Recent reports have announced that Crunchyroll, the largest anime streaming service, will be replacing Aegisub with Israeli Software, OOONA, to produce subtitles more efficiently. Anime fans across the world are disappointed with this collaboration due to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians (via a report by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry).
Crunchyroll is also ignoring the needs of groups who require Closed Captions to understand the scenes better. They are isolating a large chunk of their audience in favor of AI-based subtitling, which defeats the point of a streaming service. Overall, this hasn’t been a great year for Crunchyroll, and this won’t be the end of it.
You must log in or register to comment.
The problem here is that all these major anime providers are owned by Sony, so you’re kinda fucked if you want to boycott them.
You’re not fucked if you have The Pirate Bay. :-)
Did you read the article - or even the title? This story is about people turning to piracy, not turning to another official source.
I wouldn’t even pirate their content! Let’s just hope enough people leave so they can shut down already!!! :-(
Its not their content (unless they make originals I dont know) they are just distributing Japanese content
Animelab died for this
The whole “calling out Israel for genocide means you’re antisemitic” line is so worn out and honestly just exhausting. Israel has spent like 4+ decades trying desperately to associate criticism of israel with antisemitism.
I’ve been boycotting Crunchyroll for years, and I’m not stopping anytime soon.
“Piracy is a human right, collective ownership of the seas, comrades!” — Erik L. Midtsveen
Maybe instead of everyone calling it isreal and palestine, they should say the isreali government and innocent people.
They should say Netanyahu is committing genocide.
Saying israel instead of directly naming the culprits is sort of like when people say antifa. In the case of antifa it makes bad actors able to demonise the word and make it seem like a bad thing, so it can be used to twist peoples minds and make them think its a bad thing.
In the case of this genocide, it dehumanises the people committing the atrocities and diverts blame to the word instead of the people. Which has the effect of people like Netanyahu being able to reassociate the word with the israeli people and the jews.
So it absolutely isnt antisemitic to say israel is committing genocide, but it is unhelpful to divert the blame from the real asshats in charge.
Corporations can’t stand it a logarithmic graph. They need freaking geometric progressions, and then they do stuff that gets them an anti-logarithmic graph.
I would very much like a streaming service that makes it transparent what it actually spends its income on.
Like - a streaming service where i pay $10/month and 90% of that goes to the studios/artists that actually produce the anime? I would take that.
But right now i’m worried that i pay $10/month and 90% of that goes to the shareholders of the streaming provider as “profit” while the studio gets almost nothing.
Yeah… sweet summer child you might not want to read Chokepoint Capitalism. It’s closer to 99% for BigContent lawyers and right holders and less than 1% for actual creators.
Lol, I’m sure it’s a good book and Cory Doctorow is well renowned, but I can’t help but think: “Defeat Chokepoint Capitalism by buying our book right now!”
Get thee to The Pirate Bay and send your direct donations on the side.
Greed kills
I bailed on CR when they fired their US based IT people and outsourced to the cheapest Eastern Euro country. It wasn’t even a purely moral decision. The website was janky in the first place and I knew it wasn’t going to get batter at that point.
So non-Americans can’t do a good job, amirite?
I didn’t get that vibe from the parent comment. the reaction was to the motivations of the rich fatcats who aren’t happy with the obscene wealth they already have. Not American Exceptionalism.
especially if they arnt familiar with the tech.
Funnily enough, i was considering just today whether i should re-open my old Crunchyroll account. But i guess i won’t do it now after all. IIRC there’s been a streak of bad press about crunchyroll; like, this today isn’t the only issue.
why not just pirate shit without a noble cause for once? You know - the old fashioned way
Impossible.
Piracy is always noble.
quiet.
Fuckin wish I pirated this turd.
i liked it.
