The amount of media being wiped from the internet is worrying for viewers, and industry workers who need the exposure, says journalist and critic Zach Schonfeld
Last June, fans of Comedy Central – the long-running channel behind beloved programmes such as The Daily Show and South Park – received an unwelcome surprise. Paramount Global, Comedy Central’s parent company, unceremoniously purged the vast repository of video content on the channel’s website, which dated back to the late 1990s.
I wish this worked, but it only does for things that are popular.
As it stands I think I’m just going to have to back up my entire media collection for fear of not being able to get a copy during retirement - when I plan to watch a shit tonne of TV.
I’ve looked around quite a bit for The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. No one seems to have the complete series. The show ran nightly for 30 years and amassed 6714 episodes so it would be quite a large torrent.
Most of the episodes aired before at-home VHS was common, and TV stations weren’t in the habit of archiving their old footage for nightly broadcasts; The show was viewed as transient since it dealt with current events, and nobody expected people to want to re-watch old episodes. It’s likely that a lot of them aren’t available simply because nobody (including the tv station) has recordings.
It’s likely that most episodes aired before the dawn of home video recording (early 80s) are completely lost media. NBC and other networks weren’t in the habit of archiving tape-to-air media.
Ahhhh this is an absolute tragedy. The same thing goes with many movies from the golden age of Hollywood. I love to watch these old films. It breaks my heart that so many are lost forever.
The only way to watch the original Star Wars movies before George completely fucked with them is piracy.
The 4K77, 80 and 83 editions are what you’re after. Enjoy. There are apparently reduced noise versions as well, but I thought it was perfect as is. It’s old. It’s supposed to have noise and grain. The desert scenes in the first one are really noisy and I’m not 100% sure why. Maybe he filmed those on cheaper film stock in smaller cameras, but that’s just a guess.
I do have a double set with original (or as much as you could get) along with the post-prequels completely broken one. I think there was a pre-prequels version as well. But then that is DVD quality, which is getting on a bit.
The likes of Disney+ doesn’t even acknowledge the originals even exist.
Same with their Alien and Aliens versions as well. No director’s cuts at all, which is a shame as I far prefer them. They should have both.
There was a storm in the desert where they were filming which destroyed a lot of the equipment and almost doomed the film.
I think I remember reading that they had to use cheaper film stock in those scenes for that reason.
This is why I still download movies and try to keep them. They make up the bulk of the crap I keep on my hard drives.
And there was a time when the computer science world wanted to avoid this… and it was 1990 (yes, almost 35 years ago) when the term digital dark age was coined. It was in response to several things. Firstly: the first voyager probe was sent and the code used to store the information could not be disciphered by (then) the latest computers, which resulted in a problem. The second thing is that governments all around the world were starting to be heavily computerized and the older computers used in the 1960s were 100% incompatible with newer systems.
In the US and UK in 1960 the first census were done by computers, and by just 1976 there were only two computers in the world that could read that data, and one of them was a museum piece.
The FOSS community has done far more to combat this with emulation over the past 30 years than any corporation has ever done. Whether it is for video games like MAME, MESS, or whatever console emulator you want to mention, or by OSes like MS-DOS and Amiga Lemon and countless others that emulate almost every system ever created.
Now these fucks are just shitting all streaming media and forcing normal people to have to break the law by pirating the stuff just to keep the stuff from vanishing into oblivion.
Used to be considered simply prudent to back up the vhs tapes you bought and people were encouraged to tape their favorite shows off the tv. Now some random CEO of the month has the right to bury decades worth of creative works?
Backup vhs tapes? They put copy protections on those too, which made that difficult. In the 90s I had two VCRs, I ran the output of one to the input of the other to record duplicates. Some of the copy protection schemes would fuck with the signal or the tracking.
All US made VCR’s had a circuit in them called macrovision. Its what caused the distortion in the copies when the tape was recorded with it. The German units did not have this. He purchased them through friends who were in the military. They bought them from the base exchange or px I don’t remember which. As far as PAL and NTSC I’m pretty sure he had something to deal what that as well. The guy bought the second VCR in the state right behind some super rich guy. He still had it in the 90’s and it took up most of a fairly large table.
Up until he died he made copies of everything he could get his hands on. He lived right on a county line and arranged it with his neighbor across the road in the other county to drop his netflix DVD’s in his mail box for pickup. He would get his DVD’s in the morning rip them and then put them in the neighbors mailbox before noon. It would be picked up that day and he would repeat the process. When he died I ended up with a huge amount of ripped DVD’s that I eventually gave to someone just to get them out of my way. I kinda regret that sometimes.
For ntsc vhs players it wasnt a component in the vcr that was made for copy protection. They would add garbled color burst signals. This would desync the automatic color burst sync system on the vcr.
CRT TVs didn’t need this component but some fancy tvs would also have the same problem with macrovission.
The color burst system was actually a pretty cool invention from the time broadcast started to add color. They needed to be able stay compatible with existing black and white tv.
The solution was to not change the black and white image being sent but add the color offset information on a higher frequency and color TVs would combine the signals.
This was easy for CRT as the electron beam would sweep across the screen changing intensity as it hit each black and white pixel.
To display color each black and white pixel was a RGB triangle of pixels. So you would add small offset to the beam up or down to make it more or less green and left or right to adjust the red and blue.
Those adjustment knobs on old tvs were in part you manually targeting the beam adjustment to hit the pixels just right.
VCRs didn’t usually have these adjustments so they needed a auto system to keep the color synced in the recording.
You should probably read that wikipedia link. I built some of the blockers or stabilizers as Wikipedia article describes them. You could see the pulses described in the output of a scope that messed up the AGC in the VCR. All the blocker did was blank out the pulses and that was enough to prevent macrovision from working on the VCR when making a copy.
Someone bought ALL the thrift store DVDs in all my small city’s thrift stores, like four of them. People are starting to know that self-ownership is where everyone is going
You don’t need to run it on a pi. In fact, I’d actually argue against it; A pi will be underpowered if you’re ever needing to transcode anything. Transcoding is what Plex/Jellyfin does if your watching device can’t natively play the video. Maybe you have a 4k video, but you’re playing it on a 1080p screen. That video will need to be transcoded from 4k into 1080p for the screen to be able to display it. Or maybe the file is encoded using ACC (a fairly recent encoding method) which isn’t widely supported by older devices. This often happens with things like smart TVs (which often don’t support modern encoding and need to be transcoded even if the resolution is correct.)
