A feature which is frequently used by anime fansubbing groups, and almost never elsewhere.
Those groups often seem strangely bleeding-edge. They always adopt new features years before western groups will... I wonder why.
Those groups often seem strangely bleeding-edge. They always adopt new features years before western groups will... I wonder why.
As a result they're always on the hunt for options which could help them do their stuff and:
* they'll find out about other possibly interesting features at the same time as they're poring over release notes
* because they might have to re-export their rips multiple times during QC, they can toy around extensively with features & settings (especially on early exports when they'll most likely have typos & al and will have to redo the export anyway)
tl;dr: they have plenty of opportunities to find and try out bleeding-edge features.
I think the long answer has something to do with what they do benefitting from it more than other things, and the short answer is "because they're geeks"; so they perhaps care less about slow hardware adoption of things like 10-bit than other encoders.
Changes to those standards can cause significant upheaval, as happened when the standard def TV groups multilaterally agreed to switch from XviD in AVI to h.264 in MP4 container.
AIUI, the tertiary anime groups, who take h.264/MKV/ASS releases and re-encode as MP4 with burned in subtitles, cater to those using lower spec hardware but who still want high def video.