Recent reports have announced that Crunchyroll, the largest anime streaming service, will be replacing Aegisub with Israeli Software, OOONA, to produce subtitles more efficiently. Anime fans across the world are disappointed with this collaboration due to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians (via a report by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry).
Crunchyroll is also ignoring the needs of groups who require Closed Captions to understand the scenes better. They are isolating a large chunk of their audience in favor of AI-based subtitling, which defeats the point of a streaming service. Overall, this hasn’t been a great year for Crunchyroll, and this won’t be the end of it.
Lol. Crunchy roll was always crap. Watching anime in the raw is torture.
Well then, fund an alternative.
- MuseAsia
- Ani-One
- RetroCrush ?
Ha fuck… that was my last personal sub… any alternative beside the high seas? I’m seasick…
The end goal was always to deprive us of alternatives
There’s always torrents but it was very convenient to just go to crunchy and start something… torrenting and putting it in plex and all… it’s just less convenient
Usenet is great also downloads very quickly. Just automate the whole process.
I was doing usenet more than 10yrs ago… not that straightforward, needs a subscription anyway… and the whole NAS + plex or something similar is still needed. I get the idea but there’s a point in life where 10€ per month for the ease of use is very appealing.
I pay around 2 to 3 dollars a month, I bought lifetime index subscriptions.
Look into setting up an -arr stack. Overseer with radar/sonaar plus your torrent client of choice and a VPN. The setup takes a weekend at most and the final product is honestly easier to use then navigating shitty streaming services now. It actually is more convenient after just a little bit of setup.
They took our comments and reviews, now they’re ruining subtitles, are delayed, etc. The arr stack is starting to be just as convenient if not more.
Lord Gaben said it best, piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem (the people who couldn’t afford it weren’t going to buy it anyway).
You’re right about comments and reviews… I miss some of that. You’re also right quoting the old Gaben. But still… it seems we can’t keep any nice things for long :-/
Has he actually changed his stance on piracy? I hadn’t see anything to indicate that but maybe I’m mistaken.
HiDive. Until they get the fuckaround bug.
Honestly, piracy is easier than it ever has been. You can automate torrents or usenet downloads with the *arr suite. There’s a bit of a learning curve to get it set up… But once it’s running, it’s basically just “add show to your watchlist” and ~15 minutes later it shows up on your media list with full metadata, subtitles, etc ready to go.
Plenty of people will suggest stremio, which is… Contentious. It works for streaming by downloading a torrent to cache. After you watch it, stremio automatically deletes the cache. So in day to day operation, it uses very little hard drive space and primarily relies on your internet speed and properly seeded torrents. But that latter part is the problem… Since it deletes the cache, it isn’t actually seeding anything in return. If everyone used stremio, nobody would actually be able to use it, because none of the torrents would be seeded. It’s a sort of mass prisoner’s dilemma.
Technically, you can set stremio to keep a rolling cache of {x} size, and it will hold onto the torrents until you start to download something new and it needs that space. But very few people will expect to hit a 1.0 ratio, even with a decently sized cache.
The whole point is not to do any setup and maintenance just to watch anime… I already have a job where I have to do that and I was hoping that it would pay for the convenience. My passion is watching anime, not setup downloading pipeline for them.
There are plain old anime piracy sites, for both downloading and streaming, if you don’t want the headache.
The point of the setup is you only need to do it once, you don’t set up everything every time you want to download something…
Got any guides for that stuff? Sounds pretty neat
Google stremio + realdebrid, it’s all spelled out step by step on many guides, you basically download the app (on pc, android, tvs) add community repos, add torrentio, click customize, paste your real debrid api key and you’re done. Past that you can pick extensions like marvels or other torrent addons to add categories and other sources.
Real debrid you pay like 6$ a month for, it automatically dloads the torrent when you click it or grabs from its cache (almost always cached/downloaded by others)Makes stremio run as fast/smooth as netflix/hulu/etc.
Stremio auto tracks what is watched, keeps history/playback time accurately. It’s basically how kodi addons used to be as it’s own smoother app.
Never heard of stremio, sounds like it plays the role of a media server, in which case it doesn’t have to be streamio? Plex or Jellyfin could work too
Stremio is the “downloader” and the “streamer”, so it’s both. Plex and Jellyfin require you to download beforehand.
It is easier to watch anime for free than it is to pay for it.
Then you pay for it? Plain and simple. You pay for that convenience.
I am paying for it… it becomes tricky when the disagreement isn’t on price but on replacing fellow human with AI from a country with genocidal tendencies. That’s where I draw my line I guess.
There are classical, “best of all time”, titles that an anime lover like you would defintely enjoy. They’re not available on Crunchyroll, they’re not on Amazon Prime, Netflix, you can’t purchase a copy. A few had selected censored releases in VHS, good luck hunting them down.
