Pirating the Pirates (mubi.com)

- 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

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 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.

I was talking to Bob Gale once about this topic and he said that him and Zemeckis had put a veto clause in their contract when they sold BTTF to Universal in the 90s giving them the power over any later fuckery with the releases, while they are alive. This was during the height of the 3D TV craze and he said Universal had asked for permission to do a 2D->3D conversion of BTTF and both Bobs had refused. So there's one franchise at least that won't get dicked with in the near future.

[I'm not totally against 2D->3D conversions if done right. The Titanic conversion looks like it was filmed 3D-native, beautifully done. The Star Wars: Episode 1 conversion is essentially unwatchable and killed the whole project.]

The changes are mostly just window dressings around the original footage, like extra CGI in transition scenes. They don't really change much of the core movie experience. It does end up causing some funny side effects though. Like when the main characters move from one place to another you'll see a splashy dinosaur like creature or fancy robot, but once they actually arrive in the scene the background falls back to the original with a lot less of that added CGI action.

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.

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.

Have to take things into your own hands these days and grab the 2160p Dolby Vision streams and stuff them onto a BD-R, if you know what I mean.

One of the factors contributing to it not necessarily being cheaper to buy box sets: Target, Best Buy, and other big US chains have given up on physical media for movies. Last I heard Wal-Mart is on the fence about long term support for it. (At the moment the only chain I know that seems still in it for the long haul seems to be Barnes & Noble, but they could have one bad quarter and change their minds quickly. My local store the DVD and Blu-Ray section is somewhat obviously what used to the Music section and still has a bit left of that old focus.)

Even the manufacturing side seems to be disappearing. Sony has flirted with dropping physical media sales of movies. Warner Brothers and Paramount seem likelier to drop physical media sales if they are allowed to merge.

Netflix lets very few originals make it to physical media. Most of the exceptions I'm aware of are Sony projects. Sony Animation being one of Netflix's last exclusive deals from a studio that isn't themselves. A lot of Prime Originals don't make it to physical media. It seems a mixed bag for HBO Originals and Hulu/Disney+ Originals, presumably based on some internal formulas of popularity. A lot of Apple TV Originals seem to get delayed physical output, but that's largely been because Apple TV doesn't have its own studio, but that changed relatively recently with the purchase of Red Hour (Ben Stiller's studio, of Severance and The Dink fame).

It certainly feels like physical media is dying right now. Maybe more reason to switch to investing in it over streaming services, not that an individual's budget decisions in this vein will affect the company's bottom lines enough that they will notice.

I've come across sealed Blurays or even the occasional former Blockbuster rental so it's actually kind of fun in a record-crate-diving sort of way, if you're into that. But of course you can always just buy new, which you'll probably have to do in some cases: the odds are against me finding Koyaanisqatsi at the thrift, let alone the Criterion Collection Qatsi Trilogy, but I'm okay with that.

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

But his weird sound mixing philosophy (experience over clear dialog / dialog as sound effects) makes me nuts. So fix those too, please.

>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.

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.

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.

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?

This shows the price, what am I missing?