This could be a huge deal for anyone working on video codecs or display tech. Finding legally clear, high-quality, uncompressed (or mezzanine) 4K HDR footage to test encoders against is surprisingly difficult. Most test footage you find online has already been stomped on by YouTube or Meta compression.
Having the raw EXR sequences and the IMF packages for Sol Levante and Meridian means researchers can finally benchmark AV1 vs HEVC vs VVC using source material that actually has the dynamic range to show the differences. The fact that they included the Dolby vision metadata is the cherry on top.
Don’t most camera manufacturers (like ARRI and BlackMagic) have test footage for their raw and/or log formats on their websites? Here’s ARRI’s (which includes ProRes in addition to their proprietary formats) https://www.arri.com/en/learn-help/learn-help-camera-system/...
Anyone can freely license a work to the public, and copyright holders were doing that long before modern computers were invented.
“Open source” (other than, say, in the context of open water sources or intelligence or journalistic sources, where it was rarely used) as a descriptive term did not enter the common lexicon until 1998 and that was specifically to refer to software source code.
You’re correct but words and phrases can evolve in their meaning over time. If the licensing terms for this are analogous to open source software licensing terms then calling it “open source media” is pretty reasonable.
It's awful what happened to literally. The enormity of the change in meaning is so egregious. When it literally gets used with both meanings in the same conversation, decimating my brain, I have to wonder how nonplussed anyone trying to learn English must be. I'm sure there are plenty of words it's happened to, but this must the most egregious example.
I used to work at a company developing an independent H.264 decoder implementation. We would have killed for this kind of source content, especially if the license allowed showing it at trade shows.
Funny how how all the links, including the ones to their own pages, are routed through google.com/url, e.g. the link "Assets Available to Download". Usually tracking isn't quite this visible.
In my experience, the blog usually falls in some weird space where the marketing team owns it somehow. It’s best to leave them be and let them handle it, because if you suggest an alternative and then something goes wrong or isn’t to their liking you’ll never hear the end of it.
The reason for the intermediary is because the clickthrough sends the previous URL as a referer to the next server.
The only real way to avoid leaking specific urls from the source page to the arbitrary other server is to have an intermediary redirect like this.
All the big products put an intermediary for that reason, though many of them make it a user visible page of that says "you are leaving our product" versus Google mostly does it as an immediate redirect.
The copy/paste behavior is mostly an unfortunate side effect and not a deliberate feature of it.
Quoting web standards, you are more optimistic than I am, unfortunately, nobody uses them consistently or accurately (look at PUT vs POST for create / update as a really good example of this - nobody agrees) its a shame too, there's a lot of richness to the web spec. Most people don't even use "HEAD" to ensure they aren't making wasteful REST calls if they already have the data.
> All the big products put an intermediary for that reason
Surely whoever maintains the big products can add headers if they want?
And this is about people who care enough about not showing up in Referer headers to do something about it rather than people in general not understanding the full spec .
I worked on these big web products before and the answer then was that no, you couldn't trust it to be honored and it would have been considered a privacy incident so better off just having the redirect and having no risk. You can't trust the useragents for example.
Not sure if the reliability of the intentional mechanism has improved enough where this is just legacy or if there's entirely new reasons for it in 2026.
Referrer-Policy is a response header, so in this case it would be Google sending it, and the browsers who would be honouring it. You have to hope that the browser makers get it correct... Unless I misunderstood?
It sees periodic major updates to keep it in line with standards. That's not much more than maintenance mode, but it's more than just keeping the servers running. It seems like someone at Google pays attention to it and keeps it from falling behind, but I suspect the same was true of Google Reader until it wasn't.
>someone at Google pays attention to it and keeps it from falling behind
I feel like it's the same for Google My Maps. They even discontinued the Android app, so you can only use it on the web. It totally feels like there's a single guy keeping the whole system up.
And when I click them I get a page with "Did you mean netflix.com?
The site you just tried to visit looks fake. Attackers sometimes mimic sites by making small, hard-to-see changes to the URL." which then sends me to the Netfçix home page. Chrome on MacOS.
it's because their s3 bucket is called "download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com". the subdomain makes chrome think it's pretending to be "netflix.com"
The ios gmail app does the same thing, but why? I would assume the app could just transparently relay the click through its already-open grpc channel to google's servers, and it would be faster for them and (more importantly) for me.
Do not give netflix -too- much credit for this. Netflix permanently closes distribution of most content they touch and kills the very physical media ownership options for content that they built their empire on.
You will be hard pressed to find a blu-ray or dvd release of any netflix show in the US.
As someone that enjoys having a physical offline media collection, and who does not want to support netflix, I am often forced to buy japanese copies or bootleg copies of netflix shows whereas I can buy legitimate US copies from virtually all other studios.
Even hits like K-Pop demon hunters, netflix has forbidden physical purchase or ownership, so piracy is the only option for those who are not netflix customers or want to watch offline on a blu-ray player on an airplane.
I absolutely torrent as a way to discover new content, but I want favorites on a shelf on very long shelf life media where it does not require internet access and is never going to get altered or deleted as streaming services often do, or end up unavailable in the future with no seeders.
There are piles of obscure things for which physical (sometimes bootleg) media exists but no seeders.
For example the mexican hacking drama Control Z, I found 0 complete rips even on private trackers, but I did find some nice blu ray bootlegs with cases and cover art.