Basically, if you’re 100% positive that every device you’re watching it on will never need transcoding, then a pi is acceptable. But for anything else, I’d recommend a small PC instead. You can even use an old PC if you have one laying around.
Or if you want to use a new machine, maybe something like an HP Elitedesk. They’re basically what you see in every single cubicle in every single office building. They’re extremely popular in corporate settings, which means there are a ton of used/refurbished systems available for cheap, because IT destroys the drives and sends the rest to refurb when they upgrade their fleet of PCs. So for the refurb you’re basically just paying the cost of an SSD they added in (to replace the one IT pulled out), plus whatever labor is associated with dusting it out and checking the connections to make sure they all work. You can pick up a modern one for like $250 on Amazon (or your preferred electronics store).
Worth noting that the elitedesk generations are marked by a G-number, so google the model (like an EliteDesk G9, G7, etc) to see what kind of processor it has; Avoid anything with an intel 13th or 14th generation CPU, (they have major reliability issues) and check with Plex/Jellyfin’s CPU requirements list to see if it supports hardware accelerated transcoding. For Intel chips, look for QuickSync support.
For storage, I’d recommend running a NAS with however many hard drives you can afford, and one that has extra ports for future expandability. Some NAS systems support Plex and/or Jellyfin directly, but the requirements for full support are tricky and you’ll almost always have better luck just running a dedicated PC for Plex. Then for playing, one of two things will happen. Either the device is capable of directly playing the file, or it will need to be transcoded. If it’s directly playing, the plex server basically just points the player to the NAS, and the player handles the rest. If it’s transcoding, the PC will access the NAS, then stream it to the player.
As for deciding on Plex vs Jellyfin, that’s really a matter of personal preference. If you’re using Plex, I’d highly suggest a PlexPass sub/lifetime purchase; Wait until Black Friday, because they historically do a (~25% off) discount on their lifetime pass. Plex is definitely easier to set up, especially if you plan on streaming outside of your LAN.
Jellyfin currently struggles from a lack of native app support; Lots of smart TVs don’t have a native Jellyfin app, for instance. But some people have issues and complaints (many of them justified!) with Plex, so if the FOSS sounds appealing, then consider Jellyfin instead. Jellyfin is also rapidly being developed, and many people expect it to have feature parity with Plex within a few years.
And if you’re having trouble deciding, you can actually set up both (they can run in tandem on the same machine) and then see which one you prefer.
And the nice part about using a mini PC is that you can also use it for more than just Plex/Jellyfin. I have the *arr suite running on mine, alongside a Factorio server, a Palworld server, and a few other things.
my own plex server (or something else if there’s a better alternative idk)
– complexity level 1:
First off a heads up, Jellyfin will serve you much better. Plex is commercial software, and they’ve treated their users quite poorly numerous times to appease copyright pressures. Commercial software always has an incentive to screw you.
Lots and lots of well-made guides and stuff on YouTube and such for getting Jellyfin setup, but if you want a little more in depth, I’ve detailed a bit below 👇
— complexity level 2:
Even better than a Pi for media hosting, if you can swing it is those “1 liter PCs” that IT departments throw out en masse anymore. (At least I hope they still do? They might just burn them now since reusing them has caught on /s)
Basically, something you can stuff a bunch of hard drives in. You can turn any old PC and hard drives into a decent little server. The only other important thing is offsite backups for what REALLY matters to you. I use a cloud service called “iDrive” that’s decent enough. That way my family pictures and artwork aren’t obliterated if my office burns or floods or something.
Self-hosting IS a project, but you learn a lot and it can be really fun! I want to preface that I’m not an IT professional by any stretch.
–complexity level 3:
I currently use an OS called “Proxmox” to host virtual machines. It’s really powerful and gets easier as you get the hang of it.
It hosts a little virtual server that only runs PiHole, which blocks ads and tracking across my entire WiFi network. It’s amazing. (Not YouTube ads tho. Long story. Other tools for that.)
But it mainly hosts OpenMediaVault, which is great for just hosting a file server, and it’s well integrated with Docker for setting up “containers.” Lighter than virtual machines, consistent, and easily managed. (Imagine getting to wipe Windows but leave your D:\ drive untouched every time, and everything comes back configured like you want it.)
Right now, I’d say experiment with stuff within virtual machines, try it out. Figure out how you want to set yourself up. The best part is, you don’t need to open up anything on your home network.
– Complexity level 4:
There’s a neat service called Tailscale for accessing your network securely from out of the house, but don’t worry about that yet.
There’s a service for everything. I’ve replaced all of Gsuite with a self hostable called NextCloud, for instance!
Facebook clone for just your family? Minecraft / Terraria / whatever server? (Private MMO server?), the sky’s the limit really!
TL;DR:
Just take it one step at a time. Take notes. Learn to take good backups. Ask questions. Lots of questions. We’re all in this together. :)
I’m not against nuclear power, but could they have concocted a worse set of motivations? Restarting Three Mile Island to power Microsoft’s AI ambitions? Shit reads like something a super villan would cook up.
I’ve just realized there’s an animated series on Youtube, that I’ve had a really hard time (read: impossible) finding anywhere else, and if LEGO (yes, I’m talking about Ninjago) decides to delete these videos from their channels, the OG seasons are nowhere to ve found as far as I can tell. Yes, there are some cartoon streaming services but those are few in number and getting fewer, so I wouldn’t bet on them or any new ones that spring up having that content available in 5-10 years. And that’s worrying. Time to download all 15 seasons and store them somewhere! (oh shit, I don’t have enough space, do I)
Edit: found them on a downloads site from the piracy megathread, but only Seasons 1-11. I’ll get them all soon enough.
Edit 2: The first 11 seasons from that website come up to just over 105GB and I don’t have the space. Do I buy a 256GB USB/ Drive to store this at? I’m scared that I’m getting to the point of becoming a data hoarder. Not too long ago, I didn’t know what I’d do with my single 32GB USB, now I have added a 128GB one, and a 64GB Ventoy usb to the mix, and I still don’t have enough. Wtf?
Do you have desktop or laptop?
For desktop, I recommend getting an HDD for storage. They’re cheaper, I bought a 4tb Seagate Ironwolf for less than 100€.
I also have a 1tb nvme, where I store things that require fast reads like my gaming collection while the system is installed in an SSD. (The parts were not bought at the same time).
For laptop, you might want to stick to what you have inside and just get a good external USB.
The usual brands are still good and I think prices have flatten across the industry.
You can have large amounts of storage without being a hoarder, tbh in this day and age its just prudent to have an offline DRM free copy of your favorite media
If you have a bit of spare cash I can’t recommend building a NAS and setting up a jellyfin server enough, its really nice knowing that everything on it won’t disappear unless you will it
If only. I’m a student living in student accommodation. I can’t set up a NAS because hosting things on the network is against their policy, and I also wouldn’t feel comfortable having that type of hardware in my room. And if electricity bills skyrocket because of me, I’ll be forced to pay them.
You could attach an external drive to a slim laptop or low-power PC like a Pi, only accessible by yourself, and technically you’ve got a media server!
You can host things from a virtual machine on your main computer, with a chunky external drive attached, if you wanted. :) That’s the fun part, you can start from basically craigslist or hand-me-down hardware, and expand as your knowledge and space allow!
You could also run services from a paid hosting server, but I don’t think the returns would be great for packing tons of data on there. :p
You might be able to convert to hevc (x265) and trim it down by quite a bit.
You will always lose a bit of quality converting though, even from 1080p to 1080p, but I consider it pretty acceptable for cartoons and things of that nature.
Have my main server back home, while I’m traveling I have a script to reencode to av1 onto my local machine, works beautifully and the quality drop isn’t too bad (colors look weird but think that’s the Intel xe encoder)
What’s a safe place to buy storage online? I’ve seen horror stories of an sd card in a drive enclosure, and modifying the storage to make it appear larger than it is.
My brother in christ you have less than a TB of storage. you’re very far from being a hoarder.
I still have my first 512GB HDD from when I was in high school and I’ve got over 32TB on my latest build, plus my archive of old drives I leave off until I need to access them. Join us, it’s better.
Storage is relatively cheap, and don’t stress becoming a data horder, added bonus, learning to manage it well is a nice skillset to develop…
Looks over at the 700tb rack!
Do it. Buy an hdd, start to understand how to store the data safely, how to torrent and how to contribute to the community.
You’ll learn a lot, and I am guessing that you are very young, all this knowledge will be very useful in the future. Every cent spent now, will multiply in the future
Preservation is an invasive and destructive process. Recreating the experience of watching ‘The Daily Show’ in the 90s or early '00s is already impossible. Language and culture mildew and rot just like leather and wood.
EDIT: People don’t seem to understand what I’m talking about. Even the people who are responding in good faith seem confused. That’s on me. So I thought I’d try to clarify with an example.
Take the Mona Lisa. Perhaps one of the most preserved objects in history. It’s so well preserved that it’s impossible to see. Sure, you can look at it, but you won’t see it. Taking a picture of the painting is encouraged, but you can’t get a look at it in your camera roll either.
If you saw the actual painting hanging on a friend’s wall, your first thought would probably not be “what a masterpiece”, but “why didn’t they remove the default print that came with the frame”? If you go to Paris, you can wait in line to have the “Mona Lisa experience” but the painting you saw wasn’t hanging on the wall, what you’ll see is the Mona Lisa you brought with you.
(yes, I stole this example from ‘were in hell’ youtube channel)
Preservation is an invasive and destructive process. Recreating the experience of watching ‘The Daily Show’ in the 90s or early '00s is already impossible. Language and culture mildew and rot just like leather and wood.
EDIT: People don’t seem to understand what I’m talking about. Even the people who are responding in good faith seem confused. That’s on me. So I thought I’d try to clarify with an example.
Take the Mona Lisa. Perhaps one of the most preserved objects in history. It’s so well preserved that it’s impossible to see. Sure, you can look at it, but you won’t see it. Taking a picture of the painting is encouraged, but you can’t get a look at it in your camera roll either.
If you saw the actual painting hanging on a friend’s wall, your first thought would probably not be “what a masterpiece”, but “why didn’t they remove the default print that came with the frame”? If you go to Paris, you can wait in line to have the “Mona Lisa experience” but the painting you saw wasn’t hanging on the wall, what you’ll see is the Mona Lisa you brought with you.
(yes, I stole this example from ‘were in hell’ youtube channel)
Figured I’d make a copy. Who knows, the OP might change it in the future. Gotta preserve the past and all.
obviously a news show isn’t going to feel the same rewatching it. that’s not the point lol.
that would be like saying it’s dumb to preserve newspapers in libraries because it’s not going to feel as good rereading the “Hitler is dead” headline. people don’t look at old news to have a good time.
boy was it silly of us to preserve that kind of thing and it totally never comes in handy/s
that’s not even what people are upset about anyway. comedy Central mostly makes entertainment programming that isn’t news based and can still be enjoyed whenever. believe it or not, comedy Central has a lot of content that will stand the test of time. especially when looking at their stand-up catalogue.
this is the destruction of a library. a digital one, but a library none the less. that’s what people are mad about.
but you’re right. we should just dump all of our old movies and shows. they’re worthless moldy junk anyway… 🙄
I’m the genealogist of my family. There are things about what life was like when my grandmother was young that now only I know (since she’s passed on). As I research through more and more of my family history, going back further and further, the less and less I know about what life was like when my ancestors were around, especially the minutiae of every day life. But I WANT to know what life was like. It’s fascinating and, more importantly, we don’t always know now what will be important in the future so how can we learn from the mistakes of the past if we don’t even know they existed? My kids will never know directly what living life in the 90s as a teen was like. But I do. I remember. But I won’t be here forever and if they ever want to have even a tiny inkling of what it was like, I need to ensure that the stories, the accounts, the events, the nuance, the opinions… are recorded and passed on, as my grandmother did with me.
The saying, “History is written by the victor” is absolutely true. But if we had the little tiny details from the perspectives of lots of different people, the victor cannot rewrite history for their benefit and in their image. History, no matter how big or small, matters.
If you don’t care. Cool for you bro. Ignore it. But for the rest of us who want to learn, recording and archiving matters. I feel nothing but honour in my obligation to ensure events and history is passed on for future generations.
Sure, “no man sets foot in the same river twice”, but that does nothing to argue against the preservation of cultural items.
Take music, for instance. I never feel the same way the second time listening to a song as I did the first time, but that doesn’t make the music less special or change anything about it at all, and it certainly does nothing to advance a hypothetical argument that music shouldn’t be recorded or that the recordings of it shouldn’t be preserved for future enjoyment or different audiences.
What an absolutely idiotic take. like holy shit bro this has to be the dumbest shit I’ve ever read, and I’ve come across some doozies. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this thread is now dumber for having read through it. I award you no up votes and may lemmy mods ban your account.
Even considering your edits, it’s still a stupid argument. By that same logic nothing should be preserved. Watching LotR now is not the same as watching it when it first came out, which should have never been made according to you because by that time the book should have already been destroyed since you wouldn’t want to preserve it for 50 years, but Tolkien shouldn’t have even written it, since they were based on ideas and drafts he did during the first world war exploring how war changes men and power corrupts, which obviously is only valid in that context and nowhere else so it should be destroyed since preserving it would be invasive and destructive, no?.
Preserving something can never be destructive, it’s the opposite of it. If the Mona Lisa was destroyed you wouldn’t even know it existed, so how can having preserved it be destructive when the alternative is oblivion?
And I agree that the Mona Lisa is no big deal, you know who else agrees? People from that time. It’s widely known that the Mona Lisa was one of Da Vinci’s less famous works, and until Napoleon made a big deal out of it it was just a random painting in a random museum. So I get part of your point, that people who make a big deal out of the Mona Lisa are only there to see the famous painting, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no reason to preserve it, or that there are no people who go there to see the actual Mona Lisa.
Wait until you realize that most of your favorite movies and shows have been re edited or messed with.
I was watching the office for the 100th time and one of my favorite jokes was just straight up removed from the show during this rewatch. So just in the last few months they’ve gone back and edited the show.
I was also rewatching breaking bad and they’ve changed some of the music as well.
Don’t know why they cut it honestly since it’s been there forever, but when Michael is trying to set people up he sets Kevin up with Erin and when Erin looks disappointed Kevin says:
“you will learn to love me”
Michael: “slow down Kevin, you gotta let the cookies cool before you pop em in your mouth!”
That whole exchange is now gone and you only get Erin’s disappointment and her asking Michael if she can talk to him in private. The cookie joke is gone for some reason
Dude, Halo: Master Chief Collection removed a LOT of perfectly timed tracks from key moments of Halo 2, because they were Breaking Benjamin songs.
I remember when a pair of Hunters is just about to bust open these massive gates in New Mombasa…here comes the sick instrumental from “Blow Me Away”…!
…No, just some vaguely Halo-esque drumbeat on loop.
The music licensing industry has pretty much always been Satan, but the sheer arrogance to think they have the right to claw audio out of existing works because they’re not getting infinite revenue out of it is a new friggin low.
When trying to find a copy of Forza 4 (or one of them) after being disappointed with the cut down version they had on gamepass, I discovered it couldn’t be sold anymore because of a deal MS made with Porsche that eventually ran out.
Ace Combat games are also on a countdown as soon as they release, because the likenesses of the planes from the defense companies expire, so they get de-listed.
I had a coworker who cited music licensing as the sole reason he can’t find his favorite show anymore: The Drew Carrey Show. Whatever schmuck owns the music licensing refuses to cooperate with the rest of the show owners, so it can’t be streamed or distributed anywhere.
Another example would be Scrubs, most of the songs used in the show (including key moments and the OG songs were perfect for them) have been edited out and replaced because of licensing issues. Unless you’ve got the DVDs or pirated older versions, you’re stuck with the new music and it’s not the same.
It’s going to be a fun historical period to look back on when there are just huge gaps where IP/product control became so powerful that no record of certain things were allowed to exist.
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This is why pirating is justified. If you want your shows to last forever, torrent them, and keep them seeded.
I wish this worked, but it only does for things that are popular.
As it stands I think I’m just going to have to back up my entire media collection for fear of not being able to get a copy during retirement - when I plan to watch a shit tonne of TV.
It’s a shame there is no plan to make consumer grade glass storage.
I’ve looked around quite a bit for The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. No one seems to have the complete series. The show ran nightly for 30 years and amassed 6714 episodes so it would be quite a large torrent.
Most of the episodes aired before at-home VHS was common, and TV stations weren’t in the habit of archiving their old footage for nightly broadcasts; The show was viewed as transient since it dealt with current events, and nobody expected people to want to re-watch old episodes. It’s likely that a lot of them aren’t available simply because nobody (including the tv station) has recordings.
It’s likely that most episodes aired before the dawn of home video recording (early 80s) are completely lost media. NBC and other networks weren’t in the habit of archiving tape-to-air media.
Ahhhh this is an absolute tragedy. The same thing goes with many movies from the golden age of Hollywood. I love to watch these old films. It breaks my heart that so many are lost forever.
The only way to watch the original Star Wars movies before George completely fucked with them is piracy.
The 4K77, 80 and 83 editions are what you’re after. Enjoy. There are apparently reduced noise versions as well, but I thought it was perfect as is. It’s old. It’s supposed to have noise and grain. The desert scenes in the first one are really noisy and I’m not 100% sure why. Maybe he filmed those on cheaper film stock in smaller cameras, but that’s just a guess.
The director was an amateur, and he didn’t align the grains of sand with the grain of the film.
They were course and rough and irritating and got everywhere.
It’s not his fault that sand is coarse, rough, and irritating, or that it gets everywhere.
The late 90s dvd versions are gold.
I do have a double set with original (or as much as you could get) along with the post-prequels completely broken one. I think there was a pre-prequels version as well. But then that is DVD quality, which is getting on a bit.
The likes of Disney+ doesn’t even acknowledge the originals even exist.
