> 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”.
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
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.
> 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 TNG remaster because Netflix streaming took over the industry mid-project.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!).
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.
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.
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.
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
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'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 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?
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'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.
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.
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”.
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.
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 TNG remaster because Netflix streaming took over the industry mid-project.
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...
[0] https://kotaku.com/forza-horizon-4-delisted-xbox-licensing-1...
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.
>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.
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.
Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.
----
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment_Software_Associa...
Very smooth way of using your torrenting skills on your CV.
I'm not one of those people. :D But I do know one; he's a professional librarian.
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.
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.
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 bet not even 1 in 1000 people pirating are doing it primarily as a preservation exercise.
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
https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2181751/dvds-with-t...
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.
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?
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.
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))