Even with blu-ray rips in hand, burning a disk myself and putting it into a nice recognizable case that fits in my blu ray wall cases is a pain in the ass and I would rather pay someone else for this service.
Plus it makes it way easier to hand select shows to hand a kid to play in a portable media player, and avoids the need to give them unrestricted alone time with an internet capable device.
I prefer official copies but if the studios do not allow them and thus do not want my money then bootlegs it is.
Warm storage with checksums and redundancy is the only long-term safe option.
I would recommend making a pair of HFS boxes, that storage will last far longer than pressed cold media.
I mean, I do both. But physical disks make it easier to stay away from the internet when I want a simple entertainment experience without distractions.
I absolutely torrent as a way to discover new content, but I want favorites on a shelf on very long shelf life media where it does not require internet access and is never going to get altered or deleted as streaming services often do, or end up unavailable in the future with no seeders.
You're on a site called Hacker News, and don't know how to burn a video file to DVD?
I literally burned and sold bootleg software to churches as one of my go to hustles as a kid, and have a blu ray burner handy.
Knowing how, and being willing to do it for piles of titles and make cases that are nice to display and browse in the real world alongside mass produced copies, takes a lot of effort and I have better things to do with my limited time.
As is tracking down very rare titles in blu ray quality. Often easier to just buy the most decent cased copies I can and rip for long term storage.
Writable DVD longevity seems to be a bit of a crapshoot. There are stories of people reading 20 year old burned DVDs just fine and others getting errors on discs only a few years old.
If I were worried about longevity, I would not personally rely on a bunch of DVDs I burned.
I was curious about this recently. I was wondering about open files of well known artists.
Unlike netflix/YouTube its not immediately clear to me which Organisation would spearhead something like this out of their own interesting. Closest I know of is the MuseGroup, which are doing this "growing of the pie" with open source music creation Software.
I found the Sol Levante AE project files to be a huge nothinburger. Like there's nothing there... it's literally just a background and two character layers, no effects or camera moves or anything that would be remotely interesting to a VFX person.
This feels to me like an intentional obfuscation-- like the studio didn't actually want to open-source anything meaningful, or netflix didn't pay them enough to justify collecting huge project files.
Not that crazy. The cost of storing the film—even 2 hour features—is dwarfed by the rest of the production costs. You can afford a dedicated HDD when you're done.
The cost to generate a future kind of film from some template (script, characters, art choices, etc in some kind of source file) won't be much more than the cost to store it.
When this happens, perhaps we will cache the results but later dump them. Assuming storage costs don't drop faster and more significantly.
Maybe 30 years?
Edit: Lots of downvotes. I'm a filmmaker, I've made lots of photons-on-glass films. Most of us are experimenting with this tech and aren't thumbing our noses at it like people outside our industry. We don't really have a choice but to adapt, and I find it funny that casual observers on the outside are so morally opposed. It's actually an incredible tool for pitching and has utility for some SFX, compositing, and B-roll shots today. It's really going to help mid market and below, for films that don't have Disney budgets.
> I find it funny that casual observers on the outside are so morally opposed. ... It's really going to help mid market and below, for films that don't have Disney budgets.
Agreed. I also have a few decades of experience in film and television production, mostly in creating and deploying new digital tooling paradigms from 'desktop video' in the 90s to virtual sets to real-time 3D environments. New digital production tools have almost always had the biggest impact enabling low-end and mid-tier creatives, not big budget studio productions. In the early 90s the Amiga-based Video Toaster enabled upstart productions like Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Babylon 5. The Toaster also enabled about 95% more cable-access crap and bad porn but the other 5% was fantastically creative new stuff which couldn't have existed on indy budgets. Dramatic new production paradigms tend to unleash both democratization and disruption. Most people welcome the democratization yet reflexively fear the disruption. Today, few recall the early 90s predictions from the professional production industry of desktop video causing economic and creative doom, despite being widespread and echoed across mainstream media.
While machine learning-based production tools aren't flexible or granular enough yet for more than limited experiments, there's no reason they won't become increasingly useful for real work. IMHO they'll likely have the same kind of democratizing impact as desktop video and the Toaster - 95% more regrettable crap, some of which we're already starting to see but, eventually, also 5% more wonderfully creative stuff which wouldn't have existed without it. The crap will quickly fade away but the bold new stuff will remain pushing creative frontiers and shaping tomorrow's classics.
It's funny to me that I work in film and have more hope and imagination over the use of this technology than people who (presumably) don't make films at all.
As long as humans have dreams it won't be like that. The human spirit and desire to connect to others and tell stories doesn't just suddenly die.
I think the very best lens to look at it is that all of the tens of thousands of kids that go through film school and never get to bring their VFX-heavy fantasy to life now suddenly have voice to match their ambition.
The downvotes are a good sign. If AI didn't promise massive artistic disruption -- the sort that threatens to put real creative power into the hands of outsiders -- no one would object.
Look at the history of photography itself to see an example. "But... but... but my portrait-painting skills will be obsolete! Somebody do something. Waaah."
Your comment left me incredibly annoyed because I think you fully misunderstand the relationship of AI to art.
> If AI didn't promise massive artistic disruption -- the sort that threatens to put real creative power into the hands of outsiders -- no one would object.
Putting creative power into the hands of outsiders isn't important. In fact, creative power is currently in the hands of outsiders. You do not need a cinema studio to make a good film. There is nothing stopping most people from making a good feature length film and putting it up on YouTube except for their willpower, spirit, and creativity.
