History of Digisubbing

[bayoab]

Originally Posted by Access

Wasn't the move to Rizon and other servers prompted by the fact that the enforcement or rules were not as restrictive as ETG? ETG for instance required that any fserv hosting mp3s or licensed / pirated be asked to remove the files, or be kicked. I remember ETG bouncing up and down a few times, but it never went down for more than 2-3 days and it always came back.

Some of them had originally fled ETG to go to mircx and didn't want to go back. ETG was never even considered seriously due to its limitations. (No licensed, no services, not enough room. I was in this channel, I saw the whole event). Most of them wanted a network with more services (including nickserv) which ETG did not have. A few went to ETG anyways. Also, they wanted a network which could actually support all of them in a centralized location which restricted which networks they could go to.

I still say they should have gone to Efnet.

[kvnphm1]

I was wondering at that time why all the "good" group were on ETG and all "Bad" group were on aniverse =P

[Thelastguardian]

Disclaimers: I don't mean to sound like an old fart. I am just reciting what I remember as I go thru my cdrs. And I am not that old anyway.

Ahhh the old days...I remember bothering an op(Anion?) in the back then brand new Anime-Keep channel about f-servers usage/abuse XD . That was a long long time ago

From my memory (fuzzy at best, add the phase "If I remember correctly" in front of every line)-

Elite-Fansub is a splinter group from another group, right? From what I gathered, some people had a disagreement and formed a splinter group named Elite-Fansub (the original group's name was also E-F I think...or is Elite-Fansub the original group? Can't remember.)

*Decide going against studying for my exams and start going thru my oldest CDRs stacks*

I see Ah My Goddess (Anime-Empire@Dal.net, good times in Dalnet. Shame it got sank in late 2002 with DDoS. Still remember the splits.) encoded with 320x240 Divx3. Looks like VHS raw ( ; ) ). That would make it about early 2001, right?

I remember that Divx4 was released in mid 2001 and many fansubbers were not happy about that. Something about Divx3.11 is superior compared to Divx4 for some perverse reasons :^). Some insisted at coding with Divx3 until the end of that year (Fruit Basket comes to mind).
Of course, I preferred D4 because people tend to encode at 640x480 with D4. Not so with D3 (which is just a hacked MS' mpeg4 implementation).

Found BakaMX's D3.11A Fruit Basket. I think their OP subbing for that series look better than even some modern groups' XD. The encoding still looks very good.

Found Anime-Factory(efnet)'s tiny(352x240)encoding of Love Hina. TV raw obviously

Found Tenchi Muyo very tiny sub (320x240) with the sub covering 1/3 of the already small screen. The files have no group name, but the encoder sure remembered to remove the OP to minimize the file size for us leechers^_^ .
Oh my god, I just found the Real version (*.rm) of Tenchi Muyo English dub. 15 mb for 25 minutes XD . Don't ask me how old these are.

Just realized that someone took all my Initial D (some are E-F) 1st stage cdrs 4 years ago. Blah

Found Ishin-Anime (or Ishin-Digital for some time) Love Hina Again. Early 2002?

"Anime-Fansub@EFnet (April 16, 2001)" Angelic Layer. D3. The had sub for ops already- Only English sub though, no Japanese words.

If I find anymore I will keep your project posted .

[bayoab]

Originally Posted by Thelastguardian

From my memory (fuzzy at best, add the phase "If I remember correctly" in front of every line)-

Elite-Fansub is a splinter group from another group, right? From what I gathered, some people had a disagreement and formed a splinter group named Elite-Fansub (the original group's name was also E-F I think...or is Elite-Fansub the original group? Can't remember.)

IIRC, AnimeCo is actually the group that splintered off E-F (the first of many....). I have E-F's origins somewhere in my logs. I want to say the elite part came from them being on the ircserver Elite-Orbit.

[Thelastguardian]

Originally Posted by bayoab

IIRC, AnimeCo is actually the group that splintered off E-F (the first of many....). I have E-F's origins somewhere in my logs. I want to say the elite part came from them being on the ircserver Elite-Orbit.

I don't know the people from those two groups. So at best I am at an arm's length to the real issue. I think it was disagreement among the E-F leader and another member?

Originally Posted by bayoab

From what I remember (and have gotten from speaking from others)... It was more fractified:
1. Myriads of little groups on various networks
2. Groups concentrate on Efnet/Dalnet. Toward the end of this period, some groups began jumping to ETG and Aniverse.
3. July 11th(?) 2001, Efnet is DDos'd into oblivion and goes down for nearly a week. Most efnet groups jump to Dalnet, ETG or Aniverse
4. Dalnet goes down and then kicks off the warez groups. Everyone Flees To ETG/Aniverse. Big group boom 1 occurs on ETG/Aniverse.
5. Aniverse goes down, groups flee to mircx. Big group boom 2 occurs on Mircx.
(Somewhere around here, ETG is DDos'd and the ETG groups start trying to form bakanet which fails).
F. Mircx is ddos'd, after taking down 3 other networks, most groups flee to Rizon. Big group boom 3 occurs on Rizon.