Same with their Alien and Aliens versions as well. No director’s cuts at all, which is a shame as I far prefer them. They should have both.
There was a storm in the desert where they were filming which destroyed a lot of the equipment and almost doomed the film.
I think I remember reading that they had to use cheaper film stock in those scenes for that reason.
This is why I still download movies and try to keep them. They make up the bulk of the crap I keep on my hard drives.
And there was a time when the computer science world wanted to avoid this… and it was 1990 (yes, almost 35 years ago) when the term digital dark age was coined. It was in response to several things. Firstly: the first voyager probe was sent and the code used to store the information could not be disciphered by (then) the latest computers, which resulted in a problem. The second thing is that governments all around the world were starting to be heavily computerized and the older computers used in the 1960s were 100% incompatible with newer systems.
In the US and UK in 1960 the first census were done by computers, and by just 1976 there were only two computers in the world that could read that data, and one of them was a museum piece.
The FOSS community has done far more to combat this with emulation over the past 30 years than any corporation has ever done. Whether it is for video games like MAME, MESS, or whatever console emulator you want to mention, or by OSes like MS-DOS and Amiga Lemon and countless others that emulate almost every system ever created.
Now these fucks are just shitting all streaming media and forcing normal people to have to break the law by pirating the stuff just to keep the stuff from vanishing into oblivion.
Used to be considered simply prudent to back up the vhs tapes you bought and people were encouraged to tape their favorite shows off the tv. Now some random CEO of the month has the right to bury decades worth of creative works?
Backup vhs tapes? They put copy protections on those too, which made that difficult. In the 90s I had two VCRs, I ran the output of one to the input of the other to record duplicates. Some of the copy protection schemes would fuck with the signal or the tracking.
I had a friend with a huge copied VHS library. He ordered his equipment from Germany. No macrovision on equipment there so his copies were very good.
Was this in the US? Because then you had PAL vs NTSC, which is think would be an even bigger problem.
All US made VCR’s had a circuit in them called macrovision. Its what caused the distortion in the copies when the tape was recorded with it. The German units did not have this. He purchased them through friends who were in the military. They bought them from the base exchange or px I don’t remember which. As far as PAL and NTSC I’m pretty sure he had something to deal what that as well. The guy bought the second VCR in the state right behind some super rich guy. He still had it in the 90’s and it took up most of a fairly large table.
Up until he died he made copies of everything he could get his hands on. He lived right on a county line and arranged it with his neighbor across the road in the other county to drop his netflix DVD’s in his mail box for pickup. He would get his DVD’s in the morning rip them and then put them in the neighbors mailbox before noon. It would be picked up that day and he would repeat the process. When he died I ended up with a huge amount of ripped DVD’s that I eventually gave to someone just to get them out of my way. I kinda regret that sometimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Protection_System
For ntsc vhs players it wasnt a component in the vcr that was made for copy protection. They would add garbled color burst signals. This would desync the automatic color burst sync system on the vcr.
CRT TVs didn’t need this component but some fancy tvs would also have the same problem with macrovission.
The color burst system was actually a pretty cool invention from the time broadcast started to add color. They needed to be able stay compatible with existing black and white tv.
The solution was to not change the black and white image being sent but add the color offset information on a higher frequency and color TVs would combine the signals.
This was easy for CRT as the electron beam would sweep across the screen changing intensity as it hit each black and white pixel.
To display color each black and white pixel was a RGB triangle of pixels. So you would add small offset to the beam up or down to make it more or less green and left or right to adjust the red and blue.
Those adjustment knobs on old tvs were in part you manually targeting the beam adjustment to hit the pixels just right.
VCRs didn’t usually have these adjustments so they needed a auto system to keep the color synced in the recording.
You should probably read that wikipedia link. I built some of the blockers or stabilizers as Wikipedia article describes them. You could see the pulses described in the output of a scope that messed up the AGC in the VCR. All the blocker did was blank out the pulses and that was enough to prevent macrovision from working on the VCR when making a copy.
My gmaws wall of VHS tapes ripped from every movie she ever rented from a blockbuster would beg to differ
In the long run, shit like this is theft from the Public Domain.
Yeah, there really should be some expectation of stewardship in exchange for absurd post-Disney copyright durations.
What, and take any responsibility for the Commons?
What a brilliant way to put it, “theft from the public domain”. I’m gonna have to remember that one.
Someone bought ALL the thrift store DVDs in all my small city’s thrift stores, like four of them. People are starting to know that self-ownership is where everyone is going
/r/datahoarders
Is there a
dataLemmy alternative?Edit: don’t post if you just woke up
Letting others hoard for you. Torrents, usenet
What are the biggest usenets?
I use usenetserver.com and have been for a long time at least.
Well there’s borrowing, but I feel that’s what we’re all already doing.
Dammit, I was completely asleep. I meant if there was a Lemmy alternative
Recent events with streaming services has really been the best argument for self hosting your own content
Every day I inch closer and closer to setting up my own plex server (or something else if there’s a better alternative idk)
but the term “raspberry pi” makes me scared and confused
Plex is good but another option is jellyfin
You don’t need to run it on a pi. In fact, I’d actually argue against it; A pi will be underpowered if you’re ever needing to transcode anything. Transcoding is what Plex/Jellyfin does if your watching device can’t natively play the video. Maybe you have a 4k video, but you’re playing it on a 1080p screen. That video will need to be transcoded from 4k into 1080p for the screen to be able to display it. Or maybe the file is encoded using ACC (a fairly recent encoding method) which isn’t widely supported by older devices. This often happens with things like smart TVs (which often don’t support modern encoding and need to be transcoded even if the resolution is correct.)
Basically, if you’re 100% positive that every device you’re watching it on will never need transcoding, then a pi is acceptable. But for anything else, I’d recommend a small PC instead. You can even use an old PC if you have one laying around.
Or if you want to use a new machine, maybe something like an HP Elitedesk. They’re basically what you see in every single cubicle in every single office building. They’re extremely popular in corporate settings, which means there are a ton of used/refurbished systems available for cheap, because IT destroys the drives and sends the rest to refurb when they upgrade their fleet of PCs. So for the refurb you’re basically just paying the cost of an SSD they added in (to replace the one IT pulled out), plus whatever labor is associated with dusting it out and checking the connections to make sure they all work. You can pick up a modern one for like $250 on Amazon (or your preferred electronics store).