The bottleneck on great art has never been technology but the creative vision of the individual. Increased AI presence in art will do nothing to alleviate that bottleneck.
With that said, I am not bothered by the emergence of AI or its applications for any kind of art. I'm just a realist. It will enable equally enable both the great and the shitty, so in the end it is a wash.
Your comment left me encouraged, just because there are so few people left around here who would say something like
>You do not need a cinema studio to make a good film. There is nothing stopping most people from making a good feature length film and putting it up on YouTube except for their willpower, spirit, and creativity.
That being said, it's not true. Even Robert Rodriguez had to exercise a modicum of management skill and spend a non-trivial amount of money to get El Mariachi made. And even then, the available resources severely constrained what he could do with $7000 (about $20000 today).
The next Rodriguez is probably already using half-baked, primitive tools like WAN 2.2 to blow us all away. We just don't know who he or she is yet.
Something else that's not true is:
>It will equally enable both the great and the shitty, so in the end it is a wash.
The great works add far more to our culture than the shitty works take away. Before AI, 90% of everything was crap. After AI, 99% of everything might be crap. But the remaining 1% is all that matters.
My reaction to your original comment was probably too ornery.
You are right that not everyone can make a great film, but I would still contend that most everyone (in the US and Europe) has the right material conditions to make a great film (access to a camera, editing software, people, and locations). You'd need great discipline, leadership, creativity, and charisma to get it done. Most people lack one or more of those qualities.
Meridian is a great way to see what high quality HDR content should look like. The dark parts of the film are beautiful. A shame the rest of Netflix’s catalogue isn’t the same.
Slightly off-topic, but I notice Cosmos Laundromat (2016) is on that page. One of my favourite animated shorts ever. Something so unique about it. It would be nice to get a feature length version of it, but alas.
I’m still rocking a plasma tv which sidesteps the matter altogether :)
Best tv tech to date, though OLED improvements in the past year mean we might see good panels hitting the market in a few years. The race to produce the brightest panels (and putting them on display for comparison and testing in brightly lit electronics stores in environments that couldn’t be further from the actual viewing experience) resulted in a bunch of mass market crap.
Took down my Pioneer Kuro a couple of weeks ago. OLED is so good now.
Agree with the in store crap and all the processing that’s turned on for the TVs on display. But brightness is useful - can help combat ambient light, and HDR can look amazing.
It's all technical test footage used to test their media pipelines – presumably, they're sharing it to create industry standards, particularly for partner and open-source library implementations.
Anyone else surprised that the download links are plain HTTP without SSL? I know it's a page that in the past I would have typically not worried about securing - but nowadays it's SSL everything or else your browser yells at you.
Yeah, this is bad. The page almost seems like someone’s pet project that didn’t have any explicit funding and they got bored or left Netflix in 2020. I’m not sure how that would explain the lack of SSL cert except for just general lack of thoroughness.
It's actually a regression overall compared to physical media like DVDs and Blurays. No director commentaries, no behind the scenes, no silly menu games, etc. Streaming would theoretically allow for tons of this type of content to be made and connected to a film at any time but instead we have this stagnant recreation of cable TV. C'est la vie
The lack of director commentaries and behind the scenes content on streaming has always baffled me as the rights to that must be much cheaper to acquire and would result in more minutes of streaming watched for less licensing money.
It's telling that VFX subcontractors are putting out their own BTS content on YouTube now as promotional material, since the primary production companies for shows and films (with a few exceptions) have completely stopped doing this.
I miss director commentary, I loved re-watching movies with that audio track.
Is there just too much content now? Or has streaming become such a "content mill" that the creators aren't inspired enough about their own work to sit down and talk about it after it's complete?
I would guess this is the reason. Before there was unlimited content or ways to entertain yourself on a screen, having additional content on a disc would have been a marketing point to make people feel like they’re getting more for their money.
But now, I doubt even 1 in 1,000 people would respond to that, since there is always something else that can be instantly switched to watching or playing, so why go through the effort?
We’ve started watching Pluribus on Apple TV and it seems like when they’re making the show Apple contractually obligates them to make a podcast about each episode. Some of them are very interesting (like costume design) and some are less so.
It was funny how the sound engineers remoted in for the podcast and had extremely low quality mics, despite it being a show with fantastic sound (really it’s an excellent show in general, just really good).
I noticed the same with Severance (also Apple TV). After every episode, there is a short director commentary/crew interviews about random episode specifics or more higher level thoughts.
The Chernobyl tv show had a nice podcast that went with it as well. I think these kinds of extra features are especially nice when it is for a show based on real life. They get to point out things that may not have been 100% historically accurate due to budget/time, and also get to bring in experts to speak about things related to developing the show.
It is funny that these things often just get released on podcast platforms and aren't really integrated into the streaming service.
Especially since this show, and the shows mentioned in these parent comments are all produced by the platforms they got released on. So they also have a whole lot more control to actually integrate this extra content.
These streaming platforms often state they are competing to keep you on their platform consuming things, and it seems odd to me that they wouldn't want to try and capture people for longer with these kinds of extras. Especially since as the other user indicated, these would be much lower cost to produce and license compared to the original content. And for someone who really enjoyed what they watched it would be a pretty appealing extra to have.
Exactly. And this is why a whole dimension of collecting rare footages is quite dead now. This is why piracy through these great public trackers still matters.
