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Answerman - When Did US Anime Publishers Transition from VHS to DVD?


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Eisenmann V



Joined: 06 Nov 2013
Posts: 212
PostPosted: Tue Aug 23, 2016 12:12 am Reply with quote
[quote="Kougeru"]
Quote:


DVD just needs to die out already. It served us well, but there's no legitimate reason to waste resources on DVD anymore. Bluray are far more durable/long-lasting, much higher quality, more space, ect ect.... and again, they're NOT that much more expensive to produce.


Considering there was a factory making VHS players as recently as a few months ago, I'm pretty sure DVD's gonna hang on for quite a while.
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AnimeLordLuis



Joined: 27 Jan 2015
Posts: 1626
Location: The Borderlands of Pandora
PostPosted: Tue Aug 23, 2016 12:31 am Reply with quote
I got a PS2 in 04 and didn't even realize that it doubled as a DVD player until my friend told me well that's what happens when your so excited about a new game console that you take it out and start playing without even reading the box or instructions. Laughing
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Spawn29



Joined: 14 Jan 2008
Posts: 551
PostPosted: Tue Aug 23, 2016 1:03 am Reply with quote
I still remember when a lot of older DVD had you flip things upside down to watch the other bonus features. I also remember when I rented Pokemon: The First Movie back in 2000 on DVD and the DVD had major skipping issues. I remember for a little while, I was like "Support VHS!" because of that.
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Shadowrun20XX



Joined: 26 Nov 2007
Posts: 1935
Location: Vegas
PostPosted: Tue Aug 23, 2016 1:08 am Reply with quote
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/la_blue_girl_1/reviews/ La Blue Girl Vol 1-2, June 6 1996 was the first DVD I remember buying. I think I bought it before owning the player.

My first DVD player was giant (as big as a common bed pillow) It wasn't Sony and didn't read every disc. People were upset at the letterbox, widescreens wen't common yet.

I've still got my Ranma movie 1 jewelcase and sleeve, part two went to a regular DVD case.

I have a first print IRIA DVD, I bought a bunch of CPM stuff back then.

I'll have to go through old magazines to look for some history. The internet isn't on point with these recent Irrelevant searches.

I'm trying to remember what the Virgin megastore, Tower Records and Suncoast shelves had on them at that time.

Back in the day when Lunar 2 released for sega cd I was in 8th grade, around the end of 1995, in early 1996 we had a foreign exchange student that was watching Detective Conan on a piece of technology that I can not find on the net. Wiki says minidisc doesn't have a vid player but he was watching the show on a handheld player. Maybe a bootleg?
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Triltaison



Joined: 03 Jul 2011
Posts: 724
PostPosted: Tue Aug 23, 2016 2:47 am Reply with quote
Zalis116 wrote:
Quote:
The anime publishers dutifully kept putting out VHS releases (albeit in very small quantities) until around 2005. Bandai Entertainment was the first company to go DVD-only with their release of Avenger, and everyone else followed suit not long after.

At the risk of fansplaining, there is some evidence that DVD-only anime releases have existed at least since mid-2001, with Pioneer's NieA_7.


I 100% agree that there were DVD-only releases prior to Avenger's release in '05. I was in high school from '01 to '05 and ran its anime club from '02-'05, which was great fun when my public school only had VCRs, more new anime each year only came out on DVD, and most people were transitioning or had already transitioned to getting their anime on DVD. Because I needed to show things for club, I often had to buy the subbed VHS in addition to my own DVD copy (if both existed). -But there were literally no other options other than DVD for certain titles at the time. With increasing frequency, I had to make a VHS copy of whatever episodes we were watching that week from my or other club members' DVDs in order to use the school equipment to show those VHS-less series for club. Excel Saga, FLCL, Rune Soldier, Noir, Betterman, Angel Links, Chobits, Soul Hunter, Twelve Kingdoms, Risky Safety, and (indeed) Niea_7 are just some of the ones I remember that were DVD-exclusive during that time period. Those series and soooo many others wasted a good two hours of my life copying and recopying onto the same dogeared blank VHS cassette each week just so we could watch newly released anime. I hated doing it, but there was no other way to watch new anime series on the school A/V equipment (older series on VHS weren't a problem). It was such a blessing when one of the two kids with a PS2 could come (I had a large Pioneer player at home that was too expensive to cart to a high school) and we could just watch the DVD.

