> Spencer Draper—best known as the Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader on YouTube, where he reviews the technical and historical aspects of digital releases with a rigor usually reserved for scholarly peer review
I will occasionally think about various topics "I'm really into <thing> but is anyone else in to <thing>??"
And then I read a quote like the above and I realize that, for lack of a better phrase, "it's a big world out there" and people have many varied interests.
Plus, if folks are REALLY into <thing> then they want different perspectives about <thing> even if it's a sub-topic that has been covered before.
In other words, write blog posts and make videos. Someone will consume that content and you never know where that leads.
This is what the early web was all about: people sharing their obscure hobbies and obsessions with everyone else, building small communities across the world. It was beautiful. It is still out there, to a degree, but unfortunately the socials have sucked the air out of publishing on external websites. Back in the day, this guy would have had his own blog or specific AV/cinephile forum, and now he's just another guy on youtube.
More otimistically, there were far fewer obsessive niches online then as the technical requirements were so large to set a site up. Even if the ones that existed were great.
There are a lot more obsessive YouTube channels and newsletters in a lot more varied niches today by comparison. I'm delighted regularly by new discoveries.
If you were obsessed with cinema and films, chances are you were already adjacent enough to the internet to blog about it. If you were obsessed with woodworking, probably you needed to wait for the smartphones and YT boom.
Unless you were one of the few people lucky enough to live in New York most of us never had access to movies beyond what you could find in a second tier Blockbuster on a Friday night. Or worse: cable television.
Nah. phpbb was a thing. Every niche crafting hobby imaginable had at least on "authoritative" forum-based online community before smartphones were a thing.
As someone who is also into <thing> but maybe not other <thing>, it's really great to sometimes delve into the deep world of <thing> for an hour or so to broaden ones perspective and get a general feel for what other people choose to spend their consciousness budget on.
Definitely one of the better sides of the information age is how easy this is now.
In other words: "A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox" [1]
"Writing online is a way to show people the 'wrinkles' of your brain. If you write enough, people can see how closely your winkles match their wrinkles. If the wrinkles match closely enough, you start to get followers who like the way you think. Those people can become friends and that leads to future life opportunities and experiences."
I have had a lot of things just kind of _happen_ by virtue of writing blogs and publishing software. These things all have very strange second lives that exist beyond your own initial conception of them that is consistently surprising.
One thing to note, is that the library of congress has the power to create the exceptions to the DMCA. The EFF lobbies for expansion of the exact powers the article is advocating for.
https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca-rulemaking
Kinda related, but I hate how the big studios go after old videogames and try to take them down. It looks like, in the future, this era will be called the "digital dark ages", not because all the stuff got lost to bitrot, but because all the stuff became illegal to own so that the studios could sell the new stuff again and again.
The home-computer world is especially interesting for old games. If something made it to a Nintendo or Sega console, it's probably very well-preserved, but I'd be surprised if even 1% of all video games made were released on consoles.
There's an unfathomable number of games that were released on the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, and most famously DOS that were made by one or two people, self-published, and have now completely fallen into obscurity to a point where it's not 100% clear who owns the copyright and who to give money even if you wanted to, which has led to the "probably-illegal-but-not-really-enforced" term of "Abandonware".
I honestly kind of think that Abandonware should be codified into law in the same way that trademarks are; if you're not actively giving me a legitimate way to buy your game then I don't think it should be illegal for me to get it illegitimately.
There's a book of BASIC software I have. I'd like to publish the programs online. I've tried to contact the author, but he's dead. I tried to contact the publisher, but they were acquired. I tried to contact the acquiring publisher, but they went out of business 20 years ago. The trail is cold there, and I imagine it's nearly impossible to figure out who owns the rights now.
Archive.org is full of copyrighted software without known authors. I know it because i'v found a lot of Pocket PC & Palm software from studios/companies that don't even exist anymore.
Someone else mentioned archive.org, check to see if they have a copy of it already - if not, you can always send it to them. They've got a full archival copy of all Nintendo 64 games (and others) so they seem to have some kind of legal protections / exemptions.
They're relying on the DMCA liability shield by allowing user uploaded files and removing them upon request by a the copyright holder - and then someone else uploads the same file.
"Methods of Orbit Determination for the Microcomputer" by Dan Boulet.
I think I found a PDF scan once, though even with OCR it wasn't exactly copy-pastable into a BASIC interpreter. I'd like to clean up the programs and put them on github, or something. Might end up just re-implement the algorithms (which are explained in the book), because there's no copyright on algorithms.
There are projects like eXoDOS that are attempting to provide a complete DOS archive. They are currently at version 6 that weighs in at just under 700GB. But they seem to be finding new stuff all the time, thus the versioning of the archive.
I played a bunch of random shareware games on our family's Apple IIgs and I'd love to find some of those again, but I was so young I can't really remember much other than like some visual images and vibes.
I would like to take this opportunity to pitch an old favourite of mine - Blast Doors (1996) by Freds Friends. Aka "The Nuclear Family Feud". Basically it's a 3D version of Artillery with some elevation physics, and a fun theme around nuclear weapons being fully legalized for home defence. So you're a bunch of grouchy neighbours in your mobile nuclear bunkers, firing off various warheads at eachother and saying quippy 90s things. It has a very distinct style and wry, absurdist sense of humor - and for a long time was available on the website of one of the developers (which was also delightfully 90s).
Fred Haslam was apparently also at Maxis and worked on Sim City 2000.
Nevermind the Commodore etc. who are preserved as abandonware. Remember FLASH games? They are mostly gone already. Even if you still have a copy, they can't be run anymore. There were some efforts made, but last I checked plenty of FLASH games still didn't work flawlessly.
Flashpoint Archive now has around 200K flash games that can be downloaded and ran locally. Im sure this is nothing compared to what used to exist but basically anything of note is in there
What do you use to run them locally? FLASH doesn't exist anymore and all the emulators do not properly work. I've got an archive of FLASH games myself, but I cannot play them anymore.
Flash Player in the browser doesn't exist anymore. There's still the standalone Flash Player that game with Adobe Flash/Animate, and it works fine. It doesn't depend on browser compatibility, since it runs on its own.
A Flash game I made a million years ago actually works in Ruffle now. It's really quite bad so I don't really want to prominently display it on my blog, but I might hide it somewhere as easter egg.
Ruffle is getting good enough where I think we might be properly archive all the Flash stuff.
I end up being drawn into and wasting time on a flash video site [1] at least once a year and there's always at least a bunch of animations not working properly. But it has gotten better over the years.
> There's an unfathomable number of games that were released on the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, and most famously DOS that were made by one or two people, self-published, and have now completely fallen into obscurity to a point where it's not 100% clear who owns the copyright and who to give money even if you wanted to, which has led to the "probably-illegal-but-not-really-enforced" term of "Abandonware".
Mostly unrelated but if you are looking for this "effervescence" in modern times, don't hesitate to take a look at Pico8 games and Ich.io.
On Pico 8, everything is free (except the one time pico 8 licence).
On Itch.io I bought a ridiculous 400 games pack for a few dollars a few years back.
You have to dig a little but I found more gems in both those libraries than I expected.
It should be. There are lots of good ideas of modifying copyrights so that its not the automatic 70 year after life of author (or what every it is now).
>unfathomable number of games that were released
One of the problems is that there are too many and hard to find curate to separate the good from the meh.
He intentionally samples less than 5 seconds iirc, and they still ding him, take all profits from the video, which took many many hours to create, and he cannot afford a lawsuit. It's absolutely ridiculous.
Wait til you hear it's (or at least was) possible to get dinged for 0.00 seconds.[1] That particular issue's probably solved by now, since Youtube requires claims to include a time stamp showing where the problem clip is. Nevermind the fact that wasn't a requirement to begin with. No wonder the corps ding every creator out there. It's free money with no downside to them. Nevermind the fact they're actively destroying culture.
That kind of works with smaller players (a random thai TV channel dinging people incorrectly is probably going to get some sort of time-out, and even if not, going to court against a smaller player like that is probably within the realm of possibility), but the big players have too much leverage. If Sony gets threatened with even minor punishments, they can simply say 'Fine. But then you have to remove all videos featuring gameplay from Sony Interactive Entertainment's games, or else we'll sue you for copyright infringement'. Even that example is fairly narrow and something that Sony is clearly allowed to do within the current bounds of copyright. They could go full nuclear and demand anything even vaguely related to Sony and its cultural hoard be taken of Youtube, and Youtube would have to comply, if nothing else, while the fight in court goes on.
Youtube has very little leverage, and Google/Youtube is very invested in not ending up in court over this kind of disputes, and the corps making claims know that.
The only actual fix is reforming or abolishing copyright.
We did try to reform copyright; that's what the DCMA was about. While I'm not a lawyer, my understanding is that if a rights holder alleges that a video infringes their rights, Google passes that on,and the creator of the video responds that it is fair use, Google is then immune to any liability per the DCMA (it would be a matter between the two parties). What I do not understand is why that process is not being followed here. Why is Google not insisting that the big media companies follow the law and use the process laid out by the DCMA?
The DMCA is absolutely not copyright reform. It was brought to us by the same mindset that brought us the Bono act. It's a bad piece of legislation that should have been replaced 20 years ago.
> What I do not understand is why that process is not being followed here. Why is Google not insisting that the big media companies follow the law and use the process laid out by the DCMA?
Because the DMCA and copyright in general proved to be a massive hindrance in actually having Youtube be workable, so they made their own system which functionally bypasses it, by giving in to the corps. The corps can either misuse the DMCA and make life hell for Youtube, or they can get in on the system with Youtube and make some cash on the side. There is no middle ground where the DMCA isn't misused, Youtube gets to exist and the corps don't get paid.
I’d love to see a similar three strikes enforcement of bogus claims. N strikes and the copyright immediately enters the public domain. Pick your battles very carefully.
Seems intuitively difficult to implement changes to the law to get this, but I can dream.
Agreed, and it was already like this in the 2000's (when I got involved in the abandonware scene). I remember the owner of Home of the Underdogs getting constantly in battles with takedown notices for games she only intended to preserve. Not piracy in the sense of "losing tons of money", nobody but enthusiasts cared about these games anymore.
There is zero practical difference between owning a game they don't allow you to play and not owning it. Thus if taking steps to make it playable is illegal, then the equivalent to ownership is illegal.
I hate how they are stopping the physical releases.
I guess I do understand it from the business perspective - I never buy a physical release myself - but ... 20 years later, it will be impossible to get these games.
Some time in the next 20 years, pirates will be able to download the game from the e-shop server and create a fake e-shop server where everything is free.
Isn't that one of the whole points of copyright? So the authors can print new copies and not have to compete with other people releasing copies they made?
Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.
The original game might be stopping people. It's not like games have a good track record of continuing to work for decades. DRM of all kinds poses a huge problem in this regard, but so does garden variety technological change. The GOG preservation team has quite a few videos about deeply technical work they needed to do to make e.g. Prince of Persia run properly on modern PCs. Sure I can just pirate a copy for PS2 and run it with PCSX2, but thats “piracy" (even though I still have a working original disc!).
So, no: there's a lot stopping people, especially copyright law, from keeping around working copies of their games.
> copyright expires
Not in your lifetime. 70 years after death if the author brings us out into centuries. Books written 60 years before my kids were born won't be out if copyright until they are in their 40s, for example.
Even GOG has some oddities were the available copy is not the original experience.
My recent experience of trying to play the original Mafia game.
Booting it up a GoG copy, I found that there was no music while driving (a core memory of my original play through).
This music has been removed...
This also affected small radios you'd find playing music, they now dead.
It really took away from the game experience
I ended up scratching out my original CD copy of the game, installing version 1.0 of the game. It had all the music and better visuals
The patches removed visual features for performance, not GoG's fault here, not sure why GoG hosts an inferior version, its quite a downgrade. The music removal I do not understand.
(This all was particually obvious in an early mission, where you have to beat up some parked cars with baseball bats, the patched version show minimal dents and zero scratches, and the radio sitting in the corner make no sound. This completely changes in the V1.0 copy, so much more atmosphere)
This happens because the original publisher signed a deal for the commercial music with a limited time.
So when that time expired, any further releases had to remove the music.
Another example of how copyright makes preservation difficult.
I mean, it's obvious: copyright seeks to create a mechanism to compensate creators by creating scarcity. They succeeded.
It turns out archiving those creations effectively is in direct tension with that scarcity. So we made a system to incentivizes creation, and then destruction of the creation. This is visible with the "copyright cliff" in books, but also the incredible difficulty of legally keeping computer programs running over the decades. Copyright's restrictions on derivative works, coupled with the insanely long copyright term, create a sort of digital wasteland, with only those willing to go underground having great collections of old programs.
A fun way to frame the copyright lifetime absurdity is to point out that in a few years there will be books published on the 1900s that will be copyright protected until the 2100s.
I think the real tragedy of abandonware is that copyright holders aggressively pursued abandonware sites "just in case", while not actually having any plans to redistribute the games legally. The abandonware sites were cracking (or making cracks available, whatever) and making these games playable in modern devices, thus ensuring these games were preserved, but copyright holders (through ESA [1] legal action or similar) simply wanted to stop this, with not plans otherwise. These games often weren't available otherwise. We're talking games of the DOS or C64 era, with no real commercial viability (unless bundled with thousand other games, which they eventually sometimes did, often using the cracks developed by the abandonware scene!).
It is often very difficult or even impossible to locate who currently owns the rights to some intellectual property in order to re-release it legally.[0]
Yeah, that's part of the copyright mess. It's partly described by Lawrence Lessig in his book "Free Culture" [1].
It seems petty to me that copyright holders (or their legal proxies) aggressively sought to shut down abandonware sites without any plan to make the software available in any shape. I mean, these were marginal pieces of software, no longer money earners, and the abandonware sites served as digital museums.
I refuse to believe this train of logic. By the time copyright expires AI will be able to handle removing copyright protection and making it able to run on modern hardware. The only point of doing it now instead of later is so that people commit copyright infringement.
> I refuse to believe this train of logic. By the time copyright expires AI will be able to handle removing copyright protection and making it able to run on modern hardware. The only point of doing it now instead of later is so that people commit copyright infringement.
This must be some powerful combination of magical thinking plus a lack of awareness of the context. In the early 2000's, the time I'm recounting, nobody thought of AI. And it wasn't about copyright infringement since the people in the abandonware community I'm talking about owned the goddamn games, they were trying to digitally preserve them and make them available to others. You really need to be familiar with these people and their goals before you "refuse to believe" anything; uninformed opinions just won't do.
It helps to get a perspective about both the time and the type of games we're discussing. In fact, if you were at all a participant of the community back then, you'd know in which little regard warez kiddies were held.
Even without AI the time it takes to break DRM is not decades and many schemes are trivial to break. And a lot of pirates who share copyrighted material had that material originate from a legal purchase. That doesn't make it any less worse.
I think you're simply unfamiliar with the topic. Have you ever interacted with abandonware communities from 20+ years ago? Since you're so sure their goal was copyright infringement.
In many cases, all that remains of these games is the cracked digital versions, the physical versions don't exist anymore. The abandonware crew did all the preserving, without them there wouldn't be anything to release, AI or not.
Also, a lot of "legally available" software from today (say, via GOG who do own the rights) has the fingerprints of crackers who made it possible for the software to run today.
> And a lot of pirates who share copyrighted material had that material originate from a legal purchase. That doesn't make it any less worse.
Regular pirates distribute recent games, which is obviously an entirely different matter. The abandonware community is/was concerned with preserving digital artifacts and games for posterity, and making old stuff playable today. Games that otherwise would have been lost, forgotten, or simply impossible to play. Those are completely different goals, and it's wrong to claim they did it "to commit copyright infringement".
I don't want to offend you, but your initial claim that abandonware crews decades ago should have somehow foreseen AI would make cracking/fixing easier is the most deranged thing I've read in a while. It also doesn't address that something you cannot play in your lifetime is effectively unavailable and lost to you.
>Since you're so sure their goal was copyright infringement.
It was the means towards their goal at the very least. These people could be maintaining a private archive of this software and other material in a temperature controlled room to preserve it until copyright expires. The legal paths of archiving exist, but these people choose to do it illegally often knowing that other people are going to down and use the software.
>The abandonware crew did all the preserving, without them there wouldn't be anything to release
Usually there is a copy or backup somewhere. Just because a pirated copy is more accessible that doesn't mean that pirates should get all of the credit.
>and it's wrong to claim they did it "to commit copyright infringement"
You are taking this too literally. "Regular pirates" don't want to commit copyright infringement either. It is just the means they achieve their actual goals.
>It also doesn't address that something you cannot play in your lifetime is effectively unavailable and lost to you.
No one has a right to use anyone else's software. I don't have a right to use Windows 3.1 in my lifetime. I don't have a right to play some random game from the 90s that only had 100 copies made. It's okay for software to be unavailable or be lost.
>No one has a right to use anyone else's software. I don't have a right to use Windows 3.1 in my lifetime. I don't have a right to play some random game from the 90s that only had 100 copies made. It's okay for software to be unavailable or be lost.
If you replace software with book, music or movie, would you still claim that? That would kill a lot of culture and cultural studies. Are software that different? More specifically, are games that different?
> [copyright infringement] It was the means towards their goal at the very least.
Which one is it? Before, you claimed it was their goal (what they wanted to do). You cannot have it both ways. The actual goal matters.
> These people could be maintaining a private archive of this software and other material in a temperature controlled room to preserve it until copyright expires. The legal paths of archiving exist, but these people choose to do it illegally often knowing that other people are going to down and use the software.
As I said, this just shows you are unfamiliar with the goals of abandonware. They were preserving the games in playable form, and they needed them to be played, because games are not static artifacts; they must be experienced. Besides, asking them to keep copies in temperature controlled rooms is ridiculous, these were passion projects done on a budget, out of commodity hardware and rented servers. This started before torrents by the way, and some abandonware communities frowned upon the notion of just downloading a big file of everything anyway.
> Usually there is a copy or backup somewhere
No, there often wasn't. Resist the urge to reply "well, theoretically..." and consider that maybe I know about this a bit more than you.
> You are taking this too literally. "Regular pirates" don't want to commit copyright infringement either. It is just the means they achieve their actual goals.
I'm taking this the way you wrote it, how else? Don't backpedal. The goals of pirates and abandonware crews were different (though, of course, there was some cross-pollination).
> No one has a right to use anyone else's software. I don't have a right to use Windows 3.1 in my lifetime. I don't have a right to play some random game from the 90s that only had 100 copies made. It's okay for software to be unavailable or be lost.
"Right" is a made-up thing (often broken by the industry that later enforced similar rights; do you know the history of Hollywood studios?). And no, it's not ok. Just because you think some made-up legal right trumps human cultural experience doesn't mean you're right.
It's not ok for software (or books, or movies) to be lost. It matters. Just not to you. I think basically 99% of your argument boils down to "I don't care enough about games preservation, and therefore I don't see the problem".
You are the only ones talking about goals so I'm not sure how to even answer this. I believe that pirates use the idea of preservation to justify why they pirate things and to make them feel less bad about breaking the law and stealing from others.
>out of commodity hardware and rented servers
Those servers were likely more expensive than properly storing it at their house.
>No, there often wasn't.
In practice there tends to be. If you are in the retro hardware / software community you will see rare things come up on auction. The idea that all copies just disappeared does not match reality.
>The goals of pirates and abandonware crews were different
But both of those groups distributed pirated software.
>It's not ok for software (or books, or movies) to be lost.
Then I would encourage you to preserve archival copies of things you want to see preserved.
> You are the only ones talking about goals so I'm not sure how to even answer this. I believe that pirates use the idea of preservation to justify why they pirate things and to make them feel less bad about breaking the law and stealing from others.
No, I'm not the only one: you mentioned what you thought was the goal in your initial comment (copyright infringement) and you're restating it now. Again it's very telling this is your "belief", but you acknowledged tacitly that you are unfamiliar with how abandonware projects worked, never having talked to the people. But I have. Do you think it would be maybe wise to acknowledge your beliefs are not based on actual knowledge?
The goals matter. In fact, they matter to you as well, because you've been arguing from a position of belief about the goals ("justify why the pirate things") that is simply incorrect. Why not update your knowledge instead?
> In practice there tends to be. If you are in the retro hardware / software community you will see rare things come up on auction. The idea that all copies just disappeared does not match reality.
This is simply false. I don't think you are into "the retro hardware / software" community at all, I dare you to claim otherwise. Also, rare things do come up on auction, but this doesn't mean as a norm they exist! And the people involved in these projects are breaking all kinds of copyrights and have always been persecuted for this, which you'd know if you were involved in those communities.
> But both of those groups [pirates and abandonware groups] distributed pirated software.
I talked about goals. Your answer is a non-sequitur, because it argues about something that wasn't in dispute. Please try not to do this.
> Then I would encourage you to preserve archival copies of things you want to see preserved.
You haven't the faintest idea of what I do or don't do. More importantly, we're not discussing me, are we? Please try sticking to the point.
At this point you're sounding like a mix of dishonesty and willful ignorance.
LLMs right are generating tons of software that will ultimately never be archived. I think you should come to terms with reality. Not everything is distributed to other people. Not everything is saved to disk. A LLM will generate a script to calculate something, then eventually that script is deleted to make room for something more important.
> Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.
Which people? In the case of abandonware, the original software is often not in the hands of the copyright holder anymore, due to neglect or lack of interest. Sometimes all or most relevant physical copies have become damaged. All that remains is a (cracked) file download in an abandonware website. Thanks to the abandonware community it gets preserved.
Besides, a piece of software history only serves its purpose if you can experience it. With no way of legally experiencing it (you cannot buy it) how do you propose to experience it? You cannot always wait it out, you might die first due to how long copyright lasts. Or is this nebulous concept of copyright more important than human experience?
> People who have a legal copy of the game can preserve that copy until copyright expires.
No, that's the point. "Can" doesn't mean they do; only "pirates" kept copies. Copyright owners didn't care, only got involved on the legal side of things. When copies became "legal" again, they were often cracked copies.
I know you keep ignoring this, but that's just because you're unfamiliar with how the abandonware community worked.
> You don't need to be able to experience it. There are many things in life that I can't experience and that's okay.
Games are not static works of art. A game needs to be played in order to be preserved. If you were familiar with the abandonware community you'd know this was their mission. Just because you don't care about this doesn't mean it's not important.
All your comments so far boil down to: "I don't care about old game preservation, and so I don't see the problem with copyrights." Which is a you rather than us kind of problem.
So why can't those "pirates" keep legal copies instead of an illegal one.
>A game needs to be played in order to be preserved
Does a bottle of wine need to be drunk in order to be preserved, or does storing it in a wine cellar preserve it. The idea that you have to be able to play something for it to count as being preserved is not accurate.
>I don't care about old game preservation, and so I don't see the problem with copyrights.
My opinion boils down to:
* Preservation does not justify piracy
* Preservation is often used as a euphemism for piracy
> So why can't those "pirates" keep legal copies instead of an illegal one.
Often those copies are legal (as in purchased; e.g. the abandonware archive of Home of the Underdogs started with the personal collection of legally purchased games of the owner; she also scanned manuals, cover artwork and whenever possible any goodies that came with the games; as much as possible from the game was preserved). Other times the legal copy just doesn't exist. In either case, the goal of games preservation is that the games are played; these are paintings hanging on a wall.
> Does a bottle of wine need to be drunk in order to be preserved, or does storing it in a wine cellar preserve it. The idea that you have to be able to play something for it to count as being preserved is not accurate.
Games are not wine, and you're wrong.
> Preservation does not justify piracy
Yes, it does. It's just that you're not interested in preservation. You went as far as claiming that it's ok for games/software to die; do you realize anything else you claim about "using AI" or "keeping copies somewhere" and "temperature controlled rooms" is more or less nonsense? The fundamental thing is that you don't care about preserving games. Everything else you're saying is a red herring. If you're ok with games being lost forever, then of course every measure to preserve them will seem excessive or pointless to you. (Please don't insist with "copyright holders surely have a copy...", I've already explained that they often don't. Do me the courtesy of not rehashing refuted claims).
> Preservation is often used as a euphemism for piracy
Wait, before you claimed it wasn't. Now you claim it is. Keep your story straight. Also, you more or less didn't dispute you're completely unfamiliar with abandonware, only basing your opinions on prejudice (and some deranged nonsense about AI), so it's very hard to take your arguments seriously.
>the goal of games preservation is that the games are played
If their is a goal to allow people without a license to play a game protected by copyright to play the game, I can not support it.
>Games are not wine, and you're wrong.
But both can only be experienced by taking it out of where its being preserved and playing / drinking it.
>Yes, it does. It's just that you're not interested in preservation.
I do support preservation but not the flavor of preservation which is piracy. For example someone finds "lost media" and since it's "lost media" that means they can just upload a TV episode protected by copyright for others to watch for free.
>Wait, before you claimed it wasn't. Now you claim it is. Keep your story straight
This confusion is intentionally done by pirates to make what they are doing sound legitimate. There are 2 flavors of preservation. Legal preservation which follows the law in how one preserves the work and illegal preservation which is essentially piracy.
> If their is a goal to allow people without a license to play a game protected by copyright to play the game, I can not support it.
> I do support preservation but not the flavor of preservation which is piracy. For example someone finds "lost media" and since it's "lost media" that means they can just upload a TV episode protected by copyright for others to watch for free.
As established previously, this all stems from you not valuing preservation. If you value copyright over culture, you don't value culture. "Piracy" and "copyright" are arbitrary terms, and copyright is not a goal in itself; it sometimes gets in the way.
> This confusion is intentionally done by pirates to make what they are doing sound legitimate. There are 2 flavors of preservation. Legal preservation which follows the law in how one preserves the work and illegal preservation which is essentially piracy.
