Change of attitude regarding speedsubs

What's with the change of attitude regarding speed- and qualitysubs? You know. Back in the times when Aone (considered quality group) used to release like >15 subs/month and Naruto Anime was still somewhat cool and not a pile of fillers.
People used to watch "quality" subs. A-E, Triad, Aone, L-E etc. where the groups of choice for almost everything. The (in the beginning) few people who watched speedsubs were considered dumb or as newbies (well they often were).
But then, for no apparent reason, the way things used to be and the "scene" changed. Today almost everyone is gay -not for bridget- but for speedsubs. DB and other groups like this get their subs multiple times more often downloaded than stuff from groups like Lunar.
And in the meantime the majority of /a/ considers one to be a looser for watching Mai Otome from Static subs instead of Doremi (speedsubbers). Main arguments are like "lol fancy karaoke" and "I hope you enjoy your uberstyled subs". Well of course I keep thinking "Yeah and I hope you enjoyed your crappy encode and the even worse translation" but nevermind.

How do you explain this change of attitude?

Speedsubbers generally have better quality than ever before and quality groups are generally slower than ever before, pretty simple.

>>1
Let's disregard Otome (I believe there are some words being translated differently which enrages certain key persons and pulls the entire /a/ along with it), as I see it (judging from the GameFAQs anime and manga board) people are very brand loyal, and will only download from a big name group.

I, on one hand, think all (without exception) big name groups suck. I wouldn't dream about not downloading a speedsub. Of course, I don't follow any airing anime at the moment, just watching anime in my 40 year backlog. I hate anything that is not using cel animation (before I watch it, and I have nothing about 3D anime).

buy anime on dvd and watch dub, fag

People who are totally into something to the point of obsession (aka complete faggots with no lives) always fight over irrelevant crap like "dub vs. sub", "this sub vs. that sub" or "this show vs. that show". Wherever you find a "scene" for something, you'll find those religious fucktards.

Don't talk to them. Don't feed them. Just leech what you can from them and move on. You don't want to become like this.

This applies to everything, not only anime.

>>4
seconded

The same reasons modern game companies are the way they are. Duuh, who needs quality? If we get our shit out first that more people want to eat, we're golden.

It might also be the other bullshit notion, however unspoken, that the speedsubbers' near-Babelfish translations are as lossless (and therefore as good) as you can get, to hell with grammar and good writing.

>>1

All of the incredibly high-quality groups have disappeared for some reason, nobody's sure why. These days "not-speedsubs" means Lunar, or Nanashi, who are:
1) not any better at translating (significantly over ADTRW/BUTTROCK/MEYRIN, the official randomly-changing-names group of Team 4chan!)
2) hardsub, when softsub-speedsubbing is a better encode
3) cover everything in so much unnecessary typesetting crap that it distracts from everything good; just look at anything AnY-Nanashi produces, especially. Noein and Eureka have the most ridiculously ugly karaoke you ever saw, and it covers up about half of the actual OP animation!

>>8
nanashit are hard gay for karaoke

>>All of the incredibly high-quality groups have disappeared for some reason, nobody's sure why.

How about, most of the people that kept those teams running were kids with lots of free time and now they've just grown out of it?

And now we're into the next generation of subbers with their own preferences and style.  The first digi-subs weren't that great either.  LH had some seriously pixellated size 9 subs in ugly yellow.

>>10
Well, obviously old subbers will always stop and new ones will start, but the question is why the newer generation seems to mainly consist of "speed subbers".  What >>2 said was pretty close to correct... the few old big dynasty groups that are left are dying and often 5-10+ episodes behind, while good quality fansubs are made faster than ever.  Naruto paints a particularly good picture of this scene:  AOne is 17 episodes, or 4 months, behind DB, yet AOne's encoding and subtitles are only marginally better; DB has quite acceptable video quality, and the subs are almost always free of errors in translation or grammar... although, compared to AOne's, they are a bit clunky and tend to not be as well written.  The days of speedsubs being comparable to what you see in a HK bootleg DVD are long gone.

It seems like what happened is that it became harder to become involved with the extremely zerocool awesome megagroups, while at the same time it became much easier to find a few people to connect with, find a show to do, and start up a group.  I think it's the expanding of anime fandom in general and the digisub scene in specific in combination with improved distribution that has created a much larger playing field than ever before, with each group only doing a few shows, thereby preventing any one group from creating the kind of dominance exhibited in the past.  Bittorrent, in particular, has allowed any random citizen on the internet to create a fansub and distribute it to thousands of fans without the need for intense uploading power and host it on any number of torrent portal sites.

At the same time, all of these things that keep groups from becoming huge like in the past prevent "brand loyalty", as >>3 brought up, to take place, and fans are just as likely to download Unknown Group A's translation as they are Unknown Group B's, and if they care at all about groups, most fans will probably be happy with whatever they got and stick with that, instead of trying to determine whose subtitles are TEHBEST.