Rare movies and film documentaries from the 20th century still can be found on rutracker, for example. The Russians really did create a dedicated community of archivists, with the quality varying to a certain degree depending on the uploader's reputation, but they certainly created a notorious collection of movies, even the ones relatively unknown or sometimes censored to death on western countries.
Remember those DVD releases that had plastic edges and cardboard fronts/backs? That's an era for you. They're always max 480p, sometimes even 480i, and often single layer, dual sided. Those came out when the Sony was still making Trinitron CRTs that could barely do 720p.
Depends on the DVD. Some of them do look terrible, but some aren't too bad. Probably depends on how it was transferred and mastered and what bitrate they used on the disc.
Can’t speak for OP but personally I’m thinking of things like the ability to actually add new features. Like what Netflix did with the Bandersnatch episode of Black Mirror years ago. Online video is extremely locked down when compared to the web.
Probably because there are over 9000 different TVs with their own proprietary apps on each one. So the easiest thing to do is just go with the lowest common denominator which is just giving you a menu to play a simple video.
For sure. But something like Bandersnatch shows that it is technically possible. Not for all devices of course. But there could be some kind of open standard companies implement and startups innovate on. But no one with power has an interest in doing that.
20 years ago, it was possible to seamlessly merge video clips from multiple streaming RealPlayer servers into a single composite video stream, using a static XML text file (SMIL) distributed via HTTP, with optional HTML annotation and composition.
This is technically possible today but blocked by DRM and closed apps/players. Innovation would be unlocked if 3rd party apps could create custom viewing experiences based on licensed and purchased content files downloaded locally, e.g. in your local Apple media library. The closed apps could then sherlock/upstream UX improvements that prove broadly useful.
It is not blocked by DRM but different codec.
Even if you have two MP4 files, but if they were encoded differently ffmpeg will still need to do some computation to join them.
Gapless playback with MSE would require identical encoding, which is likely more prevalent in the Apple catalog than the wild west of Youtube. Client-side transcode would require DRM cooperation.
For two video streams with different encodings, swapping between two media players + prefetch can give a close approximation of a continuous video stream.
This could be a huge deal for anyone working on video codecs or display tech. Finding legally clear, high-quality, uncompressed (or mezzanine) 4K HDR footage to test encoders against is surprisingly difficult. Most test footage you find online has already been stomped on by YouTube or Meta compression.
Having the raw EXR sequences and the IMF packages for Sol Levante and Meridian means researchers can finally benchmark AV1 vs HEVC vs VVC using source material that actually has the dynamic range to show the differences. The fact that they included the Dolby vision metadata is the cherry on top.
Don’t most camera manufacturers (like ARRI and BlackMagic) have test footage for their raw and/or log formats on their websites? Here’s ARRI’s (which includes ProRes in addition to their proprietary formats) https://www.arri.com/en/learn-help/learn-help-camera-system/...
yeah but distributing them is probably not just “oh it’s open source!”
These are motion pictures, not software. “Open source” is about the latter.
It's not popular, but even creative commons, the organisation that wrote the licence they are using, prefers the term "free cultural work" https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/freeworks/
They're "we won't sue you for using these" bytes. The terminology might be fuzzy but I feel like everyone in this thread understands the concept.
But... you'll see Netflix calls it "OPEN SOURCE CONTENT" if you click the link.
You are right! At least the link title got it right.
I believe open source is about the law. Software is one way it can be applied.
IAAL (but this is not legal advice).
Anyone can freely license a work to the public, and copyright holders were doing that long before modern computers were invented.
“Open source” (other than, say, in the context of open water sources or intelligence or journalistic sources, where it was rarely used) as a descriptive term did not enter the common lexicon until 1998 and that was specifically to refer to software source code.
https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source...
You’re correct but words and phrases can evolve in their meaning over time. If the licensing terms for this are analogous to open source software licensing terms then calling it “open source media” is pretty reasonable.
I’m all for linguistic evolution as long as it decreases ambiguity and confusion, as opposed to exacerbating it. See: “literally.”
It's awful what happened to literally. The enormity of the change in meaning is so egregious. When it literally gets used with both meanings in the same conversation, decimating my brain, I have to wonder how nonplussed anyone trying to learn English must be. I'm sure there are plenty of words it's happened to, but this must the most egregious example.
Is it decimating your brain literally or figuratively? You only have one, after all.
I used to work at a company developing an independent H.264 decoder implementation. We would have killed for this kind of source content, especially if the license allowed showing it at trade shows.
Finally? This content has been up since 2018.
Funny how how all the links, including the ones to their own pages, are routed through google.com/url, e.g. the link "Assets Available to Download". Usually tracking isn't quite this visible.
It's because their blog is hosted on blogger.com (yeah, weird decision), which is owned by Google and does that by default.
I also have a blogger.com blog.
Why? Because I had it for 20+ years, and I still didn't find an easy way to automatically migrate it to WordPress.
You're also presumably not a $400m+ company, which makes it more intestesting.
I assure you no amount of capital trivializes the endeavour of migrating to/from Wordpress.
GP speaks wisdom.
In my experience, the blog usually falls in some weird space where the marketing team owns it somehow. It’s best to leave them be and let them handle it, because if you suggest an alternative and then something goes wrong or isn’t to their liking you’ll never hear the end of it.
My point was that it's not trivial to migrate away from blogger.
Clearly engineers at Netflix have more important work to do.
It is very odd. I don’t see a good reason, not even tracking.
