Pirating the Pirates

"“To me, it [the original Star Wars trilogy] doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it.” - George Lucas, 2004

It is insane how much George Lucas has edited the original Star Wars trilogy. I think no movies have had more edits over time than Star Wars.

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.

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

> Spencer Draper—best known as the Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader on YouTube, where he reviews the technical and historical aspects of digital releases with a rigor usually reserved for scholarly peer review

I will occasionally think about various topics "I'm really into <thing> but is anyone else in to <thing>??"

And then I read a quote like the above and I realize that, for lack of a better phrase, "it's a big world out there" and people have many varied interests.

Plus, if folks are REALLY into <thing> then they want different perspectives about <thing> even if it's a sub-topic that has been covered before.

In other words, write blog posts and make videos. Someone will consume that content and you never know where that leads.

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.

Tangentially related, I've been toying with the idea of just buying all my film and series content again rather than maintaining subscription services. My SO and I watch TV maybe once a week yet we maintain a subscription to Crave & Netflix.

I'm pretty sure it'd work out cheaper to just buy box-sets of a series when we start watching it but haven't done the deep dive yet.

> 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.

> Beyond Star Wars, an illicit cottage industry has sprung up to patch the holes in any given film’s digital representation.

I've thought about making an Oppenheimer except all scenes are in chronological order and the cringe ones are gone Edition

> 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”.

I was watching lawrence of arabia recently, and was thinking about similar stuff. There's a few scenes (scenes around the: "my name is for my friends" and the echoey canyon in particular) where lawrence looks almost like a photorealistic game character.

I still don't know what exactly caused this but most likely a multitude of factors are in play. - Deserts are bright, so a bright light was used to illuminate his face, causing his eyes to sparkle. - Streaming from Netflix and compression / decompression might have eaten away some of the high frequency detail

I also learned that they shot the movie in a bigger film stock, so the digitized version of this movie is highly regarded.

If anyone has any idea as to why these scenes in particular look off, i would love to learn more.

Cobbling together something resembling the original is a cool idea, but don't the originals still exist somewhere? Surely not all of the original prints have been destroyed? Aren't there movie archivists somewhere carefully preserving every version of every major movie?

It is regrettable that the law draws no distinction between such a situation and the sale of counterfeit goods on eBay. Section 1201 does not take intent into account, whereas the aforementioned "pirate code" essentially consists of norms developed by the community itself.

It gets worse:

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

I quite liked the Despecialized editions when I watched them quite a while ago, for anyone who hasn't seen them - the audio remastering is very appreciated (VHS rarely has good audio), but certainly not the poorly-fitting CGI additions.

Reminds me of Ben Hur, it had that green sky tinge to it as well.

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

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

one of my projects on the backlog is to figure out how to combine the dvd copies and the bluray copies of the x-files so that I can have 4:3 episode in hd. especially in the first couple of seasons they crop a lot of stuff to fit it into widescreen, I'm waiting until AI gets good enough that I can using the dvd quality original fill in and upscale the cropped part of the hd episodes.

Does it mean that the Sergio Leone's movies in Mubi are these restoration? It wasn't clear for me.

Leone is one the greatest directors of all time. I've been nagging my sons to watch this trilogy for years.

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

As a side note/game: imagine you're not particularly tech savvy. Now figure how much Mubi costs using only their website.

(Why? Why do companies do that??)

Dear copyright holders,

You deserve to get compensated. You should get compensated.

But stop acting against the will of the consumers. And stop fighting the technology.

Remember when you thought VHS and DVD would kill the movie industry? You were wrong then, and you're wrong again, now.

Make a very simple website where people can search for actors, search for directors, search keywords, search awards...

And then show us torrent links for all of the content, all of the versions, all of the audio formats, all of the video resolutions, all of the languages, the director's cut, with or without subtitles baked in, theatrical release, re-release, fan edits, all of it. Make it easy for someone else to document a new version, and share the torrent. Set up Popcorn Time or whatever, if you're smart.

I download the content on my own dime. I'll even seed it for a bit, because I like it, and why not?

And then, let me buy a decryption key. Make the price reasonable. Make it Pay What You Want, if you're really smart. When you're setting that price, think real hard about the fact that the illegal option is literally one click away for anyone technically savvy. That decryption key should be shared for all of the different versions available to me. I pay once, I get all the formats, now, and forever. Let me save the key to my account, if you want to set up accounts and recommendations, and etc. Let me save the key in my Plex or Jellyfin server. Or as file metadata, or in a json in a zip file at the end of the file...

Say it's legal for me to pass that license on to one of my kids, when I die.

If you're real smart, grant me the right to legally loan that key to a friend, so they can watch the movie, and then return the key (or I get to auto-revoke it after a number of days).

Hell, tell me a price to have a private (or public?) screening of the movie at a theater that rents out screens.

Cocoon is not available on streaming. That's so dumb. It will enter the public domain in 2081. Until then, earn some reasonable money, by making a legal way for people to do what they're already doing. As frictionless as possible.

And if you're a genius, come up with a way for someone to show you their DVD, Blu-Ray, VHS copy of a movie, and give them that decryption key, for free. They already bought your movie once. Don't make them regret it. Reward them for it. Send it out to anyone who "bought" the movie on AppleTV, Google Play Movies, YouTube, Amazon, etc. But I doubt you're that smart.

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))

I will say this again, and again, and again: thanks to piracy, I got to watch many amazing movies, especially those that came out before the 2000s. Eventually I bought lots of DVDs and Blu-Rays, CDs( heck I even rediscovered my music in taste).

I'm not sure which is more morally wrong: preserving works of art for future generations, or destroying them for profit.

Everything is a Remix

A praise for forensics, maybe? EN01 or raw data, that is the question.

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.

Can we use AI to get better lip syncing of the Dollars trilogy yet? I would love to see this.

I liked The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but the post-dub voice of Wallach when he was much older, did not quite fit into the movie anymore; it felt strange compared to his voice when he was younger.

As for Hollywood ruining videos: well, it is time to phase out Hollywood. The movies are cultural heritage and the best quality must be preserved (without artifical AI slop clowning it up and changing things; I see that on youtube every day, it is AWFUL. AI slop constantly lies about things. I can call it lie-slop).

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

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