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."
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 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.
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.
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"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!
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.
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
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.
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..)
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Starsucks
They also have a film archive section.
;-)
Well, post early, post often
Well, yes and no. In theory copyrights expire after a set time. Oddly enough though, ever time the old Mickey Mouse movies come up to their time to be public domain, the copyright law period magically gets extended. Its almost like disney is able to get the laws done their way... hmm...
I believe It used to be a set period after the creation of the work (15 years?), then it was changed to a set period after the authors death, and since then has gone from 15 years all the way to the current 70 year span. Its a shame that greed is so powerful...
I've never heard of a Sorenson player for *n?x, and it doesn't seem that freshmeat has either.
;P
There is one, it's called 'QuickTime 4' and the only *NIX it supports is Mac OS X.
As for a free Sorensen-compatible player, sorry.
You can play QT files encoded with different codecs using xanim on *NIX, but Sorensen is not supported anywhere but (AFAIK) Mac and 'Doze.
--K
The copyright law was changed in 1992 to protect the trickle of income from movies made in the 1930s.
Of course, as this article states, this copyright law's unfortuante consequence is the literal decomposition of a portion of our culture before it can be preserved for future generations.
Imagine if great, but not world famous oil paintings now hanging in local museums, courthouses, etc. were left in humid cellars for a hundred years to crack and peel.
Copyright law beyond 30 years has the same net effect for great, but not still profitable film-based media. Imagine if film students didn't study Citizen Kane and Modern Times. We probably wouldn't have a surviving copy of them today. How many other great films we don't even know about have already been lost?The films on this site are not "great", but taken collectively, they are great cultural and historical repository like any of our libraries or government archives.
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
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.
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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.
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
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.
It protects companies that still make money from a creation from losing a lot of money. If the first Mickey Mouse film was to go into the public domain, Disney would lose all control of Mickey Mouse. This, of course, is their own fault for not progressing as a corporation and finding other ways to make money, but it's a lot cheaper to buy laws than to explore new revenue streams. To hell with fair use and common sense.