Forum - View topicAnswerman - When Did US Anime Publishers Transition from VHS to DVD?
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WhosAsking
Posts: 79 |
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Because in those markets, legit videos don't sell well. As you've noted, most of the distribution in these kinds of markets is bootleg. BluRay hasn't even gotten a toehold in those markets, as HD recordings are almost exclusively bootlegged from torrents, DDLs, and private copying. Going back to the subject, back when anime was mostly a VHS thing, I preferred dubs because my Japanese was spotty and I tended to be turned off by the difference in timbres. But once dual-language DVDs started appearing, I was much more comfortable switching back and forth and knowing I wouldn't lose a thing. Having dual-language also encouraged less cuts on releases which is normally a good thing. Since many older anime haven't made the HD jump yet, DVD still has its place in those areas, but I'll take HD as they come (as long as they're good HD jobs; there are some that don't make the grade). |
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Macron One
 Posts: 151 Location: Netherlands |
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VHS seemed to stick around for quite a while longer in Japan. While browsing auctions on Yahoo Japan, i noticed shows like Mai-Hime still had VHS tapes, which seemed sort of unreal. A while back, i received a random volume of Pretty Cure: Max Heart on VHS in an auction lot of other stuff, which kinda made me do a double-take. It would have been well into 2006 when that series wrapped up its VHS release.
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WingKing
Posts: 617 |
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I was one of those people who came to DVD via Playstation 2 - I got mine in 2001, and I remember at the time feeling like I was a late adopter, so it's interesting to hear other people on here talking about not getting theirs until much later than I did. My PS2 is actually still my primary DVD player to this day, though I'm planning to finally upgrade to a Playstation 4 and Blu-Ray capacity in the next couple of months. I've been buying anime BDs for a while, but I've only been able to watch them at other people's houses who already have BD players. And yeah, VHS quality pictures never bothered me, either. My parents got our first VCR in 1983, so it was what I was used to for almost 20 years. VHS generally looks awful on modern flatscreens, of course (so does the picture on my original NES, for that matter), but I still have one of those old portable TVs with a VCR built-in, so I just use that if I have a video to watch, and the picture looks fine on it. I only still have a handful of tapes at this point, though, mostly collectible or keepsake things like my high school senior class video. Any movies that I still wanted to own I upgraded a long time ago, and I never had any anime on VHS. The first anime I ever watched were on the dreaded traded tapes, but those belonged to my friends, not to me. Last edited by WingKing on Mon Aug 22, 2016 3:00 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5347 |
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I still have my first DVD player from 2002, or at least around then, hard to remember.
http://www.njuskalo.hr/image-bigger/dvd-playeri/toshiba-sd-120e-dvd-player-slika-67989458.jpg Before that the only Anime I ever owned were films, I never remember seeing any TV shows. Though it was mainly just kids Anime that I was watching. |
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Spawn29
Posts: 551 |
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I think the first anime DVD I bought in 2004 which was probably Inuyasha DVD volumes given how big of a fan I was at the time. I think the last anime I bought on VHS was probably some VHS copy of Dragon Ball GT in 2002 because I wanted to watch the series before it was release in the US.
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Dr.N0
Posts: 149 |
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I think this is a bit reductive. I have been buying legit Blu-ray disks of Mainland, HK, and Taiwanese movies for a couple years now. Legit VCDs of those same titles are often listed alongside them. It is the same at least for Thailand too. |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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I would be inclined to trust your comments on the matter for exactly this reason. That said, as a developer of several decades who knows nothing about DVD/BD authoring, is it straightup more "complex" (and time consuming) or is it a case that the DVD authoring process is so refined and the BD process is comparatively new? I know various newer development processes that I personally find more time consuming simply because I'm so familiar with the older way, even though logically speaking, some of the newer processes are a "simplification" of older processes. I would expect DVD authoring to be simpler if only because it is more limited, but just curious on why BD authoring would be considered prohibitively more costly. (either in terms of time or money or both) |
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purplepolecat
 Posts: 130 |
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Justin breaks it all down in this super-interesting ANNCast. It's probably just all BS to protect his job security and preserve the "pretend BD authoring is hard" conspiracy, though. 
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4594 |
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The PS2 was definitely the first DVD player my family owned. Hell, somewhere around here I still have the remote-control accessory we bought for it so that we didn't have to rely on the wired controllers. I think I actually got my first-ever DVD set, which had to be the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, shortly before that, so I literally couldn't even play it for a little while. I do know that my first anime DVD purchase was season 2 of Big O when I saw it on a Best Buy shelf, and then the first couple volumes of GITS Stand-Alone Complex for full MSRP at Borders because I didn't know any better back then. (Ah, youth...) I missed out on the anime VHS era, but it definitely would have been fun to have been a fan back then. |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2560 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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Seeing as I only really entered the anime fandom in 2004, I never bought anime on VHS as a "new" purchase. What I have done is bought the occasional anime on VHS in the years since, mainly because it can't be purchased in any other format (mainly here in North America, though I do own a couple of titles that are VHS-exclusive in Japan), and rarely did I wind up getting a VHS tape that was still sealed.
