Slashdot Mirror
Free Internet Movie Archive
Andy Tai writes: "In sharp contrast to the music and movie industries' attempts to control access to content, the Internet Moving Image Archive aims to keep movie content freely available to the public. It provides 359 movies online and will add 642 more. The content is encoded in MPEG2 format and can only be converted to Open Source MPEG4 formats. The content is either public domain or owned by Prelinger Archives. So come and get your free movie now!" This reminds me of Project Gutenberg - anyone else know of good repositories around the Web? Post 'em below.
Keep it real with AdCritic. Now there is a repository with good "content" (Ok, yeah, it's all commercials, but still, they are funny!!)
Information is the catalyst for revolution
When are they going to make a subsection of adult film archives? ;-)
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
They are surely futuristic and will surely gain much. Our support is with you.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
free's good by me. . .how's the selection?
It's been said before but it's worth saying again, Textfiles.com is a terrific repository of a ton of the ol' BBS files. Go on and check out the coffee faq, woo!
What is not mentioned is that these movies are BIG.
For example, the AEC movie on radioactive fallout is about 194megs for 8 minutes of film. At least they did not cop-out and put the films in an unwatchable postage-stamp sized picture.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
This will destroy intelectual property as we know it! It will destroy innovation in the movie industry! We have to keep movies closed so no one can see them... I err...
Well some people try to use that argument for software...
Seriously though, you *KNOW* the MPAA is going to be coming down hard on them.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
I seem to remember Xoom/Nbci had some free movies on their site (free if you became a member that is).Hmm, Looks like they are gone now. I want an MPG archive of all the Marx Brothers Movies =)
--
Jon - TheSpork
This group has really captured the spirit of the early days of the web. Content nobody wants to see with bandwidth requirements nobody can handle.
Amazing.
It's 1994 again and I'm trying to view a graphics rich page on a 14.4 modem.
Thanks for the nostalgia!
--Kara
--Kara
Before you ask, I already have a boyfriend and he's more of a man than you'll ever be.
They even have my favorite movie, The Chicken of Tommorrow! Hehe, well maybe someone will make use of these movies with a cheap(er) rippoff of mst3k.
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
I'm not really sure how you can classify this as being "in sharp contrast to the music and movie industries' attempts to control access to content". Most of these "movies" are quite short, and date back from the 40s and before (although there are a few newer ones).
The movie and music industries are trying to control attempts to download free music or videos which are still currently "hot" things. It's sort of like downloading the newest Metallica song versus downloading Mozart. One produces money for a specific artist or company, the other is available from many different sources and doesn't guarantee anyone specific money.
It's almost 2am, so I hope I made sense. On the other hand, it is a cool resource, and I guess what will really make the difference is the content of the next 600 or so additions.
---
---
"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
There is probably a great deal of good material to be edited into some funny/creative/musical/artistic works.
The real question is, what would the same types of film from the past ten years tell someone 50 years from now?
Bleh!
spunk.org has got some good t-files too.
New worlds are not born in the vacuum of abstract
New worlds are not born in the vacuum of abstract
ideas, but in the fight for daily bread --Rudolf Rocke
Most of the movies used in MST3K, from what I understand, weren't public-domain, which is why they can't show some of them on TV anymore. They lost the rights to them.
Taking the "X" out of X-Rays
ca. 1940s
Running time: 9:14
Sponsor: General Electric Company
*In Dr. Evil's voice* "Riiiiiight."
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
It's too bad. I thought MST3K rocked.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Or Suggestion Box (1945), the nail bitingly suspenseful telling of "How war plant workers made suggestions that resulted in efficiency and economy".
And don't forget About Bananas (1955), the touching story about the banana industry. My eyes tear up even thinking about it.
All the big budget action flicks will never be able to withstand the awesome beauty of 1950's hygene flicks.
Just before I saw this article I was reading an article in the latest Linux Journal about the history of MPEG, an interesting read on video and audio compression.
Anyway, the site looks interesting enough. The files are big, to be sure. I'm downloading right now a movie shown to Cold-War elementary school children about atomic warfare.
