AnimeSuki

A

a.f.k - they have no website, only irc channel, LUCKY STAR and i am still waiting for Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei...... -_-

Anime-Empire they don't sub anime series once it has been licensed

Anime-Destiny they are only subbing zatch bell, and they are still subbing it.......

Anonymous only irc channel and they are speed sub

Ayako they are subbing Seto no Hanayome , murder princess and many more......

Ayu they are subbing umisho, Baccano!

B

Bullet Speed Subs another speed sub, and as for speed sub, don't expect their front to be styled...

Black-Sheep only irc channel and subbing mononoke

Black-Order subbing D.gray man and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

C

C1 they are subbing Tokimeki Memorial ~Only Love~

Conclave Slow.................subs.....

CrystalNova Murder Princess

D

Dattebayo Fansubs I don't think i need to tell people what are they are subbing................... sometimes they releases Pythagoras Switch and Pokemon Diamond and Pearl

Devil's Lair they have no website at all, and sub devil may cry

Doremi-Fansub joint project with umai to sub Kenichi

E

Eclipse one of the fansub, i am supporting.

F

Formula Sub very slow in releasing CODE-E............. doing joint project with shinsen sub in subbing Kateikyoushi Hitman Reborn!

Froth-Bite Zero no Tsukaima

G

Gundam Seed Net Gundam 00

Guerrand LUCKY STAR

GG Fansubs code geass and Seto no Hanayome

Genjo-Subs one of the fansub still doing Kaibutsu Oujo

H

Huzzah Fansubs only irc channel and completed Reideen, mp4 format

Infinite-Zero [I-Z] Dragonaut -the Resonance

J

JEEP slow........... LUCKY STAR

k

Kuro-Hana Kenichi and they are currently subbing death note special tv ep

KissSub Lovely Complex

L

Live-evil they don't sub anime series once it has been licensed.

Lunar Anime they don't sub anime series once it has been licensed.

M

m.3.3.w Fansubs School days, speed subs

Lemon Angel Project and joint project with shinsen subs in subbing heroic age

mahou should be waiting for claymore DVD then sub it......

http://makototrans.blogspot.com/]Makoto Fansubs this is a blog page, and it is the only fansub who have completed towards the terra and the skull man

Mendoi Fansubs damn slow in releasing kiss dun engage planet and overdrive, and still want to engage in another project with Conclave in subbing gundam 00....zzzz..... -_-

N

Nyoro~n Fansubs Gundam is going to be over sub...................

Nuke ef - a tale of memories, hopefully they will release fast enough

P

Philanthropy Fansubs Previously known as Otacon, subbing Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai

S

Shinsen-Subs they have the largest amount of translators and doing alot of projects.......

Serin Fansubs [SRN] the only fansub subbing iDOLM@STER Xenoglossia and Touka Gettan

SD Project naurto? D.Gray-man?

Starlight they are the only fansub out there, subbing El Cazador de la Bruja, yey!

Static-Subs [SS] doing alot of joint project with Eclipse.

T

Toki-Fansubs blog page yey for overdrive

U

Umai-Fansubs For those folks out there still waiting for Romeo x Juliet, i doubt they will release anymore of the last 3 ep, as this anime series has been dropped, but still another over sub anime series - Kenichi and Baccano!

Undine doing Saishuu Shiken Kujira which is promotional for a game. -_-

[W]

We are IN Denial [WinD] subbing Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai, Lovely Idol and lucky star

Y

Your Mom speed sub....

Yesy subbing Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS and Shinkyoku Soukai Polyphonica.

I will update more in the future.......

Fansub

A fansub (short for fan-subtitled) is a version of a foreign film or foreign television program which has been translated by fans and subtitled into a language other than that of the original. The most common material to be fansubbed into English is Japanese anime,but the phenomenon is much more common in non-English-speaking areas where a wide variety of foreign (especially American) films and TV shows are subtitled and distributed for free online by fans.

Because distribution of fan subtitled content is a violation of copyright laws in most countries, the ethical implications of producing, distributing, or watching fansubs are topics of much controversy, despite the fact that fansub groups do not profit from their activities, and often cease distribution of their work once the material has been licensed outside of its country of origin.

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.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.

Early fansubs

Early or "traditional" fansubs were produced using analog video editing equipment. First, a copy of the original source material, called a raw was obtained. The most common raw source was a commercial laserdisc. However, a commercial VHS tape or even a homemade recording could be used as well, though that would entail a lower quality finished product. A translated script was then made to match the dialog of the raw video. The video script was then timed. Timing is the process of assigning a "start time" (Synch-Point) and "end time" for each line of subtitling; this determines how long a given subtitle would remain on the screen.

Timing a script was usually done in conjunction with computer software designed specifically for that purpose. The person performing the timing would watch the source video and would assign the appearance, changing, and removal of the subtitle text using a computer. The two most popular programs used in this process were JACOsub (on the Commodore Amiga) and Substation Alpha (on MS Windows).

