Quote:
Originally Posted by Tofusensei
***Paging Dr. Access. Dr. Access to the floor, thank you.***
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http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?t=20229
This thread is rather long and involved, but it mentions a lot of the earlier releases in passing.
Honestly I cannot remember a whole lot about the early-early releases since not a lot of them really interested me. At some point Fivestar released "Baby Love", believe a 'revised' release was made on or before March 24, 2001. That was the first thing I actually watched all the way through. Honestly you started seeing the more interesting stuff around then, animeco was releasing Momoiro Sisters, around the same time, and then Kero Kero Chime later that year.
But by then, Elite-fansubs and a lot of other "first-generation" groups had been around roughly 6 months prior to that, or in some cases longer. Early in October 2001, devilray posted on the website that elite-fansubs was coming up on it's one-year aniversary. The timeline that getfresh posted seems about right, animefactory did predate a lot of the other first-generation groups and candidate for goddess was among their early releases, if not their first.
I do remember that encode quality wasn't too good back then. It wasn't until mid-2001 when Nandub was released that you could make half-decent divX311alpha encodes by todays standards. Before that, you either used another standard like MPEG-1 (which generally resulted in oversized files) or you were pretty much stuck with the built-in codec for divx311alpha. There were hacks out there, but they were a lot of work, and any improvement was minor at best. The other codecs you see popping up from that time, .rm, .vivo, etc., none of the digisub groups (or anyone in their right mind) even touched those. Even originally-encoded divx311alpha was so far above those.