My cable modem usually gets 50-100 K/sec, but I'm getting about 16 K/sec from this site. I think it's definately a candidate for several good mirrors if it gains any sort of popularity - the 10 min. movie is 246 MB.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
This is a kick ass idea! I wonder when/if we'll get some old classics like Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy or Chaplin?
Synchronized cocks!
I've had this idea for a long time that what the Internet needs is a "file in file out" type site that can use large processing farms (or perhaps distributed computing) and turn a link to a file into any size/format you want.
For instance...as much as I like the high quality image of MPEG-2 streams, I just don't want to download them and find out they aren't in SVCD-compliant format. It's way to much work to reencode them. If they aren't ready to burn as SVCD they are just going to park on my hard drive and chew up space. If they are staying on my hard drive, I'd rather have some nice compact MPEG-4 files. Of course, since the quality on this old films probably isn't that great, maybe I would want VCD versions?
So imagine there's this site with a form. I type in the link to the file (like "http://www.archive.org/oldmovie.mpg" or anything). Then I use radio buttons to choose my preferred format (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Quicktime, AVI, RealMedia...although why the hell anyone would choose that is beyond me). Last, I choose the sub-format. If I pick MPEG-1, I can choose VCD-compliant, or XVCD maybe. Or I can type in a custom width/height. I can alter pretty much anything you can do in your basic home video editor (resize, crop, basic effects).
Then I hit go. The converter site connects to the link I gave it, and starts downloading the file. If the file is streaming, it hands the processing off to the pool of servers and immediately hands me a link to the final stream. With enough hardware, this could be real time. Of course, if it isn't a streaming format, it would have to download the file and then process it and hand me the link.
Anyway, think about how cool this would be, for text documents, sound files, anything. A legally questionable extension would be, if someone requested a VCD version of a file, could the site cache that file and then offer it immediately the next time someone else requested it?
Anyone want to fund this type of venture? All we would need is a few good server farms, or a good distributed processing client.
Please discuss if you think this is a good idea and lets see if we can't get something started!
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
mst3k did rock. i and many of my friends watched it religiously. (some still do; it comes on certain channels still.)
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
oh, and for those of you interested in some more mst3k action, check out this link:
b oo ks/Eye_of_Argon.html
http://brie.bmsc.washington.edu/people/merritt/
it is a truly awful sci-fi story called 'the eye of argon' as it would have been hacked to pieces by the mst3k guys, had they ever actually read it.
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
Who can resist claymation for the common man, i.e. the lego film? I'm quite fond of 2001: A Lego Odyssey.
Unfortunately, they're in Quicktime, mostly. If you're without, it's worth finding someone with a Mac or Windows to watch the better of them.
Destination Earth 1956 Running time: 13:36
Producer: Sutherland (John) Productions
Sponsor: American Petroleum Institute
In this corporate-sponsored cartoon, Martian dissidents learn that oil and competition are the two things that make America great.
Change the sponsor to Microsoft and the word "oil" to software and I think I see a good promotional tool for Gates to try after the little speech yesterday from his underling...
Synchronized cocks!
The most important reason for these sort of archives is to show history that many would like to pretend did not exist or simply erase.
For example, #19585, a WWII era propaganda film on Japanese internment.
They have not only cold war 'duck-and-cover' films,
but also some of those old Encyclopedia Brittanica flicks they showed us in elementary school!
(FWIW, I'm not even that old...I saw those wacky educational movies on *16mm film* in the mid 80s.)
God this rocks.
--K
slashdotted takes on a new meaning.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
http://come.to/iz nuff said (tm)
LOL, I love it but...
What has changed? =P
I look at your post and I see a perfectly apt description of the current state of the "web" - content I don't care for, requiring bandwidth I have no way in hell of obtaining.
Fun fun fun!!
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Has anyone ever seen the movie 'Roger and Me'? This sounds like some of the footage Michael Moore probably used in the film!
Achievement USA 1955 Running time: 10:45
Producer: Sound Masters
Sponsor: General Motors Corp.
