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Excuse this extremely old question, but today I found a box of blank VHS cassettes, and it reminded me of growing up in the sticks, begging my parents to mail tapes to creepers I met through IRC. Then it dawned on me that at some point probably before 2010, the last fansub was mailed by VHS and the world probably didn't even notice. There's a solid chance some of you were involved enough in the scene to have some insight as to when high-speed internet became ubiquitous enough that fansub groups made the jump to purely digital distribution. If any of you are in the Internet Archive's discord, I remember them digitizing a bunch of tapes but I don't think they kept track of when the fansubs themselves were copied. Personally, I remember encountering a website offering VHS swaps as late as 2005. That's 5 years after the PS2 brought DVD players into millions of living rooms. If this website is accurate, 40% of American homes had standalone DVD players by 2010. The jump had to have taken place sometime before then. So my question to you, is: Were people still trading VHS fansubs during the Obama administration?
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Jan 22, 2024 23:30
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Maybe but IIRC VHS fansubs really started to die out when DivX encoding was broken and Bittorrent became the thing cause you could have 200-300 meg files download over night even if you weren't on cable or basic broadband internet
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Jan 22, 2024 23:55
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When I got into the fansubbing scene circa 2005, torrents and "digisubs" had already exploded and brought in a big new audience. VHS fansubs were always a pretty small scene as far as I understand it, but I wasn't in the US so I never experienced VHS fansubs for myself. The torrent era made the scene and audience explode in size very quickly and while some of the people had previous experience with VHS subs, most did not. There was a weird cultural clash for a few years in the mid-00's between an older VHS-influenced culture that didn't think of what they were doing as piracy in any sense (and would drop shows upon announcement of a license, even though the DVD release at that point would be probably one or two years away), and a newer crowd that absolutely did think of it as warez. Some of the fansub tooling was inherited from the VHS era too. For example, there was an awful subtitle editor called Substation Alpha that was originally developed for VHS subtitling - it wasn't ever all that popular for a variety of reasons but a much modified version of its file format (.rear end, Advanced Substation Alpha) is the dominant subtitling file format in fansubbing to this day. One problem for the longevity of the VHS era though was that the VHS tooling never really made a successful transition into the Windows era; AFAIK most VHS fansubbers used Amigas (combined with a device called a genlock) for doing the actual video mixing. I think there were isolated holdouts doing actual VHS fansubs well into the 2010's (Central Anime were one such holdout that did it for a very very long time I think) but at that point it was really a nostalgic gimmick more than anything else. Overall my impression and recollection (as something of an outsider/latecomer to the scene, mind) is that most VHS fansubbers had quit or migrated into digisubbing by 2005 or so.
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Jan 23, 2024 11:53
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I heard that it continued surprisingly long in latin america but I don't know anything beyonf that.
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Feb 11, 2024 02:53
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