For what it's worth... During my 4 years of high school, VHS anime went from being plentiful as a freshman (I even bought all of Dual! at a grocery store) to being practically nonexistent on store shelves my senior year (the same year the Musicland/Sam Goody/Suncoast/Media Play stores all disappeared from my part of the US prior to their nationwide '06 bankruptcy). I don't remember many anime VHS coming out after '05 (the last I can clearly remember are Dragonball GT and Pokemon: Advanced), but my college had a much better set-up for its club so I didn't need to pay attention to VHS releases anymore. Funnily enough, here's an '06 ANN forum thread talking about the dearth of anime VHS that year, which is right when I remember them evaporating alongside all the Sam Goody stores.

-So if Justin meant that Avenger is when Bandai abandoned VHS altogether going forward (which is what I think you intended), that totally falls in line with what I remember.
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Galap
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Joined: 07 Apr 2012
Posts: 2354
PostPosted: Tue Aug 23, 2016 3:33 am Reply with quote
purplepolecat wrote:

Sorry, I thought the "winky smiley" made that fairly clear. I had no intention of denigrating Justin's profession, and I did find the ANNCast on this subject genuinely interesting.


It's ok. no trouble there. Sarcasm is always hard to convey in text haha.
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Kadmos1



Joined: 08 May 2014
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Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP
PostPosted: Tue Aug 23, 2016 7:04 am Reply with quote
The oldest DVD my family has (as in the year it the DVD was released) is the '97 release of "Selena" and "Spies Like Us".
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encrypted12345



Joined: 25 Jan 2012
Posts: 718
PostPosted: Tue Aug 23, 2016 10:07 am Reply with quote
I'm going to stay on DVDs for a while, at least maybe until there is freeware that can easily play Blu-rays on the PC rather than forcing me to rip the shows out of the Blu-Ray itself. There's some headway I think, but it's still buggy.

Even then, it may still not be worth it for me since the Blu-ray and DVD are very similar formats, at least more than VHS and DVD. If I get a Blu-ray player for Christmas or something, I'd still be able to play DVDs.
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FLCLGainax





PostPosted: Tue Aug 23, 2016 12:35 pm Reply with quote
This ANN review claims an obscure OAV called Tenamonya Voyagers was the industry's first DVD-only release.

Shadowrun20XX wrote:

I'm trying to remember what the Virgin megastore, Tower Records and Suncoast shelves had on them at that time.

I vaguely remember the local Tower near me had mostly CPM and Pioneer catalog stuff in 1999.
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EricJ2



Joined: 01 Feb 2014
Posts: 4016
PostPosted: Tue Aug 23, 2016 1:31 pm Reply with quote
relyat08 wrote:
Although I had watched some anime on rented VHS, it was almost entirely due to Netflix that I became an anime fan, since the local rental shops didn't carry a very good selection of anime in any format.

That's remarkably similar to my story, though at the time, it was my parents who bought the DVD player in order for us to all sit down and watch Ghibli films that my sister in law brought over. After that I signed up for a Netflix account and rented tons of anime through it. Netflix disc rentals were the sh** back then.


Of the ONE (non-chain) video rental in our area that was making the big jump to DVD's and had an anime section, the shelf selection was pretty poor, with everything either middle-volume or missing, and the rest of the titles low-rent ecchi (which was more common to find on disk by that point, since the lower element always jumps on any new format).
The clerks there were emerging anime fans too, but said that it was safer to keep the ecchi titles because "When we put anything else there, it always ends up stolen!"

We were more desperate in those days. Sad
I remember, just BEFORE the big explosion in '99-'00--when the DiVX Wars were over, everyone finally came out of hiding, bought the winning player and were hooked--Netflix was just one office in Santa Clara, CA, uniting all those poor lost souls who had to buy whatever title was on DVD, and then sell it back to Software Etc.
After things took off, it got pretty bad for one office to serve an entire nation of DVD users; you would routinely have to wait two weeks to a month for your favorite title to become available, and the closest available title to the top of your queue that they would send you would be pot luck.