Once the script was prepared and timed, the next step was to produce one or more masters. A master was a high quality copy of the finished fansub from which many distribution copies could be made. The fansubber would playback the raw video through a computer equipped with a genlock in order to generate the subtitles and then overlay them on the raw signal. The hardware of choice was an Amiga PC as most professional genlocks were extraordinarily expensive.

The final output of this arrangement was then recorded. The master was most often recorded onto SVHS tape in an attempt to maximize quality, though some fansubbers were forced to use inferior but less expensive VHS. Once completed, the master copy was then sent to a distributor.

Fansub distributors (who delivered videos to fans) were usually separate from fansubbers, who did translations and produced masters. Since most members of the fansub community did not want to profit from their activities, fansubs were usually not "sold". Typically, a fan who wanted copies of a given program would mail blank VHS tapes to a fansub distributor, along with a modest payment for shipping expenses. The distributor would then record copies onto the "customer's" blank cassettes, and ship them back. Alternatively, a fansub distributor might sell copied tapes outright, but at a low price which was intended to be exactly enough to cover the cost of blank cassettes and shipping.

This style of fansubbing was quite cost intensive for the fansubber and the distributor. The raw usually was purchased at a high price; nearly all Anime Laserdiscs (or tapes) cost more than $50, and many cost more than $100. It would not be uncommon for a $50 Laserdisc to contain just 30 minutes of video.

Obtaining quality raws for a series of moderate length could cost over $1000. As well, many fansubbing groups paid professional translators in order to generate the script. Then, expensive video equipment was required: Laserdisc player, PC, genlock, and recording deck for producing the master; subsequently two or more video decks were then needed for producing distribution copies. Professional grade video hardware such as players, recorders, and editing decks was extremely expensive; easily into the thousands of dollars.

The video quality of early fansubs was not good. The high cost of equipment forced most fansubbing groups to use less expensive but inferior quality consumer grade electronics. Even when a high quality LD source and professional grade hardware could be used, the final fansub was at best a third-generation copy. In reality, most fansubs in circulation were fourth or fifth generation copies, and were not made on professional equipment. Thus, in practice quality was usually very poor, though the actual localization and translation were closer to a professional level than those found in modern fansubs.

Modern fansub techniques

Modern fansubs are produced almost entirely on computer. A raw is still required, but unlike the fansubbers who relied on laser discs, most raw sources comes directly from recordings off Japanese TV, which are widely available via Japanese peer-to-peer programs such as Winny or Share. While TV recordings are now the primary type of raw used today, rips of region 2 DVDs are also used. For older shows not available on DVD, some modern fansubbers use computers equipped with sophisticated video capture hardware to get digital copies of older analog media (laserdisc or tape) to work with.

Once the video is in the computer it can be edited and subtitles applied with minimal or no loss of quality, compared to the playback-recording cycle required in traditional fansubbing. However, a majority of the encoding formats used generally cause some loss of quality versus the original broadcast or DVD. A relatively inexpensive PC can perform all of the manipulation necessary, without the need for expensive and complex devices such as editing decks and a genlock.

Translation is usually done solely by listening to the recording. While commercial releases will often have access to the scripts, fansubbers have to translate by ear. This can sometimes lead to mistakes or unclear spellings of names. The latter is most common with shows that use Western names. Because of ambiguities resulting from Japanese pronunciation and transcription of English names, names like Alice can sound or be spelled like "Arisu" - which can be misheard as any number of Alice alternatives. This can lead to different fansubbing groups using different spellings.

A famous example is Winry Rockbell from Full Metal Alchemist, who was spelled as both Winry and Winly by different groups due to the equivalence of the alveolar approximant and alveolar lateral approximant in Japanese.

An alternative to using the raw Japanese file for audio translation is the use of video that has been subtitled in Chinese. China (both the People's Republic of China and the Taiwan) have their own fansub groups that also release to the Internet.

Several fansubbers are known to translate into English the Chinese translations of the original Japanese, although this inherently reduces the accuracy of the translation because of the fact it has gone through two translations.

A recent example of a show that was fansubbed entirely using Chinese subs is My-Otome; Doremi, one of the groups that worked on the show, used two native Chinese speakers for the project, although several translation checkers were on hand to verify against the original Japanese.

After translation is complete, the subtitles are written and timed, and then often checked for errors (quality control, or simply QC). There are several methods of subbing currently used.

"Hard" subtitles, or hard subs, are encoded into the footage, and thus cannot later be removed. "Soft" subtitles, or soft subs, are subtitles applied at playback time from a subtitle datafile, either mixed directly into the video file, or in a separate file. With the correct media player or an auxiliary program softsubs are superimposed on the footage and appear indistinguishable from hardsubs.

