I’m still bitter that crunchyroll co-opted fan subbing to make a shit load of cash, made speedsubs and the fansub scene whither away, and got away with it to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars
Like the new school anime fans don’t realize what fan subs used to be like. They’ll occasionally download a show from one of the groups that actually still subs like groups back then, mtbb, fff, tsundere, gjm, etc where they have animated op/ed with English lyrics, overlaid signs, different fonts, etc.
Nowadays it’s just rip the crunchy or amazon subs and clean up the typesetting, make a few edits, call it a day. I don’t blame them, that shit must’ve been a ton of work, but when I rewatch something like watamote I miss what we lost. Then I watch a crunchyroll sub rip and it’s like all one font, the op/ed isn’t translated, if they bothered to translate signs it’s often just the same text at the bottom instead of an overlay, etc.
the actual translation with crunchyroll is often mediocre too but that’s a very debatable topic especially depending on whether you think anime fans should understand what things like kawaii, senpai, aniki, and onii-chan mean (plus honorifics in general)
It still happens sometimes though, I remember kaguya having crazy subtitles and that was 2019. Like they pushed the limits of my media player where they had literally redrawn entire backgrounds to translate signs that had 0 relevance to the plot. The chika fans were hardcore
Yeah 100% with you on every point, we traded a lot to get official subs for the normies. On that note though kaleido is doing amazing typesetting work on gundam gquuuuux this season
That’s the most frustrating part. “We” didn’t, 4 uc Berkeley tech bro assholes did and amassed a fucking fortune in the process. They co-opted the scene that they contributed nothing to and flipped it into a VC wet dream, somehow. Nepotism had to be involved to connect them to VC early and shield them from DMCA bullshit; other piracy streaming sites existed but they all survived so long because unlike crunchyroll none were hosted in the us
But yeah there are still great subgroups and typesetters. I refuse to subscribe to crunchyroll or hidive bc of their bullshit. Sometimes I download rips if I really want to see something asap but the subs are trash. It’s almost always worth it to wait a few days/weeks for someone to typeset and for popular series sometimes someone does actually do a proper fansub still (or at least heavily edits the web subs to be a more accurate translation, have OP/ED/signs, etc). GLORYs release of NieR was excellent one from recent memory
Another crunchyroll/sentai gripe: they are purposely worsening the quality of their bluray releases to make them easier to encode at low bitrates. They essentially blur the content and cause sharp details to lose definition so that artifacts won’t be created during the bitrate starved encoding process. This makes no sense since they are encoding around 30Mbps for bluray video. Thankfully scene groups have figured out ways to undo the damage using the web rips
https://slow.pics/c/uuZvw4U2 - a comparison of the bluray before and after the filter removal on “Yoru no Kurage wa Oyogenai/Jellyfish Can’t swim in the Night”, a mid anime
https://slow.pics/c/hpobp0nl - a comparison of the web, bluray, and after the filter removal on “Sousou no Frieren”.
Zooming in for detail especially shows the issue and if you watch on a high resolution or physically large display it’s much more noticeable during playback. It wouldn’t matter as much except this is the only source for physical releases for many anime. CR is cancer (but tbf many Japanese studios are also absolutely terrible at releasing their own media in decent quality, don’t even get me started on why downloading in 1080p is sometimes the wrong choice)
Yeah it’s honestly embarrassing how bad the people making the BDs are at encoding, lowpassing everything it seems like, sometimes with the web release being higher quality (not to say those aren’t also fucked up, lazarus in particular has been atrocious as far as release quality)
Not to mention the best official subs have terrible typesetting compared to the best fansubs.
I’m still bitter that crunchyroll co-opted fan subbing to make a shit load of cash, made speedsubs and the fansub scene whither away, and got away with it to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars
Like the new school anime fans don’t realize what fan subs used to be like. They’ll occasionally download a show from one of the groups that actually still subs like groups back then, mtbb, fff, tsundere, gjm, etc where they have animated op/ed with English lyrics, overlaid signs, different fonts, etc.
Nowadays it’s just rip the crunchy or amazon subs and clean up the typesetting, make a few edits, call it a day. I don’t blame them, that shit must’ve been a ton of work, but when I rewatch something like watamote I miss what we lost. Then I watch a crunchyroll sub rip and it’s like all one font, the op/ed isn’t translated, if they bothered to translate signs it’s often just the same text at the bottom instead of an overlay, etc.
the actual translation with crunchyroll is often mediocre too but that’s a very debatable topic especially depending on whether you think anime fans should understand what things like kawaii, senpai, aniki, and onii-chan mean (plus honorifics in general)
It still happens sometimes though, I remember kaguya having crazy subtitles and that was 2019. Like they pushed the limits of my media player where they had literally redrawn entire backgrounds to translate signs that had 0 relevance to the plot. The chika fans were hardcore
Yeah 100% with you on every point, we traded a lot to get official subs for the normies. On that note though kaleido is doing amazing typesetting work on gundam gquuuuux this season
That’s the most frustrating part. “We” didn’t, 4 uc Berkeley tech bro assholes did and amassed a fucking fortune in the process. They co-opted the scene that they contributed nothing to and flipped it into a VC wet dream, somehow. Nepotism had to be involved to connect them to VC early and shield them from DMCA bullshit; other piracy streaming sites existed but they all survived so long because unlike crunchyroll none were hosted in the us
But yeah there are still great subgroups and typesetters. I refuse to subscribe to crunchyroll or hidive bc of their bullshit. Sometimes I download rips if I really want to see something asap but the subs are trash. It’s almost always worth it to wait a few days/weeks for someone to typeset and for popular series sometimes someone does actually do a proper fansub still (or at least heavily edits the web subs to be a more accurate translation, have OP/ED/signs, etc). GLORYs release of NieR was excellent one from recent memory
Another crunchyroll/sentai gripe: they are purposely worsening the quality of their bluray releases to make them easier to encode at low bitrates. They essentially blur the content and cause sharp details to lose definition so that artifacts won’t be created during the bitrate starved encoding process. This makes no sense since they are encoding around 30Mbps for bluray video. Thankfully scene groups have figured out ways to undo the damage using the web rips
https://slow.pics/c/uuZvw4U2 - a comparison of the bluray before and after the filter removal on “Yoru no Kurage wa Oyogenai/Jellyfish Can’t swim in the Night”, a mid anime
https://slow.pics/c/hpobp0nl - a comparison of the web, bluray, and after the filter removal on “Sousou no Frieren”.
Zooming in for detail especially shows the issue and if you watch on a high resolution or physically large display it’s much more noticeable during playback. It wouldn’t matter as much except this is the only source for physical releases for many anime. CR is cancer (but tbf many Japanese studios are also absolutely terrible at releasing their own media in decent quality, don’t even get me started on why downloading in 1080p is sometimes the wrong choice)
Yeah it’s honestly embarrassing how bad the people making the BDs are at encoding, lowpassing everything it seems like, sometimes with the web release being higher quality (not to say those aren’t also fucked up, lazarus in particular has been atrocious as far as release quality)