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

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.

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.

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).

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.

\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.

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.

I bought my first DVD player specifically to use Netflix, which seemed like a dream come true. Oddly enough, I only learned of its existence when the post office delivered someone's disk to me by mistake. I nearly threw it out, thinking it was some promo disk, like the ones AOL saturated the world with, and when I found a real movie inside, I still couldn't believe it wasn't a scam.

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.

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.

I get what you're saying, but I don't really agree with the idea that both ways are just as good, or just as "right". Certainly not technically. But if you don't care about the actual video quality, that is fine. Just not really something I understand at all.

I had a hard time truesting Netflix back then. Not sure how they do it now, but they seemed able to avoid the whole mutilation of discs that the brick-and-mortar rental stores always had huge problems with.
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How did Netflix deal with people like this?

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.

I definitely remember the PS2 being the impetus for many people to watch stuff on DVDs. To a lesser extent, I saw the same happening with PS3s and Blu-Rays: When the PS3 came out, even at US$600, it was still the cheapest Blu-Ray player on the market. I was in college at the time, and I'd hear conversations from film students getting PS3s solely to watch Blu-Rays. Was the PS2 the cheapest DVD player on the market at the time too? Or did people buy PS2s to play video games and saw the DVD-playing as a nice bonus?

For the record, we got our first DVD player around 2002 or 2003. Our first DVD was Toy Story 2 (but our oldest one is Pleasantville--it's old enough that it shows off "Interactive Menus" as a special feature). Our first anime DVD, however, was Tenchi Muyo!, which I bought at a Suncoast for US$160. Man, that hurt.

EricJ2 wrote:

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.

I hate to break it to you, but the sub vs. dub conflict is still going on. (But I think it's no coincidence that I see it flare up the worst on YouTube, where there usually isn't a language option.).

leafy sea dragon wrote:

I definitely remember the PS2 being the impetus for many people to watch stuff on DVDs. To a lesser extent, I saw the same happening with PS3s and Blu-Rays: When the PS3 came out, even at US$600, it was still the cheapest Blu-Ray player on the market. I was in college at the time, and I'd hear conversations from film students getting PS3s solely to watch Blu-Rays. Was the PS2 the cheapest DVD player on the market at the time too? Or did people buy PS2s to play video games and saw the DVD-playing as a nice bonus?

The PS3 wasn't the cheapest bluray player at the time. Sony, Samsung, and others had models in the $300-400 range ( and even lower on sale.). The PS3 had a big advantage because it was the only player that was fully upgradable, full compliant with future bluray protocol, and had internet connectivity right out of the box.

They supposedly had people inspecting disks as they came back, but afaik they didn't charge you for unplayable/broken disks because it could've been damaged in transit. Maybe if someone sent back every disk damaged they might cancel them, but I never heard of it. I think they also got the PO to design sorting equipment that was easier on disks (which I assume other disk-by-mail businesses benefited from as well).

A few years in, after they got big enough, Netflix apparently started getting Netflix-specific dvds (for big Hollywood releases anyway), which had different labels on the disks than home purchases. So if someone swapped a disk, they'd know.

Of the hundreds of dvds I rented (until they scaled way back on their anime library and I cancelled) I think I probably only had to return a dozen as unplayable. One title in particular arrived broken (as in, dozens of shards) 4 times! Either the disks were just cheap for that release, or someone really had it in for that title.

Not sure what you mean by you had a hard time trusting them. Were you afraid you'd get charged for bad disks that weren't your fault?

The PS3 wasn't the cheapest bluray player at the time. Sony, Samsung, and others had models in the $300-400 range ( and even lower on sale.). The PS3 had a big advantage because it was the only player that was fully upgradable, full compliant with future bluray protocol, and had internet connectivity right out of the box.

No, now the Sub vs. Dub "wars" is just about whether or not you happen to like them.
In the VHS day, it was about WHERE you could buy them, or whether they were released at all.
VHS's only had room to be subbed or dubbed, and most mainstream retail stores preferred Dubbed. That's why more dubbed titles were made, why there were more of them available, and why they were $10-$15 cheaper than the dubbed VHS. Viz sold dubbed Ranma 1/2 tapes on just about every MediaPlay shelf, but you had to get your comic-book store to special-order the "Special Edition" subbed Ranma 1/2 S1 volumes, for $35. Each.
In supporting one or the other, you were supporting the very business future of how anime existed, and since dubbing in the mid-90's was often not very good, saying you liked the cheap dubs because they were "easier" was tantamount to saying "Who cares about the original voices with subs?" And those weren't fighting words, those were Armageddon words.

When the DVD of Tenchi Muyo in Love came out, it was subbed and dubbed...Disks could do that. You didn't have to worry about which one you bought, since whichever one you bought was the one you wanted. And stores didn't have to worry about which version to sell, they just had to sell the title.
That changed...a lot of things.

When Blu battled HDDVD, both formats knew the importance of having it be compatible with an existing game console, and the Format War almost literally boiled down to a gamerz' spitting contest between PS3 users and Microsoft X-Box users. The living-room hardware fans couldn't care less, since the importance of HDTV hadn't sunk in yet, and HDDVD was looking like the more "respectable" format with Casablanca on disk.