Blabber blabber blabber!

I love anime. I love them a lot. From the very beginning and from now to the future, I will always love anime. Have I told you that before? I can still remember the time I tried downloading them via Bittorrent. At that time in 2004 I think. It was after my O levels and during the dreadful 6 month break.  

I was bored and as always surfing around World Wide Web. At that time I had no idea what bittorrent was all about. And it was at that time they were showing Gatekeepers on AXN, and then Vandread. Both were great animes and those two pioneered my way into forming a sizeable collection (and still growing) after 3 years on. I remembered the time when I was glued to the TV at around 6.30pm everyday to watch those 2 series and fortunately it was broadcasted on a daily basis.  

Then after that, I started to get real interested in animes and from surfing mindlessly, I googled (and googled a lot) on the world of anime. I absorbed everything I read about it, like a sponge. From the history, to its roots and its culture, its unique style of animation, cheap but effective, and their wonderful cast of voice actors. Its characteristic and peculiar way of animating a situation that is extremely outstanding and prominent. Its hard to explain from a non animators point of view, but I hope you get what I mean.  

Then I can still remember coming across a number of very strange websites, that lists numerous anime titles that were hinting to me that it was for download. Without prior knowledge of Bittorrent, I thought that I could just download from the net, as if these websites were some underground organization distributing file illegally. But I thought to myself, it cant be possible. The sheer amount of bandwidth needed to distributed video clips were too much and hefty.  

At that point of time, kazaa (I think) was still surviving. I tried to find them on their networks, and there were indeed some titles. But more often than not, its incomplete, with episodes missing and the download speeds were awfully slow. I almost gave up in figuring out how to make use of these websites that “hosts” these files.  

It was soon after that I realized that a new peer to peer technology has just surfaced. It declared that it was very good at transferring large files. That piece of program is called Bittorrent. Now, I wasn’t a tech wiz or anything and it took me a while to learn how Bittorrent works. Usually I wont know how to operate and use a program such as these, until I understand how the program works in detail. It took me a while to get the gist of it but I made it nonetheless.  

I cant remember what my first download was, but I remembered that among the firsts were Gatekeeper 21, Last Exile and Full Metal Panic. I think I chose these 3 because they were made from the same animation company, Gonzo. Vandread and Gatekeepers were made from Gonzo and naturally, for something that you like, you tend to be a fan of those.  

The download was slow going, but it was progressing nonetheless. One of the factors that attracted me in using Bittorrent, is that its very easy to use after you learn it. Also, they also mentioned that you would not get a corrupted download, unlike kazaa and after much investigation, I found more websites and followed up to even more websites that were sharing files through this protocol. It was an exciting time for me. Its as if a new era of file sharing had been ushered in. During that time, I had this gut feeling that Bittorrent is gonna be the next big thing in file sharing and it is today.  

Anyway I began to wonder why it was downloading slowly. I thought I read it somewhere that it’s an efficient way of sharing large files. So why was it so slow? Again, I had to take up the advanced course of Bittorrent and learned of Port Forwarding. During that time my whole family adopted this whole wireless technology stuff, and it proved a little difficult to use Bittorrent without additional configurations to the router part. It was tough at first understanding what I have to do, since I suck that this whole internet configuration thingy. But I succeeded and in no time, the download speed surged! Finally my downloaded were almost progressing quickly and in no time I would watch my first ever download anime.  

Again, I cant remember what was my first anime that has finished its download, since I was downloading numerous animes simultaneously. But I think it was Gatekeepers 21. I was soo into gatekeepers at that time and it seems natural and probable that it was Gatekeepers 21. Comprising of only 6 episodes, it accounts the life of the organization many years after the first series.  

I didn’t expect too much in terms of the quality, since ive downloaded movies from kazaa before and it was horrible. But I was shocked to find out that the gatekeepers 21 that I downloaded were in DVD quality! And for that size, 250mb an episode, I was amazed at the quality presented before my very eyes. Truly, from that point on I believed that bittorrent is the superior file sharing technology. File size is no longer a limiting factor right now with the advent of Bittorrent and video quality isnt a consideration when sharing them. I was watching high quality stuff.  

For the next 3 months before the start of a poly life, my download was at full steam, sometimes without switching off the computer for weeks on end. And shortly weeks after my first download, I started to think of the possibilities. First, I now have Bittorrent to download anything I want, especially all the animes. Second I need to keep track of the downloads and how much data in terms of MB ad GB has been written to my hardisk. Third, I have to find a way to store these animes for my own personal collection. Forth, I need to keep track of all the animes ive downloaded and watch them grow.  

For the second point, I downloaded this program ( forgot whats it called ) that keep track of internet traffic both inbound and outbound data passing through the computer. So far after 3 years, about 1.3 TB or 1300GB worth of data has been downloaded. This is cumulative of internet surfing, downloading other stuff other than anime, and anime itself. If you were to consider the amount of data downloaded just for anime alone as of November 2006, it would be roughly 600gb worth. For the third point, I started burning those animes from my harddisk to CD as data file. I don’t want to decrease its video quality anymore by converting to VCDs just because it would be able to play on TV. Watching on the computer monitor was good enough for me.  

And for the last point, I started recording down all the animes that ive downloaded, downloading and planned to download on a notepad, keeping track on the number of episodes available for that series. It was fun, keeping track. And I download heaps of it, to the point that I was downloading more that I could watch in a day. Thus, there were sort of like, a backlog of all the animes that ive yet to watch (and still there is, about ½ have not been watched yet, and 2/3 or that I haven’t even touched.) 

And so ever since after 3 years, going to be my 4^th year come march, im still downloading them. So far, I have about 122 complete title under my belt and numerous more still under evaluation for the 2006 autumn releases. I have an estimated 2677 episodes adding up to almost 600GB, totaling almost 44 days worth of non stop anime. And for that, I don’t think it will ever end. That roughly equates to about 460mb worth of data downloaded every day or about 2 episodes a day. That doest seem much at first glance, but at a constant rate such as this, a small trickle can lead to a raging river.