No.9607
Cute!
Would love to watch Di Gi Charat with kissu sometimes...
No.9609
>>9607We have watched it and still watch it occasionally! It's such a good random intermission anime that I keep it loaded and ready.
But, we can schedule a long stream of it sometime, too. We never watched anything but the original run and its specials, so there's also room for the other versions.
No.9614
>>9606Still my favorite anime and I don't understand why Gamers doesn't use them as mascots anymore.
No.9620
I know this is far from an unpopular opinion, but I really do prefer anime from 2000 and earlier. High-end digital production techniques have allowed for not just visuals but also audio that, while, technically impressive for television, are also, at least to me, kind of cold.
No.9640
>>9639They certainly were pushing merch hard from what I remember of the original broadcast. The parent company ran into a bunch of money troubles not long after it aired though. Gamers isn't owned by the same people anymore. They got bought out by their main competition a few years later (they called it a merge) and they've struggled to remain relevant in the market since the middle of the 2000s. They closed a bunch of stores down. Not sure how many are left.
No.9791
>>9787He's not just a lolicon... he's a filthy linguist too
No.9795
>>9787This one might be my favorite episode of the original 16 episodes. It's an interesting introduction to the concept of the moe, uh, what do you call them, not suffixes? The sentence enhancers, nyo. Very kawaii, nyuu~.
Any Puchiko episode is great.
No.9829
>>9828Real. The original at the very least was traditionally animated. Also it's a travesty what a bloated mess RealPlayer became, I believe with version 9 onward.
No.9830
>>9828I was able to watch some hentai with RM. Stuff like La Blue Girl is seared in my memory at its horrific buffering and low quality video. Hehehe good times.
No.9831
>>9830>horrific bufferingI'm imagining a character shouting "I............'m c....................u
m....................m
......................
.....mI...............
....N" followed by an endlessly looping 1/4 second of audio and a Windows 9x blue screen. And the inability to hold off on finishing so that the blue screen gets the load.
No.9833
>>9830>>9831From now on, I will forever remember that hentai anime as "La Blue Screen Girl"
No.9834
>>9831Something like that... maybe? It's been so long. The main thing that sticks out to me is how low definition it was. I guess it's like those images people make to make fun of VLC's weird artifacting.
It was really awesome at the time, though. I can't imagine how many kids back then were able to see Japanese animated porn. How poetic that the image I grabbed off google is so low quality.
No.9835
File:02.jpg (20.92 KB,321x240)
>>9834More or less like this. A few of those files still survive on P2P networks, most of them with rather peculiar and obscure codecs. Most probably rips from laserdiscs or VCDs.
It probably was not that bad when you were watching it on a 14" CRT and and your other option was a 352x288 interlaced VHS tape that most of the time happened to be a bootleg.
No.9836
File:3.jpg (84.53 KB,1024x768)
>>9835Kissu_-_S01E01_-_Anon_
-_Is_-_Keyed_-_VHS_-_R
ip_-_640_x_480_-_DivX.
avi
That reminds me, when I did some research recently for a P2P-relevant post, I found archives of an old website in my language that used to distribute ed2k files of Mahoromatic when it was current. When I checked the guest book, the most recent post was the admin casually stating that new releases will take a while because he got raided by the police and got his PC taken away.
I really need to make use of that one nice anon's advice and check out Usenet and / or IRC+XDCC, I'm desperately looking for 2D VHS rips, preferably ones from my country.
No.9837
>>9836Fuck, is that Agent Aika? I remember it from the time when Locomotion started subbing anime... Except that the subs rarely worked and they only appeared in one or two episodes. The rest of them, the plot was left to your imagination.
Shit, I would not be surprised if that VHS rip had been taped from Locomotion. even as an MPEG2 satellite TV channel, everything always looked bleached, with the blacks locking more like greys.
No.9838
>>9835I'm old, maybe I can help?
The two primary codecs that were used for VHS fansub rips back then were RealMedia as already mentioned and Quicktime. The Quicktime rips were usually better quality for some reason. Those were your true "digisubs" from that era but they mostly consisted of stuffed ripped from first generation VHS fansubs if you were lucky. VHS was still the primary way to distro. At that point there were a lot of VHS distro hubs set-up in America that were making tons of money off copying tapes. They were making so much the fansub groups were getting pissed off about it and refusing to send their own tapes out to certain people because they didn't want them finding their way to those distro VHS hub groups. Then later on a bunch of them were against them being ripped to digital formats because the quality was worse and didn't represent what they'd actually released. But also because they were on the "warez is illegal" thing all fansub groups do in an attempt to justify distro of someone else's copyrights. Oh and the big reason: It was cutting into their profits and ability to trade for tapes they wanted.
