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.
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
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.
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
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.
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!
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
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.
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).