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 think it's pretty clear to everyone now that when Lucas is flying solo his final output is... not great. He obviously imagined a universe a lot of people find compelling, but wasn't always the best person to realize the vision of that universe.
- there was a children's book (that my family had) that accompanied the movie
- there is a scene in the book where Biggs comes back to talk to Luke
- this didn't make any sense to me as a child b/c that scene isn't in the movie
- I realized years later that they cut the scene but AFTER the book was printed.
The scene in question is here btw: https://youtu.be/O7J_IZ9agRI?t=318
In the scene where the sand people shoot R2D2, it looked like the other way around so it was quite confusing to see them captured in the next frame. Who knew the little guy didn't have a blaster?
https://investor.colgatepalmolive.com/news-releases/news-rel...
https://nz.pinterest.com/pin/jar-jar-toothpaste--18577355335...
Very little was really lost IMO if you look at those movies with an eye free of nostalgia, but I'm sure many MANY people would disagree with that.
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.
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.
TV shows are even worse because of the soundtrack.
Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music
Even video games are not exempt from that. GTA games has tons of music removed from the radios with later digital re-releases so currently the original console disc versions are the only way to play the games as they were released back then https://www.reddit.com/r/GTATrilogy/comments/1gsqdc5/what_so...
I believe the only place you can watch them as originally produced is iPlayer, but at least the BBC has copies somewhere.
Even slightly more modern shows I think have had that happen as well. The Drew Carry show would have been a great example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WKRP_in_Cincinnati#Music_licen...
It's very hard to justify copyright in 2026 over music used in a 1980s TV show. Shows were aired once or twice (summer reruns), with additional syndication runs for particularly popular shows, and that was it. Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later. Copyright has grown absurdly out of proportion of the economic reality for which these works were originally produced.
Probably? But to devil's advocate here, I grew up watching reruns in 1990 from the 1950s on Nick at Nite or UHF stations. You could make a case that not only the actors but bands who allowed music to be used would deserve residuals, and with reruns that worked fine. The format change from TV to DVD and then to Streaming is what blew it all up.
Home video releases of whole series weren't envisioned until basically the 2000s. Most TV shows that did have releases on video would just pick a couple good episodes at a time, and sell those. A reasonable job to track down a half-dozen rights holders, and if you couldn't find them or get the rights, I assume they'd just pick a different episode.
The way the original terms were negotiated, the rights were just licensed specifically "for television" because that seemed like all that was needed, and the amount of work to locate each rightsholder to renegotiate is just astronomical. Thankfully now every show is making sure to get rights for streaming (and physical media... Right? Right?) but it's a shame what happened to everything from the 1970s-1990s. Only piracy can save us.
[0] https://kotaku.com/forza-horizon-4-delisted-xbox-licensing-1...
But we have this - https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/
"97% of project 4K77 is from a single, original 1977 35mm Technicolor release print, scanned at full 4K, cleaned at 4K, and rendered at 4K."
Opening scene comparison - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1b47UP6ZGI
Star Trek: TNG was a bit of a special case though, because it had to be re-cut and new digital special effects created and edited into scenes.
I think this perspective holds more true for things that were broadcast in HD but only got commercial DVD releases. That's a disappointing lapse in high quality availability where HD content was distributed, just not in a persistent form for home use. In those cases the best quality available is an HD TV or satellite recording which might not have been preserved even in online media sharing communities.
Don’t get your hopes up. That release is very special. It happened at just the right time: discs were still selling and streaming had not yet taken over.
There is simply not sufficient market for such restorations any longer. They probably didn’t make back the cost of the remaster.
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.
>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.
https://www.youtube.com/@diggingthegreats/videos
He intentionally samples less than 5 seconds iirc, and they still ding him, take all profits from the video, which took many many hours to create, and he cannot afford a lawsuit. It's absolutely ridiculous.
Youtube has very little leverage, and Google/Youtube is very invested in not ending up in court over this kind of disputes, and the corps making claims know that.
The only actual fix is reforming or abolishing copyright.
Seems intuitively difficult to implement changes to the law to get this, but I can dream.
Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.
The original game might be stopping people. It's not like games have a good track record of continuing to work for decades. DRM of all kinds poses a huge problem in this regard, but so does garden variety technological change. The GOG preservation team has quite a few videos about deeply technical work they needed to do to make e.g. Prince of Persia run properly on modern PCs. Sure I can just pirate a copy for PS2 and run it with PCSX2, but thats “piracy" (even though I still have a working original disc!).
So, no: there's a lot stopping people, especially copyright law, from keeping around working copies of their games.
> copyright expires
Not in your lifetime. 70 years after death if the author brings us out into centuries. Books written 60 years before my kids were born won't be out if copyright until they are in their 40s, for example.
The more important point of copyright is 'to promote the progress of the useful arts'. The 'securing for a limited time to authors and inventors, the exclusive right to their writings and inventions' is just the means. Do the means in this case seem to work well in achieving that goal?
> Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.