I should have mentioned this before but a lot of those lower than 480p resolution rips were originally made for VCD (and later SVCD). Which were the main way things were pirated in Asian regions back in the mid 90s. These used mpeg-1 and later mpeg-2 video codecs that weren't very good quality as you can imagine. SVCD was better but not as widely available as VCD stuff. You can see the VCD specs here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_CD#VideoA lot of the early stuff on the web/p2p networks ended up on the internet through a process like this:
Fansub group sends someone first generation copy of their tape (so second generation copy) -> This is copied 1-3 more times through tape trading -> 5th+ generation tape is finally captured with capture card and turned into mpeg1 VCD -> someone took the VCD copy and converted it to RealMedia/Quicktime format to save space and offer 50MB-ish file per episode.
Remember a VCD was 700-800MB per episode (or maybe two) at half 480p resolution in the first generation mpeg codec. In other words. It looked like shit.
I have some really old RealMedia rips around here somewhere on CD-Rs where parts of them are so bad quality wise you can't read the hardsubs in places. They're copies of copies of copies of copies of copies.
In 1998 or so there were tons of people on the web offering to sell you fansubs in RealMedia format (and others) in exchange for money orders. I originally finished watching DBZ that way when the original airing was happening in America. I didn't have broadband at home. For $20 a guy sent me all of DB, DBZ, DBGT and all of the movies in a combination of RealMedia and Quicktime+mpeg (usually .asf) files. I can't remember how many CD-Rs they took up but I know it was more than 15. It was the only way to get them all quickly because there was no way I was getting that shit on a dial up connection at the time.
I ordered a bunch of other shit from him because he had everything and it was cheaper for shipping than ordering the fansubbed VHS tapes. I got a bunch of tapes for stuff I liked too of course. A lot of the times to support the group.
No.9839
>>9838On my other computer I have a few old fansub websites that were doing VHS tapes bookmarked. Some of those old websites are still up and some of those groups are even still active. But they usually only do about 1 release every decade. I've been waiting on a certain series to finish being subbed since 1999. No one else has released it and it never got another official raw release anywhere. I think the licensing rights are in limbo or something.
I had to disconnect my BD/DVD/CD-ROM drive because I ran out of sata ports and needed to hook up another HDD. But I saved most of my old CD-Rs a few months ago. Not sure if they're still readable but they don't look to have disc rot. A lot of them aren't labeled. I'll try to go through them soon and see what I have laying around. I know I have a bunch of the early digisub releases in DivX format for things like Love Hina and everything else that was being released at that time. Most of the stuff coming out in DivX back then were again simply VHS fansubs being captured. Only this time it was in acceptable quality for the first time. People went ape shit for Love Hina because it was one of the first series where you could watch it in the west subtitled the same time it was airing.
The early DivX era of digisubs is really interesting. They hadn't settled on file sizes or even resolutions yet. So a lot of groups were doing 4+ releases of the same episode every week in different sizes and formats to appease leechers. Since most of the leechers were still on dial-up.
If you weren't in college behind a college T1+ connection people really turned their noses up at you back then. Got less elitist once common people started getting cable and DSL at home. I had access to a lot of private ftp servers back then but if I occupied the few leecher slots for too long with my slow connection the sysop would ban me. Got accused of being a fed once too because the guy swore my domestic dial-up ISP was in a Government building or something. I think it probably was before our ISP got that IP range.
Later on once people discovered they could get raws from Japanese P2P services digisubs really took off. But a lot of the Japanese guys didn't know wtf they were doing when it came to using their capture cards. So most raws were really shit and they never wanted to listen to stinky gaijin advice. I knew of several people that moved to Japan just so they could capture anime from Cable/Sat providers in-country. They weren't sharing their raws with everyone of course. You had to have some really good shit to trade them in exchange for access to them. That's why certain groups released garbage while another group doing the same show might have something that looked much better. One was having to use the kuso Japan P2P rip while the other had their own guy in-country that actually knew how to work with digital video.