Last edited by EricJ2 on Tue Aug 23, 2016 4:22 pm; edited 1 time in total
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peno



Joined: 06 Jul 2016
Posts: 349
PostPosted: Tue Aug 23, 2016 1:32 pm Reply with quote
My first DVD was Metropolis, which cost almost 10 times the amount DVDs cost these days. I bought it before I had DVD player, which I bought in a few days after that. I don't know when exactly this was, but I know shortly before that, I bought big collection of VHS movies in sale, for which I kicked myself later when I finally bought DVD player. I think it was somewher in the end of 2001 or beginning of 2002. After that, I almost exclusively bought DVDs. In late 2012, I finally bought my first Blu-Ray player and practically stopped buying DVDs.
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Brand



Joined: 30 Jan 2006
Posts: 1028
PostPosted: Tue Aug 23, 2016 8:09 pm Reply with quote
peno wrote:
My first DVD was Metropolis, which cost almost 10 times the amount DVDs cost these days.


Where did you buy this from? Because holy crap you over paid for that. I bought it right when it came out for about $30. Which today it might come out new for $20 but not in the $200 range...
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CandisWhite



Joined: 19 Apr 2015
Posts: 282
PostPosted: Tue Aug 23, 2016 11:06 pm Reply with quote
relyat08 wrote:
Zin5ki wrote:
Galap wrote:
They say you're used to what you grow up with, so the way VHS looks doesn't actually bother me at all, and I kind of even manage to ignore its video artifacts (while those of DVD are glaringly annoying to me).

I am still quite satisfied by DVD, for the very reason you state! That said, a Blu-Ray release of my favourite anime has finally been announced, which may be the requisite spur for me to finally consider adopting the newer format.

I always find this incredibly odd. I also grew up with VHS, but even as a kid, I could tell the video quality was horrible. When DVD came around I was thrilled, but even that wasn't enough for me after I watched my first Blu-ray around 2008 or so. Since then it has been increasingly difficult for me to justify buying anything at less than a 1080 resolution. I can't imagine being okay with less quality than that, personally.

It really depends on what a person considers "quality" and that varies widely with each person. I have a variety of movies on VHS (home and pro), DVD and Blu-ray; I'm aware of video inasmuch as I can see how my original Star Wars and Shirley Temple tapes look compared to newer stuff but don't have a problem with many VHS releases, as far as video, and am not waiting to upgrade everything that's on DVD to Blu-ray.

A great example of this is the new Escaflowne release: Many people are eager to have it in HD, which is understandable, as it's a great show and deserves to have the upgrade, but many people also offered the addendum that the show looked like garbage on DVD, something I find less understandable. I imagine if a person is a cinephile that they could describe, in great detail, every painful moment of the original Bandai DVD release but, to me, it looked beautiful. Not passable but gorgeous, from the menus to the show itself. I've watched the show on an old 27-inch, and on a newer widescreen, and it not only looks just fine but is amazing.

Neither attitude is right but is just what the individual person experiences when they see it.

It's like when someone paints their nails: An esthetician can look at the job and wince at every streak, every dot, every cuticle, while other people give the painter actual compliments because they like the colour, the sparkle, and genuinely don't see any issues.
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peno



Joined: 06 Jul 2016
Posts: 349
PostPosted: Wed Aug 24, 2016 2:42 am Reply with quote
Brand wrote:
peno wrote:
My first DVD was Metropolis, which cost almost 10 times the amount DVDs cost these days.


Where did you buy this from? Because holy crap you over paid for that. I bought it right when it came out for about $30. Which today it might come out new for $20 but not in the $200 range...

Unfortunately, in my country, that was the case. It's hard to recount back to USD, since the ratio changed significantly since then, but back then, in my country, it cost 1099, while today, even for two-disc DVD, I wouldn't pay more then 200, maybe 300 but that's max. Truth is, DVDs were very expensive here when they first came out. Not even Blu-Rays were this expensive, when they first came out.
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Zin5ki



Joined: 06 Jan 2008
Posts: 6680
Location: London, UK
PostPosted: Wed Aug 24, 2016 2:56 am Reply with quote
relyat08 wrote:
When DVD came around I was thrilled, but even that wasn't enough for me after I watched my first Blu-ray around 2008 or so. Since then it has been increasingly difficult for me to justify buying anything at less than a 1080 resolution. I can't imagine being okay with less quality than that, personally.

The matter would rest with the breadth of titles one wishes to appreciate, given the fidelity one has come to demand. Everyone has a few old titles in their collection that are unlikely to receive a Blu-Ray rescue, and in my case, I fear that to grow accustomed to the enhanced resolutions currently available would be to dispense of one's ability to enjoy older gems in the forms in which they exist.

(In addition, my Linux mini-PC is probably incapable of decoding a Blu-Ray with reasonable reliability, so I currently face hardware restrictions.)
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