Fansub - History

History

Fansubs originated during the explosion of anime production during the 1980s in Japan. Relatively few titles were licensed for distribution outside of Japan. 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.

The first distribution media of fansubbed material was VHS and Betamax tapes. Such copies were notoriously low quality, time consuming to make, expensive to produce (over US$4000 in 1986) 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, DVD and Blu-ray Disc ripping, and TV capturing, 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 highly available alternative to official DVD or Blu-ray releases.

Due to the relatively low quality of television broadcasts (when compared with a DVD or Blu-ray release of the same show), fansubs done from television video sources do not have the high quality video of official releases. There are certain "standards" that many fansub groups adhere to, resulting in certain codecs being used and certain target filesizes for encoded fansubs. This results in most fansubs having similar file sizes: 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. As the price of Hard disk drives have decreased while their storage capacity has increased, modeling fansub filesizes after optical media constraints has become largely unimportant. Fansubs using HDTV broadcast video sources require a higher bit rate to maintain quality, and in combination with varying amounts of motion between episodes (large amounts of motion require high bit rates to maintain quality), file sizes for HD fansub encodes can range from 200MB to 800MB even using the latest H264 codecs. For episodes sourced from Blu-ray discs, filesizes can be several gigabytes. Some anime series which are broadcast in high definition do not go on to be released on Blu-ray. Thus it is often the case that downloading a fansub sourced from HDTV will offer much higher video quality than purchasing an official DVD, due to the difference in resolution.

These advancements in fansubbing quality mean that fansubs are now of such quality and free accessibility that the incentive to upgrade (or in some cases downgrade, as from an HD fansub to an SD DVD) 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. 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, though several Japanese and North American anime studios and distribution companies have pointed to fansubbing as drawing a large amount of profit away from them.

In April, 2008, two Gonzo titles began free, subtitled releases simultaneously with their Japanese TV-airing counterparts on streaming websites YouTube, Crunchyroll, and BOST. In addition to the streaming video, viewers may pay any price they wish (greater than zero) to download a higher-quality version of the shows. As of October, 2009, a large number of new anime are being distributed using this same model through Crunchyroll. The general reaction from the fansub community has been to not subtitle these shows, though in some cases the streaming video is released days after the Japanese airing and in very low quality, leading fansubs to still be done of such shows. Several "fansub groups" have taken to ripping the subtitles from these Crunchyroll releases, syncing them to HDTV video sources, and then releasing them for free. That said, the apparent increase in support from Japanese animation studios for this new distribution model would suggest that it is working quite well, and the number of fansubbing groups has decreased as many people do not feel a need for fansubs when they can stream these shows legally and for free.