Worth noting that the elitedesk generations are marked by a G-number, so google the model (like an EliteDesk G9, G7, etc) to see what kind of processor it has; Avoid anything with an intel 13th or 14th generation CPU, (they have major reliability issues) and check with Plex/Jellyfin’s CPU requirements list to see if it supports hardware accelerated transcoding. For Intel chips, look for QuickSync support.
For storage, I’d recommend running a NAS with however many hard drives you can afford, and one that has extra ports for future expandability. Some NAS systems support Plex and/or Jellyfin directly, but the requirements for full support are tricky and you’ll almost always have better luck just running a dedicated PC for Plex. Then for playing, one of two things will happen. Either the device is capable of directly playing the file, or it will need to be transcoded. If it’s directly playing, the plex server basically just points the player to the NAS, and the player handles the rest. If it’s transcoding, the PC will access the NAS, then stream it to the player.
As for deciding on Plex vs Jellyfin, that’s really a matter of personal preference. If you’re using Plex, I’d highly suggest a PlexPass sub/lifetime purchase; Wait until Black Friday, because they historically do a (~25% off) discount on their lifetime pass. Plex is definitely easier to set up, especially if you plan on streaming outside of your LAN.
Jellyfin currently struggles from a lack of native app support; Lots of smart TVs don’t have a native Jellyfin app, for instance. But some people have issues and complaints (many of them justified!) with Plex, so if the FOSS sounds appealing, then consider Jellyfin instead. Jellyfin is also rapidly being developed, and many people expect it to have feature parity with Plex within a few years.
And if you’re having trouble deciding, you can actually set up both (they can run in tandem on the same machine) and then see which one you prefer.
And the nice part about using a mini PC is that you can also use it for more than just Plex/Jellyfin. I have the *arr suite running on mine, alongside a Factorio server, a Palworld server, and a few other things.
– complexity level 1:
First off a heads up, Jellyfin will serve you much better. Plex is commercial software, and they’ve treated their users quite poorly numerous times to appease copyright pressures. Commercial software always has an incentive to screw you.
Lots and lots of well-made guides and stuff on YouTube and such for getting Jellyfin setup, but if you want a little more in depth, I’ve detailed a bit below 👇
— complexity level 2:
Even better than a Pi for media hosting, if you can swing it is those “1 liter PCs” that IT departments throw out en masse anymore. (At least I hope they still do? They might just burn them now since reusing them has caught on /s)
Basically, something you can stuff a bunch of hard drives in. You can turn any old PC and hard drives into a decent little server. The only other important thing is offsite backups for what REALLY matters to you. I use a cloud service called “iDrive” that’s decent enough. That way my family pictures and artwork aren’t obliterated if my office burns or floods or something.
Self-hosting IS a project, but you learn a lot and it can be really fun! I want to preface that I’m not an IT professional by any stretch.
–complexity level 3:
I currently use an OS called “Proxmox” to host virtual machines. It’s really powerful and gets easier as you get the hang of it.
It hosts a little virtual server that only runs PiHole, which blocks ads and tracking across my entire WiFi network. It’s amazing. (Not YouTube ads tho. Long story. Other tools for that.)
But it mainly hosts OpenMediaVault, which is great for just hosting a file server, and it’s well integrated with Docker for setting up “containers.” Lighter than virtual machines, consistent, and easily managed. (Imagine getting to wipe Windows but leave your D:\ drive untouched every time, and everything comes back configured like you want it.)
Right now, I’d say experiment with stuff within virtual machines, try it out. Figure out how you want to set yourself up. The best part is, you don’t need to open up anything on your home network.
– Complexity level 4:
There’s a neat service called Tailscale for accessing your network securely from out of the house, but don’t worry about that yet.
There’s a service for everything. I’ve replaced all of Gsuite with a self hostable called NextCloud, for instance!
Facebook clone for just your family? Minecraft / Terraria / whatever server? (Private MMO server?), the sky’s the limit really!
TL;DR: Just take it one step at a time. Take notes. Learn to take good backups. Ask questions. Lots of questions. We’re all in this together. :)
Personally I just setup a PC as a NAS‡ and installed VLC on my TV so that I can just browse the NAS and play the files directly
Is it efficient? No.
Is it the best way? Also no.
Does it work? Yes, surprisingly well in fact.
‡ The first time was simply a network shared folder, the second time was using TrueNAS.
Which TV?
I’m not sure exactly what model but it’s a 4k 75in hisense running Android from like 5 years ago
Can’t keep archives of Saturday morning cartoons we all grew up with and loved; will sue you for keeping copies of them.
Definitely ok to being three mile island back online for AI though, that’s the ticket to a better humanity!
For real why has everyone with any kind of money gone psycho? Have the bad guys started winning even harder?
I’m not against nuclear power, but could they have concocted a worse set of motivations? Restarting Three Mile Island to power Microsoft’s AI ambitions? Shit reads like something a super villan would cook up.
Wait, the three mile island thing wasn’t a joke?
https://newrepublic.com/series/49/microsoft-three-mile-island-ai-nuclear
Nope. Very real.
Line go up
Yes
I’ve just realized there’s an animated series on Youtube, that I’ve had a really hard time (read: impossible) finding anywhere else, and if LEGO (yes, I’m talking about Ninjago) decides to delete these videos from their channels, the OG seasons are nowhere to ve found as far as I can tell. Yes, there are some cartoon streaming services but those are few in number and getting fewer, so I wouldn’t bet on them or any new ones that spring up having that content available in 5-10 years. And that’s worrying. Time to download all 15 seasons and store them somewhere! (oh shit, I don’t have enough space, do I)
Edit: found them on a downloads site from the piracy megathread, but only Seasons 1-11. I’ll get them all soon enough.
Edit 2: The first 11 seasons from that website come up to just over 105GB and I don’t have the space. Do I buy a 256GB USB/ Drive to store this at? I’m scared that I’m getting to the point of becoming a data hoarder. Not too long ago, I didn’t know what I’d do with my single 32GB USB, now I have added a 128GB one, and a 64GB Ventoy usb to the mix, and I still don’t have enough. Wtf?