Hard subs have traditionally been more popular than softsubs, due to a lack of player support and worries over plagiarism, but recently (as of 2006) several major fansub groups have begun using softsubs. Since modern video media can contain multiple softsubs, some groups release fansubs with several translations into different languages, or differently styled subtitles to fit different preferences.

The internet allows for highly collaborative fansubbing, and online fansubbing communities are able to release a fully subtitled episode (including karaoke with translation, kana & kanji for songs, additional remarks and translations of signs) in under 24 hours after an episode is debuted in Japan. Websites such as stormberry.tv allow the selectable subtitle tracks to be overlaid on web videos streamed from youtube.

In the case of hard subtitles a video editor (commonly VirtualDub) uses an AVISynth script to load the raw video file and the subtitle file (created by the translators) then the video software applies the subtitles on the video and captures video with the subtitles "burned" in.

The resulting fansub is a computer video file, with the companion sub file in the case of soft subs. It can be copied to CD or DVD media for physical distribution, but is most often distributed using online file-sharing protocols such as viral video, BitTorrent and by file-sharing bots on IRC. This allows modern anime fans to download the finished product at no cost to themselves or to distributors.

Distribution and playback

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, fansubs in electronic form were primarily distributed much like VHS tapes: via mail on CD-Rs. Many fans did not have high speed Internet and were unable to download large files. Many of the early electronic fansubs were made from regular VHS subs. In the case of Sailor Moon, the primary fansub in distribution today is based on VHS fansubs made almost a decade ago.

As of 2006, most fansubs are predominantly distributed through BitTorrent and IRC channels. Anime fansub news websites provide information about fansub releases. Because of a growing de-emphasis on CD-R or DVD-R distribution, file size standards have become less frequently followed.

An appropriate video and audio playback codec needs to be installed on the computer for proper playback. In addition, many of the video files use special multimedia container formats such OGM and Matroska. Special decoders need to be acquired for these formats as well. One main benefit of using Ogg media and Matroska multimedia containers is that it is possible to create a single file that has DVD-like features such as different audio tracks as well as different subtitle tracks and chapter support. At the same time, these multimedia containers can be demuxed back into their individual files, the individual files can be altered (for example, fixing a misspelling in the subtitles), and then remuxed back together.

Dynamics of fansubbing

Although executives of domestic anime distributors have been vocal about their objection to fansubs, most do not want to gain an image as being hostile to their fans. Of special note, many in the anime industry started as VHS fansubbers themselves, although fansubbing as they knew it then has become profoundly different from fansubbing as it is known today. This is due to the shift from traditional fansubbing using VHS tape to modern digisubs that are circulated on the internet.

During the early days of the Internet, it was difficult for fansubbing groups to get the attention of their target audience. Even during the early to mid 1990s, groups still had to charge a nominal fee (usually $5 to $10 at most) for a VHS and shipping charges to get the anime to its destination. Many people in the general public were not willing to trust relatively unknown internet businesses, especially during the primitive days of internet security. Most of the American and UK anime distribution companies were formed during the early 1990s, and had little competition from such amateur groups.

Some companies even formed out of fansubbing circles. However, as the internet grew in availability and speed, fansub groups were able to host and distribute fansubs online easily. Indeed, it became too easy, as many fans ignore official releases altogether, and some websites started charging for easier downloading rates. The development of new software and its newfound availability made it very simple to copy, subtitle, distribute, and play back fansubs, cutting into what DVDs offer, and their sales.

Many anime shows make their debut outside of Japan's shores in electronic format, and it is rare that a popular anime will go without fansubs. Recently, this has also applied to the tokusatsu fandom due to the fact fansubs are actually being done for Super Sentai, Kamen Rider, Ultraman, and various Daikaiju Movies which were badly dubbed over the decades. In addition, J-Horror and J-Drama, as well as other Asian Shows have been fansubbed as many people are becoming more and more curious about Asian Cinema and breaking away from the Kung Fu, Samurai, Giant Monsters films that so many people were familiar with prior to fansubbing. However, this simply undermines the work of companies like Animeigo, TokyoShock, and BCI, who have all offered subtitled versions of Samurai Films, Japanese Horror films, and in BCI's case, tokusatsu series like Ultraman. The pirating of these materials undermines the market of an already small, niche market, hurting potential releases of by providing content for free.

An anime can have number of fansub right?

Does that mean there is no official fansub or something?

Originally posted by popikachu:

An anime can have number of fansub right?

Does that mean there is no official fansub or something?

huh, i don't even understand a single word, you are saying

Originally posted by popikachu:

An anime can have number of fansub right?

Does that mean there is no official fansub or something?

There is no official fansub.
As the name suggest.
Its just animes sub by fans during their own time and willingly.
So its very possible for a few groups/individuals of fans to be subbing the same anime.

Still, most of the time there will be a dominant fansub which most people choose to dl.

i salute all fansubs group for their effort and magnanimity. thank you for bringing animes to the rest of the world.