The thing with piracy is that it’s not just a money saving trick used by teenagers, it’s also the only way to truly watch the media you enjoy regardless of what some media conglomerate thinks - they no longer get to define how, when and what you’re going to watch. You have to do a bit of setup once… yes that sucks, but from that point onwards, you’re free.
Those I have, some literally on VHS :) When I was young we had a monthly or weekly VHS of best anime from France which I subscribed to. I like some recent stuff that’s very much available on Crunchyroll though plus it’s an easy way to stay aware of releases and such.
Lol I can just add it to my phone’s torrent client when I have a plan to watch something, then later begin download when I have wifi (or if you have unlimited high speed data, that also works… sort of…), usually like before bed when the phone is plugged in, then wake up and its done downloading.
You can pre-download the next thing you plan to watch before you finish your current thing. Same for TV Shows and movies.
If you don’t use your phone for work, you can also just leave it charging and use their wifi (with VPN obviously) to torrent then come come and have it ready to watch, usually unless it has low seeders.
Watch using VLC.
(Afaik, there’s no torrent client on iOS, so this is Android only… we’ll see what happens with Android torrent clients after 2027… it works for now)
(That’s the simplist thing to do. You can also remote into a computer,but that’s a bit more complicated.)
No one reccomends stremio without real debrid, makes it instant like netflix
Hidive is probably the last good one, unless something changed in recent times.
Fansubs have always been superior.
My daughter got into anime through friends and I got some street creds by talking about how things used to be. Buying laserdiscs in Japan, subbing them and showing them at conventions. I subbed two episodes of some show I don’t remember. Or shipping VHS tapes across continents. My daughter doesn’t care, of course. But her friends were impressed. I fear that that was my last hurrah, though. I got nothing else.
That‘s how Crunchyroll itself started out if I remember correctly. Now look at it, completely unrecognizable. It‘s exemplary for how things have been progressing or rather regressing this century so far.
There are barely any real fansubs left. Most are Crunchyroll, Netflix or Funimation restyled and maybe retimed plus checked if they spent a lot of time on it.
I’m an old pirate who remembers, and the thing, the raw ingredient missing in this scenario?
need
If it didn’t exist, if there was no possible way to get a copy of somesuch Gundam episode whatever in english, some dude somewhere would cross the ends of the earth to get it onto the internet. Piracy is motivated entirely by utility and need, it’s why music piracy atrophied into almost nothing until Soulseek arrived and streaming prices increased. Supply met demand, and it will again for fansubs.
If it’s needed, someone will meet the need. We did it in 1998, we’ll do it next year.
And that’s honestly all that’s needed, the official translations are usually perfectly fine. The elaborate typesetting is what makes the fansubs so good.
Remembers all the fan sub opening/ending Karaoke so I could actually understand songs too. 🥹
Steins Gate fansubs were amazing.
Agreed, It very noticeable how bad the subs are. I remember watching an the terminator anime and the subs were atrocious.
https://reddit.com/r/television/comments/1f4cj61/netflixs_wellanimated_terminator_zero_starts/?
I’ve been an anime of crunchy roll with those auto ai subs and the main character is called Kun. Holy shit half the time it’s censoring itself because it’s trying to say something racist, but not always…
What do you expect, they started as a pirate platform.
I didn’t realize they had ever gone legit.
Corporations can’t stand it a logarithmic graph. They need freaking geometric progressions, and then they do stuff that gets them an anti-logarithmic graph.
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why not just pirate shit without a noble cause for once? You know - the old fashioned way
what are the good sources nowadays…been out of the game for awhile and it’s to trust any sites promoted on any mainstreamish social networks.
like freemediaheckyeah, old reddit hub…is that still good?
ime every pirate source had 50/50 shot of turning into some virus/scam honeypot shortly after reaching high enough popularity
nyaa. Just look for a currently active Nyaa torrent site for anime. There’s several.
no idea, man. I’m just a poser)
Fmhy ✅
https://fmhy.lol/ Free Media Heck Yea has loads of free content across tons of topics listed.
I just bookmark the piracy megathread/wiki thingy, lemmy/reddit (backup). For streaming, I would probably recommend hydra, it’s really all the same but that site has “auto-next” which I prefer. There was one site I used to enjoy that was just better than any streaming platform I’ve paid for, skip intro, skip credits (would even detect after credit scenes), subtitles in all languages and audio tracks even commentary, quick responsive high quality loading of any media your mind can remember. They went after it hard and I haven’t seen a proper iteration since (every clone slowly lost features as they were whack-a-moling).
For downloading, they’re really all crappy (several link hoops to jump through) and hit or miss (for quality and selection you can’t beat the ease of a torrent unfortunately). You can find what you want eventually but the difference in hassle is just crazy.
i used to stream pirated some shows and a movie last decade, then they took down all those sites, i dont download.
You can get the Evangellion dub off of internet archive, found that out a couple of days ago cause bored.
