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.
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?
Line go up
Yes
That’s a real bummer, right? It’s like all this stuff we love just vanishing into thin air. But honestly, with all the streaming platforms popping up, maybe it’s just the dawn of a new way to keep us entertained. It could also be a sign for us to cherish and support physical media while we still can, so start stocking up on DVDs and Blu-rays like it’s 2005!
This is why pirating is justified. If you want your shows to last forever, torrent them, and keep them seeded.
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.
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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.
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.
The simple answer to this is to change the tax code to not allow for write offs for completed projects. And to shorten how long copyright lasts (fuck Disney so much for that one)
What does this have to do with write-offs? I don’t think they can write off episodes of South Park and the daily show that have already aired.
It’s more for things like the batgirl movie that is finshed but will make more money in tax write offs to never release it. But if they lose ad revenue from removing a back catalogue, that may also let them post a loss and claim tax breaks.
I think the suggestion is that if they leave the content available, they can still write it off.
Also set up a standardized licensing process that breaks the mini-monopolies of exclusive content.
Personally, I’d also limit copyright to specific works and not the characters, setting, etc. Then protect trademarks and use those to establish canon. Like in the MCU and DC universes, Spiderman and Batman don’t exist together, but in the Superhero Fan Universe, they are roommates and play genius billionaire vs superhuman with a sixth sense prank wars on each other.
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.
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.
Music licensing in media like this gets bullshit quickly. If it was signed in for the original run, fucking leave it.
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.
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. =\
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
🖕 my home server disagrees 🏴☠️
Yep, my shelf of DVDs of movies I loved growing up became 4TB of media on a Jellyfin server, cloned to a cold drive I leave in my closet.
/r/datahoarders
Is there a data alternative?
Well there’s borrowing, but I feel that’s what we’re all already doing.
Letting others hoard for you. Torrents, usenet
What are the biggest usenets?
Enshittification continues
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?
In the long run, shit like this is theft from the Public Domain.
What a brilliant way to put it, “theft from the public domain”. I’m gonna have to remember that one.
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?
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.
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.
Get the physical medium
Absolutely, if you care about historical works you should make sure that you have a copy that you control.
A large portion of the things on my jellyfin are like that, because once they take away media ownership, and they can change or take away your stories at any time.
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?
If you have an m.2 slot, 2gb drives are cheap and don’t worry about it for a while
Are cheap
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.
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.
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$
I’m getting to the point of becoming a data hoarder
What’s wrong with that‽ Join us on the dark side (according to giant corporations anyways), we have milk and cookies!
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.
Storage is relatively cheap, and don’t stress becoming a data horder, added bonus, leaning 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
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 :)
Don’t be scared. Embrace the data. Let it flow through the fiber optic cables and into your RAID array. Dew it!
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.
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.
The more they delete, the more they can resell every few years as “new” while charging ever more exorbitant prices for!
But it before it goes back in the Disney vault!
The Disney Vault!
Write that down!