It was a fun time to be on IRC. Between this stuff and Dreamcast games I was having a grand old time.
No.9842
>>9835>It probably was not that bad when you were watching it on a 14" CRTGoing to rant some more about this because there is so much bullshit being tossed around about CRTs and video quality from back then. Especially from the people doing older shows that claim they love the grain in them.
Back in those days of CRTs being used for both mastering and watching shows we didn't see film grain. The CRT acts as a natural filter for it. In other words all that film grain wasn't seen by the people mastering the show for distro to TV networks and later for VHS/DVD releases. Tons of film artifacts people jack off about now couldn't be seen at all on those old copies.
In general if the bitrate wasn't totally shit and the digital copy was taken from an early generation VHS tape the quality was just as good as what you'd see on TV (assuming it was airing anywhere you could watch it). All that old RealMedia/Quicktime and early DivX stuff that was at about 40-80MB per 25 minute episode looked just fine. As long as the person that encoded them knew what they were doing. There were also far less way to fuck up what you were doing through the older codecs and applications people were using like virtuadub/nandub or the Amigas (mostly used for VHS). The main issues with your set-up back then was ensuring that your cables going to/from the display/VCR/Capture card were decent quality. If you had that done correctly to prevent colors from bleeding and other stuff like dot crawl things were just fine.
Most people didn't get into doing stuff like using video filters for encoding until 1999-2000. At least that's how I remember it maybe they were doing it before then. Virtuadub only had very basic filters and using them correctly was obvious. The first avisynth filters generally did a good job and most people weren't stupid enough to make everything look like crap with them. But they were REALLY slow on the CPUs of that era.
In 1999-2001 if you were encoding anime to DivX 3.11 on a high end CPU of that era you were going to get about 1-2fps speeds while encoding. If you added the few common filters to make line art look better or remove dot crawl from a semi-decent VHS your speed would tank to 0.1fps fast. In other words, not many people were doing it and you were tying up your main PC for over a day for one episode. Maybe 2-5 days depending on what it was. Encoders were generally huge geeks back then and a tight-knit group. You could actually get decent advice and they were a nice bunch. It wasn't like the flood of mean people that came when we got into the mid-2000s/XviD era.
When I first started playing with DivX the main hub where you talked about this stuff was run by the company that was attempting to monetize it and turn it into the new DVD format. Note I don't mean the DIVX company. That was a different thing entirely. Places like Doom9 and animesuki's fansubbers forum didn't pop up until much later. Back in the really early digisub era you had to be on IRC where everyone hung out.
Speaking of IRC at first it was a tight-knit place with only 2-3 channels where this was discussed. There were only 2-3 digisub groups. All the old school VHS fansub groups shunned and hated them. So it caused everyone to band together and work towards common goals like releasing new stuff as it aired and releasing the old VHS fansubbed stuff on the internet for free out of spite. Since a lot of us had been wronged by the old VHS groups because they did things like refuse to send tapes, take forever to send tapes, over charge for shipping and reporting the digisub groups to the authorities in an attempt to drive away the competition and make themselves appear more legit to the Japanese publishers. Fansub drama goes back a looooong time and most of the drama from that era has been forgotten since the stuff that happened during the digisub group splits mid-late 2000s overshadowed it (and honestly, was far worse and stupid).
Most all of the early web forums where this stuff was talked about outside of IRC are long gone too and aren't archived. So many forums from the mid-late 90s that were super popular died around 2001-2003. When all the vBulletin/phpbb forums popped up the older ones running older software died for this or that reason.
Mainly, hosting costs and drama. The old websites, homepages and guestbooks went with them. A lot of the things happening back then only live on in people's memories. It's impossible to get back in touch with most people I knew from back then too because services like AIM are no longer around. Even before AIM died most of the people on my buddy list hadn't logged on in decades before it was shut down. Plus I couldn't access a lot of my old buddy list anyway. Since you had to hack the AIM client (or use a third party one) to have more than 120 friends (I think that was the limit). So anyone above that 120 mark got lost when the HDD it was on happen to die 10 PCs ago.
This reminds me. I have a bag of old HDDs too from a computer I used from 1998-2009 or so. They're all IDE drives. I keep meaning to hook them up to see what's on them but I always get lazy and don't get around to it. I bet a lot of interesting stuff from that era of digisubs is on them.