In general, though, VHS is also how I grew up with home video, so the video quality of it still doesn't bother me too much, though it's obviously not the best out there. To be fair, though, I have recorded some of my VHS-only anime onto DVD via a VCR/DVD combo unit that allows for "direct dubbing" (a.k.a. recording from VHS to DVD) & even has HDMI output. Amazingly enough, the VHS tapes that I've seen through HDMI via this unit actually look pretty good, so I think VHS has held up far better than I think most believe.
Pssh, that's nothing. The latest anime on VHS I've heard of was Ponyo in 2008. Read that again... Freaking Ponyo! Granted, I think that may have only been for rental purposes, but it's kind of crazy that anime VHS was still being produced so close to the start of this decade. |
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TurkeyPotPie
Posts: 1 |
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Either the Street Fighter anime movie or Tenchi Muyo in Love were the first US anime DVDs. They were both released in 1997. I was a pretty avid collector of anime laserdiscs back then, and I closely followed the new DVD format. I bought a Panasonic A110 DVD player in early 1998 for what seems a ridiculous price now. I think I paid around $500 for it at the time. The first DVD I bought for it was Tenchi Muyo in Love, so it was already out by spring 1998. I got Ghost in the Shell and Ninja Scroll shortly thereafter. Pioneer and US Manga Corps (via Image) were about the only companies putting out anime DVDs in 1998 that I remember. Those early Pioneer releases were odd as they came in jewel cases inside a cardboard box. The Image releases were pretty crappy, poorly encoded in a cheap keepcase.
Anime DVD releases really took off (as in most new titles on DVD) in 1999-2000. I remember being disappointed when Bandai started that whole "Animevillage" thing in 1999 since they were only releasing in VHS. I wanted Escaflowne on DVD quite badly at the time, and ended up buying the Japanese LD release. I never bought much anime on VHS, just some of the earliest US released titles like Gunbuster back when I was first getting into anime. Looking back, it's kind of amusing to hear modern fans complain about "eye cancer" 480p or even 360p video. What was VHS's effective resolution, something like 240 lines? I'm not sure how I even watched some of that old stuff, especially 3rd or 4th generation fansub tapes, and on tiny CRT televisions to boot! 
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Anime fans FUELED the DVD revolution, back when movie studios literally didn't know what to do with it. (The big buzzword back then was "Alternate angle", and only Criterion was using commentary, from its Voyager laserdiscs.)
The fact that you could release a sub and dub on one disk singlehandedly ended the Dub wars and could put one version of a title on timid retail shelves that would appeal to all the fans, instead of only going for the "safer" dub version and exiling the sub to pricey limited editions fans had to hunt comic shops for...Which also demonstrated to the movie studios what you could do with those subtitle and dual-audio tracks. And then, Bandai and Pioneer came up with the idea of cramming an entire season of episodes on one set, instead of "only having room" for three-four episodes. Basically, the fact that Japanese tech companies like Pioneer were trying to sell living-room laser and DVD players at the same time they were selling Tenchi Muyo is what got anime onto DVD, while the Hollywood studios were just recovering from their own DiVX Wars and didn't know what movies mainstream audiences wanted to buy.
Which, naturally, was sold in software stores, next to other experimental software-video disks (remember CPM's Dominion on CD-Rom?) Then again, so did most early '97-'99 DVD's, since they were only seen for high-end desktop and PS2 users. Still, after that mistake, AE did get on early, and just as we'd gotten to Vol. 20 on the Urusei Yatsura VHS-of-the-month club, we all had to wait as the entire series rebooted from the beginning on four-episode DVD, starting with the movies/OVAs again... |
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FLCLGainax
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I adopted DVD in 1999, because of the choice of dub and sub in one package. Collecting Cowboy Bebop on DVD made more sense when 4-5 episodes were virtually the same price as 2 dub episodes on VHS.
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Brand
 Posts: 1028 |
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Back in high school, my friend got a couple of Dragon Ball Z movies that were like 8th or 9th gen copies. Being able to see any part of the movie at the point was a feat unto itself. Ahh, the old days sometimes I don't miss you at all. |
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jsevakis
Former ANN Editor in Chief
 Posts: 1684 Location: Los Angeles, CA |
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Good question! It's a dense subject so I would love to do a whole column on it if you would be so kind as to send in a self-contained question. The short answer is, it's not drastically different once you're used to the procedures, but it's still way harder and more time consuming even with experience, and with a million more places where things can go wrong. The learning curve is extremely steep, because there's no useful GUI for many parts of the process, and the overall process is extremely poorly/flat-out not documented. DVD has none of those problems. Once you get to replication stage it's far more expensive (3-4x more) and there are a bunch of additional fees as well. Last edited by jsevakis on Mon Aug 22, 2016 6:21 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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