Exactly!!!! This is my absolute favorite site!!!! You guys are the bomb-diggity!!!

Man, this is crazy. Thank you for your efforts for all this years.

Thanks again for all the comments showing appreciation! I really didn't expect such an outpouring from everyone here.
I'm only responding to questions for now, as I don't have much to comment on otherwise, but your thanks really does warm my heart and makes me feel that I was able to be helpful to many.

❤

Yes, the files are downloaded before subtitles/attachments are extracted. I've written some more info here.

AT's technique is relatively convoluted, but you can find info on it here.

For something simpler, I recall mplayer/MPV having an option to output a frame to an image, so you can use that to have subtitles rendered in the video. It looks like ffmpeg has options for burning in subtitles, or you could use a VapourSynth script to do something similar.

The site downloads the shows first from torrents then admin uses his script(s) to process them automatically. After that you can get subs from this site.

I believe that's covered in the FAQ...

Admin, so how do you get subtitles from .mkv files? I mean, do you download all the shows to extract subtitles?

First of all, I have to say a huge THANK YOU to the site administrator for managing this site for all these years. It's been the primary source for me to get the anime episodes that I am looking for, especially Aikatsu and Precure.

That said, I really hope that come May 2026, someone can see about creating a site almost like this (but not "imitating" it obviously because there are some of us who still don't really do torrents in regards to anime shows). I've really been dependent on this site to get the latest episodes from Precure seasons, so here's hoping a breakthrough can come very soon before then.

Anyone know any good sites for anime that come even REMOTELY as lol someone else said without the BS ...or even with the BS at this point

bubbles of woe
do u have to go?
we js wont know
without you though...?
*sob sob... is like naruto finishing all over again!
*,'0)x

Totally Gutted is being Shutdown, but totally understand AN FAIRPLAY!

Ur Service has been ASTRONOMICAL in providing a reliable source an resources to link an find no end of hard to find anime!

THANSK FOR ALL UR HARD WORK DUDE!

Gonna be sad to say bye to Animetosho...

please recommend any other sites that are good to use :)

i dont think i even know of any other sites other than the ones ive learned of through here an even then- not with descriptions on the links for download...

Thanks Again~ u LEGEND!!D

lol this seems like a sad dream as much I see the latest archive

Both me and my Sonarr will miss you. Thank you for all these years of keeping us alive and fed. Take care Admin o7

Man, first Arutha, now this. :(

Thank you for all your hard work.

*Auto-generated screenshots.

Hi admin. I am trying to build my own AnimeTosho-esque service. I am having trouble getting auto-generated subtitles to display subtitles, particularly subs in ASS format. How did you get this to work? I am using ffmpeg to generate the screenshots, but I'm not sure if there's something else I need to use.

1.5gb back in 2011 must have been a big deal. All these comments from 2011 are time capsules.

Gimme moar catgirls!

Goodbye, old times. First commentator.

And see you from now on forever.

Thank you for (essentially) donating a major part of your life to a project which does not profit you, but many others. It seems easy to help others without any reason or reward in theory, but not in the real life, which can and is unfair at times. I thank you for creating this website and maintaining it for such a long time, without any benefit from it.
Hope you find everything that you wish for in your life.
An anonymous person.

"I may disable some features (screenshots/attachments) and run the feed/API in a degraded state (some requests will fail) to conserve bandwidth until the quota resets."

Feelsbadman.

Thank you for everything, I am a quite young user of this site but it will not be forgotten, I love this website.
Sorry for the lack of construction and the poor language level

Love, sincerely

admin,
Thank you, for everything. I've moved homes 7 times, in four different countries, since I first came across AT - probably from cyber12 or a-s or somewhere similar - and found yours to be the least obtrusive while being succinct in its presentation. Even with the occasional blackouts and "banning" by certain principlaties... you stuck to your guns and came this far. For all that and more, I salute you, Sir/Ma'am
When the invevitable 4chan thread about some obscure news site covering this internet-monumental event gets started, I hope you take some time to comment to those of us who will no doubt miss coming here.
May your work go down in internet lore/history - not in terms of controversy or infamy - but in terms of legacy, appreciation and lifetime achievement(?) brownie points(!) alongside the work of sites/services/etc like gg, mazui, ubw (and, of course, horrible!).
Sincerely,
HC

There's a bunch of heuristics and guesswork to try and handle typical cases. Yes, a lot of regexes.