Except the 70+ years it takes before you're legally allowed to publish it, or even just adapt it. If I'm going to play things by the book, even if I archive it when I'm 10 years old, sales stop on day two of the copyright period, and the rights expire the day after it's 70 years years old, I will be 80+ years old when I'm legally allowed to let people download it, or I myself can publish an adaptation (or more likely, I'll have died and my archive version will be lost in the estate sale).
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment_Software_Associa...
[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3053050/how-one-company-is-bring...
I refuse to believe this train of logic. By the time copyright expires AI will be able to handle removing copyright protection and making it able to run on modern hardware. The only point of doing it now instead of later is so that people commit copyright infringement.
Respectfully, you don't seem to know what you're talking about.
This is some powerful combination of magical thinking plus a lack of awareness of the context. In the early 2000's, the time I'm recounting, nobody thought of AI. And it wasn't about copyright infringement since the people in the abandonware community I'm talking about owned the goddamn games, they were trying to digitally preserve them and make them available to others. You really need to be familiar with these people and their goals before you "refuse to believe" anything; uninformed opinions just won't do.
It helps to get a perspective about both the time and the type of games we're discussing. In fact, if you were at all a participant of the community back then, you'd know in which little regard warez kiddies were held.
Very smooth way of using your torrenting skills on your CV.
I'm not one of those people. :D But I do know one; he's a professional librarian.
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.
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.
I bet not even 1 in 1000 people pirating are doing it primarily as a preservation exercise.
The Library of Congress is selective about what it preserves too, as is every museum. No single entity could possibly hope to preserve every film, it takes a community.
> don’t even follow a basic 3-2-1 backup protocol
The swarm is the backup. You can't beat hundreds of hash-checked copies across the globe.
> I bet not even 1 in 1000 people pirating are doing it primarily as a preservation exercise.
I bet you're right. Isn't it wonderful, then, that those 1 in 1000 (who are overrepresented in tracker admin and release group/scene work) are able to harness those selfish impulses and turn them into the most complete, accessible, and durable distributed art preservation project in human history.
You can’t possibly compare this to yet another person downloading all of Friends to watch off their hard drive, and most of these people aren’t seeding back anyway, so they’re not even part of the swarm.
I don’t object to piracy but I do object to preservation arguments made for/by people who are in no way thinking along those lines. I can’t buy tailgating on some clearly inapplicable altruism argument.
I've thought about making an Oppenheimer except all scenes are in chronological order and the cringe ones are gone Edition
But his weird sound mixing philosophy (experience over clear dialog / dialog as sound effects) makes me nuts. So fix those too, please.
The movie is bad cause nobody can tell what is going on, or they can but it's a chore without reward. "3 weeks earlier" kind of crap every 30 seconds in the movie. Even the big plot twist is, "this scene with Einstein that you thought happened early in the timeline actually happened at the end, wow." But maybe it can be fixed.
I personally liked Oppenheimer fine as it was (except the crappy explosion), but I can see why others might not.
I also enjoyed that old Paul Newman, John Cusack, etc one that focused less on Oppenheimer. Fat Man and Little Boy.
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.
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”.
GP is correct that files with purely additive changes (like additional audio tracks) to remuxes are called hybrid remuxes.
ETA: To the author's credit, this is convention rather than a hard rule. I checked my usual sources and found the exact 89gb 4k Arrow remux the author mentions in the closing paragraph and it is indeed labelled 'remux' only. The uploader did make a note of this though: "Unfortunately, as Arrow had to pull the Italian dub due to rightsholders demands, I had to sync it from the 2017 Kino Lorber disc."
There is a community insofar as there is a relatively small group of people who sink their time into producing high quality remuxes, and this group talks to each other (on IRC and elsewhere).
>GP is correct that files with purely additive changes (like additional audio tracks) to remuxes are called hybrid remuxes.
As I corrected on a child comment to the GP, this is not correct. It is not convention either. A hybrid remux has a stream which is a hybrid of two or more sources. Simply combining tracks from different sources isn't a hybrid remux, it's just baseline good practice.
>What the author is referring to would be called a “hybrid remux”.
No. While the "hybrid" term has been used this way, the standard definition now is for remuxes where a single stream has been created by stitching together streams from two different sources. For example, a video from source A has generally better picture quality, but has some glitch or issue that requires patching in a segment from source B to create a hybrid video stream. Doing this for the main video without re-encoding is very difficult/unlikely to work because video codecs are very hard to work with in this way (you'd have to have two sources encoded with the same codec, the same encoding settings, you have to slice things at a clean GOP boundary in both sources, etc), so most commonly hybrid remuxes refer to the Dolby Vision layer.
Source: I happen to be involved in this community.
Leone is one the greatest directors of all time. I've been nagging my sons to watch this trilogy for years.
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'm not sure which is more morally wrong: preserving works of art for future generations, or destroying them for profit.
(Why? Why do companies do that??)
This shows the price, what am I missing?
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.
Some content has overlap with conventional streaming services, but then films like "Do not expect much from the end of the world" probably wouldn't see a streaming release elsewhere?
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.
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))
You could just as well say that political protest is not a thing, that it’s just vandals looking for reasons to break stuff.
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).
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.