Seasons 1-7 appear on Tubi. Pretty easy to rip with yt-dlp
If you have an m.2 slot, 2tb drives are cheap and don’t worry about it for a while
Edited: I originally absent mindedly said 2gb, meaning 2tb
Yeah, right. I know they’re cheaper than they were but they can’t be that cheap.
finds a high-speed 2tb m.2 from Kingston (a brand I trust) for £120
I stand corrected.
Do you have desktop or laptop?
For desktop, I recommend getting an HDD for storage. They’re cheaper, I bought a 4tb Seagate Ironwolf for less than 100€.
I also have a 1tb nvme, where I store things that require fast reads like my gaming collection while the system is installed in an SSD. (The parts were not bought at the same time). For laptop, you might want to stick to what you have inside and just get a good external USB. The usual brands are still good and I think prices have flatten across the industry.
Laptops though, for real…
I got an old gaming laptop with an Nvidia 960M in it, and it happened to have an M.2 slot.
I stuck a 1TB from Western Digital in there, AND it had a 1TB HDD already…man, I dunno what to do with this much space on a laptop 😂.
Made an old machine feel like brand new, seriously.
(Especially since I wiped Windows and it’s only running EndeavourOS now.)
You can have large amounts of storage without being a hoarder, tbh in this day and age its just prudent to have an offline DRM free copy of your favorite media
If you have a bit of spare cash I can’t recommend building a NAS and setting up a jellyfin server enough, its really nice knowing that everything on it won’t disappear unless you will it
If only. I’m a student living in student accommodation. I can’t set up a NAS because hosting things on the network is against their policy, and I also wouldn’t feel comfortable having that type of hardware in my room. And if electricity bills skyrocket because of me, I’ll be forced to pay them.
You could attach an external drive to a slim laptop or low-power PC like a Pi, only accessible by yourself, and technically you’ve got a media server!
You can host things from a virtual machine on your main computer, with a chunky external drive attached, if you wanted. :) That’s the fun part, you can start from basically craigslist or hand-me-down hardware, and expand as your knowledge and space allow!
You could also run services from a paid hosting server, but I don’t think the returns would be great for packing tons of data on there. :p
You don’t even need much cash. An old N40L and four 250gb ssds will get you 750gb running Truenas and raid.
105 gigs is nothing, you can get a 1TB external drive for ~60$
What’s wrong with that‽ Join us on the dark side (according to giant corporations anyways), we have milk and cookies!
You might be able to convert to hevc (x265) and trim it down by quite a bit.
You will always lose a bit of quality converting though, even from 1080p to 1080p, but I consider it pretty acceptable for cartoons and things of that nature.
Have my main server back home, while I’m traveling I have a script to reencode to av1 onto my local machine, works beautifully and the quality drop isn’t too bad (colors look weird but think that’s the Intel xe encoder)
Get a 2tb or 3tb external USB drive. They are pretty cheap.
What’s a safe place to buy storage online? I’ve seen horror stories of an sd card in a drive enclosure, and modifying the storage to make it appear larger than it is.
I get mine on Amazon. But I know a lot of people don’t like Amazon.
I’ve used ebay before many times, just be diligent. The problem with these bazaar style marketplaces is much less accountability and LOTS of fakes.
Not the best prices, but it seems like Best Buy, B&H Photo, Costco, stuff like that, might be the better “straight from the source” retailers.
I don’t trust Newegg anymore. Used to like them but they’ve been chasing the wannabe-Amazon rabbit and have been caught doing shady crap to customers.
You buy as much space as you’ll need in the next few years and make a plan for proper duplication/backup, such as 3-2-1 Backups.
My brother in christ you have less than a TB of storage. you’re very far from being a hoarder.
I still have my first 512GB HDD from when I was in high school and I’ve got over 32TB on my latest build, plus my archive of old drives I leave off until I need to access them. Join us, it’s better.
About to build my first really nice homelab NAS for Jellyfin, archiving, etc. targeting between 30-40TB if all goes well :)
Storage is relatively cheap, and don’t stress becoming a data horder, added bonus, learning to manage it well is a nice skillset to develop… Looks over at the 700tb rack!
Do it. Buy an hdd, start to understand how to store the data safely, how to torrent and how to contribute to the community.
You’ll learn a lot, and I am guessing that you are very young, all this knowledge will be very useful in the future. Every cent spent now, will multiply in the future
Don’t be scared. Embrace the data. Let it flow through the fiber optic cables and into your RAID array. Dew it!
The more they delete, the more they can resell every few years as “new” while charging ever more exorbitant prices for!
Buy it before it goes back in the Disney vault!
Write that down!
The Disney Vault!
Yo ho yo ho…
fill upp those hard drives me hearties yo ho!
Preservation is an invasive and destructive process. Recreating the experience of watching ‘The Daily Show’ in the 90s or early '00s is already impossible. Language and culture mildew and rot just like leather and wood.
EDIT: People don’t seem to understand what I’m talking about. Even the people who are responding in good faith seem confused. That’s on me. So I thought I’d try to clarify with an example.
Take the Mona Lisa. Perhaps one of the most preserved objects in history. It’s so well preserved that it’s impossible to see. Sure, you can look at it, but you won’t see it. Taking a picture of the painting is encouraged, but you can’t get a look at it in your camera roll either.
If you saw the actual painting hanging on a friend’s wall, your first thought would probably not be “what a masterpiece”, but “why didn’t they remove the default print that came with the frame”? If you go to Paris, you can wait in line to have the “Mona Lisa experience” but the painting you saw wasn’t hanging on the wall, what you’ll see is the Mona Lisa you brought with you.
(yes, I stole this example from ‘were in hell’ youtube channel)
Figured I’d make a copy. Who knows, the OP might change it in the future. Gotta preserve the past and all.
Look at the veil on her head dude, it’s translucent.