General Motors celebrates production of 50 millionth automobile with a parade through Flint, Michigan.
-- juju
I've been saying for a long time that the commerical companies who hold the copyrights to music/films should start to investigate a flat fee for entertainment.
Turner et al have a huge stock of old films that are not making them money. They should set up a system where I pay $5 for the rights to a movie for life no matter what the media. I can download it, play it in my home, see it in a cinema etc etc VHS/DVD/VCD whatever, of course I'd have to pay duplication costs. But how long before my DVD rentals are burnt in store for $2-50?
I would gladly pay for a huge number of old out of print movies. All they have to do is provide the hardware/bandwidth.
Given that any form of encryption is breakable and that most film stock is decaying would this not gnerate huge profits for them and give the consumers what they want?
This reminds me of Project Gutenberg - anyone else know of good repositories around the Web? Post 'em below.
If you're looking for texts, see The Open Directory's etext section. Typically, if I need similar resources for something, I enter the address of the resource that I have in dmoz.org's search engine and browse the category where they put that resource. Very useful, most of the time!
This ain't about some lil' grainy *.avi you can download in a couple of minutes and chuckle to yourself over.. This is about full-quality video, freely availiable online. Now I don't know about you, but I like the possibilities inherent in full quality archival video footage availiable online to use in wacky video projects.. Some of us deal with a reality *beyond* bandwidth as you know it. ...
(ooh.. that sounded a bit conspiratorial..)
-
Starsucks
I've never heard of a Sorenson player for *n?x, and it doesn't seem that freshmeat has either.
Or are you just talking out of your ass?
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
They also have a film archive section.
;-)
Well, post early, post often
Despite what all the nay-sayers say (which is most frequently "nay"), I think I may have to get a bigger hard drive. Definately gonna start downloading some of these as soon as my school gets my connection back up to full speed.
Shouldn't the famed Zapruder(SP) film be in there, or does Time still own that?
There is a security hole in slashdot. If you use IE4 or IE5, it is possible to get your password (you need to be authenticaded).
I submit a story about this hole 2 days ago. The hole is still there. Demonstration of this hole
Can somebody alert slashdot ?
If you use IE4 and IE5 you should better change your password.
Slashdot is not to blame, many web sites have this hole.
Thanks to /. this movie site is totally crashed. I can't download anything. Dammit...if only I saw the posting a little sooner...
Through the perception of illusion, we experience reality.
Snob, The 1958 Running time: 13:18 Producer: Centron Productions Sponsor: Why is a high-school girl such a snob? Descriptors: Social guidance -> I'm hoping to get some anwsers out of this one..
It'd be really nice if they ported that to Linux and the other BSDs.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
Seriously, have you guys read the titles? I'll use some in a sentence: "Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You might remember me from such educational films as The Adventures of Junior Raindrop and Goodbye, Mr. Roach."
Random Musings at Rum Smuggler
Why do you think so many movies have gratuitous baby scenes? It's not just for the "Awww, cute" factor. Then there's using multiple baby actors to play each baby used onscreen, under the guise of labor/child welfare laws. Maybe it's just a matter of playing the odds that at least one of the rugrats will live to a ripe old age. I just saw an interview with some actress in the past few days saying that they used eight (might've been six) different baby actors to portray her kid. I have no idea if what you said is true or not, but it would be a good explanation for all those damn baby actors. Oh well, at least they can act better than Demi Moore and her decrepit plastic melons...
Cheers,
It is it just me or do all these not work. I keep getting 505's not supported any ideas why ?
I wanted a funny
Destination Earth 1956 Running time: 13:36
Producer: Sutherland (John) Productions
Sponsor: American Petroleum Institute
In this corporate-sponsored cartoon, Martian dissidents learn that oil and competition are the two things that make America great.
Descriptors: Economics Oil industry Advertising: Animation
CinemaPop (www.cinemapop.com for those who dare not click on links here anymore) has a lot of movies and TV classics, in both free and pay-per-view formats — and no, the good stuff isn't all confined to the PPV areas.