It does retry for a while because sometimes the torrent gets renamed, or more info gets added to AniDB.

I've had the thought, but generally liked the idea of handling most of these cases in code, as it effectively improves the automated matching, whilst handing off the task means more manual work for someone.

There are backups, but I almost never use them. Restoring a backup often means you have to reprocess a bunch of stuff and deal with potential mismatches etc. It's basically a last resort.
Fortunately the design of this system has some redundancy (database is replicated from the updates server to the web servers), so I can often use that.

There's rate limiting here too; I'm probably more generous than Nyaa.si though, plus AT would get less traffic than Nyaa.
Otherwise I generally keep an eye on traffic patterns to see what looks problematic.

I've actually avoided doing that. Not having to co-ordinate has its perks, and I always wanted the option to walk away. Also harder to label the operation a 'conspiracy', which requires at least two people.

I'm thinking of putting them in a 7z (or maybe multiple). The smaller packages (like NZBs) will probably just be on the storage server.
The larger stuff will probably be a torrent.
I'm not sure if anyone's interested in the screenshot data, which is the largest data set.

I haven't really been keeping up with it, so I don't know.

Thank you for your service all these years.

This is a fantastic site. Thank you for over 10 years of amazing service. Hope everything goes well for you in life.

Thank you for all the years you maintained this site. It'll be missed! It was a great place and you put a lot of work into it. I appreciate that you're giving a few months of notice, because that increases the odds of someone being able to get a replacement up and running. I hope very much that someone will step in and do that, but even if they don't. the extra months of notice mean people have more time to look for inferior alternative options. I wish you the best of luck for the future.

Thanks for everything throughout the years. Always loved getting everything on AT because it was so organized, informative and user friendly. Felt like I found the holy grail of anime when I stumbled upon this site by accident a decade ago.

Best of luck on your future endeavors.

Life is fleeting, thanks for being a part of mine! (￣^￣)ゞ

The AniDB tagger does sound like a lot of manual work. You can probably look up the episode on anidb's database, but only after someone bothered adding metadata for it, which might take hours to days. So I'm guessing you have to have a lot of regular expressions to detect each group's naming scheme? Does this have to run regularly to re-classify episodes that are unclassified?
Recently I saw someone recommend "thexem.info" to some release group that posts on nyaa, but doesn't care to post on other sites with more stringent metadata requirements, in the context that they should post on other sites too.
Let's say, for example, CR decides to use absolute numbering for one anime, while for another it uses season numbers, other times this is mixed.
This seems like a pain to manage even for someone doing releases for a single group, as opposed to needing to manage this for every release out there.
Of course, someone making a clone of AT could just not classify it to save on time, then the burden is on the user to try/search all the names groups use until they get what they want.
It wouldn't be anywhere near as comfortable as AT, although I've encountered a number of times where an episode ends up in "Unsorted".
Maybe another option would be to offer users a way to contribute this metadata, something like anidb does, but even if that reduces the burden on you, now the burden is on moderators to resolve disputes or avoid abuse, and that starts complicating things again, not to mention it complicates backend implementation considerably.


> There's some degree of unpredictability that goes with managing services like these, e.g. a disk dies, DB corrupts itself, some AI bot goes crazy scraping things consuming lots of resources etc.
That's probably unavoidable, although at least you have backups? AT actually seems quite snappy, meanwhile TokyoTosho seems to be constantly dying probably due to high number of bot requests.
I often access this site through a proxy/VPN/Tor without any issues and unlike many sites you don't block them in an attempt to deal with bots. I've also seen some bots cause serious problems fo Apache, but nginx-like httpds do much better.
Any suggestions for how to deal with this? Nyaa tends to ratelimit, which sort of works, but I know many people tend to use your site's mirror of nyaa because they find their VPN is often ratelimited. TT doesn't, but is quite slow. Sites that use WAF's like cloudflare often break automation (RSS and others).