Aren't those just the URLs in google search results if you copy from the results page instead of clicking through to the destination?
The reason for the intermediary is because the clickthrough sends the previous URL as a referer to the next server.
The only real way to avoid leaking specific urls from the source page to the arbitrary other server is to have an intermediary redirect like this.
All the big products put an intermediary for that reason, though many of them make it a user visible page of that says "you are leaving our product" versus Google mostly does it as an immediate redirect.
The copy/paste behavior is mostly an unfortunate side effect and not a deliberate feature of it.
I don't understand. They are redirecting to their own S3 bucket, so who would be the recipient of the leak?
Also, isn't this what Referrer-Policy is for? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
Quoting web standards, you are more optimistic than I am, unfortunately, nobody uses them consistently or accurately (look at PUT vs POST for create / update as a really good example of this - nobody agrees) its a shame too, there's a lot of richness to the web spec. Most people don't even use "HEAD" to ensure they aren't making wasteful REST calls if they already have the data.
I was replying to
> All the big products put an intermediary for that reason
Surely whoever maintains the big products can add headers if they want?
And this is about people who care enough about not showing up in Referer headers to do something about it rather than people in general not understanding the full spec .
I worked on these big web products before and the answer then was that no, you couldn't trust it to be honored and it would have been considered a privacy incident so better off just having the redirect and having no risk. You can't trust the useragents for example.
Not sure if the reliability of the intentional mechanism has improved enough where this is just legacy or if there's entirely new reasons for it in 2026.
The other problem is if you're too big like Google, you cannot assume everyone will honor this, which is why they do these redirects.
Referrer-Policy is a response header, so in this case it would be Google sending it, and the browsers who would be honouring it. You have to hope that the browser makers get it correct... Unless I misunderstood?
Blogger predates the existence of this header by many years. Blogger, I believe, has also been in maintenance mode for many years.
It sees periodic major updates to keep it in line with standards. That's not much more than maintenance mode, but it's more than just keeping the servers running. It seems like someone at Google pays attention to it and keeps it from falling behind, but I suspect the same was true of Google Reader until it wasn't.
>someone at Google pays attention to it and keeps it from falling behind
I feel like it's the same for Google My Maps. They even discontinued the Android app, so you can only use it on the web. It totally feels like there's a single guy keeping the whole system up.
Not if you use the ClearURLs addon ;)
And when I click them I get a page with "Did you mean netflix.com? The site you just tried to visit looks fake. Attackers sometimes mimic sites by making small, hard-to-see changes to the URL." which then sends me to the Netfçix home page. Chrome on MacOS.
it's because their s3 bucket is called "download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com". the subdomain makes chrome think it's pretending to be "netflix.com"
But they said it sends them to Netfçix? That seems incorrect
...how is that even possible?
The ios gmail app does the same thing, but why? I would assume the app could just transparently relay the click through its already-open grpc channel to google's servers, and it would be faster for them and (more importantly) for me.
More recent content from Netflix is part of the ASWF Digital Production Example Library. https://dpel.aswf.io/
Do not give netflix -too- much credit for this. Netflix permanently closes distribution of most content they touch and kills the very physical media ownership options for content that they built their empire on.
You will be hard pressed to find a blu-ray or dvd release of any netflix show in the US.
As someone that enjoys having a physical offline media collection, and who does not want to support netflix, I am often forced to buy japanese copies or bootleg copies of netflix shows whereas I can buy legitimate US copies from virtually all other studios.
Even hits like K-Pop demon hunters, netflix has forbidden physical purchase or ownership, so piracy is the only option for those who are not netflix customers or want to watch offline on a blu-ray player on an airplane.
Why buy Japanese bootlegs when webrips are on popular torrent sites?
I absolutely torrent as a way to discover new content, but I want favorites on a shelf on very long shelf life media where it does not require internet access and is never going to get altered or deleted as streaming services often do, or end up unavailable in the future with no seeders.
There are piles of obscure things for which physical (sometimes bootleg) media exists but no seeders.
For example the mexican hacking drama Control Z, I found 0 complete rips even on private trackers, but I did find some nice blu ray bootlegs with cases and cover art.
Even with blu-ray rips in hand, burning a disk myself and putting it into a nice recognizable case that fits in my blu ray wall cases is a pain in the ass and I would rather pay someone else for this service.
Plus it makes it way easier to hand select shows to hand a kid to play in a portable media player, and avoids the need to give them unrestricted alone time with an internet capable device.
I prefer official copies but if the studios do not allow them and thus do not want my money then bootlegs it is.
Warm storage with checksums and redundancy is the only long-term safe option. I would recommend making a pair of HFS boxes, that storage will last far longer than pressed cold media.
I mean, I do both. But physical disks make it easier to stay away from the internet when I want a simple entertainment experience without distractions.
I absolutely torrent as a way to discover new content, but I want favorites on a shelf on very long shelf life media where it does not require internet access and is never going to get altered or deleted as streaming services often do, or end up unavailable in the future with no seeders.
You're on a site called Hacker News, and don't know how to burn a video file to DVD?
I literally burned and sold bootleg software to churches as one of my go to hustles as a kid, and have a blu ray burner handy.
Knowing how, and being willing to do it for piles of titles and make cases that are nice to display and browse in the real world alongside mass produced copies, takes a lot of effort and I have better things to do with my limited time.
As is tracking down very rare titles in blu ray quality. Often easier to just buy the most decent cased copies I can and rip for long term storage.
Writable DVD longevity seems to be a bit of a crapshoot. There are stories of people reading 20 year old burned DVDs just fine and others getting errors on discs only a few years old.
If I were worried about longevity, I would not personally rely on a bunch of DVDs I burned.
To be fair, pressed discs have succumbed to disc rot as well.
If I were worried about longevity, I would not personally rely on a bunch of DVDs I burned.
So load the files onto hard drives as a backup. That's what I do.
It doesn't seem like you're looking for a solution, just a method to hear yourself complain.
I was responding to your implied advice to burn media onto DVDs for long term storage. I never asked for any solution.
It seems like your intent here was just to be condescending and rude.
Blu-ray regions are different from DVD regions. US and Japan in Blu-ray regions belong to the same group.
Exactly this is why Japanese blu ray releases of streaming shows that lack physical US releases are a great backup option.
(2022)?
(Or earlier? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801075)
<https://netflixtechblog.com/engineers-making-movies-aka-open...> (2018)
The last addition was made in 2020.
I was curious about this recently. I was wondering about open files of well known artists.
Unlike netflix/YouTube its not immediately clear to me which Organisation would spearhead something like this out of their own interesting. Closest I know of is the MuseGroup, which are doing this "growing of the pie" with open source music creation Software.
Anyone know of something else?
I found the Sol Levante AE project files to be a huge nothinburger. Like there's nothing there... it's literally just a background and two character layers, no effects or camera moves or anything that would be remotely interesting to a VFX person.
This feels to me like an intentional obfuscation-- like the studio didn't actually want to open-source anything meaningful, or netflix didn't pay them enough to justify collecting huge project files.
How do I play back the EBU STL subtitles on Linux?
http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/ind...
Closed Caption Creator has a desktop version of Linux that can read EBU-STL files.
34gb for a 5min short film, crazy. High fidelity though
Not that crazy. The cost of storing the film—even 2 hour features—is dwarfed by the rest of the production costs. You can afford a dedicated HDD when you're done.
Well, hopefully two.
This will at some point in the future invert.
The cost to generate a future kind of film from some template (script, characters, art choices, etc in some kind of source file) won't be much more than the cost to store it.
When this happens, perhaps we will cache the results but later dump them. Assuming storage costs don't drop faster and more significantly.
Maybe 30 years?
Edit: Lots of downvotes. I'm a filmmaker, I've made lots of photons-on-glass films. Most of us are experimenting with this tech and aren't thumbing our noses at it like people outside our industry. We don't really have a choice but to adapt, and I find it funny that casual observers on the outside are so morally opposed. It's actually an incredible tool for pitching and has utility for some SFX, compositing, and B-roll shots today. It's really going to help mid market and below, for films that don't have Disney budgets.
> I find it funny that casual observers on the outside are so morally opposed. ... It's really going to help mid market and below, for films that don't have Disney budgets.
Agreed. I also have a few decades of experience in film and television production, mostly in creating and deploying new digital tooling paradigms from 'desktop video' in the 90s to virtual sets to real-time 3D environments. New digital production tools have almost always had the biggest impact enabling low-end and mid-tier creatives, not big budget studio productions. In the early 90s the Amiga-based Video Toaster enabled upstart productions like Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Babylon 5. The Toaster also enabled about 95% more cable-access crap and bad porn but the other 5% was fantastically creative new stuff which couldn't have existed on indy budgets. Dramatic new production paradigms tend to unleash both democratization and disruption. Most people welcome the democratization yet reflexively fear the disruption. Today, few recall the early 90s predictions from the professional production industry of desktop video causing economic and creative doom, despite being widespread and echoed across mainstream media.
While machine learning-based production tools aren't flexible or granular enough yet for more than limited experiments, there's no reason they won't become increasingly useful for real work. IMHO they'll likely have the same kind of democratizing impact as desktop video and the Toaster - 95% more regrettable crap, some of which we're already starting to see but, eventually, also 5% more wonderfully creative stuff which wouldn't have existed without it. The crap will quickly fade away but the bold new stuff will remain pushing creative frontiers and shaping tomorrow's classics.
If this (tragic, dystopian, abominable) future comes to pass, why would we store movies at all?
Just distribute the prompt and I'll generate my own movie on the fly, with my own tweaks of course.
It's funny to me that I work in film and have more hope and imagination over the use of this technology than people who (presumably) don't make films at all.
As long as humans have dreams it won't be like that. The human spirit and desire to connect to others and tell stories doesn't just suddenly die.
I think the very best lens to look at it is that all of the tens of thousands of kids that go through film school and never get to bring their VFX-heavy fantasy to life now suddenly have voice to match their ambition.
Is this meant as a response to my comment (which was an obvious joke) or were you just looking for an opportunity to soapbox?
The downvotes are a good sign. If AI didn't promise massive artistic disruption -- the sort that threatens to put real creative power into the hands of outsiders -- no one would object.
Look at the history of photography itself to see an example. "But... but... but my portrait-painting skills will be obsolete! Somebody do something. Waaah."
Your comment left me incredibly annoyed because I think you fully misunderstand the relationship of AI to art.
> If AI didn't promise massive artistic disruption -- the sort that threatens to put real creative power into the hands of outsiders -- no one would object.
Putting creative power into the hands of outsiders isn't important. In fact, creative power is currently in the hands of outsiders. You do not need a cinema studio to make a good film. There is nothing stopping most people from making a good feature length film and putting it up on YouTube except for their willpower, spirit, and creativity.