I agree up to 3. and then the rest is a bit off.

IIRC,
4. there were only big groups left in the scene after the big kickoff from Dalnet/Efnet. Most groups moved to ETG.

5. ETG had a strict policy about licencing. The large groups were fine with it. However they are the minority- many new and smaller groups popped up in the following months later in Aniverse.

6. Those groups include the infamous Anime-Junkies (back when they were good and I knew most of the ops. I got banned by Killshok later on, that bastard.), Anime-Fury, and others .

=> stage 2
7. Aniverse grew to almost 20000 people while ETG approached 12000 (? random numbers. Check netsplit.de for real counts).

8a. DDoS towards Aniverse and ETG in mid 2003 forced groups to move to Mircx. Aniverse was hit especially hard as they have less servers. ETG was holding itself fine.

8b. The infamous "mass naked child event" with AJ in mid-2003 shocked the whole anime fansubbing scene. One of the turning point of the fansubbing idealism for sure.

=> stage 3
9a. Mircx got shut down in early 2004 due to DDoS. Aniverse fared a bit better but had lost over 70% of its users. Many groups were left scattered across the vast plain of irc wasteland. Most groups went to Rizon, a few tried to set up their own irc servers (and failed). Others just disappeared.

9b. At the same time, IRC, as a mass distribution protocol, was being slowly but surely replaced by a totally unknown P2P software known as Bit Torrent.
Originally only 1 group pushed it (forgot who already). Others, notabely a.f.k., resisted the movement. The rise of public tracker a.scarywater.net allows groups to put their works on bit torrent without a server. By mid 2003, the whole bt movement was underway.
This leads to a declined of "idlers" in most groups' IRC channels. Bots, xdcc/fserver alike, are suddenly not as important as before. This simplification of download allows more people than ever before to download new anime such as Naruto etc. .

And Naruto sure become popular. I never imagined how big the series would become when I watched the first episode...

[Sides]

Originally Posted by Thelastguardian

I remember that Divx4 was released in mid 2001 and many fansubbers were not happy about that. Something about Divx3.11 is superior compared to Divx4 for some perverse reasons :^). Some insisted at coding with Divx3 until the end of that year (Fruit Basket comes to mind).
Of course, I preferred D4 because people tend to encode at 640x480 with D4. Not so with D3 (which is just a hacked MS' mpeg4 implementation).

Was that really the reason ?
I allways thought it was about the controversy divx caused, opendivx->divx.

[complich8]

ahh ... the "good old days"...

I remember the meeting we had, back when I was a group leader and we were trying to figure out where to move stuff after mircx. Had about a dozen network admins begging us (me and three or four other big group leaders) to go to their networks. We took a couple thousand people to a couple of them, and watched them burn and die. I don't remember who else was involved in that meeting, but I'm pretty sure it was leadership personalities from at least 6 or 7 other large groups.

I think most of the rizon groups ended up on rizon because it was already large, had extensive services, and seemed capable of withstanding reasonable amounts of ddos.

if I remember correctly, the same ddos-force that brought down mircx managed to bring down two of the numerous rizon servers, causing minor splits, but the network stayed up and the rizon admins got a good laugh out of it).

As bandwidth goes, the aniverse->mircx switch was prompted by a week long ddos of something like 1.8-2.5 gbps. I don't think I ever got a number from cjb, but I'm fairly sure that taking down down mircx would have also been at least 2 gigabit. Amazing what botnets can do, y'know?

[Access]

Originally Posted by Thelastguardian

I don't know the people from those two groups. So at best I am at an arm's length to the real issue. I think it was disagreement among the E-F leader and another member?

Most of the time it was something between one specific guy at E-F and everyone else. With a few exceptions, the rest of the people at E-F weren't that bad. If you haven't already, follow the link I gave in the thread this one was moved from.
At some point, the guy stopped being so naughty and the problems largely disappeared, you could say that was around the end of the second era (late 2001).

There was even a group "Not Elite-Fansubs" whose proclaimed purpose was to sub anything E-F subbed (I think that one was made up primarily of former members also). They subbed a few episodes of Vandread 2, this would have been mid to late 2001 I believe.