> There's also the me factor - as long as AT is around, I'd feel compelled to improve things. So I think I just need to walk away from it entirely.
Never found anyone to share some of the burden with you over the years? I suppose it is often hard to find people you can trust to handle things.

I think what's on everyone's mind right now is what will we transition to, if any of us should pick up the torch, how much work it would be.
Compared to the past, it seems fewer people are willing to do projects like these in the current year, but I hope to be proven wrong.

Not directly related, but how will the NZB and subs be released? A torrent? Maybe archive.org post? Posting it to usenet? A number of these? I'm assuming there's no point in scraping the NZBs/subs yourself as it would add a lot of load to the storage server, while an actual upload of all those tiny files would be a lot more efficient.
Do you know of anyone else that posts to usenet current releases? I'm aware of one site, but it seemed private and with questionable requirements like "no collectors", whatever that means, can't even make a large anime archive based on past postings like that?

Currently the average public anime pirate is in a tight spot: I'm aware of 2 large archives going back to 15 years of releases or so, and of course AT's nzbs.
One of those archives recently shut down (monthly costs were at least 15x yours, owner paid them out of his pocket too), the other is kind of incomplete, and with AT's nzbs going away, the only options left are private trackers for many, at least for older releases, not a pleasant spot to be in.

If this previous comment is yours, I don't understand your question, so you'll need to clarify.

We will miss you A.T~nyaan

This website is irreplaceable for many things

This is very depressing news. I love this site. I don't think there's anything like it and I worry there's never going to be again.  This community was great for NZB I know it feels pretty much irreplaceable.

I understand you need to rest and move on from this side but this is a dark day indeed.

Thanks for everything.

There are few other sources of subtitles, fewer well-curated catalogues.  Will be much missed.

thanks for everything ;-;

I found out about anime tosho just a year ago. And so far its the best place to download anime for me. I don't know if you will change your mind about shutting down or not but i wish this site to run a bit longer.

thank u admin for everything

If possible share you nyaa queries, please!!! It would be a huge help!

But thanks for all the fish and animus.

I guess I will be graduating from anime.

This was one of the places that still worked on XP.

sigh

That is good to hear.

You can already download partial database exports here. I'll make a full final dump once updates stop.
I'm looking to see what I can do with code releases. Some stuff is already available here.

I have personal income sources and not many responsibilities outside of AT.

In general, not a lot, and there's quite a number of days where I don't post at all. A lot of questions actually get answered by others here.

OHNO ;( I just found your site late last year :/ Hate to go back to Nyaa, which is a mess and you were the only quality indexer with primo AV1 releases.
I see the work you had to pour into this and I know for a fact it took a toll on you, even if it's part of your heart.

From the deepest of my heart - THANK YOU! <3

The cost of hosting this site is probably less than 2% of the admin salary, the average European salary. As the admin said, this website is very cheap, but the time spent is very long is this hobby.

It's amazing how dumb people really are.  15 years of running this site out of pocket... I believe... since I never really saw a donation link like a lot of other sites have. Do the admins have full time jobs, families, a life away from the computer screen? - (horror stories for most of the people who come here)  It's always me me me and not them. How much time does it take to answer people's questions and help with problems day after day? - (not counting the trolling, spamming, and flame wars)  As a downloader I thank the people who took the time to give us these uploads and thank Anime Tosho for making them available in an easy and organized way.   You guys will be missed.

Make your API, database and other resources publicly avaliable and open source.

Thanks a lot, will dig into it :)

I'll try to release all the backend scripts during the coming months, but for your question, the general gist is something like:

- run mkvmerge --identify --identification-format json [filename] - this will give you a list of everything with related info
- run mkvextract [func] [filename] where [func] is attachments/tracks/tags/chapters. For attachments/tracks you'll need to build the relevant command from the identify output above

There may be a few special cases to consider (like Vobsub being two files), but that's about it.