Filmspeed (www.filmspeed.com) doesn't have as many (at least not that I've yet found), but I think they're all free, and quality ones, too. For download or streaming. Plus, you can download 'em to play on your PocketPC, which is always good for kicks and surprising the guy sitting next to you on a plane. The've got Fists of Fury, Nosferatu, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Chinese Connection, A Christmas Carol, and Night of the Living Dead , among (not too many) others. Unfortunately, Night of the Living Dead isn't available for the PocketPC for some reason...
Cheers,
10 days of video content contributed by the
community reachable under http://ova.zkm.de
and audio system of the same kind ist reachable
under http://orang.orang.org/
I think the Movie Mistakes page is quite funny. Unfortunately when the big budget blockbusters have 115 entries, many of them are just "making of" trivia and so on instead of the hilarius Mystery Science Theatre 3000 badness that I crave. It seems that people submit more "mistakes" about famous films rather than about those really badly made films that are packed with errors of logic, continuity, special effects etc.
Also, even though I rarely buy stuff from them, I find it very fascinating to go to Amazon and just click around different reviews, "page you made", user made listmania lists and so on to find good stuff I might not have heard about before. It made me interested in old movies again, I have started to collect Kurosawa on DVD and I'm currently thinking of getting La Grande Illusion, Orson Welles films, The Third Man, lots of Noir detective films. Too bad Amazon doesn't stock more foreign films.
************************************************ ** *
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Old entertainment compete's with new entertainment for out entertainment dollar. Thus, by using long copyright terms to keep old artistic works away from people, they help to insure high sales of their newer and more expensive wares.
Yet another reason to show why long copyright terms are bad.
And they want to keep old content from competing with their new content.
They make money by insuring that you do not have a choice of old public-domain videos to watch.
Many years ago, it was really cool to sample bits off old films like "Reefer Madness", or do cut-ups from stereo demonstration records (how many times have you heard ("This should be played at high volume - late at night - in a residential area"?)
Time to start again...
If you focus your content on a specific subject (in this case 20th century North American culture and history), you can't call your site 'the Internet Moving Image Archive'. This implies that it is a more complete, and broader oriented collection.
Therefore, I think their name is misleading, and should be changed.
jdv
Actually, the very first movie listed on that page, "Design for Dreaming", *was* on MST3K. It was a short sometime in the early Mike days, IIRC.
;)
Not a good sign...
I happened to come across a free streaming contents site at like television when I was trying to find An Occurrence at Owl Creek, a movie I watched in elementary school in my youth -- an excellent movie which somehow surfaced in my mind while looking at the movie archive discussed by this story.
Only problem I have with 'like television' is that I can't seem to download and save, locally, the video streams, for smooth playback later.
Like http://www.movieflix.com/ or http://www.ifilm.com/. They carry much more and much better films (lots of feature films since the silent era till cca 50's).
I see your Tunak Tunak Run
and raise you a hatt-baby
http://user.tninet.se/~prv247p/hatt/hatten.swf
You can view over 80 short film clips for all types of dance steps at Memory.Loc.Gov. It's a nice collection. There are many other sujects in the American Memories Collections.
Of course there's always the newsgroups and hotline for a whole bunch of good DivX movies ;)
e x p e c t d e l a y . c o m
I just been waitin to see 'The Sheet Metal Worker'! God, I can't wait to download THAT one! Unfortunatly, those movies seem to be very bad, old, 'movies' they showed in school.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
Many of the books relate to open source software. KDE 2.0 Development , GTK+/GNOME Application Development by Havoc Pennington, and The Cathedral & The Bazaar by ESR are among them.
Andamooka: Open support for open content.
