242points · 4h ago

Pirating the Pirates

mubi.com·by piotrgrabowski·4h ago

Discussion 89 comments

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thewizzardofnl·28m ago
"“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.

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alexpotato·23m ago
One of my favorite trivia items about A New Hope:

- 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

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letsbehonest1·32s ago
if you've seen this scene, does that mean that you've sailed the high seas?
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kurthr·13m ago
There was also a comic book that came out before the movie.

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?

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paulryanrogers·26m ago
Few have made so much money from a trilogy or had such creative freedom. I admit I disliked the laser bolt changes of special editions. Yet otherwise loved seeing some modern CGI fleshing out those worlds.
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hungryhobbit·24m ago
Yeah, because what EVERYONE thought Star Wars needed was more poop jokes and bad CGI.
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kurthr·6m ago
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cosmic_cheese·2h ago
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.

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antimony51·9m ago
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.

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schlauerfox·2h ago
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
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polytely·5m ago
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.
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alexpotato·26m ago
> 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.

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javcasas·3h ago
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.
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tombert·2h ago
The home-computer world is especially interesting for old games. If something made it to a Nintendo or Sega console, it's probably very well-preserved, but I'd be surprised if even 1% of all video games made were released on consoles.

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.

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acomjean·2h ago
It should be. There are lots of good ideas of modifying copyrights so that its not the automatic 70 year after life of author (or what every it is now).

>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.

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the_af·3h ago
Agreed, and it was already like this in the 2000's (when I got involved in the abandonware scene). I remember the owner of Home of the Underdogs getting constantly in battles with takedown notices for games she only intended to preserve. Not piracy in the sense of "losing tons of money", nobody but enthusiasts cared about these games anymore.
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mahboi·1h ago
> 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

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dd8601fn·39m ago
Saying “Nolan was wrong” is begging for a fight.

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

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mahboi·26m ago
Nobody can fight me on that because I don't know who Nolan is. Guessing he's a director, but in that case, didn't know he directed Oppenheimer. I'm part of the popcorn reviews, not the tomato ones.

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.

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dd8601fn·6m ago
Yeah. One of the more celebrated filmmakers out there. If you google him you’ll see familiar stuff.

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.

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dewey·3h ago
> 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.

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sedawkgrep·3h ago
I know this is the easy take, but there really are people who are passionate about preservation beyond just acquiring things for their own use.

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

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MomsAVoxell·2h ago
I am am an amateur recordist, I absolutely love to bootleg concerts and gigs and things, as in: make my own recordings of live music and so on. I have shared everything in the appropriate places, also. I believe it is an essential artistic expression: to record the nature of the world around you for the future.

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.

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dewey·3h ago
Yep, definitely! I know of instances where professional archives and libraries work with specialized torrent sites to archive content directly and these days that's sometimes necessary with how content is locked down, games are dependent on a server or DRM schemes don't make archiving easy.

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.

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Waterluvian·3h ago
I’m absolutely obsessed with it. For me it’s driven purely from childhood nostalgia. In particular, Macintosh games. I want, and want others to have that warm excitement of nostalgia when they re-discover something forgotten.
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Forgeties79·3h ago
This is true but people also use it as a magic shield to (needlessly IMO) justify their piracy, even though they are 1) only downloading things they happen to like and 2) don’t even follow a basic 3-2-1 backup protocol, let alone anything remotely resembling SOP for preservation.

I bet not even 1 in 1000 people pirating are doing it primarily as a preservation exercise.

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softskunk·2h ago
> 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”.

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neves·51m ago
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.

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bborud·1h ago
I laughed out loud when I saw the George Lucas quote. He is the master of defiling his own work.
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HelloUsername·2h ago
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

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settsu·1h ago
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??)

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juiceland·1h ago
https://mubi.com/en/us/memberships

This shows the price, what am I missing?

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1970-01-01·2h ago
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alabhyajindal·3h ago
Anyone here subscribed to Mubi? Would you recommend it? How different are the films compared to mainstream cinema?
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dewey·3h ago
I'm not subscribed to right now, but I have been for a very long time before that. I like their curated approach a lot and it doesn't feel like you are getting drowned in crap like many other services.

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.

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bbx·3h ago
I've been signed up a few months at a time over the years. It has tons of independent movies from the US/UK/France but also from lesser exposed countries (think Danish, Greek, Thai, Polish, Norwegian…). It's mostly films released recently or in the last 20 years. It also has some older classics (Memories of Murder, Carrie, Dogma, Obsession, Carlito's Way…) but there aren't that many and they're often only there temporarily.

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.

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anderber·3h ago
They have mostly independent films. So numerous dramas and slow-burn types. I like it. I've found some great movies on there, but also have found a bunch of duds. The problem is the pricing. Right now my main services are Criterion Channel and Eternal Family.
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jayceedenton·23m ago
Can we use AI to get better lip syncing of the Dollars trilogy yet? I would love to see this.
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everyone·2h ago
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))

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sudoevil·1h ago
A praise for forensics, maybe? EN01 or raw data, that is the question.
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kristianpaul·2h ago
Everything is a Remix
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tancop·2h ago
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.
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tene80i·2h ago
Yeah it’s rough not to be able to get whatever you want without paying anyone or experiencing any downsides
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mahboi·1h ago
Surprise, piracy isn't activism, it's just people wanting free stuff or even paying some discounted rate for it
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teddyh·38m ago
That is obviously false: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_copyright>

You could just as well say that political protest is not a thing, that it’s just vandals looking for reasons to break stuff.

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shevy-java·38m ago
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).

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MrBuddyCasino·1h ago
Is it just me or is the Lorber version the only one with correct colors?
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fransje26·56m ago
Isn't the article explaining that it is supposed to be the "better" version?
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