I don't debate the history or the morality of it, I just report it as I remember it. People can argue semantics all day long, and nothing will be accomplished by it.

[DryFire]

I just found the distinction curious (and somewhat irrelevant) in the case of liability.

[getfresh]

Originally Posted by Access

Their network, their rules... that's basically what it came down to. I think this policy is still in effect even today.

The crux of the issue was that back then many fansub distros (primarily IRC fserves) would also host DVD rips of local DVDs, and fansubs that had since been licensed, both of which ETG did not want.

If you want to make the rules, you started your own network. If I remember AC actually had its own network at some later point, irc.animeco.com or something similar. Though this wasn't really b'cos of ETG's restrictions.

And Quarkboy is probably right, at least in part to their reasoning. It's not like all the ETG admins wanted to let on the fansubbers, there was some general disagreement among them. Just that, in the end, fansubbers were allowed to come on regardless. Myself, I don't debate the history or the morality of it, I just report it as I remember it. People can argue semantics all day long, and nothing will be accomplished by it.

You also forgot that back then fansubbing wasn't part of the script kiddie scene so much. It wasn't as great an evil, and pretty much every net allowed it as long as it was the unlicensed ppl AKA "fansubbers" and not the "rippers" who generally gravitated towards the kiddie warez scene and brought all of its joyous troubles along. Not to say that some fansubbers weren't packetmonkeys in those days since there were a number of chan botnet attacks, take-overs, and the fact that the xdcc bots back then were for the most part all rooted boxes. Just saying that it was an acceptable evil to the network owners in those days since no matter what chan joined a network it had a certain degree of that type of nonsense.

IRC has gotten a lot less volatile in recent years.

[Quarkboy]

Originally Posted by getfresh

IRC has gotten a lot less volatile in recent years.

Why throw eggs at old man parker's house when he's too feeble to walk outside and yell at you anymore?