Perfection
what are the good sources nowadays…been out of the game for awhile and it’s to trust any sites promoted on any mainstreamish social networks.
like freemediaheckyeah, old reddit hub…is that still good?
ime every pirate source had 50/50 shot of turning into some virus/scam honeypot shortly after reaching high enough popularity
You can get the Evangellion dub off of internet archive, found that out a couple of days ago cause bored.
https://fmhy.lol/ Free Media Heck Yea has loads of free content across tons of topics listed.
I pretty much just use 1337x.
nyaa. Just look for a currently active Nyaa torrent site for anime. There’s several.
I just bookmark the piracy megathread/wiki thingy, lemmy/reddit (backup). For streaming, I would probably recommend hydra, it’s really all the same but that site has “auto-next” which I prefer. There was one site I used to enjoy that was just better than any streaming platform I’ve paid for, skip intro, skip credits (would even detect after credit scenes), subtitles in all languages and audio tracks even commentary, quick responsive high quality loading of any media your mind can remember. They went after it hard and I haven’t seen a proper iteration since (every clone slowly lost features as they were whack-a-moling).
For downloading, they’re really all crappy (several link hoops to jump through) and hit or miss (for quality and selection you can’t beat the ease of a torrent unfortunately). You can find what you want eventually but the difference in hassle is just crazy.
i used to stream pirated some shows and a movie last decade, then they took down all those sites, i dont download.
Fmhy ✅
no idea, man. I’m just a poser)
All the streaming services are unethical now, both in pricing and operation. Netflix is maybe the least bad, but I can’t justify the cost for that, either.
Stremio + Torrentio is the way to go.
What happens next is like what happened in the 2000s. People will turn to piracy as legitimate content is no longer feasible, affordable, or ethical. Then the corporate oligarchs will crack down violently to make examples of the people they’ve given no other choice or recourse.
It’s time to eat the rich.
Netflix charges me, a single guy, for 4 simultaneous streams if I want 4k. So I shared with my parents.
Then they had the audacity to stop people from password sharing or to charge even more if you want to share. I set up an automatic email forward so my parents get every sign in related email.
Stremio + Torrentio is the way to go.
Torrentio has started blocking VPNs.
people they’ve given no other choice or recourse
I don’t know, I find I also have the option to not consume media that I can’t pay for or justify ethically. For instance, the only streaming service we have a subscription for is The Criterion Channel.
I’m looking for an ethical anime streaming service rn, and i’d be willing to pay for it (like, $10/month). Any options at all?
Like, “ethical” means that the money is used to keep the studio running that is producing the anime; not that the money goes to some big banks to profit off anime.
yeah, that just doesn’t exist anymore
True. But many people can justify it ethically.
Even if you make good money, it is still ethically questionable to support predatory practices and financially reward the objectively evil. Piracy is ethically neutral at worst and can easily be interpreted as a net positive, at least where it comes to most media. I deliberately choose to support some obscure stuff with my dollar because I want its creators to succeed and my conscience is clean.
Good for you, but Oovid opened my eyes to how different our living conditions are.
Some people may have may many alternatives, some few and some none
Just canceled. Thanks.
I’m doing my part!
My renewal was literally tomorrow too. As these streaming services get worse, I keep on cancelling. Been two years for Prime (literally smashed cancel the day ads were announced) and all i’ve got left at this point is netflix and spotify.
Netflix pricing almost has me there.
I’d cancel it in a heartbeat but my wife would murder me.
Honest question, did you try self-hosted music?
Few weeks ago I thought this was a joke but… there is a TON of stuff out there already.
From the “rough”
- minidlna (with optionally tailscale to listen outside the LAN)
- 1min setup https://github.com/9001/copyparty
- NextCloud
to having mobile apps
- navidrome (with updates via lidarr)
to minimalist
to federated
to handling discovery
… there is just so much out there!
Edit: since I wrote this message (15min ago) I setup LMS thanks to podman and shared it via
ngrokand my wife can listen to my music on her phone instantly.So… yeah it’s that quick and convenient.
Is it perfect, definitely not, but it’s also very quick to get started and to reconsider.