The bottleneck on great art has never been technology but the creative vision of the individual. Increased AI presence in art will do nothing to alleviate that bottleneck.
With that said, I am not bothered by the emergence of AI or its applications for any kind of art. I'm just a realist. It will enable equally enable both the great and the shitty, so in the end it is a wash.
Your comment left me encouraged, just because there are so few people left around here who would say something like
>You do not need a cinema studio to make a good film. There is nothing stopping most people from making a good feature length film and putting it up on YouTube except for their willpower, spirit, and creativity.
That being said, it's not true. Even Robert Rodriguez had to exercise a modicum of management skill and spend a non-trivial amount of money to get El Mariachi made. And even then, the available resources severely constrained what he could do with $7000 (about $20000 today).
The next Rodriguez is probably already using half-baked, primitive tools like WAN 2.2 to blow us all away. We just don't know who he or she is yet.
Something else that's not true is:
>It will equally enable both the great and the shitty, so in the end it is a wash.
The great works add far more to our culture than the shitty works take away. Before AI, 90% of everything was crap. After AI, 99% of everything might be crap. But the remaining 1% is all that matters.
My reaction to your original comment was probably too ornery.
You are right that not everyone can make a great film, but I would still contend that most everyone (in the US and Europe) has the right material conditions to make a great film (access to a camera, editing software, people, and locations). You'd need great discipline, leadership, creativity, and charisma to get it done. Most people lack one or more of those qualities.
We could market books as movies by marketing them as long consistent prompts. Moviebooks.
The thing about the ludds is that as a rule, they don't understand that their perceived enemies are threatening to make their lives better.
They can be safely ignored... at least here, and at least for now.
Yes I'm sure that when we start pumping out 10 movies/minute the quality will only increase.
As it currently stands, most things are crap. The speed is not the bottleneck.
Meridian is a great way to see what high quality HDR content should look like. The dark parts of the film are beautiful. A shame the rest of Netflix’s catalogue isn’t the same.
Firefox refuses to open the download links with an error like:
Blocked loading mixed active content “http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/?de...”
It seems to be something like blocking loading any HTTP request from an HTTPS page. Very annoying :(
Slightly off-topic, but I notice Cosmos Laundromat (2016) is on that page. One of my favourite animated shorts ever. Something so unique about it. It would be nice to get a feature length version of it, but alas.
I would like to see them give us an option to turn HDR off. In some situations it is just too bright and in others too dark.
I’m still rocking a plasma tv which sidesteps the matter altogether :)
Best tv tech to date, though OLED improvements in the past year mean we might see good panels hitting the market in a few years. The race to produce the brightest panels (and putting them on display for comparison and testing in brightly lit electronics stores in environments that couldn’t be further from the actual viewing experience) resulted in a bunch of mass market crap.
Took down my Pioneer Kuro a couple of weeks ago. OLED is so good now.
Agree with the in store crap and all the processing that’s turned on for the TVs on display. But brightness is useful - can help combat ambient light, and HDR can look amazing.
Newish QD oled finally hit that threshold of upgrading for me. Plasma definitely had a hell of a run though.
I wish there was a rubber ducky like thing to give you as a fellow plasma TV user.
Wouldn’t that be handled on your TV and/or streaming box? That’s how I control it, at least.
Unfortunately iPads also don’t allow you to turn off HDR
For a long time putting them in low power mode killed HDR, but it seems they patched that bug (feature)
Is this for some sort of a formal compliance or being able to point out "we host things free of charge too?
It's all technical test footage used to test their media pipelines – presumably, they're sharing it to create industry standards, particularly for partner and open-source library implementations.
It costs them little and what's in it for them is better codecs -> lower bandwidth expenses. Interests are aligned with the public, it's fine.
Anyone else surprised that the download links are plain HTTP without SSL? I know it's a page that in the past I would have typically not worried about securing - but nowadays it's SSL everything or else your browser yells at you.
Quite surprising. It does seem like you can get an https download with
Which is hitting the bucket path route at: https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.opencontent.netflix.com/sp..."aws s3 ls" similarly requests: https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.opencontent.netflix.com?li...
Yeah, this is bad. The page almost seems like someone’s pet project that didn’t have any explicit funding and they got bored or left Netflix in 2020. I’m not sure how that would explain the lack of SSL cert except for just general lack of thoroughness.
> The page almost seems like someone’s pet project that didn’t have any explicit funding
It probably is, given that it's just a static page hosted on blogger.com
From the names mentioned in the most recent blog post, they left late 2022.
Why is it bad tho?
I'm surprised they didn't use BitTorrent, with these HTTP links as web seeds. That'd make the most sense.
Politically it would be an interesting choice for Netflix to encourage people to use their BitTorrent clients..
But technically, you're right.
I didn't even know Netflix had a bit torrent client!
The page look like zero effort given anyway, like one of the free templates you can find.
this is hosted on s3 which doesn't support HTTPS, that said - if they used cloudfront in front of this bucket, they could save $$$ and have a SSL
S3 absolutely supports HTTPS. I think they set their bucket policy to forbid HTTPS. The whole thing is odd.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/exampl...
so, isn’t this using the s3 static website hosting feature - (im assuming due to the dir listing) which i dont believe does support https
no Big Buck Bunny...
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They have downloadable files that you don't need an account for.
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Cool! I'm looking forward to going through some of these, looks very interesting!