I pretty much just use 1337x.
I mean, I basically just download anything that’s not an executable. So if its a video, audio, pdf, epub, etc… I don’t worry about it. Its very rare for an updated system to get infected from a random .mkv.
I just use (https://fmhy.net/torrenting) one of the torrenting aggregators because its the most comprehensive search, I found an anime that I couldn’t find anywhere else because there are dead torrents with no seeders everywhere else I looked.
Impossible.
Piracy is always noble.
quiet.
Perfection
Fuckin wish I pirated this turd.
i liked it.
Old Fashioned Pirates were poor people treated like shit by their society lashing out at the system of oppression.
give it a couple of years and it would match just right
Don’t forget that Crunchyroll is also owned by Sony, who have basically picked up a monopoly on anime streaming services by buying out all of the competition. Aniplex, Funimation, Crunchyroll, Kadokawa, all under the Sony umbrella.
And still can’t offer the full catalog in my country
I hate that some seasons shows are on Netflix, but the rest are only on CR
All the streaming services are unethical now, both in pricing and operation. Netflix is maybe the least bad, but I can’t justify the cost for that, either.
Stremio + Torrentio is the way to go.
What happens next is like what happened in the 2000s. People will turn to piracy as legitimate content is no longer feasible, affordable, or ethical. Then the corporate oligarchs will crack down violently to make examples of the people they’ve given no other choice or recourse.
It’s time to eat the rich.
Stremio + Torrentio is the way to go.
Torrentio has started blocking VPNs.
Netflix charges me, a single guy, for 4 simultaneous streams if I want 4k. So I shared with my parents.
Then they had the audacity to stop people from password sharing or to charge even more if you want to share. I set up an automatic email forward so my parents get every sign in related email.
people they’ve given no other choice or recourse
I don’t know, I find I also have the option to not consume media that I can’t pay for or justify ethically. For instance, the only streaming service we have a subscription for is The Criterion Channel.
True. But many people can justify it ethically.
Good for you, but Oovid opened my eyes to how different our living conditions are.
Some people may have may many alternatives, some few and some none
Even if you make good money, it is still ethically questionable to support predatory practices and financially reward the objectively evil. Piracy is ethically neutral at worst and can easily be interpreted as a net positive, at least where it comes to most media. I deliberately choose to support some obscure stuff with my dollar because I want its creators to succeed and my conscience is clean.
I’m looking for an ethical anime streaming service rn, and i’d be willing to pay for it (like, $10/month). Any options at all?
Like, “ethical” means that the money is used to keep the studio running that is producing the anime; not that the money goes to some big banks to profit off anime.
yeah, that just doesn’t exist anymore
Ahh good ol’ Aegisub. I have great memories of subtitling anime in my late teens before I got a girlfriend and the fansub scene died when Crunchyroll took over.
I was also one of the people helping test Aegisub on Linux (2009-ish), I wasn’t a programmer at the time but I remember a dude called ‘verm’ in the IRC channel who did a bunch of work to make Aegisub stable on Linux. He taught me the difference between little endian and big endian, I guess he was bored that day
I would never subscribe to Crunchyroll, because they use DRM.
fan subs are best
To the extent they exist
“keikaku means plan”
I will forever recognize the Baar Sophia font from the fansubs of Naruto which got me into anime in the first place
<3 graphic designers unite
Kind of miss how much effort went into fan subs, with notes explaining things that didn’t exactly translate without context…
^ this
Not just the notes, but I feel like they put more effort into making sure the text doesn’t blend with what is on screen. Instances on Netflix of some shows where there will be white text with a white background, and the text has no drop shadow or black border.
Oh man, I remember seeing things go from burned in subs to sub tracks with all kinds of nice functional markup and managed font color schemes and such to… Slapping white text with no border/shadow in the bottom middle of the video unconditionally without formatting…
Well the advantage of having the subtitles be a text overlay over the video is that the subtitles can be separated from the video; like, you can switch them off and on and change languages (which i sometimes do as i speak multiple languages and am interested in how they translated it) without having to store multiple GB-sized video files - one for each language - for the same episode.
What are you talking about? You can do text styling even with toggleable subs. It’s why fansubbers started using .ass/ssa for subtitles back in 2005. No one sane has burned subs into the videos for more than 20 years at this point.
I can’t imagine an anime like detective conan or school rumble without translator notes. They would be unwatchable
Sub ran out midway last month.
Kodi + Premiumize.me + Otaku for the win. 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
I don’t like anime, so this has no bearing on my life. Hot take, I know.
More like useless comment in such a thread.
Why are you commenting on a post you think has nothing to do with you, then?
But let me say this; corporations becoming increasingly emboldened to replace people with AI, disregard accessibility concerns, and make ethically bankrupt purchasing decisions without any consequence is something that perhaps should concern you, regardless of whether the company’s output is of relevance to your interests or not.
Hot take, I know.