The confusion is only created by you. Out of malice, I must assume at this point, since you've implicitly acknowledged you didn't engage with abandonware communities and therefore can only infer (incorrectly) what their motives were. I, in contrast, did engage, talked to the owner of HOTU (one of the largest ones back in the day) and know how they collected games and what their motives were. Having no counter to this, you keep ignoring it and instead rehash the same debunked points.
There's only one kind of preservation: the one that actually preserves stuff.
At this point I know you understand this, you're just willfully ignorant or maliciously distorting the argument.
> Isn't that one of the whole points of copyright? So the authors can print new copies and not have to compete with other people releasing copies they made?
The more important point of copyright is 'to promote the progress of the useful arts'. The 'securing for a limited time to authors and inventors, the exclusive right to their writings and inventions' is just the means. Do the means in this case seem to work well in achieving that goal?
> Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.
Except the 70+ years it takes before you're legally allowed to publish it, or even just adapt it. If I'm going to play things by the book, even if I archive it when I'm 10 years old, sales stop on day two of the copyright period, and the rights expire the day after it's 70 years years old, I will be 80+ years old when I'm legally allowed to let people download it, or I myself can publish an adaptation (or more likely, I'll have died and my archive version will be lost in the estate sale).
Copyright law is about finding a balance between, on one side, incentivizing creators via granting them a legal monopoly on publishing, and on the other side, the philosophical notion of freedom of speech, which would allow anyone to republish, remix, and repurpose any preexisting work. The original formulation of this legal monopoly was that it was supposed to be short enough that it would expire well within the average person's lifetime, a notion which has long been gutted via regulatory capture.
I am am an amateur recordist, I absolutely love to bootleg concerts and gigs and things, as in: make my own recordings of live music and so on. I have shared everything in the appropriate places, also. I believe it is an essential artistic expression: to record the nature of the world around you for the future.
So, I do it a bit.
I think this ethos can be applied in many ways and with different media; preservationism is a high value objective. The future needs it, kinda.
This reminds me I have some film that I need to get digitized and uploaded to IA. From what I can tell they are clips from concerts in the Chicago area in the 1980s. And I think this proves GPs point, because to be honest I personally have no interest in live music, but when I found those in a can at a thrift store for $20, you bet your ass I bought them to be preserved and not turned into someone's ill-advised art project (or something equally destructive). When I see something that I know /someone/ will value I will always do what I can to save it from destruction/the trash/someone who doesn't know the value.
On one side, the dominant consumer society we live in is extremely busy churning through anything that can be sold as a product and then thrown away so that the new can replace them. Buildings go up as quickly as they come down, and we digitize books just to destroy them in pursuit of productivity gains we may or may not ever get. And of course, conflicts and war continue to destroy priceless artefacts, like they've always done.
On the other side, when you consider objective metrics, I don't think humanity ever spent so much effort and resources into preserving the past as today. Archaeology was basically invented less than 250 years ago, and now it's everywhere and continuously expanding. A lot of places are now not even allowed to change, museums are plentiful and overflowing, and the internet created a completely new world of human creation that we are increasingly trying to preserve (IA etc).
This is true but people also use it as a magic shield to (needlessly IMO) justify their piracy, even though they are 1) only downloading things they happen to like and 2) don’t even follow a basic 3-2-1 backup protocol, let alone anything remotely resembling SOP for preservation.
I bet not even 1 in 1000 people pirating are doing it primarily as a preservation exercise.
The Library of Congress is selective about what it preserves too, as is every museum. No single entity could possibly hope to preserve every film, it takes a community.
> don’t even follow a basic 3-2-1 backup protocol
The swarm is the backup. You can't beat hundreds of hash-checked copies across the globe.
> I bet not even 1 in 1000 people pirating are doing it primarily as a preservation exercise.
I bet you're right. Isn't it wonderful, then, that those 1 in 1000 (who are overrepresented in tracker admin and release group/scene work) are able to harness those selfish impulses and turn them into the most complete, accessible, and durable distributed art preservation project in human history.
There are some preservation efforts on a couple of the big movie trackers. One is "donate Xtb of space and use this script to manage it" so you don't choose the torrents, they get assigned till your donated space is full.
In Another gives bonuses for adopting torrents where the original seeder doesn't want to/can't seed anymore.
Neither are perfect but as one of those 1 in 1000 its nice to help where I can.
> The Library of Congress is selective about what it preserves too, as is every museum. No single entity could possibly hope to preserve every film, it takes a community.
You can’t possibly compare this to yet another person downloading all of Friends to watch off their hard drive, and most of these people aren’t seeding back anyway, so they’re not even part of the swarm.
I don’t object to piracy but I do object to preservation arguments made for/by people who are in no way thinking along those lines. I can’t buy tailgating on some clearly inapplicable altruism argument.
Meanwhile, there's examples of long lost footage being found again precisely because people were recording/copying/pirating for their own purposes. I'm thinking explicitly of Doctor Who footage that the BBC overwrote (tape was expensive), but years later was found on privately recorded video tapes left in someone's shed.
Personally, I enjoy pirating less well-known scifi/horror films and series. It's surprising how relatively recent productions can "disappear" when there's no streaming company interested in it. My usual example of disappearing TV is the third season of "Monkey Dust". The music rights weren't agreed, so the third season never made it to DVD and is impossible to watch legally, but hopefully people like me will keep it available nonetheless.
There's also companies that like to censor previous output, such as Disney and their pro-Nazi propaganda.
They were in no way pirated, they were recorded under the UK's copyright exemption for this purpose.
Also that is a vanishingly small amount of content, the vast majority of recovered Doctor Who episodes were found from broadcaster archives, not the public.
> They were in no way pirated, they were recorded under the UK's copyright exemption for this purpose.
That's a bit of a grey area as IIRC videotaping TV was allowed for "time-shifting", but not for keeping long term. Whether that counts as pirating is debatable.
> Also that is a vanishingly small amount of content
Yes, that was one instance that I was recalling, but I think there's been other examples of missing episodes such as Hancock's Half Hour. I just think it's a shame that productions of historical value are lost due to the legality of personal copying although that's more relevant to shows from the 80s/90s/2000s when copying technology was widely available.
Yep, definitely! I know of instances where professional archives and libraries work with specialized torrent sites to archive content directly and these days that's sometimes necessary with how content is locked down, games are dependent on a server or DRM schemes don't make archiving easy.
You frequently hear of cases where the last remaining official copy got lost and only due to some fan service (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49694382) data could be recovered.
I’m absolutely obsessed with it. For me it’s driven purely from childhood nostalgia. In particular, Macintosh games. I want, and want others to have that warm excitement of nostalgia when they re-discover something forgotten.
"“To me, it [the original Star Wars trilogy] doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it.” - George Lucas, 2004
It is insane how much George Lucas has edited the original Star Wars trilogy. I think no movies have had more edits over time than Star Wars.
> It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it.” - George Lucas, 2004
I don't begrudge any director the freedom to go back and revise their work to more perfectly realize their creative vision. The problem is when they try to erase the original released version of an historically significant film by making it completely unavailable. George had no issue accepting the accolades and billions of dollars from the original trilogy. It's fine to later release his 'perfect vision' but in today's digital media era, there's zero reason or justification to make the originals unavailable. Be proud of what your younger self made and let fans decide which they version they want to watch.
I'm not just being post-hoc selective here. I think original theatrical releases of classics should remain available even in cases like Blade Runner where the OG theatrical release is a widely-hated, critically panned abomination made by a clueless executive producer without the involvement of the director, writer or main star and released over their strong objections. It is objectively awful and by far the worst release of the film - but I still believe even that miserable train wreck should remain available forever (perhaps with appropriate warning labels :-), even if only as a cautionary tale to future clueless executive producers).
Since you brought up Blade Runner (and I agree with all your points, by the way) I'm deeply offended by how the Final Cut decided to add all these wonderful improvements yet Ridley Scott agreed to completely mess up the color grading. What's up with the new greenish tint? Did he think it would make Blade Runner look more modern or what?
Fortunately, we can still watch the Director's Cut. It's a shame, too, because the Final Cut has a lot of improvements otherwise (e.g. fixing Zhora's face is a major one).
I've heard that Ridley was busy shooting another film when the Final Cut was in production so he wasn't that involved personally. Most of the improvements were pre-approved in bullet point form, meaning the editor probably did much of what we both like about it in advance and Ridley was there in person only to supervise the color grade and to sign-off on changes.
Personally, when it comes to revisiting revered classics many years later, I think directors (even good ones) should focus on correcting obvious technical errors like matte lines in effects, muffled audio or the proverbial boom mike at the edge of a shot. They need to resist the urge to make non-technical stylistic changes like color grading or noise reduction (looking at you James Cameron). Things like adding back cut shots or recutting scenes to change pacing need to be carefully considered and only done when the original cut was obviously in error or not what the director intended at the time - perhaps due to not having time/budget to reshoot, overdub or being overruled by the studio or producer.
When a film has become a classic, and is of historic importance, it should be respected as an artifact of its time and a snapshot of a director's abilities, style and tastes at that point in their development. They should be thankful for the opportunity and stick to making it what their original intent was then, not what they'd do if they made it now. Otherwise, they're quickly on a slippery slope toward a strange stylistic hybrid between then and now.
James Cameron's Aliens "Directors Cut" is an example of a mixed bag. Fixing the VFX matte lines is a definite plus but the excessive noise reduction sucks all the texture out of the image. Adding back the lengthy sequence at the beginning of the film showing Newt and her family encountering the Aliens on the mining colony removes much of the suspense and mystery, making the film worse IMHO. Cameron cut that scene after test screenings for good reason which makes the addition feel like it was motivated by the studio's desire to market the Director's Cut with "X Minutes of New Footage!".
The same is true of the entire ~20 min French colonist digression in the Apocalypse Now Director's Cut. It's mildly interesting from an historical point of view but it brings the entire movie to a grinding WTF halt. It's a clear example of putting a mistake back into a film that should never have been in the script in the first place. The 'Newt's Family' scene in Aliens is just unnecessary but it was probably hard to know that until seeing a rough cut.
This opinion rubs me the wrong way. I don't think you meant it like this, but it really feels like when someone creates something, they now have some obligation to society, should society deem it good enough.
In my opinion, there is absolutely nothing to support this idea. If I make something, I can change it however I want, as many times as I want, and throw away old copies - even if you really really liked those old copies. It's my art, not yours.
Maybe one could make the argument that George Lucas is not the only artist here, and I'd agree with that, but to imply that society is owed something that someone created of their own volition, simply because society happens to like it, feels wrong. He can change it however he wants until the day he dies, as far as I'm concerned.
Society grants you the right to enforce what we call intellectual property. Enforcing that concept is rather new, and some of humanities biggest cultural works predate it.
The timespan for which we grant a creator the sole right to decide about his work is arbitrary and, last but not least, almost all of our cultural works are derivative in nature, so what actually is our own work is equally arbitrary defined.
In the existing framework he can do what he did, but the current one is not the only possible.
I don't see why it matters to the argument if the original creator is alive.
I also don't believe the creator has a special obligation to make things available. But I generally agree with the GP, once something is released and widely popular, society now shares some ownership. There should be some way to access it, at least as part of the historical record.
It's not the creator's responsibility to facilitate that, but they also shouldn't be able to hinder it.
Authors, painters, musicians (and at some points in my life I've considered myself among them) can have a lot of intent in creating something, and a lot of intent later to alter something, but at no point do I believe an artist owns their art once released/sold, outside of IP laws. What I mean is George Lucas has the legal right to only release the shitty remastered versions, but he certainly can't dictate they're better.
The whole concept of "death of the author" is about how regardless how a writer meant something to be interpreted, if another interpretation gets more traction, and is more coherent, it's hard to argue it's wrong.
I’m not implying that Lucas gets to decide which cut is best, just that it’s his right to decide what “Star Wars” actually refers to.
What the movie means, how it affects people, how it reflects on the author, etc. are all out of his control, but the public doesn’t get to argue with him on what it actually IS.
Once the author dies, all bets are off because things must continue to change to remain accessible to others. Translations, data format changes, viewing methods, etc. all can require adaptations. Since we can no longer ask the author their opinion, we take the works as a whole. No future discussion of SW would be complete without taking time to reference the changes it underwent over time. If nothing else, it adds necessary context to understand the media.
IMO it’s also kind of a blessing. It gives us multiple angles to consider a work from when squeezing more meaning out of it 100 years down the road.
> they now have some obligation to society, should society deem it good enough.
I was expressing a wish or, perhaps an ideal, not an obligation. I don't think there's any implied ethical, moral or legal duty on a creator to do what their patrons or fans want. As an amatuer filmmaker who's also worked in the industry creating technology for cinematic storytelling, I'm as pro-creator as can be.
And, full-disclosure, my feelings about Star Wars are 'complicated'. In 1977 I'd just become a teenager when I saw Star Wars at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood. It not only rocked my world, it made me want to be a filmmaker and changed the course of my life. Turns out I was better at software than filmmaking. Fortunately, as film became digital, my interests collided :-).
Decades later my software was used extensively to make several Star Wars films including hundreds of shots in Phantom Menace. I was at the ranch many times during production and was back at the Chinese theater for the premiere of TPM - almost exactly 22 years to the day after my life was changed in that theater. Prior to the premiere I'd only seen storyboards and individual shots so, going in, my expectations were as sky-high as any fan. But, like many hardcore fans, I felt let down by Phantom Menace. Did George owe fans the film they wanted him to make? Nope, not at all. He made the film he wanted to make. Even though I was disappointed by TPM, it hasn't changed how much I respect George. He's still a remarkable filmmaker.
I see why people think this, but it is also anti-social. Once you've introduced art to the public market, two things happen:
- people form a relationship with and an emotional response to the art
- they give you money for the art
Now, the latter gets into questions like Sony or Steam removing games or films which people have previously purchased. A consumer rights question. People tend to feel they have been treated like a sucker when the publisher does this.
The former you are effectively rescinding the emotional relationship with the art. A much more complicated question. This can certainly be pathological - see kpop and the idol industry. But I don't think it's unfair to say that insisting that the art relationship should be totally unilateral and you owe the audience nothing, is going to anger the audience.
I get your point, but also on the other hand, art is subjective, and people subjectively appreciate older / imperfect versions of things. Consider film grain - it's an artifact, an unintentional or unwanted side-effect of how films used to be made. But because it was a part of a production, people wanted it back - it gets added artificially to modern films, added as filters to video games, and video encoding has special features to support it without affecting compression negatively too much.
Or take video games, particularly 2d / pixelart ones - they were built for CRT displays and relatively low resolutions. They can remake them now with multiples of the original resolution and fidelity, but for many people it loses some of it. Some art doesn't translate at all - take this digitized artwork from Castlevania, which was digitized specifically for display on CRT displays but which loses all charm (e.g. the eyes reduced to a single pixel) when rendered somewhere else: https://x.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616587
But this probably applies to film as well; if a film was made for a 35mm projector from the 70's, it won't look good or anywhere near that "experience" on a modern day 4K OLED display without editing.
At the end of the day I think the viewer should be given options and choices. And for a good while it looked like they would - with DVD and blu-ray offering options like different audio tracks, camera angles, and different versions of the same film in one package. But that never materialized because I suppose it's only a wish from purists. And at that point they're competing with piracy and internet hobbyists like the article.
I could not agree more emphatically with your points on CRTs, OLEDs, etc. So I hope you won't mind me quibbling on one statement.
> Consider film grain - it's an artifact, an unintentional or unwanted side-effect of how films used to be made.
I don't think it's quite so binary. Depending on the context and intent, film grain can be an undesirable artifact of limited celluloid chemistry, optics and available light. But it can also be an expressive aspect of the artistic medium no different than depth of field, focal length, color timing, grading, etc.
There are certainly examples of low light scenes where it's clear the filmmaker reached the limits of then-available optics and chemistry and they were forced into compromises such using higher-speed film and/or 'pushing' the chemistry during film processing. These can increase grain and the result is often shadow detail being lost in the noise floor. I agree that's always bad.
But there are also wonderful examples where directors and DPs very intentionally selected film stocks for their unique texture, gamma curve, color sensitivity, etc as an expressive choice. In those cases, it's no different than a painter intentionally using different canvas textures, brush bristles and pigment viscosity as part of their expressive palatte. In this form, the unique textures of different film stocks are often referred to as 'image structure' (a less pejorative term than 'grain' which is often construed negatively).
> But because it was a part of a production, people wanted it back
Artists hate any limitations on their vision, whether technical, financial or societal. They want maximum expressive freedom yet also grudingly concede pushing against limitations often elevates their work to new heights. When film grain was a limitation they struggled against, they hated it. When grain is an artistic element giving their image texture, they want in their toolbox.
To be clear, not all chemical, optical or technical limitations from the past were expressively useful. No VFX artists are pining for the black matte outlines from misregistered optical printing or generational mismatch in multi-pass composites. :-) Interestingly, as optics, lighting instruments and film sensitivity improved in the late B&W era, it was briefly trendy among some cinematographers to abandon depth of field as an unfortunate historical limitation of the past. Of course, it was just an over-reaction to a long-resented limitation finally becoming a choice and DoF remained an invaluable storytelling tool in the hands of a master (https://creativecow.net/depth-of-field-gregg-toland-citizen-...). I just want to avoid similarly over-reacting by dismissing the creative value of image structure and texture as we leave unwanted graininess in the past.
I suspect we'd have several enjoyable beers debating edge cases; which visual artifacts of past technical limitations can arguably have expressive utility to visual storytellers going forward and which have no real redeeming qualities outside retro callbacks and nostalgia? I'll nominate anamophic lens flares to start: https://theasc.com/article/star-trek-into-darkness/. My take: J.J. went overboard intentionally milking them in ST:ID but I'd be horrified if Spielberg digitally removed them from Close Encounters. Philosophically, I think the same principles broadly apply to retro gaming and preservation. So much so I built a custom arcade emulation cabinet around a 27" Wells-Gardner 9200 quad-sync analog RGB CRT and Radeon R9 380x. To me, it's about authentically preserving original artistic intent, especially when the original creators placed individual pixels by hand specifically to leverage certain analog video artifacts.
Since at least 1100 CE, even artists have disagreed with you. "The Moving Hand writes, and having written, moves on. Nor all your piety nor wit shall remove half a line of it."
You don't own art that has been released to the public, anymore than you own a car or pizza that you sold.
Buying art does not give you any rights to force the owner to do anything, either.
This is where IP law gets so confusing in the modern world. You can "buy" access to IP, and it feels like you are buying the thing, but you are not. Netflix is under no obligation to provide s04e01 of CSI:Indianapolis, even if that's the sole reason you subscribed.
I'm not sure what you are arguing for. Should an artist be able to remove a viewing of a film that's already occurred if they dislike the final product? Or should George be able to forbid me to watch a released version of SW where Han shoots first?
I also remembered that scene and the early Jabba the Hutt scene from the novelisation. And because I knew them from the book, I initially loved it when the Special Editions added them back. Until I realised they don't really work. Well, Biggs does, but Jabba becomes much less terrifying from having Han talk to him like that and even walking over his tail. Jabba being just a feared name works so much better.
Yes!! I remember reading this book at the library as a kid, and for years afterwards I wondered if I had just hallucinated the whole thing.
I think it's a really important scene, and I'm sad that it was cut from the movie.
Side note: the (extremely well-done) Star Wars Radio Drama [0] included a great many expanded scenes on Tattoine (with quite a bit of expansoin on Tosche Station), and I think those scenes (which include the aforementioned scene with Biggs) really add to the richness and flavor of the setting.
If you're a fan of Star Wars and haven't yet listened to the radio drama, I highly recommend it!
There was also Luke looking up at the space battle and "Treadwell" the droid, which would have played just before all of the Biggs scenes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDPZfPe5F-w (a cleaner version is shown in How Star Wars was saved in the edit)
It doesn't affect the specific point in question here, but it's probably best to treat the RocketJump video with caution: https://youtube.com/watch?v=olqVGz6mOVE .
Yeah I knew someone would point out the controversy. Unfortunately the only other version of the clip I could find was some super grainy version, but I hadn't seen that rebuttal. Amazing.
There was also a comic book that came out before the movie.
In the scene where the sand people shoot R2D2, it looked like the other way around so it was quite confusing to see them captured in the next frame. Who knew the little guy didn't have a blaster?
Another part of the story a lot of people don't know is apparently Lucas's cut of the original Star Wars was horrible, so his wife came in and redid everything and that's the version that went to theaters. And she was the editor on the remaining two of the original trilogy as well.
I think it's pretty clear to everyone now that when Lucas is flying solo his final output is... not great. He obviously imagined a universe a lot of people find compelling, but wasn't always the best person to realize the vision of that universe.
I know it's a meme at this point, but being an "idea person" is legitimately a thing. But there is also being self-aware enough to recognize what your strengths are and when you should call in reinforcements, as it were, to fill in where there's a need. Seems there's a spectrum where people fall in how readily they will recognize this and Lucas falls more towards the reluctant side perhaps.
On a similar vein, Gene Roddenberry was pretty similar with Star Trek. He had a pretty big universe imagined, got the scaffolding in for it, but all the best works under the name of Star Trek were made by other people. Anything Gene Roddenberry was directly involved in as a script writer (see: many episodes of the original and first two seasons of The Next Generation) are generally the weakest and worst parts of Star Trek.
Yeah, also I think part of that was Gene wanted to portray a more optimistic vision of the future as a principled thing, which I get, but that also made Classic and TNG feel a bit superficial and low stakes a lot of the time. DS9 is personally my favorite series, mostly because of the age I was when it came out, but also because I liked that they shifted it to be a bit less idealistic.
I still think TNG was the best, but DS9 was good too. In hindsight though, it seems like it was good to have someone like Roddenberry doggedly insisting upon his positive vision for the future. The modern Star Trek series, where there's nobody pushing for the utopian vision any more, are kind of depressing and not really in line with the idea that humanity will eventually be able to improve itself and leave behind the pettiness that holds us back today.
Yeah, I think that's fair. IMO DS9 got the balance right because it's a bit more gritty than TNG, accepts more complexity and ambiguity, but still holds up those ideals as something worth striving for even against severe difficulties.
I'm sad to say the newest Trek shows have just missed me.
Yeah same, there was the one that was both "in the past" (taking place before TNG I believe) but thanks to mushroom magic they had instant teleportation and then timey-wimey stuff so it was also a hypermodern show. The melodrama was just grating on me after a while.
Then there was Picard which actually showed some promise but I couldn't find myself caring about the new characters they tried to introduce on top of the layers of nostalgia. I heard it got a soft reboot or new writers for season 3 but I have no idea, I haven't heard anything about it.
Voyager was still good but that was the last show I actually watched on the regular.
Yeah it's aged phenomenally well, and makes more modern Star Treks so frustratingly awful. The Visitor is arguably one of the best episodes of any Star Trek ever, Past Tense was basically prophetic. And so many of the episodes are extremely insightful on human nature - For the Uniform where good can so easily become evil - In the Pale Moonlight being of a similar nature, and so many more.
One of the things I'm most looking forward to is watching the series with my kids when they're old enough.
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Unrelated but the TNG episode Tapestry also deserves a mention. [1] Wtf happened to media. Writers used to actually understand people, now everything is so trite.
I watched it when it was originally on in the 90's. As the show got more serialized it was like a cliff hanger or huge event every few weeks. Then we got a great 10 episode arc to end the series.
Roddenberry specifically wasn't needed, Rick Berman was able to learn from his vision and maintain it. After Roddenberry died, Berman was able to maintain TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise all with the Star Trek ideals that Roddenberry always fought to maintain when he was alive. Even as Deep Space Nine and Enterprise had to seemingly throw the ideals out the window temporarily, with the Dominion and Xindi arcs, just to better demonstrate why they were so badly needed in the first place.
Unfortunately, we don't have a Rick Berman, or anyone else that maintains the same ideals, at the helm anymore.
One huge addition that she created entirely in the edit is the "ticking clock" during the final battle. Originally there was no count down to the Death Star destroying the base. Imagine how much tension would be lost without that.
> I think it's pretty clear to everyone now that when Lucas is flying solo his final output is... not great.
The evidence is pretty compelling that George had a lot of great ideas as well as some not-so-great ideas and his own ability to distinguish between the two was... less than ideal. Thus his best work was from those times he collaborated closely with talented people who had significant input and there was a strong, empowered curator. Positive examples include the great results on Star Wars, the fact that Empire is so good and his work on Raiders with Spielberg. A clear negative example is Phantom Menace where George was in absolute control.
A lot of fantastically talented creators simply shouldn't have unchecked 'final cut' over their own output. It's really nothing to be ashamed of, and frankly, is more common than not.
This is oft-repeated mythology that became popular on reddit; it's part of the campaign of feminist revisionism that's commonplace over there regardless of whether it matches reality or not. They constantly try to argue that it must have been a case of a man getting credit for work a woman did, even when the woman concerned made no such claim or even received appropriate credit.
Marcia Lucas along with two other editors won the Film Editing Oscar for Star Wars/ANH/Ep. 4 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1dW6bNBzN8&t=52s ): she was no doubt a very good editor. Neither she nor the other two "saved Star Wars in the edit" in the manner often claimed. For example, Marcia Lucas fought to keep the teen-movie version of the opening with Luke meeting Biggs and others at Tosche Station in Tatooine, while George Lucas had always preferred to begin the Tatooine segment with the droids https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olqVGz6mOVE&t=1407s .
There’s no way to know one way or another whether her editing “saved” it. There’s no other original edit without her, so it’s an unfalsifiable claim.
I was just responding to the poster claiming it was some sort of feminist conspiracy theory to claim that she was an editor on the film and did a good job. She did edit the film, and a plurality of her peers thought the editing was a good enough job to award the most prestigious award in the industry for the work.
It's reasonably clear that Star Wars would have been in some trouble if it had come out with anything like the original John Jympson edit, and in that sense it's fairly safe to say that Star Wars truly was saved in the edit. (Though that's also not very surprising, as by all accounts it's not particularly unusual for a good completed film to have had a shaky first edit.) But it seems that all the evidence suggests that George Lucas was always unhappy with Jympson's editing and understood its problems, and that it was he who selected three professional editors including Marcia Lucas to work on a re-edit which achieved his high-level creative intentions and was closely and actively supervised by him, and in which he did some of the hands-on editing to boot. There doesn't seem to be much to support the idea that the (other) editors took Star Wars out of the hands of a hapless George Lucas and bestowed on him a film which had been reworked beyond his own capabilities or vision, which is the usual "saved in the edit" claim, let alone that Marcia Lucas alone was largely responsible for that supposed feat, which is what was claimed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49883758 .
Again, I never claimed she wasn’t good at her job or didn’t earn some credit for her work on New Hope. I guess I wrongly expected HN users to have better reading comprehension and nuance than redditors. My point was entirely that in this specific instance, her contribution was overemphasized by a brigade of redditors spreading misinformation.
It’s well known that a group of fans who follow a certain youtube channel well known among star wars enthusiasts share the channel’s opinions on sites like reddit, and these became an oft-repeated myth spread there to discredit Lucas because they (like the channel admins) despise the sequel trilogy. They also don’t limit themselves to praising her editing work, but often claim that she was the _real_ creator of star wars and Lucas wouldn’t have been anywhere near as big without her. I don’t have any side on this, I am not particularly fond of the sequel trilogy nor a big fan of Lucas, but what I do dislike is the myth-making constantly pushed about various things on reddit.
I think it's justifiable to call out her contribution. She was an excellent editor without Star Wars, her work includes American Graffiti and Taxi Driver.
I consider her a part of what makes the original trilogy great but I don't think it diminishes Lucas' contribution. No one person is "what makes it great". Plus the internet loves the underdog or a a "TIL"
If you had reading comprehension, you’d understand that my comment was about the excess claims, not real ones. Marie Curie has long been known for her achievements, nobody in recent history claimed otherwise. I guess reading comprehension is too much to assume nowadays.
I have the original trilogy's original version on VHS still, and just recently watched them. I would say they hold up very well and weren't really in need of any post release changes or updates. The effects look great today compared to some other movies that actually came out later, probably because Star Wars used more practical effects vs some early Sci-Fi CGI that ended up not aging as well.
The changes are mostly just window dressings around the original footage, like extra CGI in transition scenes. They don't really change much of the core movie experience. It does end up causing some funny side effects though. Like when the main characters move from one place to another you'll see a splashy dinosaur like creature or fancy robot, but once they actually arrive in the scene the background falls back to the original with a lot less of that added CGI action.
Luckily, it seems like they are all being undone for the 50th next year. Most of them, anyway. We'll have to wait to see the release to be sure, but it's a definite improvement. Maybe the definitive version, finally.
I was talking to Bob Gale once about this topic and he said that him and Zemeckis had put a veto clause in their contract when they sold BTTF to Universal in the 90s giving them the power over any later fuckery with the releases, while they are alive. This was during the height of the 3D TV craze and he said Universal had asked for permission to do a 2D->3D conversion of BTTF and both Bobs had refused. So there's one franchise at least that won't get dicked with in the near future.
[I'm not totally against 2D->3D conversions if done right. The Titanic conversion looks like it was filmed 3D-native, beautifully done. The Star Wars: Episode 1 conversion is essentially unwatchable and killed the whole project.]
It's pretty funny, he took something that was very much a product of its time and beloved in large part for that reasons, and slowly turned it into something even hardcore fans want nothing to do with.
Very little was really lost IMO if you look at those movies with an eye free of nostalgia, but I'm sure many MANY people would disagree with that.
I think the main series has turned to trash, but isn’t it still commercially successful? I personally adored Andor, but even my parents couldn’t sit through the first couple episodes because they’re slow moving.
Massively profitable afaik, up until the last of the new trilogy which underperformed (still made ~$300mil box office using standard metrics). Andor I agree was the first Star Wars property I'd call genuinely excellent, after 'The Empire Strikes Back', but obviously that's hugely dictated by my personal taste.
On the other hand there are signs of the brand wearing thin in places, Mandalorian vs. Grogu was a critical and commercial flop (assuming the usual 2x budget for marketing, if it was more for marketing then it might have been significantly worse than just breaking even).
The trend is really clear though, and it's not going in the right direction for Disney. Obviously they have the resources to reverse that, but the question is if they have the vision and the will.
Hahah your comment put a mental image in my head of Mando fighting Baby Yoda.
We watched it yesterday at home and it was… a strange movie. It looked like it was shot on the same stage they use for the show, the budget seemed far lower than other Star Wars movies, and the story was confusing and rambling in a way my children had a lot of difficulty following. I’m glad I didn’t see it in theaters.
The (believable) rumor is that it was originally scripted as ~5 episodes of the show when management said "We looked at our release schedule and yeah, make it a theatrical release". It's ironic, so much of what's going on now is taking movies (Cape Fear for example) and stretching them in 8-10 episode seasons; it's interesting to see someone try and fail at the opposite maneuver.
If you haven't seen Moana 2... well, don't watch it. And I say this as a parent who watched Moana and loved it. But if you did watch Moana 2 and thought the plot didn't make any sense, it's because they planned a whole TV show then turned it into a movie at the last minute. This resulted in delightful moments like a villain that comes out of nowhere, and in the course of her intro song has a heel-face turn without any explanation, then disappears out of the movie forever.
I hated Moana 2 but I didn't know about the context. Thanks for that, that now explains it. It's a pity because I much prefer Moana to Frozen but I have no plans to show my kid Moana 2.
Scopes in real life, linked to film industry are interesting even more.
Marc Bernays Randolph, cofounder and first CEO of Netlifx is nephew of Edward Bernays who is nephew of Sigmund Freud. Edward developed propaganda in 30s in US, later, after Goebbels did same, renamed to public relations. Nowadays, we have Netflix doing same.
Few have made so much money from a trilogy or had such creative freedom. I admit I disliked the laser bolt changes of special editions. Yet otherwise loved seeing some modern CGI fleshing out those worlds.
IIRC the original bolts were opaque in the middle and hazy around the edges. It felt like they were blinding even to cameras and visors. New ones were thinner and evenly transparent, as if someone overlaid some cheap translucent plastic
Wait until you see how often Tolkien edited The Lord of the Rings. Most of it was name and print corrections, but still. You would think you’d fix it all after one or two reprints.
I've only barely skimmed the surface of the preservation world, but the irreverent attitude taken by the industry towards audiovisual media releases frustrates me greatly. That more accurate older releases are made unobtainable in favor of newer botched versions just adds insult to injury.
I'm grateful that diminishing returns were hit earlier with audio, though, which limits the blast radius for music releases. Most classic albums have a range of different masterings available on audio CD, many of which are available cheaply secondhand, which makes getting ahold of a good/accurate release considerably less daunting.
Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
> Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
TV shows are even worse because of the soundtrack.
Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music
Even video games are not exempt from that. GTA games has tons of music removed from the radios with later digital re-releases so currently the original console disc versions are the only way to play the games as they were released back then https://www.reddit.com/r/GTATrilogy/comments/1gsqdc5/what_so...
This isn't even the worst outcome. There are hundreds of video games that are never re-released at all and have never been available for sale digitally, entirely because of soundtrack licensing.
There is a similar case with Top Gear. Aside from the popularity of Clarkson/May/Hammond and the fantastic cinematography, the show had great editors with an ear for soundtracks. Unfortunately it seems a lot of the tracks were only licensed for broadcast TV and the DVDs have some stock music where the rights were no longer available. There are also some gags which don't work any more because the audio doesn't make sense.
I believe the only place you can watch them as originally produced is iPlayer, but at least the BBC has copies somewhere.
It's a shame they never released the full series on DVD (or blu-ray). Most of it is available if you consult a chart of all the releases, but they've been cut and rearranged to fit on discs, and the soundtrack is as you say. I imagine they didn't due to problems like this at the time, but after the scandal and with how much time has passed, they'll never actually bother, unless someone straight up steals/copies the broadcast tapes from the archives and do us all a favour.
I think it’s true for a lot of BBC shows, many had great music, but the BBC also ran hugely popular radio stations and i think it was through that they were able to license a large amount of music.
And TV shows too. If they don't have the soundtrack-free version available, they have to do surgery to remove the music in postproduction somehow, or just not re-release at all.
> Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music
Even slightly more modern shows I think have had that happen as well. The Drew Carry show would have been a great example.
Yup. Daria is one of the most tragic ones, given how it was an MTV show and thus featured music iconic to the era and familiar to the audience. Replaced with muzak in the DVD releases, and a bunch of pirates have cobbled together best-effort mash-ups based on audio from TV rips, which sometimes were of very low quality, but for some episodes, all that had survived in the piracy scene was like, a RealVideo file with a 64kbps audio stream.
I loved the show Tour of Duty on CBS from 1987-90 about the Vietnam War. It used a lot of 1960's music including the Rolling Stones Paint It Black as the opening theme.
When it was released on DVD all the music was replaced with generic stuff. Then it was released on DVD in the UK with all the original music. The music licensing laws and prices are very different. It's region 2 and PAL but plays fine on a computer.
I also really enjoyed this show and rewatched it a few years ago on DVD. But I certainly noticed the main title music was different. I don't recall noticing in-episode music though, and wouldn't have remembered it from the show.
I went looking for the PAL DVDs after seeing your comment, and found one season but not a full set. After looking a little online it seems like the PAL release might have been cropped down a bit from the NTSC release? If that's the case it seems pretty disappointing.
Scrubs was another one with pretty obvious music changes, because some were part of the dialogue or a joke that just doesn't make sense after the change.
Daria is another example - being on MTV they used a lot of popular music from the time which clearly did not cost them much extra at the time of TV broadcast but was replaced with generic music for the DVD release.
Some anime on Netflix is affected. Off the top of my head, the iconic first ending theme for Naoki Urusawa's Monster had its haunting vocals removed leaving only the backing track, and Neon Genesis Evangelion had its similarly iconic ending theme covers of Fly Me to the Moon sung by its voice actresses removed.
Interview With the Vampire theatrically ends with the rolling stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” playing over the final scene and end credits. When the movie was on Netflix, that was cut from the soundtrack and replaced with an acoustic cover of the song.
Yeah, I'm in agreement with the blog post in that I don't advocate for dismantling of copyright, but there are absurdities within the system like this that are in dire need of attention.
Shortening of copyright would fix many of these issues. Games and movies make almost all of their lifetime earnings in the first few years, and the dribble that's left afterwards is less important than preservation and public access.
It's very hard to justify copyright in 2026 over music used in a 1980s TV show. Shows were aired once or twice (summer reruns), with additional syndication runs for particularly popular shows, and that was it. Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later. Copyright has grown absurdly out of proportion of the economic reality for which these works were originally produced.
> Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later.
Probably? But to devil's advocate here, I grew up watching reruns in 1990 from the 1950s on Nick at Nite or UHF stations. You could make a case that not only the actors but bands who allowed music to be used would deserve residuals, and with reruns that worked fine. The format change from TV to DVD and then to Streaming is what blew it all up.
Home video releases of whole series weren't envisioned until basically the 2000s. Most TV shows that did have releases on video would just pick a couple good episodes at a time, and sell those. A reasonable job to track down a half-dozen rights holders, and if you couldn't find them or get the rights, I assume they'd just pick a different episode.
The way the original terms were negotiated, the rights were just licensed specifically "for television" because that seemed like all that was needed, and the amount of work to locate each rightsholder to renegotiate is just astronomical. Thankfully now every show is making sure to get rights for streaming (and physical media... Right? Right?) but it's a shame what happened to everything from the 1970s-1990s. Only piracy can save us.
Honestly I think it's fine. If corps are going to make poor decisions with their IP, oh well, their choice and their loss. There's plenty to go around.
Video games sign terrible licenses even for their most core parts. Many of the millions selling Forza games disappeared from the digital stores because they couldn't use the cars anymore.[0]
It's almost unbelievable since cars and their makers are actually getting a big marketing push from those games, but studios cannot get better conditions.
It was bound to happen with Star Wars, given how big a series it is. I wish we could have the same with more, but the amount of effort is huge in many cases, and literally impossible in others.
> Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
Star Trek: TNG was a bit of a special case though, because it had to be re-cut and new digital special effects created and edited into scenes.
I think this perspective holds more true for things that were broadcast in HD but only got commercial DVD releases. That's a disappointing lapse in high quality availability where HD content was distributed, just not in a persistent form for home use. In those cases the best quality available is an HD TV or satellite recording which might not have been preserved even in online media sharing communities.
And on top of all that, sales were not what they hoped, and with that we lost any chance of an official remaster of DS9 or Voyager, since the same work would have to be done as for TNG.
> It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
Don’t get your hopes up. That release is very special. It happened at just the right time: discs were still selling and streaming had not yet taken over.
There is simply not sufficient market for such restorations any longer. They probably didn’t make back the cost of the remaster.
>It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
The miracle was supposedly $1.2 million per season. On a back catalog item where they apparently never made their money back (maybe we shouldn't believe them on that, dunno).
But in other cases, it's not about the money at all, but about everyone cockblocking it at every step of the way long enough that the assets themselves wither and die. Babylon 5 comes to mind.
It's funny too, how they all pat themselves on the backs at the awards ceremonies and talk about the artistry and vision, but they clearly don't give a shit about it.
That isn't really true. It's different people involved - the artists really do care about the art, but they are joined at the hip to business people who don't care at all and just want to make more money.
Tangentially related, I've been toying with the idea of just buying all my film and series content again rather than maintaining subscription services. My SO and I watch TV maybe once a week yet we maintain a subscription to Crave & Netflix.
I'm pretty sure it'd work out cheaper to just buy box-sets of a series when we start watching it but haven't done the deep dive yet.
Check your public library. If you are lucky enough to live near a big one, they may have all the shows you want to watch on DVD already.
I live in a large metropolitan area and belong to 4 different public library systems. Two of them have branches within walking distance of my house. For either of them, I can go to their website, search for a dvd, and have it delivered (for free) to the branch closest to my house.
It's not instant gratification -- it takes a couple of days. But in some ways, that's a feature, not a bug.
On top of that, they also have Kanopy (a streaming service offered via libraries). The selection is NO WHERE NEAR as complete as major streaming services... but, it's certainly nice to have.
If you do go the box-set route, you might want to be careful about which editions you buy.
Alec from Technology Connections[0] about a year ago put out a video detailing frustrating trend: many modern DVD box-set re-releases of popular series are being quietly downgraded in quality.
Basically publishers are taking content originally authored for dual-layer discs and cramming it onto cheaper single-layer discs to cut costs. The result is aggressive over-compression, terrible macroblocking, and sometimes outright playback issues.
It really sucks: you try to do the "right thing" by paying for a legitimate, physical copy to own your media and you end up getting ripped off with crap.
Apparently Alec has contacted the studio that makes the discs; they don’t make single-layer discs for the Frasier box set. Alec seems to have purchased a bootleg sold at retail.
I've been wondering this some myself, how many services I could drop and just return to a physical media budget.
One of the factors contributing to it not necessarily being cheaper to buy box sets: Target, Best Buy, and other big US chains have given up on physical media for movies. Last I heard Wal-Mart is on the fence about long term support for it. (At the moment the only chain I know that seems still in it for the long haul seems to be Barnes & Noble, but they could have one bad quarter and change their minds quickly. My local store the DVD and Blu-Ray section is somewhat obviously what used to the Music section and still has a bit left of that old focus.)
Even the manufacturing side seems to be disappearing. Sony has flirted with dropping physical media sales of movies. Warner Brothers and Paramount seem likelier to drop physical media sales if they are allowed to merge.
Netflix lets very few originals make it to physical media. Most of the exceptions I'm aware of are Sony projects. Sony Animation being one of Netflix's last exclusive deals from a studio that isn't themselves. A lot of Prime Originals don't make it to physical media. It seems a mixed bag for HBO Originals and Hulu/Disney+ Originals, presumably based on some internal formulas of popularity. A lot of Apple TV Originals seem to get delayed physical output, but that's largely been because Apple TV doesn't have its own studio, but that changed relatively recently with the purchase of Red Hour (Ben Stiller's studio, of Severance and The Dink fame).
It certainly feels like physical media is dying right now. Maybe more reason to switch to investing in it over streaming services, not that an individual's budget decisions in this vein will affect the company's bottom lines enough that they will notice.
"It certainly feels like physical media is dying right now. Maybe more reason to switch to investing in it over streaming services, not that an individual's budget decisions in this vein will affect the company's bottom lines enough that they will notice."
I’ve been buying dvds and surfacing a lot of the content to Jellyfin and Tailscale, it’s a lot easier than it used to be and they even have smart TV apps on some of the platforms. Don’t even have to pirate to get use out of it.
I started doing this after having a child so that we could have kids movies on hand in Jellyfin, but am now having a lot of fun collecting DVDs and Blu Rays. I’ve also toyed with the idea of using ErsatzTV to have channels to bring the kids back to the old days where things weren’t always on demand.
Thrift stores are a good way to find DVDs (usually $2-4 a DVD, slightly more for Blu Ray). Estate sales are typically better (under $1 a DVD/BluRay).
The most expensive part of this so far has been obtaining storage drives.
I'm not sure this makes sense for most people who watch a series once and then never again. Physical media makes sense for movies and shows that you'll watch multiple times. So you might buy Firefly, but not Reacher (please, not Reacher). With kids it makes particular sense - kids love watching the same thing over and over (I'm not sure why). If Wreck It Ralph was on VHS it'd be worn out by now...
I'm not saying I disagree, but very interesting how this contrasts with attitudes people have towards books. People keep physical books around just for kicks. Often times they haven't even read half the books on their shelves.
I am in this camp, my office (and overflowing to the living room) have a lot of physical books in them. Most I only read a single time. I do think they add something 'homely' though, as if they are part of the furniture / decoration.
Also, when I notice a particular book it can spark a memory (even about the surrounding context of when I read the book) which are small but nice moments.
I'm not sure I'd feel the same about DVD / Blu Ray boxes though. I'm pretty sure the VCR boxes I used to have were just kept in a closed-door cabinet and I barely looked at them unless I wanted to watch a particular film.
Physical media can be had for very cheap on the second-hand market, so it also makes sense if you do not watch all that much.
The further your timeline goes into the future the more sense owning your media makes. You might not want to rewatch this movie in the next ten years, but what about the next thirty? Fifty years? Inflation will only make subscriptions more and more expensive. Thirty years ago a yearly salary of $40k was the same as a yearly salary of $100k now. It's funny how so many people think they earn more than their parents did, when in reality they earn way less. And that won't get better in the future. Maybe you won't even have enough money in your retirement to afford a subscription.
As others have said, it's certainly justifiable for anything with rewatchability. You can find 1080p Bluray players at thrift stores for under $20 (it took some patience for me to find a relatively newer one that was more compact and didn't have a slow interface), and Blurays are usually under $5.
I've come across sealed Blurays or even the occasional former Blockbuster rental so it's actually kind of fun in a record-crate-diving sort of way, if you're into that. But of course you can always just buy new, which you'll probably have to do in some cases: the odds are against me finding Koyaanisqatsi at the thrift, let alone the Criterion Collection Qatsi Trilogy, but I'm okay with that.
There's a ton of streaming content that is stuck in streaming, so you can only "buy" it, not buy it. Oscar-winning movies that you can't get on physical media.
Have to take things into your own hands these days and grab the 2160p Dolby Vision streams and stuff them onto a BD-R, if you know what I mean.
Yeah, I've thought about that too. Original content for e.g Netflix probably never sees a physical release. As my earlier post probably alluded to though, we don't really watch a lot of TV in our household so narrowing my 'options' is not per se a thing that would impact me.
But it does suck for those who want to move to more physical-based media _and_ enjoy original content from the streaming providers.
Netflix does surprisingly release physical media now and then. EG: Stranger Things just got a complete 4k UHD physical release.
One very nice thing about physical media is the quality is often far better than you will ever get streaming, and this is true even on non-4k releases (though, especially on 4k). Audio is often the thing the streaming providers compress the heck out of.
I want to cancel my Disney+ and then once in a month I play some movie for my kid, which would probably cost more if I bought it on a piece of media. So, eh.
Back in 1987, my parents had purchased a 4-head VHS recorder, and I rented another device from Video Library, and I set my mind to the monumental task of editing the entire run of Married… with Children into a single tape containing only scenes with Kelly [Christina Applegate] and I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams
You jest but I know someone made a copy of all “The Hobbit” films spliced together, but removed all the made up portions. And removed all the Legolas bits, since he wasn’t even in the book. I think the total run time was something like 4 hours 15 minutes.
The icing on the cake was how popular this edition was.
That does sound like an improvement over the actual Hobbit movies. I'm not even joking about Oppenheimer, would do it if I were really bored. Might be a great movie if it were simply in order.
I highly suspect someone has already made a fan edit of Oppenheimer like you've described. I searched for a few moments and found 3 already and one already describes re-cutting it in chronological order, among many other changes. Always surprises me how much effort and passion people put into fan edits. It's a facinating scene in itself with how many edits exist out there.
When it was first announced that Peter Jackson's film of The Hobbit was going to be split into two parts, I thought "Yeah, that makes sense. There's a LOT of material in that short book, because of how sparse Tolkien was being with description. Makes sense that Jackson would have trouble fitting it into a single 2.5-hour movie."
When I heard, later, that the film was going to be a three parter instead, I thought "Uh oh. There's plenty of material for two films, but three? Filler City, here we come."
My wife and I saw the movies in the cinema, and while we enjoyed them overall, I found that I was right about the filler. I was particularly annoyed by the barrels-down-the-river scene, where the film turned what should have been a moment of quiet drama into a sort of rails shooter on the screen. That scene threw me out of my immersion; the whole time, I was thinking "The only reason for this scene to exist is to be made into a video-game level." As a video game level, it would kind of work: you're in the barrels floating downstream, and you have to shoot enough orcs with the bow you somehow have (or flatten them with your barrel that has been inexplicably launched out of the water) to stop them from killing your friends. (Or perhaps the video game level would make more sense if you play as the elf on the shore, killing the orc archers before they can shoot the fish^H^H^H^H dwarves in a barrel).
Regardless of how that scene would work as a video game, the problem with it is that while watching it, I was laughing at how ridiculous it was, instead of on the edge of my seat with excitement. That is NOT what the audience should be experiencing, and it means that someone — director, producer, screenwriter, editor, who knows — made some very poor choices in putting that scene on-screen.
So yes, I'm not at all surprised that a fan edit of The Hobbit which removed all the filler would be wildly popular. In my case, I would rather buy a 4.5 hour version of the film than the officially-released version. If only that version was for sale legally.
P.S. Not all the filler material in the Hobbit film trilogy was bad. Some of the scenes that weren't technically in the original book, such as Gandalf and Galadriel discussing the threat of The Necromancer, were a positive addition and helped link the Hobbit film to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. If Jackson had stopped there it would have been fine. I have never watched the fan-made "Tolkien Edit" recut version of the Hobbit film(s) so I don't know if that scene was included or not — but in my opinion, that one would fit into a "Tolkien Edit" even if it wasn't technically part of the original book.
Having played the video game, yeah that's how the level went, and it kinda sucked.[1] It's a looping circular river (physics be damned), and I recall having to do many loops before I got 100%, since moving targets are hard to hit with a gamepad.
I can recommend the old BBC series as it's well produced and prioritises accuracy over dramatisation as far as I can tell. It's obviously a bit slower than a movie but well worth a watch if you're interested in the topic.
I watched it a few months before watching the Oppenheimer film and it did spoil the film a bit for me. I've got mixed feelings about Nolan films - I really like a lot of his work, but find that it can be a bit superficial at times. e.g. I enjoyed Interstellar but found the ending unsatisfying and a bit hand wavy. However, when I watched it, I wasn't aware of the all the Jesus links in the story, so I was approaching it as a hard scifi film.
That sounds nice too. I do prefer accuracy over drama, it's just in short supply so I settle for either. Like my favorite film is Lawrence of Arabia, but it's not accurate.
The ending of Interstellar almost ruined it for me. Even ignoring physics, it's a lazy plot device. I liked the rest of it so much that it was forgivable, but that involved mentally black-holing the end, like I forgot about it until rewatching recently.
My working theory to this point is that he made the movies he had to make then, as he got increasingly successful, he gradually transitioned (back?) to making movies he wanted to make. Which, as it turns out, I'm less enamored with then his post-big break efforts. Oh well.
Nobody can fight me on that because I don't know who Nolan is. Guessing he's a director, but in that case, didn't know he directed Oppenheimer. I'm part of the popcorn reviews, not the tomato ones.
The movie is bad cause nobody can tell what is going on, or they can but it's a chore without reward. "3 weeks earlier" kind of crap every 30 seconds in the movie. Even the big plot twist is, "this scene with Einstein that you thought happened early in the timeline actually happened at the end, wow." But maybe it can be fixed.
Hm, Dark Knight is a top one. Interstellar was amazing until the end with the black hole unraveling the plot, but I blocked that out and only remembered the rest until I rewatched recently. Dunkirk was good but kinda slow plot-wise. What I'm getting is his films are exceptional in a lot of ways like audio/visual but don't necessarily have good plots, which idk if that's even his fault. Those didn't have jumpy timelines, though.
Hm yeah, sounds like the majority of his movies do jump around. I don't remember Inception, saw that on release.
Interstellar's plot is about messing with universe time, but the movie isn't jumping around points in story time. There's just the astronaut and Earth storylines with a little crossover, and each mostly moves forwards only. I liked that part a lot actually.
It's been too long since I watched Inception, just for some reason only remember the first half of the movie being good. I was in middle school at the time, so... I'll rewatch it.
There's a lot of problems, but the main one is that it just is a pile of arbitrary rules that all the characters just constantly explain to one another.
Imagine the first third of The Matrix was cut and you just start with Morpheus explaining it all to Neo. That's Inception. And on top of that, it's not even a particular complicated idea: it's just Russian doll dreams.
