Audiobook Bay

That’s the most frustrating part. “We” didn’t, 4 uc Berkeley tech bro assholes did and amassed a fucking fortune in the process. They co-opted the scene that they contributed nothing to and flipped it into a VC wet dream, somehow. Nepotism had to be involved to connect them to VC early and shield them from DMCA bullshit; other piracy streaming sites existed but they all survived so long because unlike crunchyroll none were hosted in the us

But yeah there are still great subgroups and typesetters. I refuse to subscribe to crunchyroll or hidive bc of their bullshit. Sometimes I download rips if I really want to see something asap but the subs are trash. It’s almost always worth it to wait a few days/weeks for someone to typeset and for popular series sometimes someone does actually do a proper fansub still (or at least heavily edits the web subs to be a more accurate translation, have OP/ED/signs, etc). GLORYs release of NieR was excellent one from recent memory

Another crunchyroll/sentai gripe: they are purposely worsening the quality of their bluray releases to make them easier to encode at low bitrates. They essentially blur the content and cause sharp details to lose definition so that artifacts won’t be created during the bitrate starved encoding process. This makes no sense since they are encoding around 30Mbps for bluray video. Thankfully scene groups have figured out ways to undo the damage using the web rips

https://slow.pics/c/uuZvw4U2 - a comparison of the bluray before and after the filter removal on “Yoru no Kurage wa Oyogenai/Jellyfish Can’t swim in the Night”, a mid anime

https://slow.pics/c/hpobp0nl - a comparison of the web, bluray, and after the filter removal on “Sousou no Frieren”.

Zooming in for detail especially shows the issue and if you watch on a high resolution or physically large display it’s much more noticeable during playback. It wouldn’t matter as much except this is the only source for physical releases for many anime. CR is cancer (but tbf many Japanese studios are also absolutely terrible at releasing their own media in decent quality, don’t even get me started on why downloading in 1080p is sometimes the wrong choice)