AnimeSuki Forums

Access · 2006-07-17, 13:28

Does anyone remember the first or some early releases that were widely distributed over BT, and what group or groups were the first to use it? Have animesuki.com and scarywater.net been around since the beginning of BT use? From a purely historical perspective, what were the early reactions to the software, positive, negative, mixed, controversial, or something else? I'm not interested in modern commentary, I'm interested in the initial reaction 'back then' if anyone else remembers it, for the sake of updating a section in historical documents.

Akirasuto. · 2006-07-17, 13:45

For anime related releases, iirc BT was first welcomed and tested in the anime dvd rip scene (P-A idlers were some of the early testers, don't remember whether it was actively supported from the staff). Most found it interested and wondered whether it will take off or not, as it does provide speedier distribution without depending so much on a single point. Typing "xdcc list" upon entering a chan was becoming popular then, and fserves still took the lion share of distro.

Starks · 2006-07-17, 14:22

As far as I can remember, BitTorrent's popularity in the fansub community didn't really explode until the Summer of 2003 (when the protocol rapidly matured). BitTorrent was playing second-fiddle to XDCC until then.

iluid · 2006-07-17, 14:53

The first fansub group I remember using BT as a serious means of distribution was R-F for Hikaru no Go. At the time the reaction was mixed with a lean toward the negative side. The reason being that at that time the only available BT client was the official one, which (at least back then) didn’t allow users to cap their upload. With some types of broadband (cable especially) once your upload bandwidth is maxed your download speed slows to a crawl. This meant that a lot of people trying it out were only able to download a few MBs before maxing their upload and having their download speed slow to 1K. Those on connections that weren’t limited like this seemed to like it though. Of course, it wasn’t too long before the first unofficial client appeared with support for capping upload, which is when BT really started taking off in fansubs. As far as asuki and scarywater, I don’t remember exactly if they were around for the first few releases, if not, they certainly appeared very soon after. Also, the time period I’m talking about here is around October (maybe September?) 2002. It’s very possible other fansub groups had used it before then, but I have no idea who.

xris · 2006-07-17, 15:04

I remember late 2002 I was when I first started downloading anime (it was video tape fansubs before then for me) and I had just started using DC as my main method, never got into IRC for downloads. Start of December I first heard of this "new and easy" method to download called BitTorrent. Didn't take much notice for a month or so but once I started using it I never looked back.

Early groups using BT back then (Jan 2003) were ANBU, AonE, AJ, RiceBox, Infusion, Keep, A-Empire, Live-eviL, Solar. That's just some of the groups I had downloaded from.

You can have a look at the (unlicensed) torrents still listed on AnimeSuki from early 2003 as well, here

complich8 · 2006-07-17, 15:10

yeah, I know we weren't the first, but I think animeone's first torrent release was somewhere in the mid teens for Naruto, which would peg it around Jan 2003. I was still running aone distro back then, and just starting to get into the actual fansubbing (editing/qc) side.

I know I had seen other groups release a couple things on bt before then, but I remember seeing it as one of those new, unproven protocols that kept springing up, and they universally sucked, so I was hesitant to let Ciber run torrent distro. Seemed like just another stupid fad at the time

.

Couple months later, I was dumping as much bandwidth into torrent seeding as I was into xdcc... and then in the middle of summer 2003 I lost my bots. But that was fine, they weren't really all that necessary by then.

Starks · 2006-07-17, 16:06

I pretty much joined the fansub community when BT was in its infancy.

Nowadays, a single person on with a symmetrical 10Mbit line can run a torrent with next to no pre-seeding. That wasn't the case when I first encountered BT when working for the AnimeJunkies distro.

Back then, the health of the torrent was COMPLETELY reliant on a network of 20+ fservs and xdcc bots pumping out the release to leechers.

***GHDpro*** · 2006-07-17, 17:46

The first fansub that I know of that was put on BT was Hikaru no Go 53 by Real-Fansubbers (R-F),
the website was wirebrain.de, now known as scarywater.net

http://www.rpguru.com/doc.php/history.html
http://archive.animesuki.com/history/emuzone/
http://archive.animesuki.com/history/animesuki20021226/

That was in October/November 2002, a few months before AnimeSuki started. I think
iluid put the initial reactions properly -- there were a few groups back then that even
"hated" the use of BT, eventhough they embrace it now.