They still make the same types of films - they are just presented with a pop music soundtrack and deemed a "multimedia presentation" by the production company. This Thursday, we had our yearly multimedia presentation, thanks to Motivation Media (or something like that.) Basically it was just some company's (possibly government funded... they have to get money somewhere for the speakers and projectors) attempt at forcing Christian values down our collective throat under the guise of movie clips and a thumping soundtrack. Topics included parental relations, having good friends, and abstaining from drugs/alchohol and sex (until marraige of course). Interestingly, though we are allowed to skip pep assemblies and hang out in the commons, they refuse to allow students to miss these propaganda extravaganzas. I've also watched videos before in sexual education classes ("Billy has a wet dream" or something similar) that evoke memories of the old mental hygiene films. This genre is definitely not gone, just reinventing itself to brainwash another generation.
What can I use to play these in Linux? mpeg_play doesn't work, and neither does mtv.
A good archive on the web is Ibiblio:
"Ibiblio is a diverse and expansive collection of information on the Internet, created and maintained by the public, for the public. It is the ultimate collection of freely available information, the future of Internet librarianship, and a collaboration between the former MetaLab.unc.edu (formerly known as SunSITE.unc.edu) and the Red Hat Center for Development."
Along with a huge Linux FTP archive, it hosts a few hundred 'collections' of information off the web.
Disclaimer: I'm not entirely impartial here because I'm currently moving my website, Astrobiology: The Living Universe, to the Ibiblio servers. At the moment we're still setting it up at its new home (www.ibiblio.org/astrobiology) and implementing a new interface. The working version is at http://library.thinkquest.org/C003763.
A number of movies have been computer animated over the last few years, is there any fairly easy to learn movie making software around?
If so, Open Sources movies would be a cool idea... I'm more of a programmer, but have a lot of Artist friends (with whom I have NOTHING in common with).
What could do more for Linux on the desktop?
-- Matthew C. Tedder
http://www.atomfilms.com
Independent shorts and animation. Some good stuff. Some awful stuff.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Let's shoot this puppy here and now.
If a copyright is owned by a corporation, as is the case with most modern cinema, music, books, and software, the copyright term is now 95 years.
Yes, Windows 95 won't be public domain until the year 2093.
Personally owned copyrights, like those in most GPL software, and the kind savvy musicians and writers keep rather than sell, are good for life plus 70 years.
Meaning that (assuming Linus lives a long, healthy life avoiding the Microsoft Mafia) the Linux kernel v. 0.1 won't be available as public domain for a century and a half.
Live long, Linus Torvalds!
(ps: I ANAL. Oops. I mean, I Am Not A Lawyer, and so if in doubt ask an attorney.
Final clarification: Personally means owned by a human being or a group of human beings not hiding behind another legal identity. Corporate means either a formal business partnership, corporation, or other artificial person.)
Ruling The World, One Moron At A Time(tm)
"As Kosher As A Bacon-Cheeseburger"(tmp)
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Generic Media stores your content in QuickTime for and transcodes it to the player of your choice and streams it to you. This allows one original to be kept and easily roll with new technology/players/formats as they arrive. The just had a press release a few weeks ago. Its founded by one of the original QuickTime Engineers, Peter Hoddie.
People think Microsoft is the answer. Microsoft is just the question, "No" is the answer.
I would like to try my hand at ripping apart 1950s propaganda films, ala mst3k. Not sure what you would need. --Joey My friends and I considered doing this but gave up because of the editing problems, however a I found a piece of software that does blue screening. Let me know if you are interesting in trying this my /. and aim name are the same.
Wow we've done a number on these guys. I don't know whether to celebrate or cry. Of course, anyone offering such large files should have a more robust server, IMO.
------------
--- There is a man in a smiling bag.
Frankenstein was made in 1931! Therefore we can see it for free on the internet right? It was a pretty good flick for the time, and is still significant today. I wonder if universal will try to get a longer extension? --Joey
i love free movies. my local movie theatre shows matinee movies for free in the spring.
I think that assumes that the copyright is held by a person not a company. Not that this post matters, no one is going to go back to a thread weeks old down the list. If you do read this let me know that you saw it, my email is
m
f8336@removethis.andthis.andthis.tampabay.rr.co
Still got to protect against bots.
--Joey
Be aware of one thing: Quicktime for Linux won't read any of the movies you download from the internet.
Oh well. Its still a step in the right direction.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland