A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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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.
Yeah, there really should be some expectation of stewardship in exchange for absurd post-Disney copyright durations.
What a brilliant way to put it, "theft from the public domain". I'm gonna have to remember that one.
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.
Recent events with streaming services has really been the best argument for self hosting your own content
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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 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)
Enshittification continues
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.
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.
They're editing entertainment history to begin with. Deletion is bad enough, but possibly even more nefarious is the blatant, unapologetically sneaky editing of existing media mentioned in this thread. Jussst a little bit at a time.
Unlike many videogames, TV shows, music, movies, don't get "version / revision numbers." Can you trust your archives to be original?
Adjust for today's-sensibilities here, remove a now-naughty-word there..."oh, we don't wanna pay for that song that released in 5 years before this 36 year old television program...better it never existed!"
Their goal seems to be relegating the Internet to simply being a flow of "What's trending and making money NOW" and nothing else. Every ~~byte~~ electron has a dollar value.
They want generations growing up in a world where the corporate narrative is all that ever was and will be.
Today it's talk shows and cartoons.
Tomorrow it's biographies and documentaries. Family histories? Newspapers?
We need to stop this NOW.
Media conglomerates can't even be relied on to be stewards of their own legacy. They're coming for ours.
So, who's up for another reread/watch of Farenheit 451 or Equalibrium?
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.
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!
Don't be scared. Embrace the data. Let it flow through the fiber optic cables and into your RAID array. Dew it!
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
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!
I still have dvds and a dvd player like an old person for just this reason.
They will charge you again for the remake. So nice you have payed twice...