I don't see the problem with pretty karaoke; sometimes it gets excessive, but Aone is usually a good example of very pretty kara without going overboard.  Everything else really just depends on the fan and shouldn't be argued about.  For me, bad video quality, jumpy framerate, translation errors, spelling/grammar errors, and even awkward wording can bring me out of the show and lessen my appreciation, but for others it's not a problem.  I think having dozens of small groups with a few medium size ones, like the current situation seems to be trending towards, is an ideal scenario; those groups that do excellent work will gain popularity and hopefully stay around.

>>11
Nothing personal, you make it sound like if really anyone on the internet can just sub their own series.  Fansubbing a series is a lot of work and dedication.  Sitting down and watching a show is one thing but having to pause it every other line so you can think about how to translate it and then writing it down is downright boring and tedious.

Then there's timing it.  Setting the karaoke is an one time thing for the standard OP/ED + the one or two special openers or enders.  But you gotta sit down, translate and time the episode, research whatever extra crap you need to, every week even when the episode is so shitty you want to cry.

I remember just a year or so after the first digi-subs appeared, it was like a rat race for the best quality and fastest subs of all the popular series.  This even went on for a quite while with two or three groups doing each series, maybe a day or two in between each group's version.  Then all the groups burned out.

I see this 'speed sub' wave as a carry away from the fans that came out to fill in the void that the burned out groups left.  People who knew what to do but didn't fansub before because of the rat race mentality; people who just went for simplicity and didn't burn out as quick.  And I think they set the trend we see now.

But yeah, this pretty much plays into what >>11 said but from a different angle.  I personally just wish they stop dicking with the hardsubs and just release 100K softsub files.  Win + win for everyone but the karaoke-ego-strokers I think.

>>12
There are limits to softsubs - subbing signs and other onscreen text is awkward at best.  Also, I personally do feel that the freedom  that hardsubs bring to the typesetter makes it worth it.  The freedom that softsubs brings to the consumer is handy, but if it's a well made sub, you don't need to change anything, anyway.  Besides, it's not like you save any download time since you still have to download the raw.  Raws can also often be cleaned up a lot more than you might think by the encoder, but it seems like you have some knowledge of fansubbing so you probably do understand.  I guess what you were trying to say is that if everyone just released the softsubs then you'd be able to download an episode one time and quickly compare the subs.

Also, I have been in several groups before working on shows, so I do understand that there is a lot of work put into it, and it's not as easy as it might seem.  All that I mean is that any group of fans with the knowledge and desire to bring a show to a wider audience can do so without the need for someone's hacked box to host a bot on IRC with.  Wide-spread, fast, free distro is available for EVERYONE with the advent of BT.  Before BT, how were you gonna easily get the episode to that many people?  Certainly not with a website link.

Subs suck, I like to watch my animu without text covering up the action. Dub rulz.

>>14
Oh, an animu fan, he must have ran really far to end up here.

>>12
Softsubs would play into minimal typesetting and personally, I don't feel there's a need to go overboard and translate everything on screen.  Just translate what's in context. Spoken dialogue goes on the bottom of the screen and anything else goes on top, just like in the good old days.  So this would be a plus for me rather than a minus.

But back when I downloaded raws for the shows I was following, softsubs made a lot of sense to me.  Everyone gets the video from the same torrent, filling it with lots of seeds.  People who can't wait can watch the raw immeidately.  When group x releases a subfile a week later, just have to grab that.  No video re-encoding.  No colour bleeding from the hardsubs into the picture.  Maybe hue/saturation adjustment + post processing options in the decoder and you're set.

If you have a shitty sub, then someone is bound to fix it up and upload it again.  Version 2 or version 3?  No problem, just have to grab a new subfile not the entire file again.  Bonus: when you play that H264 video fullscreen, your softsubs will scale and keep their crispness.

But back to the topic on hand; I agree that BT has a large part to do with the speedsubber trend, I just feel that it's not because they can, that speedsubbers showed up. I think it has more to do with the large groups burning out (+ getting their projects licensed) and people coming out to fill in the void.

>>16
This is something I've wondered about.  Why do you watch raws?  Do you understand Japanese?  If not, wouldn't you enjoy the show better if you could follow the dialogue?  For me, seeing those interesting events happen without the dialogue to back it up would take a lot of the impact out of it, and it don't think it would help for me to watch it again once the subs come out, as I already know what to expect.  Then again, maybe I'm wrong.

>>17
Anime is all about being with the "in crowd", not about watching and understanding shows. Also, every pimple faced teenager understands the universal language of cartoon tits.

>>17
I understand enough Japanese to understand what's going on and most of what's being said.  That and being able to watch a new episode very week instead of waiting anywhere from between 7 to 30 days in between episodes make it worthwhile.

Rewatching stuff didn't bother me much but eventually I got lazy and didn't even bother downloading the subbed version after it came out.

"i want my anime, and i want it now"

>>5
Of course, if those people wouldn't exist, there'd be nothing for you to leech from. How do your kind contribute to reality?

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