Not that much to say at the present time but i did come across something i have dear to my heart and that i had to address, and that is fansubs.

For those that don’t watch much foreign programs in foreign languages this won’t affect you much, but it does affect the millions that do watch anime. (which if my thought is correct is actually bigger than Disney or Marvel or any of those other comic book companies)

Anime is if you look at wikipedia defined as animation (cartoons) that come from Asia, or more precisely Japan (although the general style used to draw the characters is videly used in Asia and is beginning to take foothold in western cartoons as well (Avatar: The Last Airbender being the best proof of that)
Anime is the most viewed cartoons in Japan (which is pretty natural) but is also gaining more and more recognition throughout the world with millions of fans worldwide at the present time.

Now having said that, its pretty clear that most Animes will be broadcasted in the original language unless some company decided to license it and translate it to their native language. If not that then usually subtitled at least to accomodate the audio.

Now for those who don’t have the greatest access to Anime in their local area (yours truely being one of those individuals) then you do have a little problem. of course you can invest alot of money and have it shipped, but that means not only having to bother keeping track of new releases all the time, but also taking the fees and stuff for getting it mailed to you.

Personally i don’t mind either of those if i love the anime show enough (So far i have found a few of them, although i have only invested in one series so far) And while i love having the DVD’s of the show, i am somewhat disappointed in the quality of the work and that is also the reason i don’t like the licensed work or the official work at many times.

The reason i like fansubs is simple. Its ordinary people like me and you who take the time to give the rest of the world a chance to see the true nature of a show and why they love it. The translations might not be 100% (without speaking the native and the translated language fluently its hard to tell really) but they are much closer to the real deal i assume seeing as they don’t have the restrictions that all the official releases have. Taking one of my (and many others) favorite show Naruto as an example i can say that the main characters favorite technique (which is copying himself into many temporary clones) called Kage bunshin no jutsu originally has been named the doppleganger or something in the american official release. The real translation actually reads shadow clone technique (kage litteraly translates into shadow, just as bunshin becomes clone)

doppleganger just doesn’t sound good and there are countless similar cases where the official translations butcher the language. Another thing is that those who like fansubs generally like to have bits and pieces like naming (technique name as in the above mentioned example) to be in the native language and rather have a short explanation of what it is or something in the beginning.

Now onto what i really want to talk about which as odd as it sounds right now comes down to filetypes. There are many filetypes that fansub groups use to release their versions of the anime translations into the world. The most used being AVI (which actually is many different codecs and stuff and can be rather confusing but just remember its always named AVI) and the newer combatant to the DVD subtitling standad called MKV which allows the file to have multiple audio and subtitle tracks which can be selected.
(AVI missing these functions of course if that wasn’t clear in what i said) AVI is what is known as a hardcoded format (everything being in one file) while MKV is a softcoded format (being able to contain several files like a zip file) the size of the files generally doesn’t vary that much

While the choice seems obvious given this information, the choice isn’t that simple anyway. MKV being the superior filetype has flaws that you don’t have to worry about in AVI and while these faults aren’t in themselves critical they are annoying when present. The most noticeable one in my opinion is how when several characters may be speaking together and their “speechbubbles” overlap in the subtitles. Basically the text becomes unreadable and what is incomprehencible for most to begin with (as most of the world don’t speak Japanese) becomes completely incomprihencible because you hear something beyond you to understand and you can’t read what they are saying either.

A not so frequent problem is that the font (the type of text) used by MKV isn’t the best looking one. AVI coders usually have a very readable font with thick outlines to separate it from the animation, but even with this the size doesn’t get to big which is also an issue with MKV at times, a too big font. I have at times found the font to cover nearly half the screen (on a 19″ LCD screen i might add) which is alot.

I am not saying MKV is lost, i am just saying as an open format i would have expected a better standard, a better quality and software more able to resolve these issues easier and with more ease to the user before it was put into action. Thats the whole idea behind opensource, to combat the costly developed versions of the same product on an equal level but at no cost to the users.