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.
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.
It’s not his fault that sand is coarse, rough, and irritating, or that it gets everywhere.
They were course and rough and irritating and got 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.
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.
Thanks, Obama.
Enshittification continues
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.
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.
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.
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
/r/datahoarders
Is there a data alternative?
Letting others hoard for you. Torrents, usenet
Well there’s borrowing, but I feel that’s what we’re all already doing.
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.
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.
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
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!
The Disney Vault!
Write that down!
Yo ho yo ho…
🖕 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.
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?
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!
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.
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
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!
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!
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 don’t even need much cash. An old N40L and four 250gb ssds will get you 750gb running Truenas and raid.
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.
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
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 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.
They will charge you again for the remake. So nice you have payed twice…
Get the physical medium