The first unofficial client with capping was the "Experimental BitTorrent Client" by Eike Frost btw,
and he is also the person behind wirebrain/scarywater (aka MXS).

It is interesting to see that someone from the anime community created that client, as on
newsgroups it was also someone from the anime newsgroups that created "mirror", aka
the PAR/PAR2 mechanism popular among all binary newsgroups.

Quarkboy · 2006-07-17, 19:22

On a slightly related note: I first started downloading anime using USENET. When was the first digital anime episode (tv rip or vhs encode or whatever) posted to usenet? When was alt.binaries.anime created? Anyone remember that? (p.s. nowadays alt.binaries.anime has been retooled as mainly a place for posting torrents, with alt.binaries.multimedia.anime for posting actual epsiodes... but originally there was only alt.binaries.anime)

Eeknay · 2006-07-17, 19:43

There's a website that catalogues the anime releases on Usenet, I won't post the link since it contains NZBs to both unlicensed and licensed anime. They have a calender which marks every day/date with releases, the first recorded posting date seems to be the 28th of May, 2001. Whether that was when the website started or posting started, I don't know. It does reference alt.binaries.anime as the group though.

The first posted anime seems to be Ranma 1/2 Season 1 Ep 4.

Quarkboy · 2006-07-17, 19:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by Eeknay

There's a website that catalogues the anime releases on Usenet, I won't post the link since it contains NZBs to both unlicensed and licensed anime. They have a calender which marks every day/date with releases, the first recorded posting date seems to be the 28th of May, 2001. Whether that was when the website started or posting started, I don't know. It does reference alt.binaries.anime as the group though.

The first posted anime seems to be Ranma 1/2 Season 1 Ep 4.

Naw, I was downloading off of usenet back in 1999... So that can't be the earliest. I remember downloading things like.... hm... dragonballz television rips? I think.

Eeknay · 2006-07-17, 19:55

Hmm Google is only giving me references as far back as 2001... there probably isn't a website that could tell you, maybe some hardcore old school user?

(inc) · 2006-07-18, 00:32

Quote:

Originally Posted by Eeknay

There's a website that catalogues the anime releases on Usenet, I won't post the link since it contains NZBs to both unlicensed and licensed anime. They have a calender which marks every day/date with releases, the first recorded posting date seems to be the 28th of May, 2001. Whether that was when the website started or posting started, I don't know. It does reference alt.binaries.anime as the group though.

The first posted anime seems to be Ranma 1/2 Season 1 Ep 4.

Matt didn't set up AU until aba/abma were 2 years old ... they both started in the summer of 1999 (been posting there myself the entire time, as it happens).

I also encoded and posted the first anime rip on Usenet. It was RoLW ova: "Record of the Lodoss War oav ep 01 [asf, sub]" on Feb 23, 2000. I used to post a 'received' message when my posts arrived on the secondary server that I used to let those who requested fills that the post was properly propagated... here's the message...

From: inc <inc@thedojo.bogus>
To:
Newsgroups: alt.binaries.multimedia.anime
Subject: Record of the Lodoss War oav ep 01 [asf, sub] -=- Received complete on RR from Newscene
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 22:28:19 -0800

...and, yes, the end-product was an asf, lol.

(inc)

(inc) · 2006-07-18, 00:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quarkboy

Naw, I was downloading off of usenet back in 1999... So that can't be the earliest. I remember downloading things like.... hm... dragonballz television rips? I think.

Those weren't rips (meaning off of dvds, obviously). Horrible Q -- still have 'em burned somewhere myself.

Obviously, you've been around from the start, Quarkboy, if you remember that aba started before abma, but the lag was only about a month. The fact aba was a rogue group annoyed Marco van Loon no end so he chartered abma.

(inc)

Quarkboy · 2006-07-18, 07:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by (inc)

Those weren't rips (meaning off of dvds, obviously). Horrible Q -- still have 'em burned somewhere myself.

Obviously, you've been around from the start, Quarkboy, if you remember that aba started before abma, but the lag was only about a month. The fact aba was a rogue group annoyed Marco van Loon no end so he chartered abma.

(inc)

If you can believe it, the catalyst for me even attempting to download anime from a computer was that I was somewhat religiously recording dragonballz episodes to VHS (this was back during the first airing of the freeza saga). But I missed one and didn't want to get my tapes out of order.
So i did some research, figured out i could use usenet, searched a bit, and 'Lo, there were a bunch of episodes, in fact. The absolutely SADDEST thing is that I then went up, hooked my computer up to my VCR, and recorded them BACK to VHS. Scary, huh?
Some even had norwegian subtitles, which was odd.

Thelastguardian · 2006-07-18, 18:19

Quote:

Originally Posted by GHDpro

there were a few groups back then that even
"hated" the use of BT, eventhough they embrace it now.

*cough*AFK*cough*

I heard about the whole Anime-on-BitTorrent in December 2002. Amusingly enough, I first heard about BT from people who used it download ero-games.

By summer 2003, BitTorrent had surpassed IRC as the dominate protocol for transferring anime.

DaFool · 2006-07-19, 10:39

My first torrent I used was united-anime's Haibane Renmei episode ~7 ish (around Nov/Dec 2002) using the original client. Back then I didn't really care, a few people used it, but I felt experimental because I was into Direct Connect at that time.

Starks · 2006-07-19, 12:10

The first torrents I remember downloading were .hack//LoTB.

2006-07-17, 13:28	Link #1
Access Senior Member Join Date: Jan 2004	first release done primarily over BT / purely historical context Does anyone remember the first or some early releases that were widely distributed over BT, and what group or groups were the first to use it? Have animesuki.com and scarywater.net been around since the beginning of BT use? From a purely historical perspective, what were the early reactions to the software, positive, negative, mixed, controversial, or something else? I'm not interested in modern commentary, I'm interested in the initial reaction 'back then' if anyone else remembers it, for the sake of updating a section in historical documents.

2006-07-17, 14:22	Link #3
Starks I see what you did there! Scanlator Join Date: Apr 2004 Age: 36	As far as I can remember, BitTorrent's popularity in the fansub community didn't really explode until the Summer of 2003 (when the protocol rapidly matured). BitTorrent was playing second-fiddle to XDCC until then. __________________ My list of garbage anime

2006-07-17, 16:06	Link #7
Starks I see what you did there! Scanlator Join Date: Apr 2004 Age: 36	I pretty much joined the fansub community when BT was in its infancy. Nowadays, a single person on with a symmetrical 10Mbit line can run a torrent with next to no pre-seeding. That wasn't the case when I first encountered BT when working for the AnimeJunkies distro. Back then, the health of the torrent was COMPLETELY reliant on a network of 20+ fservs and xdcc bots pumping out the release to leechers. __________________ My list of garbage anime

2006-07-17, 19:22	Link #9
Quarkboy Translator, Producer Join Date: Nov 2003 Location: Tokyo, Japan Age: 44	On a slightly related note: I first started downloading anime using USENET. When was the first digital anime episode (tv rip or vhs encode or whatever) posted to usenet? When was alt.binaries.anime created? Anyone remember that? (p.s. nowadays alt.binaries.anime has been retooled as mainly a place for posting torrents, with alt.binaries.multimedia.anime for posting actual epsiodes... but originally there was only alt.binaries.anime) __________________ Read Light Novels in English at J-Novel Club! Translator, Producer, Japan Media Export Expert Founder and Owner of J-Novel Club Sam Pinansky

2006-07-19, 12:10	Link #18
Starks I see what you did there! Scanlator Join Date: Apr 2004 Age: 36	The first torrents I remember downloading were .hack//LoTB. __________________ My list of garbage anime

2006-07-17, 13:45	Link #2
Akirasuto. Member Join Date: Jun 2004	For anime related releases, iirc BT was first welcomed and tested in the anime dvd rip scene (P-A idlers were some of the early testers, don't remember whether it was actively supported from the staff). Most found it interested and wondered whether it will take off or not, as it does provide speedier distribution without depending so much on a single point. Typing "xdcc list" upon entering a chan was becoming popular then, and fserves still took the lion share of distro.

2006-07-17, 14:53	Link #4
iluid Member Join Date: Feb 2004	The first fansub group I remember using BT as a serious means of distribution was R-F for Hikaru no Go. At the time the reaction was mixed with a lean toward the negative side. The reason being that at that time the only available BT client was the official one, which (at least back then) didn’t allow users to cap their upload. With some types of broadband (cable especially) once your upload bandwidth is maxed your download speed slows to a crawl. This meant that a lot of people trying it out were only able to download a few MBs before maxing their upload and having their download speed slow to 1K. Those on connections that weren’t limited like this seemed to like it though. Of course, it wasn’t too long before the first unofficial client appeared with support for capping upload, which is when BT really started taking off in fansubs. As far as asuki and scarywater, I don’t remember exactly if they were around for the first few releases, if not, they certainly appeared very soon after. Also, the time period I’m talking about here is around October (maybe September?) 2002. It’s very possible other fansub groups had used it before then, but I have no idea who.

2006-07-17, 15:04	Link #5
xris Just call me Ojisan Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: U.K. Hampshire	I remember late 2002 I was when I first started downloading anime (it was video tape fansubs before then for me) and I had just started using DC as my main method, never got into IRC for downloads. Start of December I first heard of this "new and easy" method to download called BitTorrent. Didn't take much notice for a month or so but once I started using it I never looked back. Early groups using BT back then (Jan 2003) were ANBU, AonE, AJ, RiceBox, Infusion, Keep, A-Empire, Live-eviL, Solar. That's just some of the groups I had downloaded from. You can have a look at the (unlicensed) torrents still listed on AnimeSuki from early 2003 as well, here

2006-07-17, 15:10	Link #6
complich8 Fansubber Emeritus Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Rockville, MD Age: 43	yeah, I know we weren't the first, but I think animeone's first torrent release was somewhere in the mid teens for Naruto, which would peg it around Jan 2003. I was still running aone distro back then, and just starting to get into the actual fansubbing (editing/qc) side. I know I had seen other groups release a couple things on bt before then, but I remember seeing it as one of those new, unproven protocols that kept springing up, and they universally sucked, so I was hesitant to let Ciber run torrent distro. Seemed like just another stupid fad at the time . Couple months later, I was dumping as much bandwidth into torrent seeding as I was into xdcc... and then in the middle of summer 2003 I lost my bots. But that was fine, they weren't really all that necessary by then.

2006-07-17, 17:46	Link #8
*GHDpro* Administrator Administrator Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Netherlands Age: 45	The first fansub that I know of that was put on BT was Hikaru no Go 53 by Real-Fansubbers (R-F), the website was wirebrain.de, now known as scarywater.net http://www.rpguru.com/doc.php/history.html http://archive.animesuki.com/history/emuzone/ http://archive.animesuki.com/history/animesuki20021226/ That was in October/November 2002, a few months before AnimeSuki started. I think iluid put the initial reactions properly -- there were a few groups back then that even "hated" the use of BT, eventhough they embrace it now. The first unofficial client with capping was the "Experimental BitTorrent Client" by Eike Frost btw, and he is also the person behind wirebrain/scarywater (aka MXS). It is interesting to see that someone from the anime community created that client, as on newsgroups it was also someone from the anime newsgroups that created "mirror", aka the PAR/PAR2 mechanism popular among all binary newsgroups.

2006-07-17, 19:43	Link #10
Eeknay Gendo died for your sins. Fansubber Join Date: Dec 2005	There's a website that catalogues the anime releases on Usenet, I won't post the link since it contains NZBs to both unlicensed and licensed anime. They have a calender which marks every day/date with releases, the first recorded posting date seems to be the 28th of May, 2001. Whether that was when the website started or posting started, I don't know. It does reference alt.binaries.anime as the group though. The first posted anime seems to be Ranma 1/2 Season 1 Ep 4.

2006-07-17, 19:55	Link #12
Eeknay Gendo died for your sins. Fansubber Join Date: Dec 2005	Hmm Google is only giving me references as far back as 2001... there probably isn't a website that could tell you, maybe some hardcore old school user?

2006-07-19, 10:39	Link #17
DaFool Resident devil Join Date: Nov 2004 Location: Philippines	My first torrent I used was united-anime's Haibane Renmei episode ~7 ish (around Nov/Dec 2002) using the original client. Back then I didn't really care, a few people used it, but I felt experimental because I was into Direct Connect at that time.