There are a lot of movies where the world-building is better than the actual plot. Harry Potter 1 for example. Or TV shows where the pilot and first few episodes have actual plot before it becomes filler.
> The movie is bad cause nobody can tell what is going on, or they can but it's a chore without reward. "3 weeks earlier" kind of crap every 30 seconds in the movie. Even the big plot twist is, "this scene with Einstein that you thought happened early in the timeline actually happened at the end, wow." But maybe it can be fixed.
This honestly reads like you don't watch a lot of movies, which is fine! The audio was really bad, which makes it nearly impossible to follow without subtitles. But with subtitles, this film is very middle of the road in terms of timeline ambiguity. I also don't think an ambiguous timeline is bad, if it recontextualizes a scene.
I mean in that Einstein scene, they are cutting footage of RDJ telling Oppenheimer he's a patriot who ran the Manhattan project with footage of him as a bumbling student people made fun of. That was definitely not a "big plot twist," they are explicitly saying it was after the war, even if it was momentarily confusing because so much is going on. I thought it was a pretty rewarding film to pay attention to.
There weren't subtitles in the theater, and that's supposedly the way the movie was meant to be watched, so :/ I could actually tell what was going on, it was just annoying and didn't add anything. I've watched plenty of movies, but almost all mainstream (just no Marvel).
The twist I'm referring to is Lewis Strauss overhearing the conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein at the beginning, which at the end they clarify actually happened later in the timeline.
Mainly the scene where Oppenheimer randomly has sex during the questioning. Could maybe also do without some of the other parts where he slowly zones out for no reason.
> Of particular note is the “remux” community, dedicated to seamlessly stitching together the best video and audio streams from different releases without any generational loss of quality.
That’s not what “remux” means. A remux is the original data from, for instance, a Blu-ray disc, transferred into a new container without re-encoding. What the author is referring to would be called a “hybrid remux”.
Remux is not a community, it's a tag that pirate release groups uses to indicate that a release contains exact copies of the original video and audio streams present on the disc.
GP is correct that files with purely additive changes (like additional audio tracks) to remuxes are called hybrid remuxes.
ETA: To the author's credit, this is convention rather than a hard rule. I checked my usual sources and found the exact 89gb 4k Arrow remux the author mentions in the closing paragraph and it is indeed labelled 'remux' only. The uploader did make a note of this though: "Unfortunately, as Arrow had to pull the Italian dub due to rightsholders demands, I had to sync it from the 2017 Kino Lorber disc."
>Remux is not a community, it's a tag that pirate release groups uses to indicate that a release contains exact copies of the original video and audio streams present on the disc.
There is a community insofar as there is a relatively small group of people who sink their time into producing high quality remuxes, and this group talks to each other (on IRC and elsewhere).
>GP is correct that files with purely additive changes (like additional audio tracks) to remuxes are called hybrid remuxes.
As I corrected on a child comment to the GP, this is not correct. It is not convention either. A hybrid remux has a stream which is a hybrid of two or more sources. Simply combining tracks from different sources isn't a hybrid remux, it's just baseline good practice.
> A hybrid remux has a stream which is a hybrid of two or more sources.
This explicitly breaks the rules of multiple communities I participate in. All streams must be untouched in a remux, and a hybrid remux is a release with untouched streams from multiple sources (there are also hybrids which are not remuxes).
What even is "a stream which is a hybrid of two or more sources?" Cutting between or combining multiple audio or video streams is simply editing. You're describing a fanedit.
>This explicitly breaks the rules of multiple communities I participate in.
Probably. Not all places allow hybrid remuxes.
I promise you that I have these definitions correct as they are most commonly used, since I am actually involved in this space.
The word "Hybrid" has been used in the way you describe, most notably by FRaMeSTOR, but I would say that everyone else has coalesced on what I described and would call my definition the standard one. It's also how the "Hybrid" edition label is used on PTP.
>What even is "a stream which is a hybrid of two or more sources?" Cutting between or combining multiple audio or video streams is simply editing. You're describing a fanedit.
No I'm not. I stand by what I said. As an example you can look at Bridge.to.Terabithia.2007.Hybrid.1080p.BluRay.REMUX.AVC.TrueHD.5.1-BLURANiUM.mkv For the sake of those reading, I will copy from the release notes:
>GER has hardcoded translated movie title which is not present in other transfers so hybrid was needed to restore the original picture. Hybrid was done with USA disc since audio from same disc was used. GER video was retimed to 23.976 FPS, trimmed on valid IDR frames and merged with MKVToolnix.
In this case, two Blu-ray video streams were spliced together.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, adding audio tracks to a video track that weren't produced together often requires editing. If not for sample rate reasons, content reasons, like extra space for additional video space at the beginning or ending most basically. It seems like in any instances like that, which I would count as "nominal," it would be appropriate to identify those as "modified from" which would seemingly place you squarely into "hybrid" space within the taxonomy of this comment thread.
Right. There is some degree of transformation which is normal or necessary. For example, if one of {video, audio} is 24fps and the other is 23.976fps, the video will have its frame rate adjusted to match the audio. For basic video/audio mismatches you may need to trim audio, insert null audio, or add a mkv container delay.
These things are normally detailed in release notes. People write pretty detailed notes laying out exactly what they did.
The muxer can apply a timestamp offset to a track, so while the audio stream remains untouched it starts at some offset relative to the start of the video stream.
Agree once you're compensating for drift by scaling the audio track you've pushed yourself out of remux territory, but again these aren't hard and fast rules (evidenced by the disagreement over terminology).
There's nothing wrong with the definition you quoted. I would say it's entirely accurate (except perhaps that it neglects subtitles, which can end up being a substantial amount of work if you choose to put the effort into it).
>What the author is referring to would be called a “hybrid remux”.
No. While the "hybrid" term has been used this way, the standard definition now is for remuxes where a single stream has been created by stitching together streams from two different sources. For example, a video from source A has generally better picture quality, but has some glitch or issue that requires patching in a segment from source B to create a hybrid video stream. Doing this for the main video without re-encoding is very difficult/unlikely to work because video codecs are very hard to work with in this way (you'd have to have two sources encoded with the same codec, the same encoding settings, you have to slice things at a clean GOP boundary in both sources, etc), so most commonly hybrid remuxes refer to the Dolby Vision layer.
Source: I happen to be involved in this community.
I don't read it that way. If you start using words like container and encoding, I feel you have to describe what those words mean and I suspect the writer probably felt that level of detail might have caused the article to drift away from the point. I have personal experience of accidentally going into too much detail when describing remuxes to non technical friends, and had later opted to describing almost exactly as the author did, because that description I think conveys the purpose pretty well.
I quite liked the Despecialized editions when I watched them quite a while ago, for anyone who hasn't seen them - the audio remastering is very appreciated (VHS rarely has good audio), but certainly not the poorly-fitting CGI additions.
Harmy's despecialized versions are awesome. I watched them in a single sitting a couple of months ago. They have been the only recent editions that resonate with my childhood memories and give me that warm fuzzy feeling that everything is in its right place as I remember it. Moreover the days before I rewatched Andor and Rogue One in tandem. IMHO, as a full saga and the culmination of a story, they are as close to perfection you can get.
Unrelated, but in the same vein of "pirating the pirates": the modern "quality of life" improvements that are so often praised alongside modern videogame remakes/remasters of classic games are rather shamelessly cribbed from emulators.
1) "Save Anywhere": Emulator save states
2) 2x/4x/10x "fast forward" mode: Emulator frameskip. Most modern emulators have a "rewind" feature, too, but legit games tend not to use it since it can trivialize the difficulty.
3) Briefly turn on EXP/Money/No random encounters: Features from cheat engines, which technically precede emulation and go back to GameShark and Game Genie before it...but cheat engines are universally built-into emulators these days, making them easier to use. Turning on EXP multipliers to "skip the grind" is definitely an emulation-heavy thing for those going through old JRPGs.
#3 is actually a return to form. These cheats started out as cheat codes that developers baked into the game up front. We lost them for a while and now apparently they're coming back?
Interesting they chose The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, probably because of the 60th anniversary?
They didn't mention that probably the Mondo release of that film is the 'best' one? Someone else did a good version count of all releases: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/id/136114
Curious what the upcoming DCP release is sourced on
Thanks for posting. I almost missed this, but it's really important to me.
I respect that creators, like Lucas, do want to continue working on past projects. (Art is never finished, only abandoned, or something like that.) But those of us who appreciate art surely can choose which version we prefer. Even if that changes over the course of our life. That is one of my favorite things about film archiving.
I didn't even realize that page existed, and I'm a developer. Could I have found it if I was determined enough? Sure, of course. But starting from the homepage as an impatient average user, there's nothing obvious. I found it under "Gift MUBI" (which presents entirely different pricing schemes than what you linked) but that was after putting thinking and hopeful clicks into it. It shouldn't be that hard. Why isn't RIGHT ON THE HOMEPAGE?? It gives me the "Am I gonna have to call and talk to a human to cancel?" ick.
I will say this again, and again, and again: thanks to piracy, I got to watch many amazing movies, especially those that came out before the 2000s. Eventually I bought lots of DVDs and Blu-Rays, CDs( heck I even rediscovered my music in taste).
I'm not sure which is more morally wrong: preserving works of art for future generations, or destroying them for profit.
I was watching lawrence of arabia recently, and was thinking about similar stuff.
There's a few scenes (scenes around the: "my name is for my friends" and the echoey canyon in particular) where lawrence looks almost like a photorealistic game character.
I still don't know what exactly caused this but most likely a multitude of factors are in play.
- Deserts are bright, so a bright light was used to illuminate his face, causing his eyes to sparkle.
- Streaming from Netflix and compression / decompression might have eaten away some of the high frequency detail
I also learned that they shot the movie in a bigger film stock, so the digitized version of this movie is highly regarded.
If anyone has any idea as to why these scenes in particular look off, i would love to learn more.
house opened my eyes to this problem. trying to reconstruct a version with the video resolution of the bluray but the original soundtrack of the dvd turned out to be a deep rabbit hole.
One of the more annoying parts of this to me is that, surely, a high quality version of the original must exist somewhere in the archives of the publisher, right? And if not that, surely the original footage must still be there, so one can recreate the edit frame by frame, as was done with TNG?
The good stuff is out there, just behind lock and key. You can't have it, because screw you.
It could also be that it genuinely isn't. The source code of Silent Hill 2, one of the best horror games of all time, is lost. It's clear from cases like that that publishers can't be trusted to preserve their media. We have to do it ourselves.
yea it makes me wish for some kind of highly organized underground structured content network where people serious about archiving could share their private collections without being accused of piracy - I've sunk some thought towards one here: https://github.com/gfody/p2p/blob/main/essays/roots-network....
considering how the frontier labs have become the ultimate pirates and gotten away with it I wonder if "the people" would be able to do the same
I wondered this and then checked and saw they're not on Mubi (at least in the UK - I hadn't realised until someone mentioned VPNs that Mubi might have different catalogues internationally, but of course they will...)
It's interesting to realise that many old film restorations have better quality then original release. So nowadays we have visually "altered" content that creators was not able to watch.
I'm not subscribed to right now, but I have been for a very long time before that. I like their curated approach a lot and it doesn't feel like you are getting drowned in crap like many other services.
It really depends what kind of films you like though, if you are looking for fast paced shows or the latest Hollywood productions you will not like it. If you enjoy going to indie cinemas, you'll like it.
I've been signed up a few months at a time over the years. It has tons of independent movies from the US/UK/France but also from lesser exposed countries (think Danish, Greek, Thai, Polish, Norwegian…). It's mostly films released recently or in the last 20 years. It also has some older classics (Memories of Murder, Carrie, Dogma, Obsession, Carlito's Way…) but there aren't that many and they're often only there temporarily.
It's worth doing the 30 days trial. I sign up for a month or two whenever I feel like the library has at least 10 films I'd want to watch.
They have mostly independent films. So numerous dramas and slow-burn types. I like it. I've found some great movies on there, but also have found a bunch of duds. The problem is the pricing. Right now my main services are Criterion Channel and Eternal Family.
I am quite happy to give Mubi my money each month, even if I don't use it a _huge_ amount. I have seen some great films on the platform, and I really do want to see them be successful.
Some content has overlap with conventional streaming services, but then films like "Do not expect much from the end of the world" probably wouldn't see a streaming release elsewhere?
Something other replies haven’t mentioned yet is that you can use a VPN on it. A service like Disney+ for example will not let you in at all with a VPN active but no problem with Mubi. You get a pretty nice selection with that.
It is regrettable that the law draws no distinction between such a situation and the sale of counterfeit goods on eBay. Section 1201 does not take intent into account, whereas the aforementioned "pirate code" essentially consists of norms developed by the community itself.
Cobbling together something resembling the original is a cool idea, but don't the originals still exist somewhere? Surely not all of the original prints have been destroyed? Aren't there movie archivists somewhere carefully preserving every version of every major movie?
Upvoted because, sadly, most people don't know that most movies (even super-famous ones) are constantly at risk from environmental and legal factors. Film degrades, warehouses go up in flames, digital copies are easily lost, and rights management is so difficult and expensive, that a lot of material just... disappears.
It's not a problem limited to movies, btw - plenty of music suffers the same fate.
"By the 1980s, it was becoming apparent that the collections of motion picture heritage were at risk of becoming lost. Not only was the preservation of nitrate film an ongoing problem, but it was then discovered that safety film, used as a replacement for the more volatile nitrate stock, was beginning to be affected by a unique form of decay known as "vinegar syndrome", and color film manufactured, in particular, by Eastman Kodak, was found to be at risk of fading. At that time, the best-known solution was to duplicate the original film onto a more secure medium.[5]
A common estimate is that 90 percent of all American silent films made before 1920 and 50 percent of American sound films made before 1950 are lost films.[6][7]"
one of my projects on the backlog is to figure out how to combine the dvd copies and the bluray copies of the x-files so that I can have 4:3 episode in hd. especially in the first couple of seasons they crop a lot of stuff to fit it into widescreen, I'm waiting until AI gets good enough that I can using the dvd quality original fill in and upscale the cropped part of the hd episodes.
Seasons 1-5 of Reno 911 were 4:3. If you stream them nowadays they've had an awful pan and scan applied that actually removes a ton of detail, results in heads being cut off, etc. All so we don't get black bars on the sides of the screen. It's so bad and makes me question whether the people that did the conversion even watched their output.
I liked The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but the post-dub voice of Wallach when he was much older, did not quite fit into the movie anymore; it felt strange compared to his voice when he was younger.
As for Hollywood ruining videos: well, it is time to phase out Hollywood. The movies are cultural heritage and the best quality must be preserved (without artifical AI slop clowning it up and changing things; I see that on youtube every day, it is AWFUL. AI slop constantly lies about things. I can call it lie-slop).
And yet... I watched two films just a couple days ago using the MUBI App on a Samsung Smart TV (airbnb, on holidays): Dream Scenario and No Other Choice. Both had a surreal image quality, as if an AI filter had completely destroyed the director's original intention. I know for sure that at least Dream Scenario shouldn't look like that, because I had already watched it. I don't know about the other but I suspect this wasn't the original look.
It's probably not MUBI's fault, but the best restoration is just powerless when the movie is watched on what most people end up watching movies this day.
Are you sure it wasn’t just the TV? Unless someone put it into filmmaker mode or similar, it almost certainly would have had motion interpolation enabled, as well as a blue white-point, oversaturated colours, and probably some artificial sharpening and de-noising.
I hate the way film and music pirates gatekeep everything. There are private trackers for games and software but they don't try to keep any content exclusive, you get faster downloads without random bad quality uploads and malware cluttering the site in exchange for keeping a good ratio.
It depends on what you care about. The Kino Lorber has good color choices, but far too much contrast: dark areas (including the characters) are pitch black; and you can't see the clouds in the skies.
You're right, now that you mention it. I want a version that combines the Arrow contrast with the Lorber colours. How strange that they still didn't get it right.
You deserve to get compensated. You should get compensated.
But stop acting against the will of the consumers. And stop fighting the technology.
Remember when you thought VHS and DVD would kill the movie industry? You were wrong then, and you're wrong again, now.
Make a very simple website where people can search for actors, search for directors, search keywords, search awards...
And then show us torrent links for all of the content, all of the versions, all of the audio formats, all of the video resolutions, all of the languages, the director's cut, with or without subtitles baked in, theatrical release, re-release, fan edits, all of it. Make it easy for someone else to document a new version, and share the torrent. Set up Popcorn Time or whatever, if you're smart.
I download the content on my own dime. I'll even seed it for a bit, because I like it, and why not?
And then, let me buy a decryption key. Make the price reasonable. Make it Pay What You Want, if you're really smart. When you're setting that price, think real hard about the fact that the illegal option is literally one click away for anyone technically savvy. That decryption key should be shared for all of the different versions available to me. I pay once, I get all the formats, now, and forever. Let me save the key to my account, if you want to set up accounts and recommendations, and etc. Let me save the key in my Plex or Jellyfin server. Or as file metadata, or in a json in a zip file at the end of the file...
Say it's legal for me to pass that license on to one of my kids, when I die.
If you're real smart, grant me the right to legally loan that key to a friend, so they can watch the movie, and then return the key (or I get to auto-revoke it after a number of days).
Hell, tell me a price to have a private (or public?) screening of the movie at a theater that rents out screens.
Cocoon is not available on streaming. That's so dumb. It will enter the public domain in 2081. Until then, earn some reasonable money, by making a legal way for people to do what they're already doing. As frictionless as possible.
And if you're a genius, come up with a way for someone to show you their DVD, Blu-Ray, VHS copy of a movie, and give them that decryption key, for free. They already bought your movie once. Don't make them regret it. Reward them for it. Send it out to anyone who "bought" the movie on AppleTV, Google Play Movies, YouTube, Amazon, etc. But I doubt you're that smart.
> Spencer Draper—best known as the Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader on YouTube, where he reviews the technical and historical aspects of digital releases with a rigor usually reserved for scholarly peer review
I will occasionally think about various topics "I'm really into <thing> but is anyone else in to <thing>??"
And then I read a quote like the above and I realize that, for lack of a better phrase, "it's a big world out there" and people have many varied interests.
Plus, if folks are REALLY into <thing> then they want different perspectives about <thing> even if it's a sub-topic that has been covered before.
In other words, write blog posts and make videos. Someone will consume that content and you never know where that leads.
This is what the early web was all about: people sharing their obscure hobbies and obsessions with everyone else, building small communities across the world. It was beautiful. It is still out there, to a degree, but unfortunately the socials have sucked the air out of publishing on external websites. Back in the day, this guy would have had his own blog or specific AV/cinephile forum, and now he's just another guy on youtube.
More otimistically, there were far fewer obsessive niches online then as the technical requirements were so large to set a site up. Even if the ones that existed were great.
There are a lot more obsessive YouTube channels and newsletters in a lot more varied niches today by comparison. I'm delighted regularly by new discoveries.
If you were obsessed with cinema and films, chances are you were already adjacent enough to the internet to blog about it. If you were obsessed with woodworking, probably you needed to wait for the smartphones and YT boom.
Unless you were one of the few people lucky enough to live in New York most of us never had access to movies beyond what you could find in a second tier Blockbuster on a Friday night. Or worse: cable television.
Nah. phpbb was a thing. Every niche crafting hobby imaginable had at least on "authoritative" forum-based online community before smartphones were a thing.
Kagi has a cool app called Small Web around this
As someone who is also into <thing> but maybe not other <thing>, it's really great to sometimes delve into the deep world of <thing> for an hour or so to broaden ones perspective and get a general feel for what other people choose to spend their consciousness budget on.
Definitely one of the better sides of the information age is how easy this is now.
In other words: "A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox" [1]
[1] https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query
I forget who said this but very similar idea:
"Writing online is a way to show people the 'wrinkles' of your brain. If you write enough, people can see how closely your winkles match their wrinkles. If the wrinkles match closely enough, you start to get followers who like the way you think. Those people can become friends and that leads to future life opportunities and experiences."
I have had a lot of things just kind of _happen_ by virtue of writing blogs and publishing software. These things all have very strange second lives that exist beyond your own initial conception of them that is consistently surprising.
One thing to note, is that the library of congress has the power to create the exceptions to the DMCA. The EFF lobbies for expansion of the exact powers the article is advocating for. https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca-rulemaking
Kinda related, but I hate how the big studios go after old videogames and try to take them down. It looks like, in the future, this era will be called the "digital dark ages", not because all the stuff got lost to bitrot, but because all the stuff became illegal to own so that the studios could sell the new stuff again and again.
The home-computer world is especially interesting for old games. If something made it to a Nintendo or Sega console, it's probably very well-preserved, but I'd be surprised if even 1% of all video games made were released on consoles.
There's an unfathomable number of games that were released on the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, and most famously DOS that were made by one or two people, self-published, and have now completely fallen into obscurity to a point where it's not 100% clear who owns the copyright and who to give money even if you wanted to, which has led to the "probably-illegal-but-not-really-enforced" term of "Abandonware".
I honestly kind of think that Abandonware should be codified into law in the same way that trademarks are; if you're not actively giving me a legitimate way to buy your game then I don't think it should be illegal for me to get it illegitimately.
There's a book of BASIC software I have. I'd like to publish the programs online. I've tried to contact the author, but he's dead. I tried to contact the publisher, but they were acquired. I tried to contact the acquiring publisher, but they went out of business 20 years ago. The trail is cold there, and I imagine it's nearly impossible to figure out who owns the rights now.
Archive.org is full of copyrighted software without known authors. I know it because i'v found a lot of Pocket PC & Palm software from studios/companies that don't even exist anymore.
It's not ideal but it's better than losing it.
Those are either "flotsam" or "derelict", definitively not "pirated".
Upvoted for use of the correct terms from marine law. Nice.
Someone else mentioned archive.org, check to see if they have a copy of it already - if not, you can always send it to them. They've got a full archival copy of all Nintendo 64 games (and others) so they seem to have some kind of legal protections / exemptions.
They're relying on the DMCA liability shield by allowing user uploaded files and removing them upon request by a the copyright holder - and then someone else uploads the same file.
At that point, I'd publish them: nobody's going to come after you, either.
Publish first and ask for forgiveness later
what's the title/author or some other identifying info?
"Methods of Orbit Determination for the Microcomputer" by Dan Boulet.
I think I found a PDF scan once, though even with OCR it wasn't exactly copy-pastable into a BASIC interpreter. I'd like to clean up the programs and put them on github, or something. Might end up just re-implement the algorithms (which are explained in the book), because there's no copyright on algorithms.
There are projects like eXoDOS that are attempting to provide a complete DOS archive. They are currently at version 6 that weighs in at just under 700GB. But they seem to be finding new stuff all the time, thus the versioning of the archive.
I played a bunch of random shareware games on our family's Apple IIgs and I'd love to find some of those again, but I was so young I can't really remember much other than like some visual images and vibes.
I would like to take this opportunity to pitch an old favourite of mine - Blast Doors (1996) by Freds Friends. Aka "The Nuclear Family Feud". Basically it's a 3D version of Artillery with some elevation physics, and a fun theme around nuclear weapons being fully legalized for home defence. So you're a bunch of grouchy neighbours in your mobile nuclear bunkers, firing off various warheads at eachother and saying quippy 90s things. It has a very distinct style and wry, absurdist sense of humor - and for a long time was available on the website of one of the developers (which was also delightfully 90s).
Fred Haslam was apparently also at Maxis and worked on Sim City 2000.
If you're reading this Fred, I loved Blast Doors and love it still. https://archive.org/details/BLASTSE2_ZIP
Nevermind the Commodore etc. who are preserved as abandonware. Remember FLASH games? They are mostly gone already. Even if you still have a copy, they can't be run anymore. There were some efforts made, but last I checked plenty of FLASH games still didn't work flawlessly.
Flashpoint Archive now has around 200K flash games that can be downloaded and ran locally. Im sure this is nothing compared to what used to exist but basically anything of note is in there
What do you use to run them locally? FLASH doesn't exist anymore and all the emulators do not properly work. I've got an archive of FLASH games myself, but I cannot play them anymore.
Flash Player in the browser doesn't exist anymore. There's still the standalone Flash Player that game with Adobe Flash/Animate, and it works fine. It doesn't depend on browser compatibility, since it runs on its own.
Not a thing on Linux as far as I know, unfortunately.
A Flash game I made a million years ago actually works in Ruffle now. It's really quite bad so I don't really want to prominently display it on my blog, but I might hide it somewhere as easter egg.
Ruffle is getting good enough where I think we might be properly archive all the Flash stuff.
I end up being drawn into and wasting time on a flash video site [1] at least once a year and there's always at least a bunch of animations not working properly. But it has gotten better over the years.
[1] https://z0r.de/7194
> There's an unfathomable number of games that were released on the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, and most famously DOS that were made by one or two people, self-published, and have now completely fallen into obscurity to a point where it's not 100% clear who owns the copyright and who to give money even if you wanted to, which has led to the "probably-illegal-but-not-really-enforced" term of "Abandonware".
Mostly unrelated but if you are looking for this "effervescence" in modern times, don't hesitate to take a look at Pico8 games and Ich.io.
On Pico 8, everything is free (except the one time pico 8 licence).
On Itch.io I bought a ridiculous 400 games pack for a few dollars a few years back.
You have to dig a little but I found more gems in both those libraries than I expected.
At some point we have to accept that it's not possible to preserve all history, and be content with a sample.
It should be. There are lots of good ideas of modifying copyrights so that its not the automatic 70 year after life of author (or what every it is now).
>unfathomable number of games that were released
One of the problems is that there are too many and hard to find curate to separate the good from the meh.
Not just that, but some fair use youtube channels like Digging the Greats:
https://www.youtube.com/@diggingthegreats/videos
He intentionally samples less than 5 seconds iirc, and they still ding him, take all profits from the video, which took many many hours to create, and he cannot afford a lawsuit. It's absolutely ridiculous.
