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.
Ahh good ol’ Aegisub. I have great memories of subtitling anime in my late teens before I got a girlfriend and the fansub scene died when Crunchyroll took over.
I was also one of the people helping test Aegisub on Linux (2009-ish), I wasn’t a programmer at the time but I remember a dude called ‘verm’ in the IRC channel who did a bunch of work to make Aegisub stable on Linux. He taught me the difference between little endian and big endian, I guess he was bored that day
And the Spotify ceo just stepped down so he could focus on weapons systems for Israel. The people running all of our media services are Nazis.
Fascism is the natural end stage of capitalism. Plenty of businesses that have no core connection and competency with the military are embedding themselves into the military. For now, most of the US top brass loathe the Trump administration, but eventually they will be replaced by loyalists. We might get a real life Enclave if something isn’t done to rid the fascists.
When property is valued over people, piracy is protest. Pirating undermines a system that guards profit while neglecting humanity. Every download is a refusal to accept laws that protect wealth over well-being.
Lol. Crunchy roll was always crap. Watching anime in the raw is torture.
Enshittification, everyone. It comes to everything.
As far as I know we don’t even have fansubs anymore, any group nowadays is just a rip of whatever streaming has the anime, current anime if it’s not picked up by any streaming will get no subs, the streaming giants were successful and embracing it and enshitifying.
Some groups are still alive:
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.
Did you read the article - or even the title? This story is about people turning to piracy, not turning to another official source.
You’re not fucked if you have The Pirate Bay. :-)
Anime’s on tpb now? Fuck me i just use #transformers
Have you been living under a rock?
I live under a rock apparently!
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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.
Genocide is wildly popular in Israel right now
"Dubbed the “Sderot cinema” by Israelis online, watching Israel’s bombardment has become a popular pastime; people take turns looking through tower viewers. Some bring popcorn and snacks, and some snap selfies as the thud of airstrikes echo in the distance.
“When I look at Gaza from here and see buildings still standing, it makes me upset. … I want Israel to continue until it’s all flattened,” Rafael Hemo, an onlooker told CNN."
Appalling.
P. S. When I tried to open your link, it failed and sent me to the MSN front page, i removed some variables/identifiers at the end of URL and that seems to work:
Ok, but fascism is wildly popular in the USA right now. Would you make the same argument there?
Or, like me, are you more inclined towards believing that more likely a few terrible people in power have sway with a vast number of easily led racists and that mischaracterises the whole country?
Ok, but fascism is wildly popular in the USA right now.
Yes, we’re a fascist country now.
But more to the point, brining up a country that was founded on Genocide of Native Americans to argue that we shouldn’t speak ill of a country founded on Genocide of Palestinians is wild.
a few terrible people in power have sway with a vast number of easily led racists
This describes both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Again, weird take unless you’re pushing for us to drop the Nazi label from 1933-1945 Germany.
Are you a fascist?
I mean… yeah? It’s not really much of a mischaracterization if it’s true. At one point you have to accept that the we’re the baddies as a US citizen.
What do you think should be done to you?
Netanyahu
Yes, Netanyahu!
Animelab died for this
So we’re banning everything from Israel now?
Yes.
Given how things have been going, it seems an appropriate course of action.
That is the purpose of a boycott yes. Here are some other examples
Abolitionist boycotts of Southern goods over slavery - https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/boycott-sugar-slavery-bds/
Boycotts of German goods over Nazi policies- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_anti-Nazi_boycott
Boycotts of South Africa over Apartheid - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Apartheid_Movement
Ongoing boycott of US goods by Canada over a threatening stance taken by US government- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Canadian_boycott_of_the_United_States
Yes
yes
I don’t want to support any company that is either directly or indirectly funding genocide and fascism. It’s not complicated.
If you found out that Netflix powered their servers using an orphan grinding machine, would you still subscribe to them?
So you don’t buy anything that comes from USA, Italy, China, Russia…, or that does business with a company based here? That’s pretty much all of them
Be serious.
I’m so super mega serious. Seriously. I’ll try it more basic, but deadly serious:
"What going on?
Me not understand.
Why hate thing? Is cause ai, or cause Israeli, both? Something else?
Why do I care who is hitting the keyboard characters to sub a story i already know/love?
Israel, the country committing a genocide? The country actively and openly exterminating an entire ethnic group? And the product isn’t even good anyway?
Yea, it’s actually so easy to tell them to fuck off. If you can’t figure that out your moral compass is broken and you should send it in for a warantee repair.
AI gets subs wrong, and thinking that doesn’t matter is both ableist and just a terrible lazy product, but that’s not the pressing matter.
It’s Israel. Because giving money to another party is not a value neutral action. Using a site that pays money to Israel—and you either know what that means or are purposefully avoiding the subject—means you are supporting Israel. Your consumption does not occur in a vacuum.
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!”
Cory Doctorow’s works are almost always free to download, just a physical copy costs money.
And ironically enough even though most book by Doctorow might be DRM-free, maybe this one is, I can’t remember.
If you want I give you a free TL;DR: it’s not just monopolies, it’s also monopsies. When we feel trapped by buying with Amazon we often forget that authors often have the same feeling. So the “chokepoint” is not 1-sided but 2-sided.
Get thee to The Pirate Bay and send your direct donations on the side.
where would i send them to?
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.
True. But many people can justify it ethically.
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
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.
Spent another 5min to
scpthe container and~/Musicon my RPi5, which I keep on 24/7, has a 512Go microSD and tailscale… and I guess that’s it, I have my own music server. I don’t have discovery on though but still, already useful!
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…
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’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.
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.
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.
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Fansubs have always been superior.
My daughter got into anime through friends and I got some street creds by talking about how things used to be. Buying laserdiscs in Japan, subbing them and showing them at conventions. I subbed two episodes of some show I don’t remember. Or shipping VHS tapes across continents. My daughter doesn’t care, of course. But her friends were impressed. I fear that that was my last hurrah, though. I got nothing else.
Remembers all the fan sub opening/ending Karaoke so I could actually understand songs too. 🥹
Steins Gate fansubs were amazing.
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.
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.
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…