This painting is a masterpiece
obviously a news show isn’t going to feel the same rewatching it. that’s not the point lol.
that would be like saying it’s dumb to preserve newspapers in libraries because it’s not going to feel as good rereading the “Hitler is dead” headline. people don’t look at old news to have a good time.
boy was it silly of us to preserve that kind of thing and it totally never comes in handy/s
that’s not even what people are upset about anyway. comedy Central mostly makes entertainment programming that isn’t news based and can still be enjoyed whenever. believe it or not, comedy Central has a lot of content that will stand the test of time. especially when looking at their stand-up catalogue.
this is the destruction of a library. a digital one, but a library none the less. that’s what people are mad about.
but you’re right. we should just dump all of our old movies and shows. they’re worthless moldy junk anyway… 🙄
I’m the genealogist of my family. There are things about what life was like when my grandmother was young that now only I know (since she’s passed on). As I research through more and more of my family history, going back further and further, the less and less I know about what life was like when my ancestors were around, especially the minutiae of every day life. But I WANT to know what life was like. It’s fascinating and, more importantly, we don’t always know now what will be important in the future so how can we learn from the mistakes of the past if we don’t even know they existed? My kids will never know directly what living life in the 90s as a teen was like. But I do. I remember. But I won’t be here forever and if they ever want to have even a tiny inkling of what it was like, I need to ensure that the stories, the accounts, the events, the nuance, the opinions… are recorded and passed on, as my grandmother did with me.
The saying, “History is written by the victor” is absolutely true. But if we had the little tiny details from the perspectives of lots of different people, the victor cannot rewrite history for their benefit and in their image. History, no matter how big or small, matters.
If you don’t care. Cool for you bro. Ignore it. But for the rest of us who want to learn, recording and archiving matters. I feel nothing but honour in my obligation to ensure events and history is passed on for future generations.
“Alright kids settle down…you wanted to know about the 90’s right?”
"Now this is the story all about how,
My life got flipped-turned upside down,
And I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there,
I’ll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel Air."
History is written by those that write stuff down.
Just a simple lowly troll, nothing of importance to see here
Sure, “no man sets foot in the same river twice”, but that does nothing to argue against the preservation of cultural items.
Take music, for instance. I never feel the same way the second time listening to a song as I did the first time, but that doesn’t make the music less special or change anything about it at all, and it certainly does nothing to advance a hypothetical argument that music shouldn’t be recorded or that the recordings of it shouldn’t be preserved for future enjoyment or different audiences.
What an absolutely idiotic take. like holy shit bro this has to be the dumbest shit I’ve ever read, and I’ve come across some doozies. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this thread is now dumber for having read through it. I award you no up votes and may lemmy mods ban your account.
Even considering your edits, it’s still a stupid argument. By that same logic nothing should be preserved. Watching LotR now is not the same as watching it when it first came out, which should have never been made according to you because by that time the book should have already been destroyed since you wouldn’t want to preserve it for 50 years, but Tolkien shouldn’t have even written it, since they were based on ideas and drafts he did during the first world war exploring how war changes men and power corrupts, which obviously is only valid in that context and nowhere else so it should be destroyed since preserving it would be invasive and destructive, no?.
Preserving something can never be destructive, it’s the opposite of it. If the Mona Lisa was destroyed you wouldn’t even know it existed, so how can having preserved it be destructive when the alternative is oblivion?
And I agree that the Mona Lisa is no big deal, you know who else agrees? People from that time. It’s widely known that the Mona Lisa was one of Da Vinci’s less famous works, and until Napoleon made a big deal out of it it was just a random painting in a random museum. So I get part of your point, that people who make a big deal out of the Mona Lisa are only there to see the famous painting, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no reason to preserve it, or that there are no people who go there to see the actual Mona Lisa.
This is stupid as hell.
Wait until you realize that most of your favorite movies and shows have been re edited or messed with.
I was watching the office for the 100th time and one of my favorite jokes was just straight up removed from the show during this rewatch. So just in the last few months they’ve gone back and edited the show.
I was also rewatching breaking bad and they’ve changed some of the music as well.
Wait what? What joke? :O That’s ridiculous!
Don’t know why they cut it honestly since it’s been there forever, but when Michael is trying to set people up he sets Kevin up with Erin and when Erin looks disappointed Kevin says:
“you will learn to love me”
Michael: “slow down Kevin, you gotta let the cookies cool before you pop em in your mouth!”
That whole exchange is now gone and you only get Erin’s disappointment and her asking Michael if she can talk to him in private. The cookie joke is gone for some reason
Music licensing in media like this gets bullshit quickly. If it was signed in for the original run, fucking leave it.
Dude, Halo: Master Chief Collection removed a LOT of perfectly timed tracks from key moments of Halo 2, because they were Breaking Benjamin songs.
I remember when a pair of Hunters is just about to bust open these massive gates in New Mombasa…here comes the sick instrumental from “Blow Me Away”…!
…No, just some vaguely Halo-esque drumbeat on loop.
The music licensing industry has pretty much always been Satan, but the sheer arrogance to think they have the right to claw audio out of existing works because they’re not getting infinite revenue out of it is a new friggin low.
When trying to find a copy of Forza 4 (or one of them) after being disappointed with the cut down version they had on gamepass, I discovered it couldn’t be sold anymore because of a deal MS made with Porsche that eventually ran out.
Sheesh!
Ace Combat games are also on a countdown as soon as they release, because the likenesses of the planes from the defense companies expire, so they get de-listed.
You couldn’t do that with physical media. =\
I had a coworker who cited music licensing as the sole reason he can’t find his favorite show anymore: The Drew Carrey Show. Whatever schmuck owns the music licensing refuses to cooperate with the rest of the show owners, so it can’t be streamed or distributed anywhere.
Another example would be Scrubs, most of the songs used in the show (including key moments and the OG songs were perfect for them) have been edited out and replaced because of licensing issues. Unless you’ve got the DVDs or pirated older versions, you’re stuck with the new music and it’s not the same.
I think that’s why you’d be hard pressed to find Daria in its original form too: music licensing.
The Drew Carrey Show just finally got a streaming release a couple months ago. On Plex. All 9 seasons now.
I still have dvds and a dvd player like an old person for just this reason.
It’s going to be a fun historical period to look back on when there are just huge gaps where IP/product control became so powerful that no record of certain things were allowed to exist.
Orwell didn’t know he was also writing about the Entertainment-Industrial Complex.