this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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Audiobook Bay

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MyAnimeList CEO Outlines Solutions to 'Rampant' Overseas Piracy Problem (www.cbr.com)
submitted 2 days ago by audiobookbay@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/audiobookbay@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Same problem the American media industry has: make a centralized platform that is a reasonable cost and isn’t super hostile to consumers

When Netflix streaming and music streaming first came out piracy started to die out. They are both somewhat hostile to consumers (drm, shitty apps, locked ecosystems, initially couldn’t do offline content) but are at least not hostile enough that the average person doesn’t care. Torrent site active membership started to drop noticeably, especially among American users.

That’s why you can see a difference now - media streaming is a pain in the ass again with price hikes, decentralized platforms, obtrusive advertising, etc, and torrent sites for tv shows and movies are starting to see users come back.

Music sites don’t see the same growth in daily active users though because the music industry has kept music streaming mostly fine. Whether you have apple, spotify, tidal, etc the catalog is mostly the same, comprehensive, and usually ad free if you pay.

Anime and manga sucks; it’s not terribly expensive but it’s yet another cost ($8 mo for crunchyroll, $6 for hidive minimum), the library is already fragmented between crunchyroll/hidive/netflix/etc. the licensing is stupid because Japan’s licensing and copyright stuff is even worse than the us so shows and manga disappear. The localizations range from very good to absolutely terrible and if you’re not in the right mind and actually use dubs they’re often just trash. Not to mention that crunchyroll is a piece of shit company that was built off making hundreds of thousands of dollars by pirating anime with other peoples fansubbing and fandubbing

[–] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Not to mention the best official subs have terrible typesetting compared to the best fansubs.

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I’m still bitter that crunchyroll co-opted fan subbing to make a shit load of cash, made speedsubs and the fansub scene whither away, and got away with it to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars

Like the new school anime fans don’t realize what fan subs used to be like. They’ll occasionally download a show from one of the groups that actually still subs like groups back then, mtbb, fff, tsundere, gjm, etc where they have animated op/ed with English lyrics, overlaid signs, different fonts, etc.

Nowadays it’s just rip the crunchy or amazon subs and clean up the typesetting, make a few edits, call it a day. I don’t blame them, that shit must’ve been a ton of work, but when I rewatch something like watamote I miss what we lost. Then I watch a crunchyroll sub rip and it’s like all one font, the op/ed isn’t translated, if they bothered to translate signs it’s often just the same text at the bottom instead of an overlay, etc.

the actual translation with crunchyroll is often mediocre too but that’s a very debatable topic especially depending on whether you think anime fans should understand what things like kawaii, senpai, aniki, and onii-chan mean (plus honorifics in general)

It still happens sometimes though, I remember kaguya having crazy subtitles and that was 2019. Like they pushed the limits of my media player where they had literally redrawn entire backgrounds to translate signs that had 0 relevance to the plot. The chika fans were hardcore

[–] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah 100% with you on every point, we traded a lot to get official subs for the normies. On that note though kaleido is doing amazing typesetting work on gundam gquuuuux this season

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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)

[–] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah it’s honestly embarrassing how bad the people making the BDs are at encoding, lowpassing everything it seems like, sometimes with the web release being higher quality (not to say those aren’t also fucked up, lazarus in particular has been atrocious as far as release quality)

[–] leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I used to pirate games, until Steam became an easier and more convenient way of getting them.

I mostly buy games on sale, intending to play them “when I find the time” (so, probably never, but I don't like to think about that).

Recently, I learned you can see the total amount you've spent on games on Steam somewhere deep in the user account menu, so I went and looked, and was shocked at the amount I've been spending on average per month.

So, give me a way to watch what I want to watch that's reasonably priced and easier and more convenient than torrenting (“more convenient” implying at least the same quality and lack of buffering, and no ads), and I'll apparently pay handsomely for it. 🤷‍♂️

So far, though, the industry seems focused on making it not only more and more expensive, but also increasingly harder and less convenient (speaking of anime, just try to watch Lazarus in sub, for instance... you'll almost certainly end up having no reasonable option but to torrent a version with custom subs...), so I'll just have to keep torrenting and spending my money on other stuff. 🤷‍♂️

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 days ago

This, but with added importance of allowing me to use my product as I see fit and delivering a product that is of equal or superior quality to piracy

With steam it’s a game, and the game is the same game pirated or not most of the time. There are some exceptions to this, like the claims that removing denuvo improves performance, but for the majority of releases on steam that’s not a factor and steam allows for modding

But if you read through the other reply thread to my initial comment you’ll see how CR and other anime producers make inferior products to pirates. You can go on nyaa/AB/baka/AT and almost always find a version of a show/movie with better image/audio quality and superior subtitles. Sometimes this is subtle, a minor or even imperceptible difference in quality and typesetting changes in the subtitles, but sometimes it’s drastic. Video and audio sourced from a BD from another region because the JP and US BDs are garbage and the CR/amazon/Netflix releases are crap. Subtitles with an objectively better translation, animation, OP/ED, sign overlays, etc

If it means I have to give up that then I will stay with piracy. Crunchyroll and hidive exist now and I won’t use them because aside from the split catalog and shitty origin issues their product is inferior. But if I could add external subs? And they didn’t starve bitrate and apply filters to smooth fine details? I would be more likely to consider it.

[–] desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 days ago

you can take my [redacted] from my cold dead smartphone. you can't beat the convenience of running a webscraper on a mobile phone and it's pointless to try.