8 ms·
Marion Stokes: A woman who taped 30 years of TV news
- inflatableDodo 8y agoI wonder how many people are doing this now and what media they are storing to.
- paulsutter 8y agoInternet Archive has been recording TV news since 2001: https://archive.org/details/tvnews https://archive.org/details/tvnews
- noufalibrahim 8y agoThey have projects based on this as well. One of the prominent ones was the Sep 11 Archive. https://archive.org/details/911 https://archive.org/details/911
- onorton 8y agoKind of tangentially related but this compilation of TV footage in the morning before the 9/11 attacks [0] is always slightly unsettling to me. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMVTB2aVUg0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMVTB2aVUg0
- code_duck 8y agoI would bet there are many people with very extensive porn collections. The more specialized, the more likely they would create a library.
- Roritharr 8y agoI remember the first time I was in awe of storage capabilities was roughly 2003 when someone sent me a screenshot of his pirated porn collection, it was in the hundreds of TBs, at that point already, mostly stored on Disc spindles. I often wonder if he's stopped accumulating at some point. In /r/datahoarders people are abusing Google Drive Quotas for the same purpose, but the capital required doesn't remotely compare to what it seems some people are willing to invest.
- Cyph0n 8y agoI think private torrent trackers are your best bet when looking for this kind of obscure content.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoI think / hope those are archived as well; e.g. what.cd and waffles had a huge archive of all kinds of rare music, bootlegs, obscure bands, limited releases, etcetera. I hope there's an organization that made sure those were archived. Are museums exempt from copyright laws for archival purposes?
- dzmien 8y agoA number of sites filled the void left in place of What.cd and preserve even more content than before. The community is very dedicated.
- philliphaydon 8y agoWhen I was living in Australia (2007-2012) I had a tv card in my computer so I could watch tv in my room, and I could record another channel while watching. So I used to record shows to mpg to watch later.
- maxdamantus 8y agoI happen to have been doing this since Feb 10 this year, as I've been using a USB DVB card to capture/watch the news. Up to 370 GiB so far, just storing the MPEG-TS streams on hard drives.
- alex_duf 8y agoOut of curiosity, why?
- maxdamantus 8y agoWhy do I watch the news? I don't like the idea of relying on the news sites here (New Zealand) in getting a brief overview of the current stories. If you meant why I'm keeping them .. I just don't really like deleting things. If the space usage ends up being impractical, I'll probably just end up reencoding them. Edit: to clarify, by "the news", I mean the hour-long show (though I skip the sports segments) that's on at 18:00 every day; we don't have the "24-hour" news cycle that seems to be common in the US.
- alex_duf 8y agoThanks!
- R_Macdonald 7y agoWould you consider donating a copy of the TV news programs Internet Archive?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- burk96 8y agoReddit's /r/datahoarder is full of people archiving all sorts of things that I wouldn't expect to be archived. Recently there was a community effort to archive YouTube's annotations before they were removed. Link here: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/b7imx9/youtube_annotation_archive_annotation_data_from/?st=jvevsum0&sh=ad6d3abc https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/b7imx9/youtube...
- rwmj 8y agoI only watch TV through downloads (get_iplayer & youtube-dl), and I have kept it all [edit: only things I downloaded intending to watch, not all TV]. This is since about 2008: fs:/volume1/media 14T 8.0T 5.6T 59% /mnt/media The reason? Why not - disks are cheap. The hard thing is deleting something since I don't know if I might want to watch it again. And at almost no real cost I don't have to make that decision. Edit: Some stats: 20,269 TV programmes; 11,830 radio programmes; 925 movies
- vthriller 8y agoI wish I started doing similar thing way earlier, because now I can't refer to a lot of content that vanished from the net for a number of reasons (creators getting bored, flagged out from youtube by bots that random haters set up, bogus copyright claims from impostors that upload all sorts of stolen things into contentid in order to create a quick buck, UMG taking down videos from music theory channels despite it obviously falling under the Fair Use and so on)
- rwmj 8y agoFor music on youtube, this trivial ytdl wrapper is essential: $ cat bin/youtube-mp3 #!/bin/bash - exec $HOME/d/youtube-dl/youtube-dl -t -x --audio-format=mp3 "$@" Saved to my Squeezebox library, it's available to play forever.
- qplex 8y agoDoesn't the audio quality take a hit when you transcode to MP3 though?
- rwmj 8y agoPossibly, but on the flip side neither my car nor my first-gen SLIMP3 can play other formats natively.
- asveikau 8y agoYouTube audio is usually aac. Sometimes I have saved audio as an .aac file without re-encoding. (Not using the same scripts, what I have done typically is get the mp4 and do: ffmpeg -i foo.mp4 -acodec copy foo.aac) Any audio player worth its salt should play .aac files. I think for the most common types [low-complexity] the patents are expired. (Curious if somebody has one that doesn't.)
- rwmj 8y agoStephen Wolfram (the man behind Mathematica) had this odd but fascinating blog entry: https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/ https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analyti... He captured every keystroke (over 100 million) on his computer.
- ErotemeObelus 8y agoThis is a great display of Mathematica's power in data science and plotting. Somehow I'm feeling compelled to reach for my wallet....
- 0-_-0 8y ago> Somehow I'm feeling compelled to reach for my wallet.... Which is a great display of Mathematica's power over people's wallets
- ErotemeObelus 8y agoOh. If I didn't know any better I would suspect Stephen Wolfram made a blogpost for shamelessly advertising the data science capabilities of Mathematica for the purpose of selling it to data scientists.
- inflatableDodo 8y agoI think the blogposts are being generated by a collection of cellular automata that are being created by a learning algorithm with access to that dataset. In other words, Stephen Wolfram.
- hateful 8y agoClosest I ever came was recording a few weeks of MTV's 120 minutes.
- dav 8y agoI still have a bunch of VHS tapes of 120 minutes
- voltagex_ 8y agoSend it to the Internet Archive.
- jaysonelliot 8y agoI've actually been searching for tapes of 120 minutes, since all you can usually find online are snippets. Did you ever digitize them?
- nisse72 8y ago> all you can usually find online are snippets I haven't looked too closely, but what's this then: https://120minutes.tylerc.com/ https://120minutes.tylerc.com/
- fenwick67 8y agoThis is basically an index of the music videos played, not an actual recording of the broadcasts
- