How did people get into anime before high-speed internet was a thing?

How did people get into anime before high-speed internet was a thing?

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is not like you can't torrent something for days, just let your pc turned on and forget about it until the anime is on your computer
or buy it from somebody that already did the job of downloading it

I was watching anime on TV ~25 years ago.

In the days of yore, anime used to be converted into a signal that was transmitted across the air directly into people's brains. Crazy how old folks used to do it, huh?

The texts of the Oracle of Wikipedia tell of a technology utilized by the ancients known only as "cable."

File size of older anime is smaller too since the bitrate is lower.
But also if you had any fleemarkets in your city chances were a couple stalls had bootleg anime you could pick up.

Toonami, Toonami Midnight Run, Adult Swim in that order, from the day they started.

I'd be lucky to find VHS tapes here and there of shows. Otherwise there was a few shows that aired on TV but oh boy the dubs in my language were terrible. There was also the ghibli movies, they were pretty widespread and famous so it was a great gateway into anime.

Miyazaki films, Gundam and Sailor Moon. At least if you were raised and not just born in the 90s.

VHS.

cable and VHS

Trading fansubbed vhs tapes by mail

I used to buy pirate cd's on the flea market
That's was like 14 years ago

It could still be discussed online on the early internet (early-mid 90s), just not easily acquired. Fansub projects took forever. Often-questionable/iffy translations in yellow subs were the norm. To actually get a hold of things not just watchable on TV, there would be local clubs / meetups where people passed around eps on VHS which you could pirate. In any case you functionally had your anime in physical format.

By 2000 you could get it online, where you could get eps at a very slow rate at a seriously tiny resolution. You were on 56k (pretty much everyone was) but when the episode itself was like 30mb, it wasn't as bad as it might seem. Indeed though, to get a whole series or a higher quality version of something it would take all night waiting.

Who here old enough to tape tree?
But mostly Suncoast Video. No one on Sup Forums will ever experience the sense of victory after discovering an asian grocery store that imported pirated movies subbed in Mandarin.

90s kid here, I don't mean that I was born in like 1998 I mean that I'm 33 fucking years old, and being into anime was even more fringe back then than it is today.

Most people didn't even have internet at home. The only anime I watched as a kid was random kids' shows that were dubbed for our country like The Mysterious Cities of Gold, Speed Racer, Nobody's Boy Remi, etc. Actually we did have Dragon ball like 20 years before Americans got it. Same with the Manga.

Even then I didn't even know that they were anime or what anime was, to me they were just cartoons that had a unique style to them.

The first anime that I knew was anime was shit like Pokemon and Digimon. I also found out that Dragon Ball was one of the most popular anime and manga of all time so I was happy to have kept them around.

Early to mid 90's

*Downloading eye-cancer .rm and .ram files (lookit up newfags)

*Trading bootleg VHS tapes from college clubs and neckbeards at the local comic shop and bringing dual deck VCR to anime Cons

*Newsgroups for aforementioned eyecancer

>Actually we did have Dragon ball like 20 years before Americans got it.


but even then...

youtube.com/watch?v=KUBnnrvTC2o

for me it went something like
>vhs
>tv
>around 2000 i downloaded episode parts through the internet or through those university IRCs
>stream or torrents around 2008 or somewhere around there when everyone uploaded shit to youtube
>only torrents since

oh actually i forgot 2001-2008 i used bearshare or emule a lot

>newsgroups

Usenet....mah nigga


alt.binaries.anime
alt.binaries.multimedia.anime
alt.binaries.multimedia.anime.repost
alt.binaries.multimedia.anime.d

O7

My roommate did fansubs in the 90s. They'd start with a already poor VHS source then manually time and code the subs in with a commodore amiga + video toaster. He said they would just constantly copy tapes and distribute them at meetups. They would also mail them. It would take entire weekends for them to do 1 or 2 episodes.

Holy shit how far we have come.

Correct when encoding in today's H.264 or above. Incorrect if encoding back in the day. Compression codecs were more primitive back then. H.264 is way more efficient than DVD-MPEG2/H.262. Why do you think you could only squeeze 3-4 episodes per dvd? The box set for a Onegai Teacher was 5 discs. I recently ripped the files out of it it and single episodes were around 1.5GB. Now even if biased it down in a new encode, the file sizes were quite large unless your sacrificed substantial quality. When you buy a blu-ray disc, they try to bias the encode to fill the entire 50GB. So, when encoders get the raws, they re-encode it with a lower bias to get the file size down. This is one of the main reasons why they started re-encoding shows in 10-bit as it allowed for better dithering and decreased banding. This resulted in even smaller file sizes.

It was fucking obnoxious when we first went to 10-bit. None of my portable devices could play shit. That's why deadfish started mp4 hardcoding shit.

>Realplayer
Kill me now.

Still relevant.