You could try moving to Tidal or Qobuz, they treat their artists better and there are tools to transfer playlists
Buying music on Bandcamp and similar has been good for me. When I got laid off I kept all the music I owned and didn’t have to pay anymore. All these subscription services suck.
I’m never, ever buying digital licenses to video or audio content. My limit is games because avoiding it is kind of impossible.
Too many platforms close down. I’ve lost licenses from the Impulse acquisition and subsequent shutdown, plus one or two others. Any day these guys can just put up a 30 day notice and rip everything out of your library. Usually this happens after an acquisition… looks like bandcamp was sold in 2023 and the buyers shitcanned half the staff too.
Disks are cheap and piracy works until they enforce digital IDs for all connectivity on the internet. At that point we’d be back to swapping thumb drives.
I only buy drm free music and then back it up somewhere myself. Bandcamp at least is drm free, but who knows if they’ll turn to shit after being bought and sold.
I was recently turned on to Stremio + Torrentio and it’s very good. I’m considering making a Pi5 device dedicated to it.
I have an old Pi floating around that I should probably look at using for stuff like this.
Are they going to be around once Google removes sideloading from unauthorized devs?
Get a divorce
Netflix has been enshityfying and on the capitalist death spiral for YEARS, cancel that shit and spend your money on a VPN and some hard drives…
Netflix makes dope original productions in my experience; I’ve watched many of their shows and enjoyed them.
It’s not wrong to give money to studios that produce good content. What’s important IMO is that the money really goes to the studios, and not to some big banks trying to leech off it.
except they cancel after 2 seasons, because they dont want to pay anymore. Plus i saw the quality in some of the shows in the season, where thier costumes, or props quality is very showing.
I’ve been paying for a VPN for over a decade and I am up to about 20TB of used disks. Make of that what you will.
Your setup isn’t modern enough and you still find convenience in paying for Netflix?
I don’t know what else to make of it…
Not far off. Most of what i’ve setup originates from a plex lifetime sub. Maintenance is completely trivial.
Every time I hear about the next thing I think about modernizing which then requires standing up something new. New shit requires a new virtual host and completely new setups of many things. Then training my wife and others on how to utilize the new tech, and then praying it doesn’t just break tomorrow from The Establishment in some way.
Plex is one of the very few solutions that works with minimal sideloading and fuckery. My instructions for someone to start using it are “download the app, check your email for an account link, and enjoy.” I would not recommend any newcomers to go with Plex though, because it’s definitely not a modern solution.
I’ve tried jellyfin, I put substantial time into trying to get it to work but it had substantial issues with subtitles which are mandatory for us unfortunately. I figure any new solution is going to also have substantial challenges in some way as there is no standardized or simple deployment of absolutely anything.
I use plex also because I have a lifetime sub. Totally agree.
Switch from VMS to docker. Use NAS to keep the media, and store your compose stacks somewhere backed up, then all you need is one host with docker/podman and a repeatable configuration driven deployment. Start adding apps with compose files, no new host setups, no significant resource needs.
I’ve tried jellyfin, I put substantial time into trying to get it to work but it had substantial issues with subtitles which are mandatory for us unfortunately. I figure any new solution is going to also have substantial challenges in some way as there is no standardized or simple deployment of absolutely anything.
Yeah, I have Jellyfin running alongside Plex, (luckily, they happily run side-by-side with the same library), but I consistently find myself using Plex instead. I want to like Jellyfin. I want it to succeed. And Jellyfin is like 80% of the way there… But that remaining 20% is a real sticking point, and I almost always end up falling back to Plex after trying (and getting frustrated with) Jellyfin.
It’s an unpopular opinion on Lemmy because of the FOSS mentality, but Jellyfin simply isn’t mature enough to fully replace Plex in many peoples’ setups. Especially when you consider the whole “getting friends and family to convert” side of things, where Plex handily beats Jellyfin in regards to account and app setup; I can walk my mother-in-law through setting up Plex, but Jellyfin adds a whole new level to the equation when she would need to sideload the app onto her TV.