Wait til you hear it's (or at least was) possible to get dinged for 0.00 seconds.[1] That particular issue's probably solved by now, since Youtube requires claims to include a time stamp showing where the problem clip is. Nevermind the fact that wasn't a requirement to begin with. No wonder the corps ding every creator out there. It's free money with no downside to them. Nevermind the fact they're actively destroying culture.
[1] https://youtu.be/VvFGumd_esg?&t=685
Honestly there should be penalties if you ding someone incorrectly, including paying their lawyer fees and an additional fee, plus all revenue stolen.
That kind of works with smaller players (a random thai TV channel dinging people incorrectly is probably going to get some sort of time-out, and even if not, going to court against a smaller player like that is probably within the realm of possibility), but the big players have too much leverage. If Sony gets threatened with even minor punishments, they can simply say 'Fine. But then you have to remove all videos featuring gameplay from Sony Interactive Entertainment's games, or else we'll sue you for copyright infringement'. Even that example is fairly narrow and something that Sony is clearly allowed to do within the current bounds of copyright. They could go full nuclear and demand anything even vaguely related to Sony and its cultural hoard be taken of Youtube, and Youtube would have to comply, if nothing else, while the fight in court goes on.
Youtube has very little leverage, and Google/Youtube is very invested in not ending up in court over this kind of disputes, and the corps making claims know that.
The only actual fix is reforming or abolishing copyright.
We did try to reform copyright; that's what the DCMA was about. While I'm not a lawyer, my understanding is that if a rights holder alleges that a video infringes their rights, Google passes that on,and the creator of the video responds that it is fair use, Google is then immune to any liability per the DCMA (it would be a matter between the two parties). What I do not understand is why that process is not being followed here. Why is Google not insisting that the big media companies follow the law and use the process laid out by the DCMA?
The DMCA is absolutely not copyright reform. It was brought to us by the same mindset that brought us the Bono act. It's a bad piece of legislation that should have been replaced 20 years ago.
> What I do not understand is why that process is not being followed here. Why is Google not insisting that the big media companies follow the law and use the process laid out by the DCMA?
Because the DMCA and copyright in general proved to be a massive hindrance in actually having Youtube be workable, so they made their own system which functionally bypasses it, by giving in to the corps. The corps can either misuse the DMCA and make life hell for Youtube, or they can get in on the system with Youtube and make some cash on the side. There is no middle ground where the DMCA isn't misused, Youtube gets to exist and the corps don't get paid.
Some of the players are entirely fake! It's a nasty little business model of socially harmful fraud that youtube are enabling.
I’d love to see a similar three strikes enforcement of bogus claims. N strikes and the copyright immediately enters the public domain. Pick your battles very carefully.
Seems intuitively difficult to implement changes to the law to get this, but I can dream.
Agreed, and it was already like this in the 2000's (when I got involved in the abandonware scene). I remember the owner of Home of the Underdogs getting constantly in battles with takedown notices for games she only intended to preserve. Not piracy in the sense of "losing tons of money", nobody but enthusiasts cared about these games anymore.
The old video games aren't illegal to own.
They may be illegal to run if they are made to depend on servers, even for single player, and those servers are taken offline.
On top of the shenanigans we have seen recently about revoking paid licenses to watch movies.
You can do illegal things if you don't get caught.
[dead]
That's not illegal, it's just... you can't play the game. Or you can but it's hard. But it's not all that common of an occurrence.
There is zero practical difference between owning a game they don't allow you to play and not owning it. Thus if taking steps to make it playable is illegal, then the equivalent to ownership is illegal.
The steps you're referring to are reverse-engineering the online component of a defunct online-only game, right? That's supposedly legal: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/old-online-games-preserved...
I hate how they are stopping the physical releases.
I guess I do understand it from the business perspective - I never buy a physical release myself - but ... 20 years later, it will be impossible to get these games.
Some time in the next 20 years, pirates will be able to download the game from the e-shop server and create a fake e-shop server where everything is free.
Isn't that one of the whole points of copyright? So the authors can print new copies and not have to compete with other people releasing copies they made?
Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.
> Nothing is stopping people
The original game might be stopping people. It's not like games have a good track record of continuing to work for decades. DRM of all kinds poses a huge problem in this regard, but so does garden variety technological change. The GOG preservation team has quite a few videos about deeply technical work they needed to do to make e.g. Prince of Persia run properly on modern PCs. Sure I can just pirate a copy for PS2 and run it with PCSX2, but thats “piracy" (even though I still have a working original disc!).
So, no: there's a lot stopping people, especially copyright law, from keeping around working copies of their games.
> copyright expires
Not in your lifetime. 70 years after death if the author brings us out into centuries. Books written 60 years before my kids were born won't be out if copyright until they are in their 40s, for example.
Even GOG has some oddities were the available copy is not the original experience. My recent experience of trying to play the original Mafia game. Booting it up a GoG copy, I found that there was no music while driving (a core memory of my original play through). This music has been removed... This also affected small radios you'd find playing music, they now dead.
It really took away from the game experience
I ended up scratching out my original CD copy of the game, installing version 1.0 of the game. It had all the music and better visuals
The patches removed visual features for performance, not GoG's fault here, not sure why GoG hosts an inferior version, its quite a downgrade. The music removal I do not understand.
(This all was particually obvious in an early mission, where you have to beat up some parked cars with baseball bats, the patched version show minimal dents and zero scratches, and the radio sitting in the corner make no sound. This completely changes in the V1.0 copy, so much more atmosphere)
This happens because the original publisher signed a deal for the commercial music with a limited time. So when that time expired, any further releases had to remove the music.
Another example of how copyright makes preservation difficult.
I mean, it's obvious: copyright seeks to create a mechanism to compensate creators by creating scarcity. They succeeded.
It turns out archiving those creations effectively is in direct tension with that scarcity. So we made a system to incentivizes creation, and then destruction of the creation. This is visible with the "copyright cliff" in books, but also the incredible difficulty of legally keeping computer programs running over the decades. Copyright's restrictions on derivative works, coupled with the insanely long copyright term, create a sort of digital wasteland, with only those willing to go underground having great collections of old programs.
A fun way to frame the copyright lifetime absurdity is to point out that in a few years there will be books published on the 1900s that will be copyright protected until the 2100s.
I think the real tragedy of abandonware is that copyright holders aggressively pursued abandonware sites "just in case", while not actually having any plans to redistribute the games legally. The abandonware sites were cracking (or making cracks available, whatever) and making these games playable in modern devices, thus ensuring these games were preserved, but copyright holders (through ESA [1] legal action or similar) simply wanted to stop this, with not plans otherwise. These games often weren't available otherwise. We're talking games of the DOS or C64 era, with no real commercial viability (unless bundled with thousand other games, which they eventually sometimes did, often using the cracks developed by the abandonware scene!).
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment_Software_Associa...
It is often very difficult or even impossible to locate who currently owns the rights to some intellectual property in order to re-release it legally.[0]
[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3053050/how-one-company-is-bring...
Yeah, that's part of the copyright mess. It's partly described by Lawrence Lessig in his book "Free Culture" [1].
It seems petty to me that copyright holders (or their legal proxies) aggressively sought to shut down abandonware sites without any plan to make the software available in any shape. I mean, these were marginal pieces of software, no longer money earners, and the abandonware sites served as digital museums.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)
>thus ensuring these games were preserved
I refuse to believe this train of logic. By the time copyright expires AI will be able to handle removing copyright protection and making it able to run on modern hardware. The only point of doing it now instead of later is so that people commit copyright infringement.
> I refuse to believe this train of logic. By the time copyright expires AI will be able to handle removing copyright protection and making it able to run on modern hardware. The only point of doing it now instead of later is so that people commit copyright infringement.
This must be some powerful combination of magical thinking plus a lack of awareness of the context. In the early 2000's, the time I'm recounting, nobody thought of AI. And it wasn't about copyright infringement since the people in the abandonware community I'm talking about owned the goddamn games, they were trying to digitally preserve them and make them available to others. You really need to be familiar with these people and their goals before you "refuse to believe" anything; uninformed opinions just won't do.
It helps to get a perspective about both the time and the type of games we're discussing. In fact, if you were at all a participant of the community back then, you'd know in which little regard warez kiddies were held.
Even without AI the time it takes to break DRM is not decades and many schemes are trivial to break. And a lot of pirates who share copyrighted material had that material originate from a legal purchase. That doesn't make it any less worse.
I think you're simply unfamiliar with the topic. Have you ever interacted with abandonware communities from 20+ years ago? Since you're so sure their goal was copyright infringement.
In many cases, all that remains of these games is the cracked digital versions, the physical versions don't exist anymore. The abandonware crew did all the preserving, without them there wouldn't be anything to release, AI or not.
Also, a lot of "legally available" software from today (say, via GOG who do own the rights) has the fingerprints of crackers who made it possible for the software to run today.
> And a lot of pirates who share copyrighted material had that material originate from a legal purchase. That doesn't make it any less worse.
Regular pirates distribute recent games, which is obviously an entirely different matter. The abandonware community is/was concerned with preserving digital artifacts and games for posterity, and making old stuff playable today. Games that otherwise would have been lost, forgotten, or simply impossible to play. Those are completely different goals, and it's wrong to claim they did it "to commit copyright infringement".
I don't want to offend you, but your initial claim that abandonware crews decades ago should have somehow foreseen AI would make cracking/fixing easier is the most deranged thing I've read in a while. It also doesn't address that something you cannot play in your lifetime is effectively unavailable and lost to you.
>Since you're so sure their goal was copyright infringement.
It was the means towards their goal at the very least. These people could be maintaining a private archive of this software and other material in a temperature controlled room to preserve it until copyright expires. The legal paths of archiving exist, but these people choose to do it illegally often knowing that other people are going to down and use the software.
>The abandonware crew did all the preserving, without them there wouldn't be anything to release
Usually there is a copy or backup somewhere. Just because a pirated copy is more accessible that doesn't mean that pirates should get all of the credit.
>and it's wrong to claim they did it "to commit copyright infringement"
You are taking this too literally. "Regular pirates" don't want to commit copyright infringement either. It is just the means they achieve their actual goals.
>It also doesn't address that something you cannot play in your lifetime is effectively unavailable and lost to you.
No one has a right to use anyone else's software. I don't have a right to use Windows 3.1 in my lifetime. I don't have a right to play some random game from the 90s that only had 100 copies made. It's okay for software to be unavailable or be lost.
>No one has a right to use anyone else's software. I don't have a right to use Windows 3.1 in my lifetime. I don't have a right to play some random game from the 90s that only had 100 copies made. It's okay for software to be unavailable or be lost.
If you replace software with book, music or movie, would you still claim that? That would kill a lot of culture and cultural studies. Are software that different? More specifically, are games that different?
Yes, I would still say that. Cultures naturally have a lifecycle which yes, does include dying.
In other words, you don't care about preservation, which makes the rest of your arguments moot.
If you think copyright is a goal rather than a means for culture, then you're wrong and everything you say stems from something misguided.
I care about preservation, but my care for preservation does not place it above the law.
Law and morality are two different things. When the law stands in the way of good, it should be ignored in the moment and reformed to be better.
> [copyright infringement] It was the means towards their goal at the very least.
Which one is it? Before, you claimed it was their goal (what they wanted to do). You cannot have it both ways. The actual goal matters.
> These people could be maintaining a private archive of this software and other material in a temperature controlled room to preserve it until copyright expires. The legal paths of archiving exist, but these people choose to do it illegally often knowing that other people are going to down and use the software.
As I said, this just shows you are unfamiliar with the goals of abandonware. They were preserving the games in playable form, and they needed them to be played, because games are not static artifacts; they must be experienced. Besides, asking them to keep copies in temperature controlled rooms is ridiculous, these were passion projects done on a budget, out of commodity hardware and rented servers. This started before torrents by the way, and some abandonware communities frowned upon the notion of just downloading a big file of everything anyway.
> Usually there is a copy or backup somewhere
No, there often wasn't. Resist the urge to reply "well, theoretically..." and consider that maybe I know about this a bit more than you.
> You are taking this too literally. "Regular pirates" don't want to commit copyright infringement either. It is just the means they achieve their actual goals.
I'm taking this the way you wrote it, how else? Don't backpedal. The goals of pirates and abandonware crews were different (though, of course, there was some cross-pollination).
> No one has a right to use anyone else's software. I don't have a right to use Windows 3.1 in my lifetime. I don't have a right to play some random game from the 90s that only had 100 copies made. It's okay for software to be unavailable or be lost.
"Right" is a made-up thing (often broken by the industry that later enforced similar rights; do you know the history of Hollywood studios?). And no, it's not ok. Just because you think some made-up legal right trumps human cultural experience doesn't mean you're right.
It's not ok for software (or books, or movies) to be lost. It matters. Just not to you. I think basically 99% of your argument boils down to "I don't care enough about games preservation, and therefore I don't see the problem".
>Which one is it?
You are the only ones talking about goals so I'm not sure how to even answer this. I believe that pirates use the idea of preservation to justify why they pirate things and to make them feel less bad about breaking the law and stealing from others.
>out of commodity hardware and rented servers
Those servers were likely more expensive than properly storing it at their house.
>No, there often wasn't.
In practice there tends to be. If you are in the retro hardware / software community you will see rare things come up on auction. The idea that all copies just disappeared does not match reality.
>The goals of pirates and abandonware crews were different
But both of those groups distributed pirated software.
>It's not ok for software (or books, or movies) to be lost.
Then I would encourage you to preserve archival copies of things you want to see preserved.
> You are the only ones talking about goals so I'm not sure how to even answer this. I believe that pirates use the idea of preservation to justify why they pirate things and to make them feel less bad about breaking the law and stealing from others.
No, I'm not the only one: you mentioned what you thought was the goal in your initial comment (copyright infringement) and you're restating it now. Again it's very telling this is your "belief", but you acknowledged tacitly that you are unfamiliar with how abandonware projects worked, never having talked to the people. But I have. Do you think it would be maybe wise to acknowledge your beliefs are not based on actual knowledge?
The goals matter. In fact, they matter to you as well, because you've been arguing from a position of belief about the goals ("justify why the pirate things") that is simply incorrect. Why not update your knowledge instead?
> In practice there tends to be. If you are in the retro hardware / software community you will see rare things come up on auction. The idea that all copies just disappeared does not match reality.
This is simply false. I don't think you are into "the retro hardware / software" community at all, I dare you to claim otherwise. Also, rare things do come up on auction, but this doesn't mean as a norm they exist! And the people involved in these projects are breaking all kinds of copyrights and have always been persecuted for this, which you'd know if you were involved in those communities.
> But both of those groups [pirates and abandonware groups] distributed pirated software.
I talked about goals. Your answer is a non-sequitur, because it argues about something that wasn't in dispute. Please try not to do this.
> Then I would encourage you to preserve archival copies of things you want to see preserved.
You haven't the faintest idea of what I do or don't do. More importantly, we're not discussing me, are we? Please try sticking to the point.
At this point you're sounding like a mix of dishonesty and willful ignorance.
> It's okay for software to be unavailable or be lost.
We can do better than that.
LLMs right are generating tons of software that will ultimately never be archived. I think you should come to terms with reality. Not everything is distributed to other people. Not everything is saved to disk. A LLM will generate a script to calculate something, then eventually that script is deleted to make room for something more important.
As I said, we can do better.
The media won't last 70 years. It has to be (infringingly) copied, or no copies will exist.
US law allows for 1 archival copy.
"You" are not supposed to play those old games. "We" have new games for "you".
> Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.
Which people? In the case of abandonware, the original software is often not in the hands of the copyright holder anymore, due to neglect or lack of interest. Sometimes all or most relevant physical copies have become damaged. All that remains is a (cracked) file download in an abandonware website. Thanks to the abandonware community it gets preserved.
Besides, a piece of software history only serves its purpose if you can experience it. With no way of legally experiencing it (you cannot buy it) how do you propose to experience it? You cannot always wait it out, you might die first due to how long copyright lasts. Or is this nebulous concept of copyright more important than human experience?
People who have a legal copy of the game can preserve that copy until copyright expires.
>With no way of legally experiencing it (you cannot buy it) how do you propose to experience it?
You don't need to be able to experience it. There are many things in life that I can't experience and that's okay.
> People who have a legal copy of the game can preserve that copy until copyright expires.
No, that's the point. "Can" doesn't mean they do; only "pirates" kept copies. Copyright owners didn't care, only got involved on the legal side of things. When copies became "legal" again, they were often cracked copies.
I know you keep ignoring this, but that's just because you're unfamiliar with how the abandonware community worked.
> You don't need to be able to experience it. There are many things in life that I can't experience and that's okay.
Games are not static works of art. A game needs to be played in order to be preserved. If you were familiar with the abandonware community you'd know this was their mission. Just because you don't care about this doesn't mean it's not important.
All your comments so far boil down to: "I don't care about old game preservation, and so I don't see the problem with copyrights." Which is a you rather than us kind of problem.
>only "pirates" kept copies.
So why can't those "pirates" keep legal copies instead of an illegal one.
>A game needs to be played in order to be preserved
Does a bottle of wine need to be drunk in order to be preserved, or does storing it in a wine cellar preserve it. The idea that you have to be able to play something for it to count as being preserved is not accurate.
>I don't care about old game preservation, and so I don't see the problem with copyrights.
My opinion boils down to:
* Preservation does not justify piracy
* Preservation is often used as a euphemism for piracy
> So why can't those "pirates" keep legal copies instead of an illegal one.
Often those copies are legal (as in purchased; e.g. the abandonware archive of Home of the Underdogs started with the personal collection of legally purchased games of the owner; she also scanned manuals, cover artwork and whenever possible any goodies that came with the games; as much as possible from the game was preserved). Other times the legal copy just doesn't exist. In either case, the goal of games preservation is that the games are played; these are paintings hanging on a wall.
> Does a bottle of wine need to be drunk in order to be preserved, or does storing it in a wine cellar preserve it. The idea that you have to be able to play something for it to count as being preserved is not accurate.
Games are not wine, and you're wrong.
> Preservation does not justify piracy
Yes, it does. It's just that you're not interested in preservation. You went as far as claiming that it's ok for games/software to die; do you realize anything else you claim about "using AI" or "keeping copies somewhere" and "temperature controlled rooms" is more or less nonsense? The fundamental thing is that you don't care about preserving games. Everything else you're saying is a red herring. If you're ok with games being lost forever, then of course every measure to preserve them will seem excessive or pointless to you. (Please don't insist with "copyright holders surely have a copy...", I've already explained that they often don't. Do me the courtesy of not rehashing refuted claims).
> Preservation is often used as a euphemism for piracy
Wait, before you claimed it wasn't. Now you claim it is. Keep your story straight. Also, you more or less didn't dispute you're completely unfamiliar with abandonware, only basing your opinions on prejudice (and some deranged nonsense about AI), so it's very hard to take your arguments seriously.
>the goal of games preservation is that the games are played
If their is a goal to allow people without a license to play a game protected by copyright to play the game, I can not support it.
>Games are not wine, and you're wrong. But both can only be experienced by taking it out of where its being preserved and playing / drinking it.
>Yes, it does. It's just that you're not interested in preservation.
I do support preservation but not the flavor of preservation which is piracy. For example someone finds "lost media" and since it's "lost media" that means they can just upload a TV episode protected by copyright for others to watch for free.
>Wait, before you claimed it wasn't. Now you claim it is. Keep your story straight
This confusion is intentionally done by pirates to make what they are doing sound legitimate. There are 2 flavors of preservation. Legal preservation which follows the law in how one preserves the work and illegal preservation which is essentially piracy.
> If their is a goal to allow people without a license to play a game protected by copyright to play the game, I can not support it.
> I do support preservation but not the flavor of preservation which is piracy. For example someone finds "lost media" and since it's "lost media" that means they can just upload a TV episode protected by copyright for others to watch for free.
As established previously, this all stems from you not valuing preservation. If you value copyright over culture, you don't value culture. "Piracy" and "copyright" are arbitrary terms, and copyright is not a goal in itself; it sometimes gets in the way.
> This confusion is intentionally done by pirates to make what they are doing sound legitimate. There are 2 flavors of preservation. Legal preservation which follows the law in how one preserves the work and illegal preservation which is essentially piracy.
The confusion is only created by you. Out of malice, I must assume at this point, since you've implicitly acknowledged you didn't engage with abandonware communities and therefore can only infer (incorrectly) what their motives were. I, in contrast, did engage, talked to the owner of HOTU (one of the largest ones back in the day) and know how they collected games and what their motives were. Having no counter to this, you keep ignoring it and instead rehash the same debunked points.
There's only one kind of preservation: the one that actually preserves stuff.
At this point I know you understand this, you're just willfully ignorant or maliciously distorting the argument.
> The idea that you have to be able to play something for it to count as being preserved is not accurate.
You're being wilfully obtuse if this is your genuine opinion about video games. Your opinion is bad and you should feel bad.
> Isn't that one of the whole points of copyright? So the authors can print new copies and not have to compete with other people releasing copies they made?
The more important point of copyright is 'to promote the progress of the useful arts'. The 'securing for a limited time to authors and inventors, the exclusive right to their writings and inventions' is just the means. Do the means in this case seem to work well in achieving that goal?
> Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.
Except the 70+ years it takes before you're legally allowed to publish it, or even just adapt it. If I'm going to play things by the book, even if I archive it when I'm 10 years old, sales stop on day two of the copyright period, and the rights expire the day after it's 70 years years old, I will be 80+ years old when I'm legally allowed to let people download it, or I myself can publish an adaptation (or more likely, I'll have died and my archive version will be lost in the estate sale).
Copyright law is about finding a balance between, on one side, incentivizing creators via granting them a legal monopoly on publishing, and on the other side, the philosophical notion of freedom of speech, which would allow anyone to republish, remix, and repurpose any preexisting work. The original formulation of this legal monopoly was that it was supposed to be short enough that it would expire well within the average person's lifetime, a notion which has long been gutted via regulatory capture.
> When I came to work for Arrow, I was bringing a lot of awareness of the methods of fan preservationists on the torrent sites
Very smooth way of using your torrenting skills on your CV.
I know this is the easy take, but there really are people who are passionate about preservation beyond just acquiring things for their own use.
I'm not one of those people. :D But I do know one; he's a professional librarian.
I am am an amateur recordist, I absolutely love to bootleg concerts and gigs and things, as in: make my own recordings of live music and so on. I have shared everything in the appropriate places, also. I believe it is an essential artistic expression: to record the nature of the world around you for the future.
So, I do it a bit.
I think this ethos can be applied in many ways and with different media; preservationism is a high value objective. The future needs it, kinda.
This reminds me I have some film that I need to get digitized and uploaded to IA. From what I can tell they are clips from concerts in the Chicago area in the 1980s. And I think this proves GPs point, because to be honest I personally have no interest in live music, but when I found those in a can at a thrift store for $20, you bet your ass I bought them to be preserved and not turned into someone's ill-advised art project (or something equally destructive). When I see something that I know /someone/ will value I will always do what I can to save it from destruction/the trash/someone who doesn't know the value.
> to record the nature of the world around you for the future
That's cool.
> The future needs it, kinda.
Agreed but we seem to be in the minority seeing that most people nowadays seem to be speed running to make Asimov's Foundation into a documentary.
On one side, the dominant consumer society we live in is extremely busy churning through anything that can be sold as a product and then thrown away so that the new can replace them. Buildings go up as quickly as they come down, and we digitize books just to destroy them in pursuit of productivity gains we may or may not ever get. And of course, conflicts and war continue to destroy priceless artefacts, like they've always done.
On the other side, when you consider objective metrics, I don't think humanity ever spent so much effort and resources into preserving the past as today. Archaeology was basically invented less than 250 years ago, and now it's everywhere and continuously expanding. A lot of places are now not even allowed to change, museums are plentiful and overflowing, and the internet created a completely new world of human creation that we are increasingly trying to preserve (IA etc).
It's a mixed picture.
This is true but people also use it as a magic shield to (needlessly IMO) justify their piracy, even though they are 1) only downloading things they happen to like and 2) don’t even follow a basic 3-2-1 backup protocol, let alone anything remotely resembling SOP for preservation.
I bet not even 1 in 1000 people pirating are doing it primarily as a preservation exercise.
> only downloading things they happen to like
The Library of Congress is selective about what it preserves too, as is every museum. No single entity could possibly hope to preserve every film, it takes a community.
> don’t even follow a basic 3-2-1 backup protocol
The swarm is the backup. You can't beat hundreds of hash-checked copies across the globe.
> I bet not even 1 in 1000 people pirating are doing it primarily as a preservation exercise.
I bet you're right. Isn't it wonderful, then, that those 1 in 1000 (who are overrepresented in tracker admin and release group/scene work) are able to harness those selfish impulses and turn them into the most complete, accessible, and durable distributed art preservation project in human history.
There are some preservation efforts on a couple of the big movie trackers. One is "donate Xtb of space and use this script to manage it" so you don't choose the torrents, they get assigned till your donated space is full.
In Another gives bonuses for adopting torrents where the original seeder doesn't want to/can't seed anymore.
Neither are perfect but as one of those 1 in 1000 its nice to help where I can.
> The Library of Congress is selective about what it preserves too, as is every museum. No single entity could possibly hope to preserve every film, it takes a community.
You can’t possibly compare this to yet another person downloading all of Friends to watch off their hard drive, and most of these people aren’t seeding back anyway, so they’re not even part of the swarm.
I don’t object to piracy but I do object to preservation arguments made for/by people who are in no way thinking along those lines. I can’t buy tailgating on some clearly inapplicable altruism argument.
Meanwhile, there's examples of long lost footage being found again precisely because people were recording/copying/pirating for their own purposes. I'm thinking explicitly of Doctor Who footage that the BBC overwrote (tape was expensive), but years later was found on privately recorded video tapes left in someone's shed.
Personally, I enjoy pirating less well-known scifi/horror films and series. It's surprising how relatively recent productions can "disappear" when there's no streaming company interested in it. My usual example of disappearing TV is the third season of "Monkey Dust". The music rights weren't agreed, so the third season never made it to DVD and is impossible to watch legally, but hopefully people like me will keep it available nonetheless.
There's also companies that like to censor previous output, such as Disney and their pro-Nazi propaganda.
They were in no way pirated, they were recorded under the UK's copyright exemption for this purpose.
Also that is a vanishingly small amount of content, the vast majority of recovered Doctor Who episodes were found from broadcaster archives, not the public.
> They were in no way pirated, they were recorded under the UK's copyright exemption for this purpose.
That's a bit of a grey area as IIRC videotaping TV was allowed for "time-shifting", but not for keeping long term. Whether that counts as pirating is debatable.
> Also that is a vanishingly small amount of content
Yes, that was one instance that I was recalling, but I think there's been other examples of missing episodes such as Hancock's Half Hour. I just think it's a shame that productions of historical value are lost due to the legality of personal copying although that's more relevant to shows from the 80s/90s/2000s when copying technology was widely available.
It took a lot more effort and care to pirate Doctor Who back then (let alone preserve it) then it does now ha
Yep, definitely! I know of instances where professional archives and libraries work with specialized torrent sites to archive content directly and these days that's sometimes necessary with how content is locked down, games are dependent on a server or DRM schemes don't make archiving easy.
You frequently hear of cases where the last remaining official copy got lost and only due to some fan service (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49694382) data could be recovered.
I’m absolutely obsessed with it. For me it’s driven purely from childhood nostalgia. In particular, Macintosh games. I want, and want others to have that warm excitement of nostalgia when they re-discover something forgotten.
"“To me, it [the original Star Wars trilogy] doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it.” - George Lucas, 2004
It is insane how much George Lucas has edited the original Star Wars trilogy. I think no movies have had more edits over time than Star Wars.
> It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it.” - George Lucas, 2004
I don't begrudge any director the freedom to go back and revise their work to more perfectly realize their creative vision. The problem is when they try to erase the original released version of an historically significant film by making it completely unavailable. George had no issue accepting the accolades and billions of dollars from the original trilogy. It's fine to later release his 'perfect vision' but in today's digital media era, there's zero reason or justification to make the originals unavailable. Be proud of what your younger self made and let fans decide which they version they want to watch.
I'm not just being post-hoc selective here. I think original theatrical releases of classics should remain available even in cases like Blade Runner where the OG theatrical release is a widely-hated, critically panned abomination made by a clueless executive producer without the involvement of the director, writer or main star and released over their strong objections. It is objectively awful and by far the worst release of the film - but I still believe even that miserable train wreck should remain available forever (perhaps with appropriate warning labels :-), even if only as a cautionary tale to future clueless executive producers).
Since you brought up Blade Runner (and I agree with all your points, by the way) I'm deeply offended by how the Final Cut decided to add all these wonderful improvements yet Ridley Scott agreed to completely mess up the color grading. What's up with the new greenish tint? Did he think it would make Blade Runner look more modern or what?
Fortunately, we can still watch the Director's Cut. It's a shame, too, because the Final Cut has a lot of improvements otherwise (e.g. fixing Zhora's face is a major one).
I've heard that Ridley was busy shooting another film when the Final Cut was in production so he wasn't that involved personally. Most of the improvements were pre-approved in bullet point form, meaning the editor probably did much of what we both like about it in advance and Ridley was there in person only to supervise the color grade and to sign-off on changes.
Personally, when it comes to revisiting revered classics many years later, I think directors (even good ones) should focus on correcting obvious technical errors like matte lines in effects, muffled audio or the proverbial boom mike at the edge of a shot. They need to resist the urge to make non-technical stylistic changes like color grading or noise reduction (looking at you James Cameron). Things like adding back cut shots or recutting scenes to change pacing need to be carefully considered and only done when the original cut was obviously in error or not what the director intended at the time - perhaps due to not having time/budget to reshoot, overdub or being overruled by the studio or producer.
When a film has become a classic, and is of historic importance, it should be respected as an artifact of its time and a snapshot of a director's abilities, style and tastes at that point in their development. They should be thankful for the opportunity and stick to making it what their original intent was then, not what they'd do if they made it now. Otherwise, they're quickly on a slippery slope toward a strange stylistic hybrid between then and now.
James Cameron's Aliens "Directors Cut" is an example of a mixed bag. Fixing the VFX matte lines is a definite plus but the excessive noise reduction sucks all the texture out of the image. Adding back the lengthy sequence at the beginning of the film showing Newt and her family encountering the Aliens on the mining colony removes much of the suspense and mystery, making the film worse IMHO. Cameron cut that scene after test screenings for good reason which makes the addition feel like it was motivated by the studio's desire to market the Director's Cut with "X Minutes of New Footage!".
The same is true of the entire ~20 min French colonist digression in the Apocalypse Now Director's Cut. It's mildly interesting from an historical point of view but it brings the entire movie to a grinding WTF halt. It's a clear example of putting a mistake back into a film that should never have been in the script in the first place. The 'Newt's Family' scene in Aliens is just unnecessary but it was probably hard to know that until seeing a rough cut.
Nodding in agreement again.
I think Aliens has a couple of additions that do make sense, Ripley being told of her daughter and the scene with the miniguns, but that's about it.
Agreed about the rest, you're basically reading my mind about how I feel about movies.
Oh you're going to love the Penultimate Cut fanedit/restoration of Blade Runner:
https://fanedit.org/what-the-final-cut-shouldve-been/ (check out the Changes tab)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsdmYjF_064 (trailer comparison)
https://archive.org/download/blade-runner-the-penultimate-cu...
Oooh! I didn't know of this. I need it.
Edit: looking at the list of changes, this is exactly what I wanted. Well, an excuse to watch Blade Runner yet again :D
There are 58 mentions about Han in this thread but none of them state that Han shot first! [0]
0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_shot_first
The incredibly rare topic that everyone on HN agrees upon.
This opinion rubs me the wrong way. I don't think you meant it like this, but it really feels like when someone creates something, they now have some obligation to society, should society deem it good enough.
In my opinion, there is absolutely nothing to support this idea. If I make something, I can change it however I want, as many times as I want, and throw away old copies - even if you really really liked those old copies. It's my art, not yours.
Maybe one could make the argument that George Lucas is not the only artist here, and I'd agree with that, but to imply that society is owed something that someone created of their own volition, simply because society happens to like it, feels wrong. He can change it however he wants until the day he dies, as far as I'm concerned.
After that day, I think the argument changes.
Society grants you the right to enforce what we call intellectual property. Enforcing that concept is rather new, and some of humanities biggest cultural works predate it.
The timespan for which we grant a creator the sole right to decide about his work is arbitrary and, last but not least, almost all of our cultural works are derivative in nature, so what actually is our own work is equally arbitrary defined.
In the existing framework he can do what he did, but the current one is not the only possible.
I don't see why it matters to the argument if the original creator is alive. I also don't believe the creator has a special obligation to make things available. But I generally agree with the GP, once something is released and widely popular, society now shares some ownership. There should be some way to access it, at least as part of the historical record.
It's not the creator's responsibility to facilitate that, but they also shouldn't be able to hinder it.
> It's my art, not yours.
I think this is where most opinions differ.
Authors, painters, musicians (and at some points in my life I've considered myself among them) can have a lot of intent in creating something, and a lot of intent later to alter something, but at no point do I believe an artist owns their art once released/sold, outside of IP laws. What I mean is George Lucas has the legal right to only release the shitty remastered versions, but he certainly can't dictate they're better.
The whole concept of "death of the author" is about how regardless how a writer meant something to be interpreted, if another interpretation gets more traction, and is more coherent, it's hard to argue it's wrong.
I’m not implying that Lucas gets to decide which cut is best, just that it’s his right to decide what “Star Wars” actually refers to.
What the movie means, how it affects people, how it reflects on the author, etc. are all out of his control, but the public doesn’t get to argue with him on what it actually IS.
Once the author dies, all bets are off because things must continue to change to remain accessible to others. Translations, data format changes, viewing methods, etc. all can require adaptations. Since we can no longer ask the author their opinion, we take the works as a whole. No future discussion of SW would be complete without taking time to reference the changes it underwent over time. If nothing else, it adds necessary context to understand the media.
IMO it’s also kind of a blessing. It gives us multiple angles to consider a work from when squeezing more meaning out of it 100 years down the road.
> I don't think you meant it like this
You're correct. I did not.
> they now have some obligation to society, should society deem it good enough.
I was expressing a wish or, perhaps an ideal, not an obligation. I don't think there's any implied ethical, moral or legal duty on a creator to do what their patrons or fans want. As an amatuer filmmaker who's also worked in the industry creating technology for cinematic storytelling, I'm as pro-creator as can be.
And, full-disclosure, my feelings about Star Wars are 'complicated'. In 1977 I'd just become a teenager when I saw Star Wars at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood. It not only rocked my world, it made me want to be a filmmaker and changed the course of my life. Turns out I was better at software than filmmaking. Fortunately, as film became digital, my interests collided :-).
Decades later my software was used extensively to make several Star Wars films including hundreds of shots in Phantom Menace. I was at the ranch many times during production and was back at the Chinese theater for the premiere of TPM - almost exactly 22 years to the day after my life was changed in that theater. Prior to the premiere I'd only seen storyboards and individual shots so, going in, my expectations were as sky-high as any fan. But, like many hardcore fans, I felt let down by Phantom Menace. Did George owe fans the film they wanted him to make? Nope, not at all. He made the film he wanted to make. Even though I was disappointed by TPM, it hasn't changed how much I respect George. He's still a remarkable filmmaker.
I see why people think this, but it is also anti-social. Once you've introduced art to the public market, two things happen:
- people form a relationship with and an emotional response to the art
- they give you money for the art
Now, the latter gets into questions like Sony or Steam removing games or films which people have previously purchased. A consumer rights question. People tend to feel they have been treated like a sucker when the publisher does this.
The former you are effectively rescinding the emotional relationship with the art. A much more complicated question. This can certainly be pathological - see kpop and the idol industry. But I don't think it's unfair to say that insisting that the art relationship should be totally unilateral and you owe the audience nothing, is going to anger the audience.
I get your point, but also on the other hand, art is subjective, and people subjectively appreciate older / imperfect versions of things. Consider film grain - it's an artifact, an unintentional or unwanted side-effect of how films used to be made. But because it was a part of a production, people wanted it back - it gets added artificially to modern films, added as filters to video games, and video encoding has special features to support it without affecting compression negatively too much.
Or take video games, particularly 2d / pixelart ones - they were built for CRT displays and relatively low resolutions. They can remake them now with multiples of the original resolution and fidelity, but for many people it loses some of it. Some art doesn't translate at all - take this digitized artwork from Castlevania, which was digitized specifically for display on CRT displays but which loses all charm (e.g. the eyes reduced to a single pixel) when rendered somewhere else: https://x.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616587
But this probably applies to film as well; if a film was made for a 35mm projector from the 70's, it won't look good or anywhere near that "experience" on a modern day 4K OLED display without editing.
At the end of the day I think the viewer should be given options and choices. And for a good while it looked like they would - with DVD and blu-ray offering options like different audio tracks, camera angles, and different versions of the same film in one package. But that never materialized because I suppose it's only a wish from purists. And at that point they're competing with piracy and internet hobbyists like the article.
I could not agree more emphatically with your points on CRTs, OLEDs, etc. So I hope you won't mind me quibbling on one statement.
> Consider film grain - it's an artifact, an unintentional or unwanted side-effect of how films used to be made.
I don't think it's quite so binary. Depending on the context and intent, film grain can be an undesirable artifact of limited celluloid chemistry, optics and available light. But it can also be an expressive aspect of the artistic medium no different than depth of field, focal length, color timing, grading, etc.
There are certainly examples of low light scenes where it's clear the filmmaker reached the limits of then-available optics and chemistry and they were forced into compromises such using higher-speed film and/or 'pushing' the chemistry during film processing. These can increase grain and the result is often shadow detail being lost in the noise floor. I agree that's always bad.
But there are also wonderful examples where directors and DPs very intentionally selected film stocks for their unique texture, gamma curve, color sensitivity, etc as an expressive choice. In those cases, it's no different than a painter intentionally using different canvas textures, brush bristles and pigment viscosity as part of their expressive palatte. In this form, the unique textures of different film stocks are often referred to as 'image structure' (a less pejorative term than 'grain' which is often construed negatively).
> But because it was a part of a production, people wanted it back
Artists hate any limitations on their vision, whether technical, financial or societal. They want maximum expressive freedom yet also grudingly concede pushing against limitations often elevates their work to new heights. When film grain was a limitation they struggled against, they hated it. When grain is an artistic element giving their image texture, they want in their toolbox.
To be clear, not all chemical, optical or technical limitations from the past were expressively useful. No VFX artists are pining for the black matte outlines from misregistered optical printing or generational mismatch in multi-pass composites. :-) Interestingly, as optics, lighting instruments and film sensitivity improved in the late B&W era, it was briefly trendy among some cinematographers to abandon depth of field as an unfortunate historical limitation of the past. Of course, it was just an over-reaction to a long-resented limitation finally becoming a choice and DoF remained an invaluable storytelling tool in the hands of a master (https://creativecow.net/depth-of-field-gregg-toland-citizen-...). I just want to avoid similarly over-reacting by dismissing the creative value of image structure and texture as we leave unwanted graininess in the past.
I suspect we'd have several enjoyable beers debating edge cases; which visual artifacts of past technical limitations can arguably have expressive utility to visual storytellers going forward and which have no real redeeming qualities outside retro callbacks and nostalgia? I'll nominate anamophic lens flares to start: https://theasc.com/article/star-trek-into-darkness/. My take: J.J. went overboard intentionally milking them in ST:ID but I'd be horrified if Spielberg digitally removed them from Close Encounters. Philosophically, I think the same principles broadly apply to retro gaming and preservation. So much so I built a custom arcade emulation cabinet around a 27" Wells-Gardner 9200 quad-sync analog RGB CRT and Radeon R9 380x. To me, it's about authentically preserving original artistic intent, especially when the original creators placed individual pixels by hand specifically to leverage certain analog video artifacts.
Since at least 1100 CE, even artists have disagreed with you. "The Moving Hand writes, and having written, moves on. Nor all your piety nor wit shall remove half a line of it."
You don't own art that has been released to the public, anymore than you own a car or pizza that you sold.
I agree with this, but that’s not what I’m arguing.
Buying a pizza does not give you any rights to force the owner to maintain that recipe you purchased a slice of.
Buying art does not give you any rights to force the owner to do anything, either.
This is where IP law gets so confusing in the modern world. You can "buy" access to IP, and it feels like you are buying the thing, but you are not. Netflix is under no obligation to provide s04e01 of CSI:Indianapolis, even if that's the sole reason you subscribed.
I'm not sure what you are arguing for. Should an artist be able to remove a viewing of a film that's already occurred if they dislike the final product? Or should George be able to forbid me to watch a released version of SW where Han shoots first?
One of my favorite trivia items about A New Hope:
- there was a children's book (that my family had) that accompanied the movie
- there is a scene in the book where Biggs comes back to talk to Luke
- this didn't make any sense to me as a child b/c that scene isn't in the movie
- I realized years later that they cut the scene but AFTER the book was printed.
The scene in question is here btw: https://youtu.be/O7J_IZ9agRI?t=318
I also remembered that scene and the early Jabba the Hutt scene from the novelisation. And because I knew them from the book, I initially loved it when the Special Editions added them back. Until I realised they don't really work. Well, Biggs does, but Jabba becomes much less terrifying from having Han talk to him like that and even walking over his tail. Jabba being just a feared name works so much better.
Yea I think the added Biggs scenes are the one thing from the Special Edition that is a clear improvement over the original.
Yes!! I remember reading this book at the library as a kid, and for years afterwards I wondered if I had just hallucinated the whole thing.
I think it's a really important scene, and I'm sad that it was cut from the movie.
Side note: the (extremely well-done) Star Wars Radio Drama [0] included a great many expanded scenes on Tattoine (with quite a bit of expansoin on Tosche Station), and I think those scenes (which include the aforementioned scene with Biggs) really add to the richness and flavor of the setting.
If you're a fan of Star Wars and haven't yet listened to the radio drama, I highly recommend it!
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-29uKdckL4
Wow, I feel like new DLC just dropped. The first twenty has echoes of American Graffiti, and expands on the Luke-Owen-Beru relationship.
There was also Luke looking up at the space battle and "Treadwell" the droid, which would have played just before all of the Biggs scenes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDPZfPe5F-w (a cleaner version is shown in How Star Wars was saved in the edit)
It doesn't affect the specific point in question here, but it's probably best to treat the RocketJump video with caution: https://youtube.com/watch?v=olqVGz6mOVE .
Yeah I knew someone would point out the controversy. Unfortunately the only other version of the clip I could find was some super grainy version, but I hadn't seen that rebuttal. Amazing.
This is the gold standard for response videos.
There was also a comic book that came out before the movie.
In the scene where the sand people shoot R2D2, it looked like the other way around so it was quite confusing to see them captured in the next frame. Who knew the little guy didn't have a blaster?
that scene is in the radio drama version as well (along with many others that aren't in the movie)
Also Dune came out before star ears
if you've seen this scene, does that mean that you've sailed the high seas?
Another part of the story a lot of people don't know is apparently Lucas's cut of the original Star Wars was horrible, so his wife came in and redid everything and that's the version that went to theaters. And she was the editor on the remaining two of the original trilogy as well.
I think it's pretty clear to everyone now that when Lucas is flying solo his final output is... not great. He obviously imagined a universe a lot of people find compelling, but wasn't always the best person to realize the vision of that universe.
I know it's a meme at this point, but being an "idea person" is legitimately a thing. But there is also being self-aware enough to recognize what your strengths are and when you should call in reinforcements, as it were, to fill in where there's a need. Seems there's a spectrum where people fall in how readily they will recognize this and Lucas falls more towards the reluctant side perhaps.
“Idea people” are not self aware. That’s the whole problem.
Idea people are a dime a dozen, but there's only a few that also have the managerial skills to make it a reality.
On a similar vein, Gene Roddenberry was pretty similar with Star Trek. He had a pretty big universe imagined, got the scaffolding in for it, but all the best works under the name of Star Trek were made by other people. Anything Gene Roddenberry was directly involved in as a script writer (see: many episodes of the original and first two seasons of The Next Generation) are generally the weakest and worst parts of Star Trek.
Yeah, also I think part of that was Gene wanted to portray a more optimistic vision of the future as a principled thing, which I get, but that also made Classic and TNG feel a bit superficial and low stakes a lot of the time. DS9 is personally my favorite series, mostly because of the age I was when it came out, but also because I liked that they shifted it to be a bit less idealistic.
I still think TNG was the best, but DS9 was good too. In hindsight though, it seems like it was good to have someone like Roddenberry doggedly insisting upon his positive vision for the future. The modern Star Trek series, where there's nobody pushing for the utopian vision any more, are kind of depressing and not really in line with the idea that humanity will eventually be able to improve itself and leave behind the pettiness that holds us back today.
Yeah, I think that's fair. IMO DS9 got the balance right because it's a bit more gritty than TNG, accepts more complexity and ambiguity, but still holds up those ideals as something worth striving for even against severe difficulties.
I'm sad to say the newest Trek shows have just missed me.
Yeah same, there was the one that was both "in the past" (taking place before TNG I believe) but thanks to mushroom magic they had instant teleportation and then timey-wimey stuff so it was also a hypermodern show. The melodrama was just grating on me after a while.
Then there was Picard which actually showed some promise but I couldn't find myself caring about the new characters they tried to introduce on top of the layers of nostalgia. I heard it got a soft reboot or new writers for season 3 but I have no idea, I haven't heard anything about it.
Voyager was still good but that was the last show I actually watched on the regular.
I watched DS9 for the first time on streaming not too long ago, and it's really really good.
Yeah it's aged phenomenally well, and makes more modern Star Treks so frustratingly awful. The Visitor is arguably one of the best episodes of any Star Trek ever, Past Tense was basically prophetic. And so many of the episodes are extremely insightful on human nature - For the Uniform where good can so easily become evil - In the Pale Moonlight being of a similar nature, and so many more.
One of the things I'm most looking forward to is watching the series with my kids when they're old enough.
---
Unrelated but the TNG episode Tapestry also deserves a mention. [1] Wtf happened to media. Writers used to actually understand people, now everything is so trite.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGvUDvZ7KyU
I watched it when it was originally on in the 90's. As the show got more serialized it was like a cliff hanger or huge event every few weeks. Then we got a great 10 episode arc to end the series.
"Death to the opposition!"
- Commander Worf, Take Me Out to the Holosuite (7x4)
The saying was something like "Gene can make a good script out of mediocre one. He can also make a good script out of a great one."
I don't know, now he is no longer with Star Trek (as he is dead) and the whole franchise is in a very weird place. Maybe he was actually needed?
Roddenberry specifically wasn't needed, Rick Berman was able to learn from his vision and maintain it. After Roddenberry died, Berman was able to maintain TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise all with the Star Trek ideals that Roddenberry always fought to maintain when he was alive. Even as Deep Space Nine and Enterprise had to seemingly throw the ideals out the window temporarily, with the Dominion and Xindi arcs, just to better demonstrate why they were so badly needed in the first place.
Unfortunately, we don't have a Rick Berman, or anyone else that maintains the same ideals, at the helm anymore.
One huge addition that she created entirely in the edit is the "ticking clock" during the final battle. Originally there was no count down to the Death Star destroying the base. Imagine how much tension would be lost without that.
https://www.rogerebert.com/tributes/the-woman-who-saved-star...
That version of events has been disputed: https://youtube.com/watch?v=olqVGz6mOVE .
> I think it's pretty clear to everyone now that when Lucas is flying solo his final output is... not great.
The evidence is pretty compelling that George had a lot of great ideas as well as some not-so-great ideas and his own ability to distinguish between the two was... less than ideal. Thus his best work was from those times he collaborated closely with talented people who had significant input and there was a strong, empowered curator. Positive examples include the great results on Star Wars, the fact that Empire is so good and his work on Raiders with Spielberg. A clear negative example is Phantom Menace where George was in absolute control.
A lot of fantastically talented creators simply shouldn't have unchecked 'final cut' over their own output. It's really nothing to be ashamed of, and frankly, is more common than not.
This is oft-repeated mythology that became popular on reddit; it's part of the campaign of feminist revisionism that's commonplace over there regardless of whether it matches reality or not. They constantly try to argue that it must have been a case of a man getting credit for work a woman did, even when the woman concerned made no such claim or even received appropriate credit.
She won the Oscar for editing "A New Hope"
I don't think its mythology to claim that Marcia Lucas edited the films. It's pretty well accepted reality.
If the remasters and the episodes I-III are anything to judge by, George really does better when there is an editor that will check him.
Marcia Lucas along with two other editors won the Film Editing Oscar for Star Wars/ANH/Ep. 4 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1dW6bNBzN8&t=52s ): she was no doubt a very good editor. Neither she nor the other two "saved Star Wars in the edit" in the manner often claimed. For example, Marcia Lucas fought to keep the teen-movie version of the opening with Luke meeting Biggs and others at Tosche Station in Tatooine, while George Lucas had always preferred to begin the Tatooine segment with the droids https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olqVGz6mOVE&t=1407s .
There’s no way to know one way or another whether her editing “saved” it. There’s no other original edit without her, so it’s an unfalsifiable claim.
I was just responding to the poster claiming it was some sort of feminist conspiracy theory to claim that she was an editor on the film and did a good job. She did edit the film, and a plurality of her peers thought the editing was a good enough job to award the most prestigious award in the industry for the work.
It's reasonably clear that Star Wars would have been in some trouble if it had come out with anything like the original John Jympson edit, and in that sense it's fairly safe to say that Star Wars truly was saved in the edit. (Though that's also not very surprising, as by all accounts it's not particularly unusual for a good completed film to have had a shaky first edit.) But it seems that all the evidence suggests that George Lucas was always unhappy with Jympson's editing and understood its problems, and that it was he who selected three professional editors including Marcia Lucas to work on a re-edit which achieved his high-level creative intentions and was closely and actively supervised by him, and in which he did some of the hands-on editing to boot. There doesn't seem to be much to support the idea that the (other) editors took Star Wars out of the hands of a hapless George Lucas and bestowed on him a film which had been reworked beyond his own capabilities or vision, which is the usual "saved in the edit" claim, let alone that Marcia Lucas alone was largely responsible for that supposed feat, which is what was claimed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49883758 .
It’s a repeated pattern, not really a conspiracy. Of course, some patterns are basically considered abhorrent to notice.
The noooticers are known to spot all 11 of the recent 2 conspiracies.
Again, I never claimed she wasn’t good at her job or didn’t earn some credit for her work on New Hope. I guess I wrongly expected HN users to have better reading comprehension and nuance than redditors. My point was entirely that in this specific instance, her contribution was overemphasized by a brigade of redditors spreading misinformation.
It’s well known that a group of fans who follow a certain youtube channel well known among star wars enthusiasts share the channel’s opinions on sites like reddit, and these became an oft-repeated myth spread there to discredit Lucas because they (like the channel admins) despise the sequel trilogy. They also don’t limit themselves to praising her editing work, but often claim that she was the _real_ creator of star wars and Lucas wouldn’t have been anywhere near as big without her. I don’t have any side on this, I am not particularly fond of the sequel trilogy nor a big fan of Lucas, but what I do dislike is the myth-making constantly pushed about various things on reddit.
Do you mean the prequel trilogy here?
Yes, got mixed up a bit between real world chronology and the star wars one.
I think it's justifiable to call out her contribution. She was an excellent editor without Star Wars, her work includes American Graffiti and Taxi Driver.
I consider her a part of what makes the original trilogy great but I don't think it diminishes Lucas' contribution. No one person is "what makes it great". Plus the internet loves the underdog or a a "TIL"
Ah yes, it's always those dastardly feminists' fault...
Indeed, very often. You are probably feeling called out.
yeah like those nags Marie Curie and Margaret Keane
If you had reading comprehension, you’d understand that my comment was about the excess claims, not real ones. Marie Curie has long been known for her achievements, nobody in recent history claimed otherwise. I guess reading comprehension is too much to assume nowadays.
I have the original trilogy's original version on VHS still, and just recently watched them. I would say they hold up very well and weren't really in need of any post release changes or updates. The effects look great today compared to some other movies that actually came out later, probably because Star Wars used more practical effects vs some early Sci-Fi CGI that ended up not aging as well.
The changes are mostly just window dressings around the original footage, like extra CGI in transition scenes. They don't really change much of the core movie experience. It does end up causing some funny side effects though. Like when the main characters move from one place to another you'll see a splashy dinosaur like creature or fancy robot, but once they actually arrive in the scene the background falls back to the original with a lot less of that added CGI action.
Whenever discussion about Lucas and his taste comes up, I remember this story in https://gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2015/04/04/fall-... about him being asked for a name for a new character, and him suggesting Darth Icky or Darth Insanius.
What about Bladerunner? It also has a bunch of different versions, with some pretty big changes: with or without the voice over.
Luckily, it seems like they are all being undone for the 50th next year. Most of them, anyway. We'll have to wait to see the release to be sure, but it's a definite improvement. Maybe the definitive version, finally.
I was talking to Bob Gale once about this topic and he said that him and Zemeckis had put a veto clause in their contract when they sold BTTF to Universal in the 90s giving them the power over any later fuckery with the releases, while they are alive. This was during the height of the 3D TV craze and he said Universal had asked for permission to do a 2D->3D conversion of BTTF and both Bobs had refused. So there's one franchise at least that won't get dicked with in the near future.
[I'm not totally against 2D->3D conversions if done right. The Titanic conversion looks like it was filmed 3D-native, beautifully done. The Star Wars: Episode 1 conversion is essentially unwatchable and killed the whole project.]
It's pretty funny, he took something that was very much a product of its time and beloved in large part for that reasons, and slowly turned it into something even hardcore fans want nothing to do with.
Very little was really lost IMO if you look at those movies with an eye free of nostalgia, but I'm sure many MANY people would disagree with that.
> even hardcore fans want nothing to do with
I think the main series has turned to trash, but isn’t it still commercially successful? I personally adored Andor, but even my parents couldn’t sit through the first couple episodes because they’re slow moving.
Massively profitable afaik, up until the last of the new trilogy which underperformed (still made ~$300mil box office using standard metrics). Andor I agree was the first Star Wars property I'd call genuinely excellent, after 'The Empire Strikes Back', but obviously that's hugely dictated by my personal taste.
On the other hand there are signs of the brand wearing thin in places, Mandalorian vs. Grogu was a critical and commercial flop (assuming the usual 2x budget for marketing, if it was more for marketing then it might have been significantly worse than just breaking even).
The trend is really clear though, and it's not going in the right direction for Disney. Obviously they have the resources to reverse that, but the question is if they have the vision and the will.
Hahah your comment put a mental image in my head of Mando fighting Baby Yoda.
We watched it yesterday at home and it was… a strange movie. It looked like it was shot on the same stage they use for the show, the budget seemed far lower than other Star Wars movies, and the story was confusing and rambling in a way my children had a lot of difficulty following. I’m glad I didn’t see it in theaters.
The (believable) rumor is that it was originally scripted as ~5 episodes of the show when management said "We looked at our release schedule and yeah, make it a theatrical release". It's ironic, so much of what's going on now is taking movies (Cape Fear for example) and stretching them in 8-10 episode seasons; it's interesting to see someone try and fail at the opposite maneuver.
Ah, so they pulled a Moana 2 with Mando?
If you haven't seen Moana 2... well, don't watch it. And I say this as a parent who watched Moana and loved it. But if you did watch Moana 2 and thought the plot didn't make any sense, it's because they planned a whole TV show then turned it into a movie at the last minute. This resulted in delightful moments like a villain that comes out of nowhere, and in the course of her intro song has a heel-face turn without any explanation, then disappears out of the movie forever.
I hated Moana 2 but I didn't know about the context. Thanks for that, that now explains it. It's a pity because I much prefer Moana to Frozen but I have no plans to show my kid Moana 2.
Oh my God… I’d heard it was a disaster, but I really missed the scope!
Scopes in real life, linked to film industry are interesting even more.
Marc Bernays Randolph, cofounder and first CEO of Netlifx is nephew of Edward Bernays who is nephew of Sigmund Freud. Edward developed propaganda in 30s in US, later, after Goebbels did same, renamed to public relations. Nowadays, we have Netflix doing same.
Hopefully, Disney can give JJ Abrams another chance to turn it around. /s
Few have made so much money from a trilogy or had such creative freedom. I admit I disliked the laser bolt changes of special editions. Yet otherwise loved seeing some modern CGI fleshing out those worlds.
How are the blaster bolts different? I'm genuinely surprised I never noticed...
IIRC the original bolts were opaque in the middle and hazy around the edges. It felt like they were blinding even to cameras and visors. New ones were thinner and evenly transparent, as if someone overlaid some cheap translucent plastic
Yeah, because what EVERYONE thought Star Wars needed was more poop jokes and bad CGI.
If only they could add some Jar Jar in there and sell more co-branded toothpaste?!?
https://investor.colgatepalmolive.com/news-releases/news-rel...
https://nz.pinterest.com/pin/jar-jar-toothpaste--18577355335...
And those weird ewok blinks that are half way between Jim Hensen and Bettie Boop...
> It is insane how much George Lucas has edited the original Star Wars trilogy. I think no movies have had more edits over time than Star Wars.
To such a sentiment, I can only say ... maclunkey.
Anyone who wants to get the original in 4k, check out 4k77
Well, maybe some of Ridley Scott's.
Wait until you see how often Tolkien edited The Lord of the Rings. Most of it was name and print corrections, but still. You would think you’d fix it all after one or two reprints.
RotK: Author's Cut runtime is 35:03:2:6:21:13
I've only barely skimmed the surface of the preservation world, but the irreverent attitude taken by the industry towards audiovisual media releases frustrates me greatly. That more accurate older releases are made unobtainable in favor of newer botched versions just adds insult to injury.
I'm grateful that diminishing returns were hit earlier with audio, though, which limits the blast radius for music releases. Most classic albums have a range of different masterings available on audio CD, many of which are available cheaply secondhand, which makes getting ahold of a good/accurate release considerably less daunting.
Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
> Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
TV shows are even worse because of the soundtrack.
Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music
Even video games are not exempt from that. GTA games has tons of music removed from the radios with later digital re-releases so currently the original console disc versions are the only way to play the games as they were released back then https://www.reddit.com/r/GTATrilogy/comments/1gsqdc5/what_so...
This isn't even the worst outcome. There are hundreds of video games that are never re-released at all and have never been available for sale digitally, entirely because of soundtrack licensing.
> the worst outcome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniracers#Lawsuit
There is a similar case with Top Gear. Aside from the popularity of Clarkson/May/Hammond and the fantastic cinematography, the show had great editors with an ear for soundtracks. Unfortunately it seems a lot of the tracks were only licensed for broadcast TV and the DVDs have some stock music where the rights were no longer available. There are also some gags which don't work any more because the audio doesn't make sense.
I believe the only place you can watch them as originally produced is iPlayer, but at least the BBC has copies somewhere.
It's a shame they never released the full series on DVD (or blu-ray). Most of it is available if you consult a chart of all the releases, but they've been cut and rearranged to fit on discs, and the soundtrack is as you say. I imagine they didn't due to problems like this at the time, but after the scandal and with how much time has passed, they'll never actually bother, unless someone straight up steals/copies the broadcast tapes from the archives and do us all a favour.
I think it’s true for a lot of BBC shows, many had great music, but the BBC also ran hugely popular radio stations and i think it was through that they were able to license a large amount of music.
I assume you mean the only place you can legally watch them
Or 007 GoldenEye where Microsoft for some reason bought the rights only to throw them into a paper shredder
GoldenEye was re-released for Xbox One and is available to purchase right now: https://www.xbox.com/en-us/games/store/goldeneye-007/9n6639h...
Oh, finally
And TV shows too. If they don't have the soundtrack-free version available, they have to do surgery to remove the music in postproduction somehow, or just not re-release at all.
> Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music
Even slightly more modern shows I think have had that happen as well. The Drew Carry show would have been a great example.
Yup. Daria is one of the most tragic ones, given how it was an MTV show and thus featured music iconic to the era and familiar to the audience. Replaced with muzak in the DVD releases, and a bunch of pirates have cobbled together best-effort mash-ups based on audio from TV rips, which sometimes were of very low quality, but for some episodes, all that had survived in the piracy scene was like, a RealVideo file with a 64kbps audio stream.
I loved the show Tour of Duty on CBS from 1987-90 about the Vietnam War. It used a lot of 1960's music including the Rolling Stones Paint It Black as the opening theme.
When it was released on DVD all the music was replaced with generic stuff. Then it was released on DVD in the UK with all the original music. The music licensing laws and prices are very different. It's region 2 and PAL but plays fine on a computer.
I also really enjoyed this show and rewatched it a few years ago on DVD. But I certainly noticed the main title music was different. I don't recall noticing in-episode music though, and wouldn't have remembered it from the show.
I went looking for the PAL DVDs after seeing your comment, and found one season but not a full set. After looking a little online it seems like the PAL release might have been cropped down a bit from the NTSC release? If that's the case it seems pretty disappointing.
Can someone give me more examples? I didn't realize this was a thing and am kind of facinated.
Scrubs was another one with pretty obvious music changes, because some were part of the dialogue or a joke that just doesn't make sense after the change.
Daria is another example - being on MTV they used a lot of popular music from the time which clearly did not cost them much extra at the time of TV broadcast but was replaced with generic music for the DVD release.
Some anime on Netflix is affected. Off the top of my head, the iconic first ending theme for Naoki Urusawa's Monster had its haunting vocals removed leaving only the backing track, and Neon Genesis Evangelion had its similarly iconic ending theme covers of Fly Me to the Moon sung by its voice actresses removed.
Dawson's Creek had iconic music, but as far as I can tell, the series with the original music is unobtainium. Afaict the pirates can't even get it.
Interview With the Vampire theatrically ends with the rolling stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” playing over the final scene and end credits. When the movie was on Netflix, that was cut from the soundtrack and replaced with an acoustic cover of the song.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonder_Years#DVD_music_rep...
WKRP in Cincinnati
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WKRP_in_Cincinnati#Music_licen...
The episode of The Simpsons where Lisa gets a pony. Homer falls asleep at the wheel to a different lullaby than what was originally broadcast.
The substitute is a subpar filler compared to the original.
Malcom in the middle ran into this, it didn't have DVDs for years.
And I'm pretty sure the ones that got released were based on pirates when they were released.
Yeah, I'm in agreement with the blog post in that I don't advocate for dismantling of copyright, but there are absurdities within the system like this that are in dire need of attention.
Shortening of copyright would fix many of these issues. Games and movies make almost all of their lifetime earnings in the first few years, and the dribble that's left afterwards is less important than preservation and public access.
It's very hard to justify copyright in 2026 over music used in a 1980s TV show. Shows were aired once or twice (summer reruns), with additional syndication runs for particularly popular shows, and that was it. Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later. Copyright has grown absurdly out of proportion of the economic reality for which these works were originally produced.
> Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later.
Probably? But to devil's advocate here, I grew up watching reruns in 1990 from the 1950s on Nick at Nite or UHF stations. You could make a case that not only the actors but bands who allowed music to be used would deserve residuals, and with reruns that worked fine. The format change from TV to DVD and then to Streaming is what blew it all up.
Home video releases of whole series weren't envisioned until basically the 2000s. Most TV shows that did have releases on video would just pick a couple good episodes at a time, and sell those. A reasonable job to track down a half-dozen rights holders, and if you couldn't find them or get the rights, I assume they'd just pick a different episode.
The way the original terms were negotiated, the rights were just licensed specifically "for television" because that seemed like all that was needed, and the amount of work to locate each rightsholder to renegotiate is just astronomical. Thankfully now every show is making sure to get rights for streaming (and physical media... Right? Right?) but it's a shame what happened to everything from the 1970s-1990s. Only piracy can save us.
In the UK Red Dwarf had full series on VHS from 1991, albeit a messy release and taking some years to catch up with what was currently airing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dwarf#Home_video_releases
Honestly I think it's fine. If corps are going to make poor decisions with their IP, oh well, their choice and their loss. There's plenty to go around.
For corps, yes, but destroying history seems a bit far
Video games sign terrible licenses even for their most core parts. Many of the millions selling Forza games disappeared from the digital stores because they couldn't use the cars anymore.[0] It's almost unbelievable since cars and their makers are actually getting a big marketing push from those games, but studios cannot get better conditions.
[0] https://kotaku.com/forza-horizon-4-delisted-xbox-licensing-1...
Yeah I bought GTA IV and still pirated it. As a bonus, don't have to launch that Steam shit every time I want to play it.
Movies especially with re-releases. Star Wars with Lucas tinkering and blocking old copies.
But we have this - https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/
"97% of project 4K77 is from a single, original 1977 35mm Technicolor release print, scanned at full 4K, cleaned at 4K, and rendered at 4K."
Opening scene comparison - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1b47UP6ZGI
Doing God's work.
It was bound to happen with Star Wars, given how big a series it is. I wish we could have the same with more, but the amount of effort is huge in many cases, and literally impossible in others.
to my eye there is quite a difference .. in favor of the 4K77 remaster !
> Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
Star Trek: TNG was a bit of a special case though, because it had to be re-cut and new digital special effects created and edited into scenes.
I think this perspective holds more true for things that were broadcast in HD but only got commercial DVD releases. That's a disappointing lapse in high quality availability where HD content was distributed, just not in a persistent form for home use. In those cases the best quality available is an HD TV or satellite recording which might not have been preserved even in online media sharing communities.
And on top of all that, sales were not what they hoped, and with that we lost any chance of an official remaster of DS9 or Voyager, since the same work would have to be done as for TNG.
> It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
Don’t get your hopes up. That release is very special. It happened at just the right time: discs were still selling and streaming had not yet taken over.
There is simply not sufficient market for such restorations any longer. They probably didn’t make back the cost of the remaster.
>It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
The miracle was supposedly $1.2 million per season. On a back catalog item where they apparently never made their money back (maybe we shouldn't believe them on that, dunno).
But in other cases, it's not about the money at all, but about everyone cockblocking it at every step of the way long enough that the assets themselves wither and die. Babylon 5 comes to mind.
It's funny too, how they all pat themselves on the backs at the awards ceremonies and talk about the artistry and vision, but they clearly don't give a shit about it.
That isn't really true. It's different people involved - the artists really do care about the art, but they are joined at the hip to business people who don't care at all and just want to make more money.
[dead]
Tangentially related, I've been toying with the idea of just buying all my film and series content again rather than maintaining subscription services. My SO and I watch TV maybe once a week yet we maintain a subscription to Crave & Netflix.
I'm pretty sure it'd work out cheaper to just buy box-sets of a series when we start watching it but haven't done the deep dive yet.
Check your public library. If you are lucky enough to live near a big one, they may have all the shows you want to watch on DVD already.
I live in a large metropolitan area and belong to 4 different public library systems. Two of them have branches within walking distance of my house. For either of them, I can go to their website, search for a dvd, and have it delivered (for free) to the branch closest to my house.
It's not instant gratification -- it takes a couple of days. But in some ways, that's a feature, not a bug.
On top of that, they also have Kanopy (a streaming service offered via libraries). The selection is NO WHERE NEAR as complete as major streaming services... but, it's certainly nice to have.
If you do go the box-set route, you might want to be careful about which editions you buy.
Alec from Technology Connections[0] about a year ago put out a video detailing frustrating trend: many modern DVD box-set re-releases of popular series are being quietly downgraded in quality.
Basically publishers are taking content originally authored for dual-layer discs and cramming it onto cheaper single-layer discs to cut costs. The result is aggressive over-compression, terrible macroblocking, and sometimes outright playback issues.
It really sucks: you try to do the "right thing" by paying for a legitimate, physical copy to own your media and you end up getting ripped off with crap.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzz_d9Y44ZE
Have you seen this video?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RfjH4lO241I
Apparently Alec has contacted the studio that makes the discs; they don’t make single-layer discs for the Frasier box set. Alec seems to have purchased a bootleg sold at retail.
I've been wondering this some myself, how many services I could drop and just return to a physical media budget.
One of the factors contributing to it not necessarily being cheaper to buy box sets: Target, Best Buy, and other big US chains have given up on physical media for movies. Last I heard Wal-Mart is on the fence about long term support for it. (At the moment the only chain I know that seems still in it for the long haul seems to be Barnes & Noble, but they could have one bad quarter and change their minds quickly. My local store the DVD and Blu-Ray section is somewhat obviously what used to the Music section and still has a bit left of that old focus.)
Even the manufacturing side seems to be disappearing. Sony has flirted with dropping physical media sales of movies. Warner Brothers and Paramount seem likelier to drop physical media sales if they are allowed to merge.
Netflix lets very few originals make it to physical media. Most of the exceptions I'm aware of are Sony projects. Sony Animation being one of Netflix's last exclusive deals from a studio that isn't themselves. A lot of Prime Originals don't make it to physical media. It seems a mixed bag for HBO Originals and Hulu/Disney+ Originals, presumably based on some internal formulas of popularity. A lot of Apple TV Originals seem to get delayed physical output, but that's largely been because Apple TV doesn't have its own studio, but that changed relatively recently with the purchase of Red Hour (Ben Stiller's studio, of Severance and The Dink fame).
It certainly feels like physical media is dying right now. Maybe more reason to switch to investing in it over streaming services, not that an individual's budget decisions in this vein will affect the company's bottom lines enough that they will notice.
"It certainly feels like physical media is dying right now. Maybe more reason to switch to investing in it over streaming services, not that an individual's budget decisions in this vein will affect the company's bottom lines enough that they will notice."
What is an ocean if not a million drops?
I’ve been buying dvds and surfacing a lot of the content to Jellyfin and Tailscale, it’s a lot easier than it used to be and they even have smart TV apps on some of the platforms. Don’t even have to pirate to get use out of it.
I started doing this after having a child so that we could have kids movies on hand in Jellyfin, but am now having a lot of fun collecting DVDs and Blu Rays. I’ve also toyed with the idea of using ErsatzTV to have channels to bring the kids back to the old days where things weren’t always on demand.
Thrift stores are a good way to find DVDs (usually $2-4 a DVD, slightly more for Blu Ray). Estate sales are typically better (under $1 a DVD/BluRay).
The most expensive part of this so far has been obtaining storage drives.
It works wonders for small kids since most of the time they just want to watch the exact same thing over and over.
I'm not sure this makes sense for most people who watch a series once and then never again. Physical media makes sense for movies and shows that you'll watch multiple times. So you might buy Firefly, but not Reacher (please, not Reacher). With kids it makes particular sense - kids love watching the same thing over and over (I'm not sure why). If Wreck It Ralph was on VHS it'd be worn out by now...
I'm not saying I disagree, but very interesting how this contrasts with attitudes people have towards books. People keep physical books around just for kicks. Often times they haven't even read half the books on their shelves.
I am in this camp, my office (and overflowing to the living room) have a lot of physical books in them. Most I only read a single time. I do think they add something 'homely' though, as if they are part of the furniture / decoration.
Also, when I notice a particular book it can spark a memory (even about the surrounding context of when I read the book) which are small but nice moments.
I'm not sure I'd feel the same about DVD / Blu Ray boxes though. I'm pretty sure the VCR boxes I used to have were just kept in a closed-door cabinet and I barely looked at them unless I wanted to watch a particular film.
Books are a signal
Physical media can be had for very cheap on the second-hand market, so it also makes sense if you do not watch all that much.
The further your timeline goes into the future the more sense owning your media makes. You might not want to rewatch this movie in the next ten years, but what about the next thirty? Fifty years? Inflation will only make subscriptions more and more expensive. Thirty years ago a yearly salary of $40k was the same as a yearly salary of $100k now. It's funny how so many people think they earn more than their parents did, when in reality they earn way less. And that won't get better in the future. Maybe you won't even have enough money in your retirement to afford a subscription.
We could share physical media with others. Like a library of sorts.
As others have said, it's certainly justifiable for anything with rewatchability. You can find 1080p Bluray players at thrift stores for under $20 (it took some patience for me to find a relatively newer one that was more compact and didn't have a slow interface), and Blurays are usually under $5.
I've come across sealed Blurays or even the occasional former Blockbuster rental so it's actually kind of fun in a record-crate-diving sort of way, if you're into that. But of course you can always just buy new, which you'll probably have to do in some cases: the odds are against me finding Koyaanisqatsi at the thrift, let alone the Criterion Collection Qatsi Trilogy, but I'm okay with that.
The problem with physical media is that often they are scratched, sometimes even unwatchable because of it.
The kids tried renting some kids series from the local library, but none of the DVDs were readable.
There's a ton of streaming content that is stuck in streaming, so you can only "buy" it, not buy it. Oscar-winning movies that you can't get on physical media.
Have to take things into your own hands these days and grab the 2160p Dolby Vision streams and stuff them onto a BD-R, if you know what I mean.
Yeah, I've thought about that too. Original content for e.g Netflix probably never sees a physical release. As my earlier post probably alluded to though, we don't really watch a lot of TV in our household so narrowing my 'options' is not per se a thing that would impact me.
But it does suck for those who want to move to more physical-based media _and_ enjoy original content from the streaming providers.
Netflix does surprisingly release physical media now and then. EG: Stranger Things just got a complete 4k UHD physical release.
One very nice thing about physical media is the quality is often far better than you will ever get streaming, and this is true even on non-4k releases (though, especially on 4k). Audio is often the thing the streaming providers compress the heck out of.
I want to cancel my Disney+ and then once in a month I play some movie for my kid, which would probably cost more if I bought it on a piece of media. So, eh.
> Beyond Star Wars, an illicit cottage industry has sprung up to patch the holes in any given film’s digital representation.
I've thought about making an Oppenheimer except all scenes are in chronological order and the cringe ones are gone Edition
Back in 1987, my parents had purchased a 4-head VHS recorder, and I rented another device from Video Library, and I set my mind to the monumental task of editing the entire run of Married… with Children into a single tape containing only scenes with Kelly [Christina Applegate] and I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams
You jest but I know someone made a copy of all “The Hobbit” films spliced together, but removed all the made up portions. And removed all the Legolas bits, since he wasn’t even in the book. I think the total run time was something like 4 hours 15 minutes.
The icing on the cake was how popular this edition was.
I'm a super Tolkien nerd (or at least used to be) who hasn't even watched the Hobbit films, but I'd watch this one.
That does sound like an improvement over the actual Hobbit movies. I'm not even joking about Oppenheimer, would do it if I were really bored. Might be a great movie if it were simply in order.
I highly suspect someone has already made a fan edit of Oppenheimer like you've described. I searched for a few moments and found 3 already and one already describes re-cutting it in chronological order, among many other changes. Always surprises me how much effort and passion people put into fan edits. It's a facinating scene in itself with how many edits exist out there.
Yep! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SEeOnYzLz1XNTPEwzefe5niUODV...
Username checks out!
When it was first announced that Peter Jackson's film of The Hobbit was going to be split into two parts, I thought "Yeah, that makes sense. There's a LOT of material in that short book, because of how sparse Tolkien was being with description. Makes sense that Jackson would have trouble fitting it into a single 2.5-hour movie."
When I heard, later, that the film was going to be a three parter instead, I thought "Uh oh. There's plenty of material for two films, but three? Filler City, here we come."
My wife and I saw the movies in the cinema, and while we enjoyed them overall, I found that I was right about the filler. I was particularly annoyed by the barrels-down-the-river scene, where the film turned what should have been a moment of quiet drama into a sort of rails shooter on the screen. That scene threw me out of my immersion; the whole time, I was thinking "The only reason for this scene to exist is to be made into a video-game level." As a video game level, it would kind of work: you're in the barrels floating downstream, and you have to shoot enough orcs with the bow you somehow have (or flatten them with your barrel that has been inexplicably launched out of the water) to stop them from killing your friends. (Or perhaps the video game level would make more sense if you play as the elf on the shore, killing the orc archers before they can shoot the fish^H^H^H^H dwarves in a barrel).
Regardless of how that scene would work as a video game, the problem with it is that while watching it, I was laughing at how ridiculous it was, instead of on the edge of my seat with excitement. That is NOT what the audience should be experiencing, and it means that someone — director, producer, screenwriter, editor, who knows — made some very poor choices in putting that scene on-screen.
So yes, I'm not at all surprised that a fan edit of The Hobbit which removed all the filler would be wildly popular. In my case, I would rather buy a 4.5 hour version of the film than the officially-released version. If only that version was for sale legally.
P.S. Not all the filler material in the Hobbit film trilogy was bad. Some of the scenes that weren't technically in the original book, such as Gandalf and Galadriel discussing the threat of The Necromancer, were a positive addition and helped link the Hobbit film to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. If Jackson had stopped there it would have been fine. I have never watched the fan-made "Tolkien Edit" recut version of the Hobbit film(s) so I don't know if that scene was included or not — but in my opinion, that one would fit into a "Tolkien Edit" even if it wasn't technically part of the original book.
Having played the video game, yeah that's how the level went, and it kinda sucked.[1] It's a looping circular river (physics be damned), and I recall having to do many loops before I got 100%, since moving targets are hard to hit with a gamepad.
[1]: https://youtu.be/HLReeDFGA7E?t=975s
What are all the "made up portions" of this work of fiction?
I’m guessing parts that weren’t in the books
Sounds like you want the old BBC TV series: https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/8771-oppenheimer?language=en-U...
Well I want a single movie, and don't mind if it's dramaticized at the expense of accuracy.
Fair enough.
I can recommend the old BBC series as it's well produced and prioritises accuracy over dramatisation as far as I can tell. It's obviously a bit slower than a movie but well worth a watch if you're interested in the topic.
I watched it a few months before watching the Oppenheimer film and it did spoil the film a bit for me. I've got mixed feelings about Nolan films - I really like a lot of his work, but find that it can be a bit superficial at times. e.g. I enjoyed Interstellar but found the ending unsatisfying and a bit hand wavy. However, when I watched it, I wasn't aware of the all the Jesus links in the story, so I was approaching it as a hard scifi film.
That sounds nice too. I do prefer accuracy over drama, it's just in short supply so I settle for either. Like my favorite film is Lawrence of Arabia, but it's not accurate.
The ending of Interstellar almost ruined it for me. Even ignoring physics, it's a lazy plot device. I liked the rest of it so much that it was forgivable, but that involved mentally black-holing the end, like I forgot about it until rewatching recently.
Saying “Nolan was wrong” is begging for a fight.
But his weird sound mixing philosophy (experience over clear dialog / dialog as sound effects) makes me nuts. So fix those too, please.
My working theory to this point is that he made the movies he had to make then, as he got increasingly successful, he gradually transitioned (back?) to making movies he wanted to make. Which, as it turns out, I'm less enamored with then his post-big break efforts. Oh well.
Yeah I'm pretty sure he has the juice to kinda do whatever he thinks is best.
Nobody can fight me on that because I don't know who Nolan is. Guessing he's a director, but in that case, didn't know he directed Oppenheimer. I'm part of the popcorn reviews, not the tomato ones.
The movie is bad cause nobody can tell what is going on, or they can but it's a chore without reward. "3 weeks earlier" kind of crap every 30 seconds in the movie. Even the big plot twist is, "this scene with Einstein that you thought happened early in the timeline actually happened at the end, wow." But maybe it can be fixed.
Yeah. One of the more celebrated filmmakers out there. If you google him you’ll see familiar stuff.
I personally liked Oppenheimer fine as it was (except the crappy explosion), but I can see why others might not.
I also enjoyed that old Paul Newman, John Cusack, etc one that focused less on Oppenheimer. Fat Man and Little Boy.
Hm, Dark Knight is a top one. Interstellar was amazing until the end with the black hole unraveling the plot, but I blocked that out and only remembered the rest until I rewatched recently. Dunkirk was good but kinda slow plot-wise. What I'm getting is his films are exceptional in a lot of ways like audio/visual but don't necessarily have good plots, which idk if that's even his fault. Those didn't have jumpy timelines, though.
Messing with time is certainly a thing he does. Momento, Inception, Interstellar, Oppenheimer, Tenet... probably others I wouldn't remember.
Hm yeah, sounds like the majority of his movies do jump around. I don't remember Inception, saw that on release.
Interstellar's plot is about messing with universe time, but the movie isn't jumping around points in story time. There's just the astronaut and Earth storylines with a little crossover, and each mostly moves forwards only. I liked that part a lot actually.
Memento was his peak and he hit new highs with inception ... its been all downhill after that ...
Memento yes, Inception definitely no. The worst experience I've had in a cinema.
It's been too long since I watched Inception, just for some reason only remember the first half of the movie being good. I was in middle school at the time, so... I'll rewatch it.
There's a lot of problems, but the main one is that it just is a pile of arbitrary rules that all the characters just constantly explain to one another.
Imagine the first third of The Matrix was cut and you just start with Morpheus explaining it all to Neo. That's Inception. And on top of that, it's not even a particular complicated idea: it's just Russian doll dreams.
It's kind of a reimagining of Paprika (2006), just dumbed down and with lots of action.
I don't see much similarity with Paprika aside from the idea of sharing dreams
Almost exactly first half of Inception is the setup and worldbuilding before the actual main heist begins. So that could explain why.
There are a lot of movies where the world-building is better than the actual plot. Harry Potter 1 for example. Or TV shows where the pilot and first few episodes have actual plot before it becomes filler.
My argument is that the world being built is uninspiring, and the endless, arbitrary rules of the world are communicated in clumsy ways.
> The movie is bad cause nobody can tell what is going on, or they can but it's a chore without reward. "3 weeks earlier" kind of crap every 30 seconds in the movie. Even the big plot twist is, "this scene with Einstein that you thought happened early in the timeline actually happened at the end, wow." But maybe it can be fixed.
This honestly reads like you don't watch a lot of movies, which is fine! The audio was really bad, which makes it nearly impossible to follow without subtitles. But with subtitles, this film is very middle of the road in terms of timeline ambiguity. I also don't think an ambiguous timeline is bad, if it recontextualizes a scene.
I mean in that Einstein scene, they are cutting footage of RDJ telling Oppenheimer he's a patriot who ran the Manhattan project with footage of him as a bumbling student people made fun of. That was definitely not a "big plot twist," they are explicitly saying it was after the war, even if it was momentarily confusing because so much is going on. I thought it was a pretty rewarding film to pay attention to.
There weren't subtitles in the theater, and that's supposedly the way the movie was meant to be watched, so :/ I could actually tell what was going on, it was just annoying and didn't add anything. I've watched plenty of movies, but almost all mainstream (just no Marvel).
The twist I'm referring to is Lewis Strauss overhearing the conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein at the beginning, which at the end they clarify actually happened later in the timeline.
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Nope, I spent my 3 hours watching it in an IMAX theater. If anything, knowing the director adds bias.
What was cringe about Oppenheimer? I bought the movie in order to watch it but felt disappointed, and have only seen it once.
Mainly the scene where Oppenheimer randomly has sex during the questioning. Could maybe also do without some of the other parts where he slowly zones out for no reason.
> Of particular note is the “remux” community, dedicated to seamlessly stitching together the best video and audio streams from different releases without any generational loss of quality.
That’s not what “remux” means. A remux is the original data from, for instance, a Blu-ray disc, transferred into a new container without re-encoding. What the author is referring to would be called a “hybrid remux”.
Are you speaking purely of the technical difference, or do you know what that particular community calls itself?
Remux is not a community, it's a tag that pirate release groups uses to indicate that a release contains exact copies of the original video and audio streams present on the disc.
GP is correct that files with purely additive changes (like additional audio tracks) to remuxes are called hybrid remuxes.
ETA: To the author's credit, this is convention rather than a hard rule. I checked my usual sources and found the exact 89gb 4k Arrow remux the author mentions in the closing paragraph and it is indeed labelled 'remux' only. The uploader did make a note of this though: "Unfortunately, as Arrow had to pull the Italian dub due to rightsholders demands, I had to sync it from the 2017 Kino Lorber disc."
>Remux is not a community, it's a tag that pirate release groups uses to indicate that a release contains exact copies of the original video and audio streams present on the disc.
There is a community insofar as there is a relatively small group of people who sink their time into producing high quality remuxes, and this group talks to each other (on IRC and elsewhere).
>GP is correct that files with purely additive changes (like additional audio tracks) to remuxes are called hybrid remuxes.
As I corrected on a child comment to the GP, this is not correct. It is not convention either. A hybrid remux has a stream which is a hybrid of two or more sources. Simply combining tracks from different sources isn't a hybrid remux, it's just baseline good practice.
> A hybrid remux has a stream which is a hybrid of two or more sources.
This explicitly breaks the rules of multiple communities I participate in. All streams must be untouched in a remux, and a hybrid remux is a release with untouched streams from multiple sources (there are also hybrids which are not remuxes).
What even is "a stream which is a hybrid of two or more sources?" Cutting between or combining multiple audio or video streams is simply editing. You're describing a fanedit.
>This explicitly breaks the rules of multiple communities I participate in.
Probably. Not all places allow hybrid remuxes.
I promise you that I have these definitions correct as they are most commonly used, since I am actually involved in this space.
The word "Hybrid" has been used in the way you describe, most notably by FRaMeSTOR, but I would say that everyone else has coalesced on what I described and would call my definition the standard one. It's also how the "Hybrid" edition label is used on PTP.
>What even is "a stream which is a hybrid of two or more sources?" Cutting between or combining multiple audio or video streams is simply editing. You're describing a fanedit.
No I'm not. I stand by what I said. As an example you can look at Bridge.to.Terabithia.2007.Hybrid.1080p.BluRay.REMUX.AVC.TrueHD.5.1-BLURANiUM.mkv For the sake of those reading, I will copy from the release notes:
>GER has hardcoded translated movie title which is not present in other transfers so hybrid was needed to restore the original picture. Hybrid was done with USA disc since audio from same disc was used. GER video was retimed to 23.976 FPS, trimmed on valid IDR frames and merged with MKVToolnix.
In this case, two Blu-ray video streams were spliced together.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, adding audio tracks to a video track that weren't produced together often requires editing. If not for sample rate reasons, content reasons, like extra space for additional video space at the beginning or ending most basically. It seems like in any instances like that, which I would count as "nominal," it would be appropriate to identify those as "modified from" which would seemingly place you squarely into "hybrid" space within the taxonomy of this comment thread.
Right. There is some degree of transformation which is normal or necessary. For example, if one of {video, audio} is 24fps and the other is 23.976fps, the video will have its frame rate adjusted to match the audio. For basic video/audio mismatches you may need to trim audio, insert null audio, or add a mkv container delay.
These things are normally detailed in release notes. People write pretty detailed notes laying out exactly what they did.
The muxer can apply a timestamp offset to a track, so while the audio stream remains untouched it starts at some offset relative to the start of the video stream.
Agree once you're compensating for drift by scaling the audio track you've pushed yourself out of remux territory, but again these aren't hard and fast rules (evidenced by the disagreement over terminology).
Is there an actual non-hybrid "remux" community?
Every high quality remux release group I know of does both normal and hybrid remuxes.
There's nothing wrong with the definition you quoted. I would say it's entirely accurate (except perhaps that it neglects subtitles, which can end up being a substantial amount of work if you choose to put the effort into it).
>What the author is referring to would be called a “hybrid remux”.
No. While the "hybrid" term has been used this way, the standard definition now is for remuxes where a single stream has been created by stitching together streams from two different sources. For example, a video from source A has generally better picture quality, but has some glitch or issue that requires patching in a segment from source B to create a hybrid video stream. Doing this for the main video without re-encoding is very difficult/unlikely to work because video codecs are very hard to work with in this way (you'd have to have two sources encoded with the same codec, the same encoding settings, you have to slice things at a clean GOP boundary in both sources, etc), so most commonly hybrid remuxes refer to the Dolby Vision layer.
Source: I happen to be involved in this community.
If the article gets something like that wrong, I’ll have a hard time taking any of it seriously. Pass for me.
The Art of Internet Pedantry™
I don't read it that way. If you start using words like container and encoding, I feel you have to describe what those words mean and I suspect the writer probably felt that level of detail might have caused the article to drift away from the point. I have personal experience of accidentally going into too much detail when describing remuxes to non technical friends, and had later opted to describing almost exactly as the author did, because that description I think conveys the purpose pretty well.
I quite liked the Despecialized editions when I watched them quite a while ago, for anyone who hasn't seen them - the audio remastering is very appreciated (VHS rarely has good audio), but certainly not the poorly-fitting CGI additions.
Harmy's despecialized versions are awesome. I watched them in a single sitting a couple of months ago. They have been the only recent editions that resonate with my childhood memories and give me that warm fuzzy feeling that everything is in its right place as I remember it. Moreover the days before I rewatched Andor and Rogue One in tandem. IMHO, as a full saga and the culmination of a story, they are as close to perfection you can get.
Unrelated, but in the same vein of "pirating the pirates": the modern "quality of life" improvements that are so often praised alongside modern videogame remakes/remasters of classic games are rather shamelessly cribbed from emulators.
1) "Save Anywhere": Emulator save states
2) 2x/4x/10x "fast forward" mode: Emulator frameskip. Most modern emulators have a "rewind" feature, too, but legit games tend not to use it since it can trivialize the difficulty.
3) Briefly turn on EXP/Money/No random encounters: Features from cheat engines, which technically precede emulation and go back to GameShark and Game Genie before it...but cheat engines are universally built-into emulators these days, making them easier to use. Turning on EXP multipliers to "skip the grind" is definitely an emulation-heavy thing for those going through old JRPGs.
4) "Randomizers" : Pulled from rom hacks.
#3 is actually a return to form. These cheats started out as cheat codes that developers baked into the game up front. We lost them for a while and now apparently they're coming back?
Interesting they chose The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, probably because of the 60th anniversary?
They didn't mention that probably the Mondo release of that film is the 'best' one? Someone else did a good version count of all releases: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/id/136114
Curious what the upcoming DCP release is sourced on
GoodBadUgly_FTR_S-235_EN-XX_10_4K_20140330_DLA_IOP_OV
GoodBadUgly_FTR_S-235_EN-XX_10_4K_PRKC_20160613_MPS_IOP_VF
Thanks for posting. I almost missed this, but it's really important to me.
I respect that creators, like Lucas, do want to continue working on past projects. (Art is never finished, only abandoned, or something like that.) But those of us who appreciate art surely can choose which version we prefer. Even if that changes over the course of our life. That is one of my favorite things about film archiving.
As a side note/game: imagine you're not particularly tech savvy. Now figure how much Mubi costs using only their website.
(Why? Why do companies do that??)
https://mubi.com/en/us/memberships
This shows the price, what am I missing?
I didn't even realize that page existed, and I'm a developer. Could I have found it if I was determined enough? Sure, of course. But starting from the homepage as an impatient average user, there's nothing obvious. I found it under "Gift MUBI" (which presents entirely different pricing schemes than what you linked) but that was after putting thinking and hopeful clicks into it. It shouldn't be that hard. Why isn't RIGHT ON THE HOMEPAGE?? It gives me the "Am I gonna have to call and talk to a human to cancel?" ick.
The price comes up after you click the "Try 7 days for free" button (also labelled "Get Started" on some loads).
That button only works if I enter my email address in the text box next to it. :/
That is so strange because it isn't the case for me. A/B testing is out of control.
I will say this again, and again, and again: thanks to piracy, I got to watch many amazing movies, especially those that came out before the 2000s. Eventually I bought lots of DVDs and Blu-Rays, CDs( heck I even rediscovered my music in taste).
I'm not sure which is more morally wrong: preserving works of art for future generations, or destroying them for profit.
Are you missing a 'not' in your second paragraph?
pardon me?
> I'm not sure which is more morally wrong: preserving works of art for future generations, or destroying them for profit.
Between:
* preserving works of art for future generations
* destroying them for profit
The first is an obvious good to me, and the second is an obvious bad. I'm assuming you meant to say 'not preserving'.
Oh I see, you didn’t get the joke then.
Of interest, another painstaking fan recreation... Alien 3: The Legacy cut
https://youtu.be/eCIXkBEoqeM?si=Ts0enOPy3z9fVBg6
(Link is just to a review of it, you need to torrent it if u want to watch it (its 41GB lol))
I was watching lawrence of arabia recently, and was thinking about similar stuff. There's a few scenes (scenes around the: "my name is for my friends" and the echoey canyon in particular) where lawrence looks almost like a photorealistic game character.
I still don't know what exactly caused this but most likely a multitude of factors are in play. - Deserts are bright, so a bright light was used to illuminate his face, causing his eyes to sparkle. - Streaming from Netflix and compression / decompression might have eaten away some of the high frequency detail
I also learned that they shot the movie in a bigger film stock, so the digitized version of this movie is highly regarded.
If anyone has any idea as to why these scenes in particular look off, i would love to learn more.
It's time to mention fanedits (again): https://www.reddit.com/r/fanedits/wiki/findingfanedits/
Sadly, some of the greatest treasures in the world can only be obtained in questionable ways.
It gets worse:
https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2181751/dvds-with-t...
house opened my eyes to this problem. trying to reconstruct a version with the video resolution of the bluray but the original soundtrack of the dvd turned out to be a deep rabbit hole.
One of the more annoying parts of this to me is that, surely, a high quality version of the original must exist somewhere in the archives of the publisher, right? And if not that, surely the original footage must still be there, so one can recreate the edit frame by frame, as was done with TNG?
The good stuff is out there, just behind lock and key. You can't have it, because screw you.
It could also be that it genuinely isn't. The source code of Silent Hill 2, one of the best horror games of all time, is lost. It's clear from cases like that that publishers can't be trusted to preserve their media. We have to do it ourselves.
yea it makes me wish for some kind of highly organized underground structured content network where people serious about archiving could share their private collections without being accused of piracy - I've sunk some thought towards one here: https://github.com/gfody/p2p/blob/main/essays/roots-network....
considering how the frontier labs have become the ultimate pirates and gotten away with it I wonder if "the people" would be able to do the same
And that list is not even correct...
Does it mean that the Sergio Leone's movies in Mubi are these restoration? It wasn't clear for me.
Leone is one the greatest directors of all time. I've been nagging my sons to watch this trilogy for years.
I wondered this and then checked and saw they're not on Mubi (at least in the UK - I hadn't realised until someone mentioned VPNs that Mubi might have different catalogues internationally, but of course they will...)
Just dropping my referral code in case anyone wants a Mubi trial btw: https://mubi.com/en/t/web/global/fpiivi3
It's interesting to realise that many old film restorations have better quality then original release. So nowadays we have visually "altered" content that creators was not able to watch.
Anyone here subscribed to Mubi? Would you recommend it? How different are the films compared to mainstream cinema?
I'm not subscribed to right now, but I have been for a very long time before that. I like their curated approach a lot and it doesn't feel like you are getting drowned in crap like many other services.
It really depends what kind of films you like though, if you are looking for fast paced shows or the latest Hollywood productions you will not like it. If you enjoy going to indie cinemas, you'll like it.
I've been signed up a few months at a time over the years. It has tons of independent movies from the US/UK/France but also from lesser exposed countries (think Danish, Greek, Thai, Polish, Norwegian…). It's mostly films released recently or in the last 20 years. It also has some older classics (Memories of Murder, Carrie, Dogma, Obsession, Carlito's Way…) but there aren't that many and they're often only there temporarily.
It's worth doing the 30 days trial. I sign up for a month or two whenever I feel like the library has at least 10 films I'd want to watch.
They have mostly independent films. So numerous dramas and slow-burn types. I like it. I've found some great movies on there, but also have found a bunch of duds. The problem is the pricing. Right now my main services are Criterion Channel and Eternal Family.
I am quite happy to give Mubi my money each month, even if I don't use it a _huge_ amount. I have seen some great films on the platform, and I really do want to see them be successful.
Some content has overlap with conventional streaming services, but then films like "Do not expect much from the end of the world" probably wouldn't see a streaming release elsewhere?
Something other replies haven’t mentioned yet is that you can use a VPN on it. A service like Disney+ for example will not let you in at all with a VPN active but no problem with Mubi. You get a pretty nice selection with that.
I've had justwatch.com tell me things are on Mubi with ads, so I've watched films on it, but can't remember which ones and not enough to subscribe.
Nothing really special about it, it costs 15.99 EUR/month, Blu-Ray lots are very cheap now. DVDs are even cheaper, plus you get to own them forever.
It is regrettable that the law draws no distinction between such a situation and the sale of counterfeit goods on eBay. Section 1201 does not take intent into account, whereas the aforementioned "pirate code" essentially consists of norms developed by the community itself.
Cobbling together something resembling the original is a cool idea, but don't the originals still exist somewhere? Surely not all of the original prints have been destroyed? Aren't there movie archivists somewhere carefully preserving every version of every major movie?
Upvoted because, sadly, most people don't know that most movies (even super-famous ones) are constantly at risk from environmental and legal factors. Film degrades, warehouses go up in flames, digital copies are easily lost, and rights management is so difficult and expensive, that a lot of material just... disappears.
It's not a problem limited to movies, btw - plenty of music suffers the same fate.
Unfortunately not. Film suffers from “vinegar syndrome”, an autocatalytic reaction that can only be slowed down but never fully stopped.
Wikipedia has a decent overview on this, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_preservation
"By the 1980s, it was becoming apparent that the collections of motion picture heritage were at risk of becoming lost. Not only was the preservation of nitrate film an ongoing problem, but it was then discovered that safety film, used as a replacement for the more volatile nitrate stock, was beginning to be affected by a unique form of decay known as "vinegar syndrome", and color film manufactured, in particular, by Eastman Kodak, was found to be at risk of fading. At that time, the best-known solution was to duplicate the original film onto a more secure medium.[5]
A common estimate is that 90 percent of all American silent films made before 1920 and 50 percent of American sound films made before 1950 are lost films.[6][7]"
I laughed out loud when I saw the George Lucas quote. He is the master of defiling his own work.
one of my projects on the backlog is to figure out how to combine the dvd copies and the bluray copies of the x-files so that I can have 4:3 episode in hd. especially in the first couple of seasons they crop a lot of stuff to fit it into widescreen, I'm waiting until AI gets good enough that I can using the dvd quality original fill in and upscale the cropped part of the hd episodes.
Seasons 1-5 of Reno 911 were 4:3. If you stream them nowadays they've had an awful pan and scan applied that actually removes a ton of detail, results in heads being cut off, etc. All so we don't get black bars on the sides of the screen. It's so bad and makes me question whether the people that did the conversion even watched their output.
Preservation doesn’t mean much if nobody can legally access the preserved version in their lifetime.
Guess even the pirates need better opsec. Hilarious how often these things come full circle.
That first quote in the article perfectly sums up how people can change.
Are there really people who want their 1960s spaghetti Western clouds green?!
I liked The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but the post-dub voice of Wallach when he was much older, did not quite fit into the movie anymore; it felt strange compared to his voice when he was younger.
As for Hollywood ruining videos: well, it is time to phase out Hollywood. The movies are cultural heritage and the best quality must be preserved (without artifical AI slop clowning it up and changing things; I see that on youtube every day, it is AWFUL. AI slop constantly lies about things. I can call it lie-slop).
A praise for forensics, maybe? EN01 or raw data, that is the question.
Reminds me of Ben Hur, it had that green sky tinge to it as well.
Everything is a Remix
And yet... I watched two films just a couple days ago using the MUBI App on a Samsung Smart TV (airbnb, on holidays): Dream Scenario and No Other Choice. Both had a surreal image quality, as if an AI filter had completely destroyed the director's original intention. I know for sure that at least Dream Scenario shouldn't look like that, because I had already watched it. I don't know about the other but I suspect this wasn't the original look. It's probably not MUBI's fault, but the best restoration is just powerless when the movie is watched on what most people end up watching movies this day.
Are you sure it wasn’t just the TV? Unless someone put it into filmmaker mode or similar, it almost certainly would have had motion interpolation enabled, as well as a blue white-point, oversaturated colours, and probably some artificial sharpening and de-noising.
I hate the way film and music pirates gatekeep everything. There are private trackers for games and software but they don't try to keep any content exclusive, you get faster downloads without random bad quality uploads and malware cluttering the site in exchange for keeping a good ratio.
As far as I can see none of the content mentioned in the post is under an exclusivity rule (it can all be shared in other places).
Whether a 90GB file will still have anyone seeding it on a small or public tracker at the point you want to download it is another question of course.
Surprise, piracy isn't activism, it's just people wanting free stuff or even paying some discounted rate for it
That is obviously false: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_copyright>
You could just as well say that political protest is not a thing, that it’s just vandals looking for reasons to break stuff.
Yeah it’s rough not to be able to get whatever you want without paying anyone or experiencing any downsides
Is it just me or is the Lorber version the only one with correct colors?
It depends on what you care about. The Kino Lorber has good color choices, but far too much contrast: dark areas (including the characters) are pitch black; and you can't see the clouds in the skies.
You're right, now that you mention it. I want a version that combines the Arrow contrast with the Lorber colours. How strange that they still didn't get it right.
Isn't the article explaining that it is supposed to be the "better" version?
Dear copyright holders,
You deserve to get compensated. You should get compensated.
But stop acting against the will of the consumers. And stop fighting the technology.
Remember when you thought VHS and DVD would kill the movie industry? You were wrong then, and you're wrong again, now.
Make a very simple website where people can search for actors, search for directors, search keywords, search awards...
And then show us torrent links for all of the content, all of the versions, all of the audio formats, all of the video resolutions, all of the languages, the director's cut, with or without subtitles baked in, theatrical release, re-release, fan edits, all of it. Make it easy for someone else to document a new version, and share the torrent. Set up Popcorn Time or whatever, if you're smart.
I download the content on my own dime. I'll even seed it for a bit, because I like it, and why not?
And then, let me buy a decryption key. Make the price reasonable. Make it Pay What You Want, if you're really smart. When you're setting that price, think real hard about the fact that the illegal option is literally one click away for anyone technically savvy. That decryption key should be shared for all of the different versions available to me. I pay once, I get all the formats, now, and forever. Let me save the key to my account, if you want to set up accounts and recommendations, and etc. Let me save the key in my Plex or Jellyfin server. Or as file metadata, or in a json in a zip file at the end of the file...
Say it's legal for me to pass that license on to one of my kids, when I die.
If you're real smart, grant me the right to legally loan that key to a friend, so they can watch the movie, and then return the key (or I get to auto-revoke it after a number of days).
Hell, tell me a price to have a private (or public?) screening of the movie at a theater that rents out screens.
Cocoon is not available on streaming. That's so dumb. It will enter the public domain in 2081. Until then, earn some reasonable money, by making a legal way for people to do what they're already doing. As frictionless as possible.
And if you're a genius, come up with a way for someone to show you their DVD, Blu-Ray, VHS copy of a movie, and give them that decryption key, for free. They already bought your movie once. Don't make them regret it. Reward them for it. Send it out to anyone who "bought" the movie on AppleTV, Google Play Movies, YouTube, Amazon, etc. But I doubt you're that smart.
Can we use AI to get better lip syncing of the Dollars trilogy yet? I would love to see this.
And lose half the charm?
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