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.
They’re editing entertainment history to begin with. Deletion is bad enough, but possibly even more nefarious is the blatant, unapologetically sneaky editing of existing media mentioned in this thread. Jussst a little bit at a time.
Unlike many videogames, TV shows, music, movies, don’t get “version / revision numbers.” Can you trust your archives to be original?
Adjust for today’s-sensibilities here, remove a now-naughty-word there…“oh, we don’t wanna pay for that song that released in 5 years before this 36 year old television program…better it never existed!”
Their goal seems to be relegating the Internet to simply being a flow of “What’s trending and making money NOW” and nothing else. Every
byteelectron has a dollar value.They want generations growing up in a world where the corporate narrative is all that ever was and will be.
Today it’s talk shows and cartoons.
Tomorrow it’s biographies and documentaries. Family histories? Newspapers?
We need to stop this NOW.
Media conglomerates can’t even be relied on to be stewards of their own legacy. They’re coming for ours.
So, who’s up for another reread/watch of Farenheit 451 or Equalibrium?
Edits arent exactly new
Han shot first
Fair. Can also cite all the Islamic iconography and sound removed from Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
As for Star Wars, Han absolutely shot first. (High five)
Weren’t a lot of those wacky edits by Lucas’ own whims though? I’d say there’s a distinction between a creator editing his own work and say, Disney going “We lost the rights to John Williams, so we removed the score from the entire franchise.” Lol
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.
Yo ho yo ho…
fill upp those hard drives me hearties yo ho!
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.
deleted by creator
Ahhhh this is an absolute tragedy. The same thing goes with many movies from the golden age of Hollywood. I love to watch these old films. It breaks my heart that so many are lost forever.
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.
I wish this worked, but it only does for things that are popular.
As it stands I think I’m just going to have to back up my entire media collection for fear of not being able to get a copy during retirement - when I plan to watch a shit tonne of TV.
It’s a shame there is no plan to make consumer grade glass storage.
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.
Your honor I object that he interrupted me while watching Ow My Balls!
I think I need a rewatch with this new perspective. I saw Enlightenment to Romanticism through a lens of British stuffiness that gave the veneer of “light hearted”, but Ow My Balls makes a little more sense with a layer of mid-Atlantic mud. I already got Boob Comedies from Ren and Stimpy through Family Guy. What I want is hero stories to save Atlas, but the scornful judgment in the movie’s framing is a force of Christian conservatism trapping him between two worlds.
Thanks, Obama.
/r/datahoarders
Is there a
dataLemmy alternative?Edit: don’t post if you just woke up
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.
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
I still have dvds and a dvd player like an old person for just this reason.
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.
Wait what? What joke? :O That’s ridiculous!
Don’t know why they cut it honestly since it’s been there forever, but when Michael is trying to set people up he sets Kevin up with Erin and when Erin looks disappointed Kevin says:
“you will learn to love me”
Michael: “slow down Kevin, you gotta let the cookies cool before you pop em in your mouth!”
That whole exchange is now gone and you only get Erin’s disappointment and her asking Michael if she can talk to him in private. The cookie joke is gone for some reason
Music licensing in media like this gets bullshit quickly. If it was signed in for the original run, fucking leave it.
I had a coworker who cited music licensing as the sole reason he can’t find his favorite show anymore: The Drew Carrey Show. Whatever schmuck owns the music licensing refuses to cooperate with the rest of the show owners, so it can’t be streamed or distributed anywhere.
Another example would be Scrubs, most of the songs used in the show (including key moments and the OG songs were perfect for them) have been edited out and replaced because of licensing issues. Unless you’ve got the DVDs or pirated older versions, you’re stuck with the new music and it’s not the same.
I think that’s why you’d be hard pressed to find Daria in its original form too: music licensing.
The Drew Carrey Show just finally got a streaming release a couple months ago. On Plex. All 9 seasons now.
Dude, Halo: Master Chief Collection removed a LOT of perfectly timed tracks from key moments of Halo 2, because they were Breaking Benjamin songs.
I remember when a pair of Hunters is just about to bust open these massive gates in New Mombasa…here comes the sick instrumental from “Blow Me Away”…!
…No, just some vaguely Halo-esque drumbeat on loop.
