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.
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.
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.
You should probably read that wikipedia link. I built some of the blockers or stabilizers as Wikipedia article describes them. You could see the pulses described in the output of a scope that messed up the AGC in the VCR. All the blocker did was blank out the pulses and that was enough to prevent macrovision from working on the VCR when making a copy.
My gmaws wall of VHS tapes ripped from every movie she ever rented from a blockbuster would beg to differ
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.
Most of the episodes aired before at-home VHS was common, and TV stations weren’t in the habit of archiving their old footage for nightly broadcasts; The show was viewed as transient since it dealt with current events, and nobody expected people to want to re-watch old episodes. It’s likely that a lot of them aren’t available simply because nobody (including the tv station) has recordings.
Yo ho yo ho…
fill upp those hard drives me hearties yo ho!
/r/datahoarders
Is there a
dataLemmy alternative?Edit: don’t post if you just woke up
Well there’s borrowing, but I feel that’s what we’re all already doing.
Dammit, I was completely asleep. I meant if there was a Lemmy alternative
Letting others hoard for you. Torrents, usenet
What are the biggest usenets?
I use usenetserver.com and have been for a long time at least.
Enshittification continues
🖕 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.
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.
I still have dvds and a dvd player like an old person for just this reason.
Thanks, Obama.
Here’s a random paranoid tangent before lunch! I was reading recently about the evolution of theater in England over a hundred years from ~1550-1650. Elizabeth ruled during the first part of that interval, and Shakespeare wrote. His plays included perspectives from wide slices of society and were performed for royalty and commoners alike. Elizabeth died and private theatrical commissions began to outgrow public theater, which according to wikipedia “sustained themselves on the accumulated works of the previous decades”.
Starting in 1642 theaters were closed entirely by act of a Puritanical Parliament. That ban lasted 18 years and once the audience was Quite Thirsty, the English Restoration restored theater abstractly and filled it with bawdy raunch.
Yada yada, Disney then hired a crew of weepy Christian writers in the 20th century to repackage folk tales into Little Mermaid and Iron Man, which seems parallel enough to Shakespeare retelling Ovid. Film flourished, and in the early days of broadcast TV anybody could star in their own very own program. The Writers were on the brink of delivering us Heroes, but they up and left before they could save the cheerleader.
Now this age of regurgitated, computer animated-and-written, crowdsource produced art seems familiar, too. We’re filling the gaps with what we know, and the Appalachians wielding the pen are finding gaps they didn’t know were there. It’s odd being here, but my point is that if we are stuck in a loop then there’s the potential that on the horizon is a period of Hollywood producing a bunch of light hearted Boob Comedies.
Preservation is an invasive and destructive process. Recreating the experience of watching ‘The Daily Show’ in the 90s or early '00s is already impossible. Language and culture mildew and rot just like leather and wood.
EDIT: People don’t seem to understand what I’m talking about. Even the people who are responding in good faith seem confused. That’s on me. So I thought I’d try to clarify with an example.
Take the Mona Lisa. Perhaps one of the most preserved objects in history. It’s so well preserved that it’s impossible to see. Sure, you can look at it, but you won’t see it. Taking a picture of the painting is encouraged, but you can’t get a look at it in your camera roll either.
If you saw the actual painting hanging on a friend’s wall, your first thought would probably not be “what a masterpiece”, but “why didn’t they remove the default print that came with the frame”? If you go to Paris, you can wait in line to have the “Mona Lisa experience” but the painting you saw wasn’t hanging on the wall, what you’ll see is the Mona Lisa you brought with you.
(yes, I stole this example from ‘were in hell’ youtube channel)
This is stupid as hell.
obviously a news show isn’t going to feel the same rewatching it. that’s not the point lol.
that would be like saying it’s dumb to preserve newspapers in libraries because it’s not going to feel as good rereading the “Hitler is dead” headline. people don’t look at old news to have a good time.
boy was it silly of us to preserve that kind of thing and it totally never comes in handy/s
that’s not even what people are upset about anyway. comedy Central mostly makes entertainment programming that isn’t news based and can still be enjoyed whenever. believe it or not, comedy Central has a lot of content that will stand the test of time. especially when looking at their stand-up catalogue.
this is the destruction of a library. a digital one, but a library none the less. that’s what people are mad about.
but you’re right. we should just dump all of our old movies and shows. they’re worthless moldy junk anyway… 🙄
Just a simple lowly troll, nothing of importance to see here
Even considering your edits, it’s still a stupid argument. By that same logic nothing should be preserved. Watching LotR now is not the same as watching it when it first came out, which should have never been made according to you because by that time the book should have already been destroyed since you wouldn’t want to preserve it for 50 years, but Tolkien shouldn’t have even written it, since they were based on ideas and drafts he did during the first world war exploring how war changes men and power corrupts, which obviously is only valid in that context and nowhere else so it should be destroyed since preserving it would be invasive and destructive, no?.
Preserving something can never be destructive, it’s the opposite of it. If the Mona Lisa was destroyed you wouldn’t even know it existed, so how can having preserved it be destructive when the alternative is oblivion?
And I agree that the Mona Lisa is no big deal, you know who else agrees? People from that time. It’s widely known that the Mona Lisa was one of Da Vinci’s less famous works, and until Napoleon made a big deal out of it it was just a random painting in a random museum. So I get part of your point, that people who make a big deal out of the Mona Lisa are only there to see the famous painting, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no reason to preserve it, or that there are no people who go there to see the actual Mona Lisa.
What an absolutely idiotic take. like holy shit bro this has to be the dumbest shit I’ve ever read, and I’ve come across some doozies. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this thread is now dumber for having read through it. I award you no up votes and may lemmy mods ban your account.
Preservation is an invasive and destructive process. Recreating the experience of watching ‘The Daily Show’ in the 90s or early '00s is already impossible. Language and culture mildew and rot just like leather and wood.
EDIT: People don’t seem to understand what I’m talking about. Even the people who are responding in good faith seem confused. That’s on me. So I thought I’d try to clarify with an example.
Take the Mona Lisa. Perhaps one of the most preserved objects in history. It’s so well preserved that it’s impossible to see. Sure, you can look at it, but you won’t see it. Taking a picture of the painting is encouraged, but you can’t get a look at it in your camera roll either.
If you saw the actual painting hanging on a friend’s wall, your first thought would probably not be “what a masterpiece”, but “why didn’t they remove the default print that came with the frame”? If you go to Paris, you can wait in line to have the “Mona Lisa experience” but the painting you saw wasn’t hanging on the wall, what you’ll see is the Mona Lisa you brought with you.
(yes, I stole this example from ‘were in hell’ youtube channel)
Figured I’d make a copy. Who knows, the OP might change it in the future. Gotta preserve the past and all.
Look at the veil on her head dude, it’s translucent.
This painting is a masterpiece
Sure, “no man sets foot in the same river twice”, but that does nothing to argue against the preservation of cultural items.
Take music, for instance. I never feel the same way the second time listening to a song as I did the first time, but that doesn’t make the music less special or change anything about it at all, and it certainly does nothing to advance a hypothetical argument that music shouldn’t be recorded or that the recordings of it shouldn’t be preserved for future enjoyment or different audiences.