I tend to seperate things by people / groups rather than IRC-servers. That is why I saw most of the second-phase groups were formed by dissatisfied members or people who wanted to be members (but were refused) of first-phase groups. If you accept that, it shouldn't come as a surprise that most of the second-phase groups were structured much differently than the first-phase groups. Only later on, I believe, did you see groups primarily being formed from scratch.

[[darkfire]]

Heres the first working page on www.archive.org for Elite-Fansubs
http://web.archive.org/web/200105162...e-fansubs.com/
The earliest the site existed was winter 2000.

[Thelastguardian]

Originally Posted by Sides

Was that really the reason ?
I allways thought it was about the controversy divx caused, opendivx->divx.

Partly. But some argued Divx3.11A was better than D4 in certain aspects. Don't ask me what though, I don't remember.

The transition was surprisingly smooth, to say the least.

That is why I saw most of the second-phase groups were formed by dissatisfied members or people who wanted to be members (but were refused) of first-phase groups.

I personally think the actual reason is large groups tend to respect licencing rule. For example, Chobits (mid 2002) was originally subbed Anime-Keep etc. . Then it got licenced. Then AJ and others took over. The secondary groups grew to over 800 people each with that series alone. I still think it is amazing.

Nowaday, you just need to sub a massively popular licenced series, and your channel is gold.

[Access]

Originally Posted by Thelastguardian

I personally think the actual reason is large groups tend to respect licencing rule. For example, Chobits (mid 2002) was originally subbed Anime-Keep etc. . Then it got licenced. Then AJ and others took over. The secondary groups grew to over 800 people each with that series alone. I still think it is amazing.

Nowaday, you just need to sub a massively popular licenced series, and your channel is gold.

We'll by my reckoning the second phase ended sometime around the end of 2001. After that, the primary reason behind new group formation was not being chased out of or choosing to leave a first-phase group. More new groups were being formed from scratch and the like. By and large, the groups formed during the second phase were no less ethical than those formed prior to it. If anything, they were generally more ethical in that they treated their own people better. And pleanty of groups born in the second-phase grew to the point where they were just as large, or larger, than the older groups.

In what came after the second phase, you had any number of things going on...
Groups formed from scratch, breakoff groups, piracy groups that had developed a 'fansubbing wing' within their group, groups formed with the sole purpose to sub one series, the first joint projects (I think), etc. I think the only other change from then and today is BT.

And I think if you look at the small fraction historical groups (5+ years old) that survive to this day and are still active (producing subs) versus the many that died off, you'll see another common thread there.

[Starks]

Zhentarim was one of the last big groups that came from the second phase.

When I joined the fansub community towards the end of 2002, they were one of the most popular groups around.

[killmoms]

I never understood the whole DDoS issue... why did this keep happening to the different networks? What sort of people were behind these attacks and why did they occur?

Always wondered about that.

[Starks]

Originally Posted by ClessAlvein

I never understood the whole DDoS issue... why did this keep happening to the different networks? What sort of people were behind these attacks and why did they occur?

Always wondered about that.

The mircx DDoS was caused by an internal dispute that got far out of hand.

[lamer_de]

Zhentarim was one of the last big groups that came from the second phase.

Zhentarim is a R1 DVD rip group. They did like 14 releases overall that were fansubbed or so, and that was much later.

CU,
lamer_de

[Starks]

Originally Posted by lamer_de

Zhentarim is a R1 DVD rip group. They did like 14 releases overall that were fansubbed or so, and that was much later.

CU,
lamer_de

Wait, I must be thinking of Psychlo...

[StarCreator]

Originally Posted by lamer_de

Zhentarim is a R1 DVD rip group. They did like 14 releases overall that were fansubbed or so, and that was much later.

CU,
lamer_de

Ah, that explains why I had never heard of them...

[bayoab]

Originally Posted by Starks

The mircx DDoS was caused by an internal dispute that got far out of hand.

No....
The mircx ddos was because the admin had discovered something and properly reported it. One of the script kiddies involved found out who did it and Ddos'd the network. The script kiddie had nothing to do with the network.

(I do not remember how much of this was actually made public so full details purposely omitted.)

Originally Posted by Starks

Wait, I must be thinking of Psychlo...

Batting 2 for 2.
Also DVD rippers. I believe they have never produced a proper fansub considering envirosphere does not have a record of them.

[Akirasuto.]

The closest P-A had come close to fansub was re-timing/re-editing HK scripts back in those days.

[CelesAurivern]

Originally Posted by lamer_de

Zhentarim is a R1 DVD rip group. They did like 14 releases overall that were fansubbed or so, and that was much later.

CU,
lamer_de

Wasn't SSO 13 eps?