No.9847
>>9837>everything always looked bleached, with the blacks locking more like greys.CRTs didn't have the problem with blacks that modern LCDs and LEDs do. Blacks actually looked black (or close enough to it). That's why older rips look "washed out" in those areas when you view them on modern displays.
I ranted so much in my last post and got off topic. Basically, I just wanted to say that on a CRT from that era in general the VHS fansubs and DivX era higher bitrate digisubs looked great. The lower bitrate ones were passable quality assuming the source of them was good and not a 10th generation VHS that had been played over 9,000 times already. Even the 240p stuff looked just fine in full screen at 640x480+.
I had a 21 inch CRT monitor as my main monitor for years and it most everything from the RealMedia-DivX+ era stuff looked as good or better than the Sat provider I was using for television at that time. By the time digisubs got some standards about bitrate+filesize and we got into XviD era everything looked better than the DVDs you could purchase from the legit western companies selling anime. I had a lot of those to compare the fansubs too. Fansubs almost always won out quality wise in translation and video quality.
Where early DivX-era shows mostly suffer is audio quality. Since the video bitrate was considered more important the audio bitrate was reduced as much as possible to ensure the video got enough bitrate for the target file size. Which is why there were so many different releases for the same episodes of show. Finding a digisub with 128kbps mp3 audio was really rare at first in the DivX era. Usually good quality for audio was considered to be something like 64kbps. Some groups would even attempt to go lower if they could get away with it. No one released in 320kbps because it took up too much room and bitrate away from the video portion of the .avi file. Well I don't want to say no one. There were a few people that would push out stuff with massive file sizes. But once they saw hardly anyone could leech them they stopped.
The only time someone might try to give 128kbps to the audio in the early days is if the show was music heavy throughout and it was really important to the story.
The main concern back in those days was ensuring the video itself wasn't a sea of blocks.
No.9854
Eh I've written so much I might as well talk about file size and why people were pushing them so low in the Realmedia-Early DivX 3.11 era.
Aside from the obvious one: Most people having dial-up and fitting a set number on a CD-R there was a really important reason to keep file sizes low.
In those days pre-bittorrent there was a job in digital funsubbing that's mostly been forgotten now. You ever see an old show where groups still put credits in the OP or title cards? You know what I mean. "Encoded by <x>", "Translated by <x>", "Quality checking by <x>" etc.
Well you'll see a very important but obsolete job being credited. "Disto by <x>".
What "distro" meant was the main guy that got the show out through fserv bots, ftp and other means. Usually, it was some guy that was decent at cracking into servers. Which was really really easy back then compared to now. What these guys would do is use common exploits to find servers and computers on networks with a lot of bandwidth. Once they'd found one they would place a back door so they could ssh into it later. Then they'd patch any exploits they'd found to prevent someone else from hacking in to steal it away from them. After that they would install an ftp server and usually an fserv (xdcc) bot.
In other words they built up botnets purely for trading warez and in this case anime fansubs with other people. They'd use their botnet to help distribute new releases to everyone in multiple IRC channels and other private ftp servers. It was a really important position in those days. Someone with a bunch of fserv bots and a fast private ftp server not only got access to new fansub releases (and raws) early they also got access to rare stuff like warez, games, anime raws, manga and anything else you can think of.
The digisub groups were shunned by both the old VHS fansub groups that operated out of college campuses and the warez scene. So they had to build up their own network to share their files with each other and leechers.
Since having a good connection at home was so rare building up a botnet like this was the only way to get access to most things back then. Even stuff that was released freely to the public by warez groups. Since downloading large files from the fserv bots on IRC or from ftp servers would tie up the precious slots. On most of those even the fast servers there were usually only 1-4 open slots at a time. If you tied one up for too long with your little dial-up connection they'd boot you off and ban you because it was causing other people to wait.
Which was one of the main reasons why people lurked the IRC channels of fansub groups and checked them so often. When a new release hit the fserv bots you had to be fast if you wanted to see it within the next day. Since you had to wait in line behind everyone that requested the file before you did. Many times there would be hundreds of people waiting in line ahead of you. For some smaller groups that didn't have a good distro network you might have to wait 2-3 days to fetch the file even if you had broadband at home.
