Pirating the Pirates

167

ppiotrgrabowski about 3 hours ago 49 commentsRead Article on mubi.com

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Discussion (49 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

softskunk•about 2 hours ago

> 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”.

bborud•14 minutes ago

I laughed out loud when I saw the George Lucas quote. He is the master of defiling his own work.

schlauerfox•about 2 hours ago

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

cosmic_cheese•about 2 hours ago

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.

javcasas•about 2 hours ago

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.

tombert•about 1 hour ago

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.

acomjean•about 1 hour ago

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.

the_af•about 2 hours ago

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.

dewey•about 3 hours ago

> When I came to work for Arrow, I was bringing a lot of awareness of the methods of fan preservationists on the torrent sites

Very smooth way of using your torrenting skills on your CV.

sedawkgrep•about 2 hours ago

I know this is the easy take, but there really are people who are passionate about preservation beyond just acquiring things for their own use.

I'm not one of those people. :D But I do know one; he's a professional librarian.

MomsAVoxell•about 2 hours ago

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.

dewey•about 2 hours ago

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.

Waterluvian•about 2 hours ago

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.

Forgeties79•about 2 hours ago

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.

HelloUsername•about 1 hour ago

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

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

1970-01-01•about 1 hour ago

It gets worse:

https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2181751/dvds-with-t...

alabhyajindal•about 2 hours ago

Anyone here subscribed to Mubi? Would you recommend it? How different are the films compared to mainstream cinema?

dewey•about 2 hours ago

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.

bbx•about 2 hours ago

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.

anderber•about 2 hours ago

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.

everyone•about 1 hour ago

Of interest, another painstaking fan recreation... Alien 3: The Legacy cut

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))

MrBuddyCasino•21 minutes ago

Is it just me or is the Lorber version the only one with correct colors?

tancop•about 1 hour ago

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.

tene80i•about 1 hour ago

Yeah it’s rough not to be able to get whatever you want without paying anyone or experiencing any downsides

mahboi•23 minutes ago

Surprise, piracy isn't activism, it's just people wanting free stuff or even paying some discounted rate for it

kristianpaul•about 1 hour ago

Everything is a Remix