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I post these a while ago because I found some really old encodes on an external in this thread desuarchive.org/a/thread/166623677/#166627607

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i got internet on 98' butdownloading anime wasn't a thing until mid 2000s before that other than what was on tv, you had to go to the smelly store run by the fat guy with the creepy smile and buy a vhs or if you were lucky a pirated cd

Toonami, for me. I remember watching Dragon Ball Z with my brother for hours.

Memories.

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Back in the day, i rented hentai from a vhs store. They kept it hidden and you had to ask for it discretely.

Low speed internet where it took 2-3 weeks to download a 700mb movie.

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you kids these days are so spoiled. way back in the day you had to get someone to send you a vhs copy of anime with a typed or hand written translation you had to read while watching.

How about dem OG files?

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>parts
Never again.

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youtube.com/watch?v=GEGzjlPk7sM

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Toonami, and lots of VHS tapes either legit or bootleg.
What a time it was to be alive

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There was this thing called TV.

I don't think I have any of them anymore. I barely had any on the external. I think the latest "old releases" like that I have is Love Hina.
It's the numbers on the bitrate and shit that amaze me. 30mb episodes, fucking 16kbps audio with random insanely loud screeching noises, 320x240 10FPS like a fucking flip phone screen. People should really archive these if they still have them and upload them.

>high-speed internet was a thing

Internet cepat buat apa


Dream On !

Thank god I was born in the internet era

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Holy shit, I forgot about this. Memories.

I've been replacing the old ones when they get blu-ray rereleases. Love Hina is one such show. Remasters are so pretty.

A lot of the file size caps had to do with file size limits on news groups.

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>Hobbyist/Anime stores that sold fansub dvds/vhs from behind the counter
>Mall kiosks that sold imported figma/dvds as well as fansub dvds/vhs
>Adult Swim/Toonami
>Downloading almost unwatchable quality fansubs on 56k internet
Downloading 1080p bluray rips on modern highspeed internet to watch on my 50 inch HDTV is a blessing. I still miss it though.

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Webm for reference. This is downscaled to 640x480 and it still looks beautiful compared to the dvd rips.

>With chapter markers and multiple sub tracks

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Libraries got some manga like Akira, then there were badly dubbed VHS tapes and badly subtitled pirated tapes.

No way that isn't a dvdrip. Soft subs and that high quality? I never download that high quality until late 2000's.

I was showing Sup Forumsnon the quality of the recent bluray remaster.
See

VHS bootleg tapes with subs on them existed in 1999, the birth of fansubbing right there, although most of said tapes were for Tokusatsu shows, only some anime from the 80's sometimes got tapes, I recall some Sailor Moon tapes being available because people were sick of the localized version.

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ive still got some old CDs with anime on them that a friend burned for me in the early 2000's. I remember you could roughly fit 3 episodes on a disc. Im afraid to see what kind of quality they really are. Ill see if any of them are still readible

VHS tapes my little user, we had our bootleg tapes with 4 episodes of an anime we would likely never have in its complete form and we liked it.

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Oh whoops. I knew there was no way anything looked that good back then.

My country outsourced animation to Japan for a lot of stories, even my father used to watch them as a kid. Didn't even know it was a thing back then, it was all cartoons for me

Anime didnt exist before the internet, youve been in a time loop

What cunt?

Blockbuster or Hollywood videos stores

Bootleg VHS fansubs from import shops in Chinatown.

I'm not even joking.

Germany
fucking loved this stuff

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Bootlegs were so cheap back then. 2-3 dollars.

Before Netflix, there was these things called 'Video Rental Stores' and you would go there and pay money to borrow a Video Home System cassette (or VHS for short). Then it was just a matter of finding where the 'Japanimation' section was.

Was Love Hina done on film? I thought it was one of those tape only anime that look like shit when upscaled for bluray.

Hollywood video > Blockbuster. Discuss.

>high speed
speak for yourself my english friend

I'm sure it was cell animated and captured on film. If you have the film masters, it's easy to produce a high quality digital copy.

>His grandma wasn't a weeb that loved Heidi

rec.arts.anime too. Don't forget the innumerable show fandom groups as well.

mein Neger
Pinocchio war besser

>Rented Plastic Little from Hollywood Video
>Watched it with my family
>mfw the bathhouse scene

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Especially when the Hollywood location had Gamecrazy attached to it. I miss them both.

Sounds like a fond, fun, family memory.

Seems like just yesterday, doesn't it? I still miss that smell.

>Being able to rent entire game consoles for a weekend.

Don't listen to these fake oldfags.
The truth is that in ye olde days, there were events called "bootleg battle royale" where each participant had to cotribute with an anime vhs of their own. Once you gave your vhs you were sent to a room with the rest of participants (that also had to give one) and were given a weapon at random, then when all the participants arrived the game started and it was kill or be killed. The last man standing was the one who got to kept all the stash of accumulated vhs.
I still remember killing my best fried to get a copy of Ranma ovas.

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I was exposed to anime when I was a kid in the '90s in different ways.

Speed Racer was the first anime I ever watched.

Back when Scifi Channel was still good, I watched Lensman and Robot Carnival.

I had a friend in fourth grade who's uncle gave him a laser disc for his birthday, and I had the opportunity to watch uncensored versions of Akira and Project A-Ko. Man did those leave life-long impressions on me!

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I don't remember the VHS days, but I do remember watching anime on youtube, with dial-up. I'd read a book while I waited for the videos to buffer.

I remember reading manga on youtube

>How did people get into anime before high-speed internet was a thing?
Slowly

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>Even then I didn't even know that they were anime or what anime was, to me they were just cartoons that had a unique style to them.

I didn't know they were Japanese until my mom told me they were. She believed Japanese cartoons had "subliminal messages" that would do some sort of harm to me, I'm not sure what. Though I'm pretty sure Sailor Moon turned me gay, so maybe she was right.

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Right. But sometime around when Love Hina was made or soon after they started mastering to tape to save money. But that means a lot of shows in that era are forever trapped in low-quality. The one that comes to mind is Kamichu which has a damn ugly BD.

I'm peruvian.

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>german-dutch-japanese co-production

crazy times

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>Anime turned me gay
I don't think you can just turn gay. Anime has made me lust after 2d girls though.

We got lucky with love hina. They must've kept the film master. Or maybe they still had all the cells. It's relatively new, so I don't see why they wouldn't have it. All I know is that these blu-rays are beautiful.

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I remember downloading Lodoss War in .ogm format and not knowing what the fuck to do with it. I was stuck on Windows 98 for a ridiculously long time, so I was very limited when it came to anime.

MPC-HC is dead. Fortunately, it will work for a long time. But, there's another player that looks promising. I don't think I'll use VLC.

There's a building in my city that used to be a Hollywood Video, and still has the ghosts of mountains on its side from the old logo. It's kind of spooky.

Outside of the anime on tv, you used to have people who would try to subtitle things on vhs and would be sent to anime clubs and the like. If you could read and speak japanese, you could rent japanese movies from japanese video stores if there was a large japanese community.

I remember spending a week to download my subtitled inyuasha movies.

if you were lucky, a local rental store had jap anime VHS

sometimes i'd be able to find tiny resolution real media video files of evangelion and love hina. or have my computer download bigger animu files overnight or for days on kazaa (an early p2p software)

i didnt have cable so i couldnt watch it on tv programming

You paid the fat japanese guy at your local comic shop.

You faggots are so lucky these days. If you were into anime or manga in the early 90s you had to fucking work at it.

I was paying college kids to notebook handwritten translations of Berserk volumes in 1995.

I used to buy random anime VHS on flea markets

that reminds, i was never able to watch the ranma ovas. i should go watch them now

Perfect time to do so since they released the blurays for them somewhat recently.

Pirated CDs at the flea market mostly, occasionally betamax/vhs, sometimes really shity quality mp4 on limewire.

I don't even remember what I watched back then, none of the shit I watched was ever complete. I'm glad that shit is over

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I don't want it to be dead. I don't know what to do without it. ;_;

Maybe I just need a newer computer. I've always been slow with this kind of thing.

As I said. MPC-HC is pretty solid. I doubt we will need to update it for awhile. It's open source, so I am sure somebody will patch it if the time comes.

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>betamax

The only thing I ever watched on Betamax was All Dogs Go to Heaven. My mom had forbidden it because the dogs drank and gambled. I've never seen anything on Laserdisc at all. I've only seen a Laserdisc once, at a pawn shop. I didn't know what the hell it was until I thought for a minute. "Oh, is THAT a Laseridsc?" I was surprised at the size. They were closer to a 45 LP than a DVD.

We can only hope. I've tried mpv and frankly hated it. It's too non-user-friendly. Maybe some form of MPC-HC will survive. Sadly I'm not smart enough to ensure its survival on my own.

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Oldfag here.

Blockbuster, and VHS tapes which were fandubbed by the guy selling the bootlegged tapes. It was a pain in the ass like no one's business actually.

I was actually more of a manga reader back then and had a rich friend who'd buy all the volumes in a series that I would borrow or I'd have to buy one volume every few weeks with my allowance. As for anime I'd just buy/rent VHS/DVDs and download shitty quality videos from Limewire to watch on realplayer. Also youtube anime in parts.

I used to count on 10 Mb per hour knowing that the connection would drop at 0400. That got me 60-70 Mb per night on a weekday.

My country didn't have many licensed series so you couldn't really get anything ln blockbuster or other video rental stores (aside from some Dragon Ball movies if you were lucky) so the only way you had to get animr was to:
A) go to the local comic store and buy imported vhs or bootlegs
B) know someone who had a person in japan who would ship him vhs
C) go to screenings that the local nerd fanclub organized
D) attend anime cons and buy overpriced bootlegs

Bitches don't know bout my .rmvb files.

True oldfags only .avi

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For me, a Japanese video rental store that has the most up to date shows recorded on vhs. My mom would borrow variety hour tv shows and for mw its anime or kaiju movies.