Evolution of the fansub

Fansubs originated during the explosion of anime production during the 1980s in Japan. Relatively few titles were licensed for distribution in foreign countries. This made it difficult for anime fans to obtain new titles. Some fans, generally those with some Japanese language experience, began producing amateur subtitled copies of new anime programs so that they could share them with their fellow fans who did not understand Japanese. In an attempt to avoid ethical and legal problems, fansubbers adopted the practice of distributing their works at zero profit.

The first distribution media of fansubbed material was VHS tapes. Such copies were notoriously low quality, time consuming to make, expensive to produce, and difficult to find. A limited number of copies were made and then mailed out or distributed at local anime clubs. Fans could purchase fansubs at a modest cost or could contact clubs who would record the material on their own blank video cassettes.

However, with the advent of widespread high-speed Internet access, desktop video editing, and DVD ripping, the original process has largely been abandoned in favor of digital fansubbing (digisubbing) and electronic distribution of the resulting digisubs. This has allowed fansubbing to transform from a slow and tedious task that generates a low quality preview of an attractive show to a cheap, easy, and quick way to create a high quality and high availability alternative to an only-slightly-better quality official DVD copy, although some groups release HD quality fansubs.

However, a majority of fansubs are encoded at distinctly less than DVD quality, often featuring fewer channels of sound and less picture quality since many stem from TV recordings. Even fansubs based on Japanese DVD rips have less quality. The primary reason is file size: 175 MB, 233 MB, and 350 MB are generally treated as the "standard" sizes for a fansub file because they divide evenly into 700 MB, the size of a typical CD-R. Since the introduction of the DVD, sizes like 172 MB and 344 MB are also used, allowing 13 or 26 episodes (one season) to fit on a DVD. However, since most digisubs now use a better MPEG-4 compression, in comparison to the MPEG-2 compression used by DVDs, the difference in quality is becoming less noticeable despite the smaller filesizes.

Digisubs are now of such quality and free accessibility that the incentive to upgrade to a legitimate copy once a title is domestically licensed may be severely diminished. However, recent research by the Yale Economic Review has shown that people who download movies are no less likely to buy movies than those who do not, calling this conclusion into serious question.[1] Economic instabilities in both the US and Japan have made it hard to gauge the precise consequences of digisubs on the commercial industry, as well.

Some in the anime community argue that digisubbing has distorted the original fansub culture and transformed it from a respected practice to nothing more than pirating for cheap entertainment, and consider it the anime equivalent of Zero day warez trading. Some fansubs even show up on warez sites - though mainly because there are warez traders who also happen to be anime fans, leading to a coincidental grouping of the two, much the same that pornography and anime show up together on several sites.
Posted by eko pujiarto, Monday, May 14, 2007 11:14 PM

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