The music licensing industry has pretty much always been Satan, but the sheer arrogance to think they have the right to claw audio out of existing works because they’re not getting infinite revenue out of it is a new friggin low.
When trying to find a copy of Forza 4 (or one of them) after being disappointed with the cut down version they had on gamepass, I discovered it couldn’t be sold anymore because of a deal MS made with Porsche that eventually ran out.
Sheesh!
Ace Combat games are also on a countdown as soon as they release, because the likenesses of the planes from the defense companies expire, so they get de-listed.
You couldn’t do that with physical media. =\
The more they delete, the more they can resell every few years as “new” while charging ever more exorbitant prices for!
The Disney Vault!
Write that down!
Buy it before it goes back in the Disney vault!
Someone bought ALL the thrift store DVDs in all my small city’s thrift stores, like four of them. People are starting to know that self-ownership is where everyone is going
The simple answer to this is to change the tax code to not allow for write offs for completed projects. And to shorten how long copyright lasts (fuck Disney so much for that one)
Also set up a standardized licensing process that breaks the mini-monopolies of exclusive content.
Personally, I’d also limit copyright to specific works and not the characters, setting, etc. Then protect trademarks and use those to establish canon. Like in the MCU and DC universes, Spiderman and Batman don’t exist together, but in the Superhero Fan Universe, they are roommates and play genius billionaire vs superhuman with a sixth sense prank wars on each other.
What does this have to do with write-offs? I don’t think they can write off episodes of South Park and the daily show that have already aired.
I think the suggestion is that if they leave the content available, they can still write it off.
I don’t think they can write it off either way, though. It only makes sense to write off shows that haven’t made money. It’s just “retiring” when you’re taking about something that’s already been released. There’s no ulterior profit motive, unlike when they write off unreleased movies and shows.
It’s more for things like the batgirl movie that is finshed but will make more money in tax write offs to never release it. But if they lose ad revenue from removing a back catalogue, that may also let them post a loss and claim tax breaks.
I’m not a CPA, but I don’t think you can write off something that already made a profit. How would that even work, if companies were able to write off predicted ad revenue? They could make up any value and never have to pay any taxes at all.
I don’t think write-offs have anything to do with them removing these episodes.
Recent events with streaming services has really been the best argument for self hosting your own content
Every day I inch closer and closer to setting up my own plex server (or something else if there’s a better alternative idk)
but the term “raspberry pi” makes me scared and confused
my own plex server (or something else if there’s a better alternative idk)
– complexity level 1:
First off a heads up, Jellyfin will serve you much better. Plex is commercial software, and they’ve treated their users quite poorly numerous times to appease copyright pressures. Commercial software always has an incentive to screw you.
Lots and lots of well-made guides and stuff on YouTube and such for getting Jellyfin setup, but if you want a little more in depth, I’ve detailed a bit below 👇
— complexity level 2:
Even better than a Pi for media hosting, if you can swing it is those “1 liter PCs” that IT departments throw out en masse anymore. (At least I hope they still do? They might just burn them now since reusing them has caught on /s)
Basically, something you can stuff a bunch of hard drives in. You can turn any old PC and hard drives into a decent little server. The only other important thing is offsite backups for what REALLY matters to you. I use a cloud service called “iDrive” that’s decent enough. That way my family pictures and artwork aren’t obliterated if my office burns or floods or something.
Self-hosting IS a project, but you learn a lot and it can be really fun! I want to preface that I’m not an IT professional by any stretch.
–complexity level 3:
I currently use an OS called “Proxmox” to host virtual machines. It’s really powerful and gets easier as you get the hang of it.
It hosts a little virtual server that only runs PiHole, which blocks ads and tracking across my entire WiFi network. It’s amazing. (Not YouTube ads tho. Long story. Other tools for that.)
But it mainly hosts OpenMediaVault, which is great for just hosting a file server, and it’s well integrated with Docker for setting up “containers.” Lighter than virtual machines, consistent, and easily managed. (Imagine getting to wipe Windows but leave your D:\ drive untouched every time, and everything comes back configured like you want it.)
Right now, I’d say experiment with stuff within virtual machines, try it out. Figure out how you want to set yourself up. The best part is, you don’t need to open up anything on your home network.