Agreed wholeheartedly.
I built out bluefin as a panacea to issues I had with subtitles on a set of media on my plex server and it couldn’t even give me subtitles.
I hear a lot of rave reviews for Kodi, but that’s serverless so now I need to open up storage or setup a vpn server and isolate a vlan… and how in the everliving fuck am I going to explain configuring this? Oh, and that needs sideloading too and if I go with a vlan now they need to figure out how to connect their device to a VPN. That’s a nightmare.
Sure, I can setup Kodi at home on my TV device and leave plex as is but i’m no closer to a server based transcoding solution. That sucks.
Ha fuck… that was my last personal sub… any alternative beside the high seas? I’m seasick…
Honestly, piracy is easier than it ever has been. You can automate torrents or usenet downloads with the *arr suite. There’s a bit of a learning curve to get it set up… But once it’s running, it’s basically just “add show to your watchlist” and ~15 minutes later it shows up on your media list with full metadata, subtitles, etc ready to go.
Plenty of people will suggest stremio, which is… Contentious. It works for streaming by downloading a torrent to cache. After you watch it, stremio automatically deletes the cache. So in day to day operation, it uses very little hard drive space and primarily relies on your internet speed and properly seeded torrents. But that latter part is the problem… Since it deletes the cache, it isn’t actually seeding anything in return. If everyone used stremio, nobody would actually be able to use it, because none of the torrents would be seeded. It’s a sort of mass prisoner’s dilemma.
Technically, you can set stremio to keep a rolling cache of {x} size, and it will hold onto the torrents until you start to download something new and it needs that space. But very few people will expect to hit a 1.0 ratio, even with a decently sized cache.
The whole point is not to do any setup and maintenance just to watch anime… I already have a job where I have to do that and I was hoping that it would pay for the convenience. My passion is watching anime, not setup downloading pipeline for them.
It is easier to watch anime for free than it is to pay for it.
There are plain old anime piracy sites, for both downloading and streaming, if you don’t want the headache.
Lol I can just add it to my phone’s torrent client when I have a plan to watch something, then later begin download when I have wifi (or if you have unlimited high speed data, that also works… sort of…), usually like before bed when the phone is plugged in, then wake up and its done downloading.
You can pre-download the next thing you plan to watch before you finish your current thing. Same for TV Shows and movies.
If you don’t use your phone for work, you can also just leave it charging and use their wifi (with VPN obviously) to torrent then come come and have it ready to watch, usually unless it has low seeders.
Watch using VLC.
(Afaik, there’s no torrent client on iOS, so this is Android only… we’ll see what happens with Android torrent clients after 2027… it works for now)
(That’s the simplist thing to do. You can also remote into a computer,but that’s a bit more complicated.)
The point of the setup is you only need to do it once, you don’t set up everything every time you want to download something…
Got any guides for that stuff? Sounds pretty neat
Google stremio + realdebrid, it’s all spelled out step by step on many guides, you basically download the app (on pc, android, tvs) add community repos, add torrentio, click customize, paste your real debrid api key and you’re done. Past that you can pick extensions like marvels or other torrent addons to add categories and other sources.
Real debrid you pay like 6$ a month for, it automatically dloads the torrent when you click it or grabs from its cache (almost always cached/downloaded by others)Makes stremio run as fast/smooth as netflix/hulu/etc.
Stremio auto tracks what is watched, keeps history/playback time accurately. It’s basically how kodi addons used to be as it’s own smoother app.
Never heard of stremio, sounds like it plays the role of a media server, in which case it doesn’t have to be streamio? Plex or Jellyfin could work too
Stremio is the “downloader” and the “streamer”, so it’s both. Plex and Jellyfin require you to download beforehand.
There are classical, “best of all time”, titles that an anime lover like you would defintely enjoy. They’re not available on Crunchyroll, they’re not on Amazon Prime, Netflix, you can’t purchase a copy. A few had selected censored releases in VHS, good luck hunting them down.