Hence why the "distro" position was so important. Someone with a large botnet and access to really fast ftp servers could get the file up on multiple fserv bots quickly. That way there would be enough slots for everyone to grab the file when the release was announced to the channel. The encoder/quality checker would send it to the distro guy after it was ready. Then it would go to the fastest private ftp server they had which would in turn send it to all the fserv bots they had (and the bots run by other people with botnets if some trading agreement was in place). Only after all that was done would the leechers get access through the public bots and ftp servers.
This job became obsolete due to the torrent protocol. Which allowed leechers to share the burden of distro. It also lessened the legal risk for the groups. Since most of the computers/servers in their botnets were typically owned by Government organizations or large corps. who were lax with their security on their high bandwidth servers. We'd lose access to our fastest ftp servers and fserv bots all of the time because the sysop would discover they'd been pwned and were being used to share so-called illegal data. More than a few people got in trouble over the years because of this. The servers were constantly going down and new ones had to be cracked in to to replace them.
Hence why I'm so against attempting to make .torrent files/trackers into a private club. It defeats the entire purpose of why bit torrent protocol was created in the first place.
No.9864
>>9857Not as much as you might think. At one point in the late 90s-early 2000s almost every .mil was rooted and hosting some kind of content. It was really easy to build a botnet back then. Lots of kids had control over so many Windows 9x and Linux machines. One computer club I used switched everything over to an obscure OS because it was so hard to secure a server in those days.
The down side is people started using those botnets to do bad things. So many IRC servers were ddos'd and ended up closing because of the botnet wars happening on IRC back then. My favorite place was enterthegame but it had to close up shop due to all the botnet wars. Everyone ended up on Rizon because of those ddos wars.
No.9870
>>9847No, I mean, it was exclusive to that satellite channel, all the others looked perfect back in 2000. It was as if they were poorly recording it in the american continent to air it later in europe with certain contents replaced.
No.9871
I want to reply a bit to the CRT question before going back to Digi Charat to stay on topic (even if this is very good offtopic), but I'm on mobile while cleaning the desk.
-to the anon wanting 2d VHS rip: If you can specify the country, I may have something that may interest you, if the tape has survived after 20 years stored.
- I havent been able to find my old Digi charat realmedia CD.
- I remember that as late as 2002, we pooled money between classmates to buy a a rip of the entire Ranma 1/2 (just a few seasons). We ended with a pile of cd-r's containing poor quality VHS rips, and given how much extra money and time it would have costed to copy those cds on a 4X recorder (I did not have a job back then), I ultimately did not make a personal copy when I was my turn. Thank glob that 2 years later I would have DSL at home and start torrenting anime like crazy
- Oh, I forgot to add: there was some "altruist trade". Rather than paying, during the dial up era we will arrange a trade in a chatroom and mail each other cds with games or anime. That's hiw I got Digi Charat in Real Media format, yellow subtitles and everything. I had one of the good versions of the player in a magazine cd, so it's like I never used realplayer while having an interner connection.
Damn, offtopic again. Sorry.
No.9873
>>9871>2d VHS ripOh that sounds awesome! I will spill the beans later in
>>>/qa/153055 when I reply to the other anon after having gotten some sleep, just wanted to already bring attention to the thread as I believe fansubs were mentioned in it back then as well and it might be worth moving the conversation?
Till then!
No.9880
>>9871very interesting derail desu I don't mind at all
if anything just post some cute dejiko pics to bring it "on topic" (there is no topic I just wanted to dump these mp4s since I had em and kissu has such a big file size limit)
No.10132
>>10074ep 11
the more I watch this show the more I am convinced that di gi charat is one of the greatest anime of all time
No.10159
>>10132It is quite amazing. It shouldn't be as good as it is, for being an ad for a store and having only 3 minutes of show per episode. The designs are impeccable and something you'd expect from a long-running series from highly paid and well regarded artisans with decades of experience. Just the OP alone is remarkable and full of endless charm and style.
No.10303
>>10159I've been watching the later full episodes too and they're just as good
I think I'll watch all of Nyo soon
No.10462
>>10427there was a di gi charat thread on /a/ the other day that died too soon...
;_;
No.10464
>>10427I hate this blue guy so much. A blemish upon an otherwise great show.
No.10523
>>10467Very unrowdy indeed
No.10538
>>10462the final episode..... (of the ones short enough to post).....
amazing show. pure, unadulterated, high-grade moe.
No.10642
>>10622no problem
I am now indoctrinated into the cult of Gamers nyo