1. Introduction

1.1 What is fansubbing?

Fansubbing, or fan subtitling, is the process of taking a video or movie in a foreign language and adding your own subtitles to it so that people who don't know the original language can watch and enjoy the work. The phenomenon of fansubbing is most prevalent in the anime community, since most anime originates in Japan and must be translated before it can be widely shown outside of Japan. However, fansubbing certainly is not limited in scope to anime; it can be employed whenever one wants to make a motion picture work accessible to people unfamiliar with the language.

1.2 System requirements

The following describes what you need in terms of hardware and software before you start with this guide. For a listing of what software you need to install once you get started with this guide, see the Software Installation section.

Hardware requirements

You need a computer with all of the following:

• A DVD-ROM drive, preferably one without the region set (this makes CSS decryption easier).
• A fast CPU. The faster, the better, since video encoding is CPU bound. A Pentium III 500 MHz is probably the minimum CPU required to play back DVD video comfortably under Linux.
• 10 GB of free drive space; more is even better. You can get away with less if you encode directly from the DVD-ROM drive instead of copying it to your hard drive first, but this guide does NOT take that approach, because it is less flexible.
• A CD writer, to burn the result onto a CD. For burning SVCDs you need a drive supported by cdrdao.

Software requirements

This guide assumes you have Red Hat Linux 7.3 installed. While the descriptions in this guide can easily be amended to suit other Linux distributions, any widespread attempt at handling all of the possible variations would make this guide impossible to author.

Make sure that the following rpms (which come with Red Hat 7.3) are installed:

• SDL
• libogg
• libvorbis
• cdrecord
• cdrdao
• arts
• esound

1.3 Copyright & author information

Copyright (c) 2002 David Jao <djao@dominia.org>.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.

All comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome and should be sent to djao@dominia.org.

1.4 Legal disclaimer

Some of the programs whose usage is documented in this guide can optionally make use of CSS decryption routines for decrypting the contents of encrypted DVDs. Although CSS decryption software is legal in most countries, its legal status in the US is in doubt in light of the MPAA v. Reimerdes, Corley and Kazan court ruling. THE AUTHOR OF THIS GUIDE DOES NOT SANCTION THE ILLEGAL USE OF CSS DECRYPTION SOFTWARE IN THE UNITED STATES. READERS WHO ARE SUBJECT TO US LAW MUST AGREE TO LIMIT THE APPLICATION OF THE TECHNIQUES IN THIS GUIDE TO UNENCRYPTED DVDS ONLY.

Regardless of the legal status of CSS decryption, the copyright laws in most countries do not allow unlicensed copying of DVD videos except in very limited "fair use" contexts. THE AUTHOR OF THIS GUIDE DOES NOT SANCTION THE ILLEGAL COPYING OF COPYRIGHTED DVDS.