– Complexity level 4:
There’s a neat service called Tailscale for accessing your network securely from out of the house, but don’t worry about that yet.
There’s a service for everything. I’ve replaced all of Gsuite with a self hostable called NextCloud, for instance!
Facebook clone for just your family? Minecraft / Terraria / whatever server? (Private MMO server?), the sky’s the limit really!
TL;DR: Just take it one step at a time. Take notes. Learn to take good backups. Ask questions. Lots of questions. We’re all in this together. :)
Plex is good but another option is jellyfin
Personally I just setup a PC as a NAS‡ and installed VLC on my TV so that I can just browse the NAS and play the files directly
Is it efficient? No.
Is it the best way? Also no.
Does it work? Yes, surprisingly well in fact.
‡ The first time was simply a network shared folder, the second time was using TrueNAS.
Which TV?
I’m not sure exactly what model but it’s a 4k 75in hisense running Android from like 5 years ago
You don’t need to run it on a pi. In fact, I’d actually argue against it; A pi will be underpowered if you’re ever needing to transcode anything. Transcoding is what Plex/Jellyfin does if your watching device can’t natively play the video. Maybe you have a 4k video, but you’re playing it on a 1080p screen. That video will need to be transcoded from 4k into 1080p for the screen to be able to display it. Or maybe the file is encoded using ACC (a fairly recent encoding method) which isn’t widely supported by older devices. This often happens with things like smart TVs (which often don’t support modern encoding and need to be transcoded even if the resolution is correct.)
Basically, if you’re 100% positive that every device you’re watching it on will never need transcoding, then a pi is acceptable. But for anything else, I’d recommend a small PC instead. You can even use an old PC if you have one laying around.
Or if you want to use a new machine, maybe something like an HP Elitedesk. They’re basically what you see in every single cubicle in every single office building. They’re extremely popular in corporate settings, which means there are a ton of used/refurbished systems available for cheap, because IT destroys the drives and sends the rest to refurb when they upgrade their fleet of PCs. So for the refurb you’re basically just paying the cost of an SSD they added in (to replace the one IT pulled out), plus whatever labor is associated with dusting it out and checking the connections to make sure they all work. You can pick up a modern one for like $250 on Amazon (or your preferred electronics store).
Worth noting that the elitedesk generations are marked by a G-number, so google the model (like an EliteDesk G9, G7, etc) to see what kind of processor it has; Avoid anything with an intel 13th or 14th generation CPU, (they have major reliability issues) and check with Plex/Jellyfin’s CPU requirements list to see if it supports hardware accelerated transcoding. For Intel chips, look for QuickSync support.
For storage, I’d recommend running a NAS with however many hard drives you can afford, and one that has extra ports for future expandability. Some NAS systems support Plex and/or Jellyfin directly, but the requirements for full support are tricky and you’ll almost always have better luck just running a dedicated PC for Plex. Then for playing, one of two things will happen. Either the device is capable of directly playing the file, or it will need to be transcoded. If it’s directly playing, the plex server basically just points the player to the NAS, and the player handles the rest. If it’s transcoding, the PC will access the NAS, then stream it to the player.
As for deciding on Plex vs Jellyfin, that’s really a matter of personal preference. If you’re using Plex, I’d highly suggest a PlexPass sub/lifetime purchase; Wait until Black Friday, because they historically do a (~25% off) discount on their lifetime pass. Plex is definitely easier to set up, especially if you plan on streaming outside of your LAN.
Jellyfin currently struggles from a lack of native app support; Lots of smart TVs don’t have a native Jellyfin app, for instance. But some people have issues and complaints (many of them justified!) with Plex, so if the FOSS sounds appealing, then consider Jellyfin instead. Jellyfin is also rapidly being developed, and many people expect it to have feature parity with Plex within a few years.
And if you’re having trouble deciding, you can actually set up both (they can run in tandem on the same machine) and then see which one you prefer.
And the nice part about using a mini PC is that you can also use it for more than just Plex/Jellyfin. I have the *arr suite running on mine, alongside a Factorio server, a Palworld server, and a few other things.
It’s going to be a fun historical period to look back on when there are just huge gaps where IP/product control became so powerful that no record of certain things were allowed to exist.
Orwell didn’t know he was also writing about the Entertainment-Industrial Complex.
