Fansub

From OLSEncyclopedia

Fansubs are fan-made subtitled versions of anime episodes, originally intended to raise awareness of anime in the US. There are two types of fansubs, the original fansubs and digital fansubs.

Legal issues

Fansubs are in a decidedly grey area in terms of legality. There exists somewhat of a gentleman's agreement between the industry and fansubbers that fansubs will be tolerated so long as the group stops releasing the series when it gets licensed for distribution in that country. However, some fansub groups don't care about this and will continue subbing anyway, usually with the rationale that official releases take forever and that translation quality is usually higher from the fansub groups than the official companies, because the company that licenses it gets exclusive distribution rights, and thus has no incentive to produce a quality product, whereas fansub groups will often sub a series that another group is already subbing, and the whole "X sub group is better than Y sub group" thing exists.

Generally speaking, though, it's expected of the fansubbers to stop their production when a series gets licensed and expected of the fans to purchase the official releases of shows they like.

Original fansubs

Back in the day, fansubbing was basically a one person operation. That one person would import a VHS tape containing anime from Japan, translate it, write up subtitles, time them to go with the dialogue, and then record the two back together onto another VHS tape. They would then offer these up to anyone who wanted them, for a nominal fee that only covered the cost of the VHS tape and shipping.

Digital fansubs

Nowadays, fansubbers have gone digital. The entire operation is done via the internet, and there are very many groups who divide the tasks for each new episode between their members to speed up the process.

Digital Fansub terminology

• Raw Provider - The person who digitally records the episodes as they air on Japanese TV.
• Translator - The person who listens to the dialogue and translates it into English.
• Typesetter - The person who handles placement of subtitles for labels, signs, computer screens, etc. They also choose the fonts and effects and make sure everything is readable.
• Timer - The person who synchronizes the subtitles with the video so that the appropriate subtitle is being displayed for each line of dialogue.
• Encoder - The person who takes the raw and the translated/typesetted/timed subtitles and merges them together, producing their release.
• Quality Control - Most fansub groups have a quality control staff whose job it is to take preliminary encodes and look for obvious translation/spelling/grammar issues, mis-timed subtitles, mis-positioned subtitles, and more.
• Karaoke - Refers to the subtitles for the opening and closing songs in each episode, as well as any insert songs. Most sub groups will sub the karaoke in English, Japanese, and romaji.
• Translator's Note - These are present in most, if not all fansubs and disappointingly few domestic DVD releases. These explain cultural references and other things that the translator felt needed further explanation.
• Softsub - Refers to a video format where the subtitles are not embedded in the video, but rather are a separate stream within the file that can be turned on or off in your media player. One such format that supports this is Matroska (*.mkv).
• Hardsub - Refers to a video format that cannot store the subtitles within itself, so they must be encoded into the video. These subtitles cannot be turned off.
• Matroska - An audio/video container format. It can hold video and audio encoded with whatever codecs you like, it can do soft subtitles, you can specify the font you want it to use, subtitle positioning, multiple video and audio streams, and even define chapters, similar to those on DVDs, so you can skip the opening song and get straight to the episode just by hitting "next" in your video player. All this in an open source format. This is the real deal.
• AVI - Stands for Audio-Video Interlace. It's a closed format that's pretty old, but widespread. Like Matroska, it's a container format and can hold audio and video encoded with pretty much any codec. Doesn't have nearly the expansive feature set that Matroska does.
• MP4 - Some groups, for some reason, release their stuff in this format. It's yet another container. It also sucks.
• H264 - The video codec that makes anime look pretty. It takes a fair amount of processing power to decode and play these things, but man, they are worth it. Most high definition (720p) anime releases are encoded in H264, usually in a Matroska container.
• XVID - An okay video codec. Things kinda look blurry when encoded in it. Lots of groups that haven't been enlightened with H264 still use it.

What is amazing about this whole process is that it can happen with decent quality of translation and encoding within a matter of days of the episode airing in Japan.

Distribution

Distribution of fansubs these days is done mostly via BitTorrent, though most groups still release to their IRC channels. Only losers get their anime from video-sharing sites like Youtube.

Speed subs

You'll hear about these before long. Some groups are "speed subbers", meaning that they translate not from Japanese, but from Chinese subtitled releases. These groups' releases are usually plagued with translation errors, no matter the level of quality control. Doremi is one such group. In their defense, their subtitles have gotten better recently, but still a far cry from even the fastest of the non-speed subbers.

Links

• AnimeSuki - Lists only non-licensed fansub releases
• Baka-Updates - Lists non-licensed and licensed fansub releases, perfect place to turn to when your favorite series gets licensed on a cliffhanger.
• Combined Community Codec Pack - Codecs for everything that digital fansubbers release, and Media Player Classic bundled within. Install this and you're good to go.
• VLC Media Player - If you're fed up with codecs, use this to play virtually everything with no need to install codecs.
• CoreAVC - an H264 decoder that tries to be as fast and resource-efficient as possible. Costs money, but enables H264 playback on lesser hardware.
• Dattebayo - A fansubbing group for the anime series Bleach and Naruto.