The thing with piracy is that it’s not just a money saving trick used by teenagers, it’s also the only way to truly watch the media you enjoy regardless of what some media conglomerate thinks - they no longer get to define how, when and what you’re going to watch. You have to do a bit of setup once… yes that sucks, but from that point onwards, you’re free.
Those I have, some literally on VHS :) When I was young we had a monthly or weekly VHS of best anime from France which I subscribed to. I like some recent stuff that’s very much available on Crunchyroll though plus it’s an easy way to stay aware of releases and such.
Then you pay for it? Plain and simple. You pay for that convenience.
I am paying for it… it becomes tricky when the disagreement isn’t on price but on replacing fellow human with AI from a country with genocidal tendencies. That’s where I draw my line I guess.
No one reccomends stremio without real debrid, makes it instant like netflix
The end goal was always to deprive us of alternatives
There’s always torrents but it was very convenient to just go to crunchy and start something… torrenting and putting it in plex and all… it’s just less convenient
They took our comments and reviews, now they’re ruining subtitles, are delayed, etc. The arr stack is starting to be just as convenient if not more.
Lord Gaben said it best, piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem (the people who couldn’t afford it weren’t going to buy it anyway).
You’re right about comments and reviews… I miss some of that. You’re also right quoting the old Gaben. But still… it seems we can’t keep any nice things for long :-/
Look into setting up an -arr stack. Overseer with radar/sonaar plus your torrent client of choice and a VPN. The setup takes a weekend at most and the final product is honestly easier to use then navigating shitty streaming services now. It actually is more convenient after just a little bit of setup.
Usenet is great also downloads very quickly. Just automate the whole process.
I was doing usenet more than 10yrs ago… not that straightforward, needs a subscription anyway… and the whole NAS + plex or something similar is still needed. I get the idea but there’s a point in life where 10€ per month for the ease of use is very appealing.
I pay around 2 to 3 dollars a month, I bought lifetime index subscriptions.
Hidive is probably the last good one, unless something changed in recent times.
HiDive. Until they get the fuckaround bug.
These mutherfuckers forgot where they came from! Time to remind them
Oh they do remember. They fondly remember those early years piggybacking on strangers goodwill before laughing all the way to the bank.
They’ve been on borrowed time since Sony bought them. Honestly I’m amazed they’ve lasted this long.
deleted by creator
Fansubs have always been superior.
Remembers all the fan sub opening/ending Karaoke so I could actually understand songs too. 🥹
Steins Gate fansubs were amazing.
That‘s how Crunchyroll itself started out if I remember correctly. Now look at it, completely unrecognizable. It‘s exemplary for how things have been progressing or rather regressing this century so far.
There are barely any real fansubs left. Most are Crunchyroll, Netflix or Funimation restyled and maybe retimed plus checked if they spent a lot of time on it.
I’m an old pirate who remembers, and the thing, the raw ingredient missing in this scenario?
need
If it didn’t exist, if there was no possible way to get a copy of somesuch Gundam episode whatever in english, some dude somewhere would cross the ends of the earth to get it onto the internet. Piracy is motivated entirely by utility and need, it’s why music piracy atrophied into almost nothing until Soulseek arrived and streaming prices increased. Supply met demand, and it will again for fansubs.
If it’s needed, someone will meet the need. We did it in 1998, we’ll do it next year.
And that’s honestly all that’s needed, the official translations are usually perfectly fine. The elaborate typesetting is what makes the fansubs so good.
Agreed, It very noticeable how bad the subs are. I remember watching an the terminator anime and the subs were atrocious.
https://reddit.com/r/television/comments/1f4cj61/netflixs_wellanimated_terminator_zero_starts/?
I’ve been an anime of crunchy roll with those auto ai subs and the main character is called Kun. Holy shit half the time it’s censoring itself because it’s trying to say something racist, but not always…