There’s basically zero innovation in online video.
Such a pity startups can’t innovate on the content stores of the big companies.
It's actually a regression overall compared to physical media like DVDs and Blurays. No director commentaries, no behind the scenes, no silly menu games, etc. Streaming would theoretically allow for tons of this type of content to be made and connected to a film at any time but instead we have this stagnant recreation of cable TV. C'est la vie
The lack of director commentaries and behind the scenes content on streaming has always baffled me as the rights to that must be much cheaper to acquire and would result in more minutes of streaming watched for less licensing money.
It's telling that VFX subcontractors are putting out their own BTS content on YouTube now as promotional material, since the primary production companies for shows and films (with a few exceptions) have completely stopped doing this.
I miss director commentary, I loved re-watching movies with that audio track.
Is there just too much content now? Or has streaming become such a "content mill" that the creators aren't inspired enough about their own work to sit down and talk about it after it's complete?
> Is there just too much content now?
I would guess this is the reason. Before there was unlimited content or ways to entertain yourself on a screen, having additional content on a disc would have been a marketing point to make people feel like they’re getting more for their money.
But now, I doubt even 1 in 1,000 people would respond to that, since there is always something else that can be instantly switched to watching or playing, so why go through the effort?
We’ve started watching Pluribus on Apple TV and it seems like when they’re making the show Apple contractually obligates them to make a podcast about each episode. Some of them are very interesting (like costume design) and some are less so.
It was funny how the sound engineers remoted in for the podcast and had extremely low quality mics, despite it being a show with fantastic sound (really it’s an excellent show in general, just really good).
I noticed the same with Severance (also Apple TV). After every episode, there is a short director commentary/crew interviews about random episode specifics or more higher level thoughts.
I liked it quite a bit.
The Chernobyl tv show had a nice podcast that went with it as well. I think these kinds of extra features are especially nice when it is for a show based on real life. They get to point out things that may not have been 100% historically accurate due to budget/time, and also get to bring in experts to speak about things related to developing the show.
It is funny that these things often just get released on podcast platforms and aren't really integrated into the streaming service.
Especially since this show, and the shows mentioned in these parent comments are all produced by the platforms they got released on. So they also have a whole lot more control to actually integrate this extra content.
These streaming platforms often state they are competing to keep you on their platform consuming things, and it seems odd to me that they wouldn't want to try and capture people for longer with these kinds of extras. Especially since as the other user indicated, these would be much lower cost to produce and license compared to the original content. And for someone who really enjoyed what they watched it would be a pretty appealing extra to have.
DVD extras existed as an incentive for users to re-buy films they already had on VHS.
No such incentive is necessary with streaming, the format competes so well on convenience it doesn't have to invest in extra content.
Exactly. And this is why a whole dimension of collecting rare footages is quite dead now. This is why piracy through these great public trackers still matters.
Rare movies and film documentaries from the 20th century still can be found on rutracker, for example. The Russians really did create a dedicated community of archivists, with the quality varying to a certain degree depending on the uploader's reputation, but they certainly created a notorious collection of movies, even the ones relatively unknown or sometimes censored to death on western countries.
Disney+ has quite a bit of this actually. I agree though that overall most streaming services don’t offer this.
DVDs were iirc 480p which would look absolutely terrible on a modern TV.
Remember those DVD releases that had plastic edges and cardboard fronts/backs? That's an era for you. They're always max 480p, sometimes even 480i, and often single layer, dual sided. Those came out when the Sony was still making Trinitron CRTs that could barely do 720p.
Depends on the DVD. Some of them do look terrible, but some aren't too bad. Probably depends on how it was transferred and mastered and what bitrate they used on the disc.
> There’s basically zero innovation in online video.
AV2 is coming out this year.
> Such a pity startups can’t innovate on the content stores of the big companies.
What do you mean?
Can’t speak for OP but personally I’m thinking of things like the ability to actually add new features. Like what Netflix did with the Bandersnatch episode of Black Mirror years ago. Online video is extremely locked down when compared to the web.
Can a startup not make a bandersnatch-like web page with video on it? What would stop them?
Probably because there are over 9000 different TVs with their own proprietary apps on each one. So the easiest thing to do is just go with the lowest common denominator which is just giving you a menu to play a simple video.
For sure. But something like Bandersnatch shows that it is technically possible. Not for all devices of course. But there could be some kind of open standard companies implement and startups innovate on. But no one with power has an interest in doing that.
20 years ago, it was possible to seamlessly merge video clips from multiple streaming RealPlayer servers into a single composite video stream, using a static XML text file (SMIL) distributed via HTTP, with optional HTML annotation and composition.
This is technically possible today but blocked by DRM and closed apps/players. Innovation would be unlocked if 3rd party apps could create custom viewing experiences based on licensed and purchased content files downloaded locally, e.g. in your local Apple media library. The closed apps could then sherlock/upstream UX improvements that prove broadly useful.
It is not blocked by DRM but different codec. Even if you have two MP4 files, but if they were encoded differently ffmpeg will still need to do some computation to join them.
Gapless playback with MSE would require identical encoding, which is likely more prevalent in the Apple catalog than the wild west of Youtube. Client-side transcode would require DRM cooperation.
For two video streams with different encodings, swapping between two media players + prefetch can give a close approximation of a continuous video stream.
>AV2 is coming out this year.
Which has less than 48 hours to go.
I love it just because squid game.
With all that $500K talent, you would think they could make a better looking website.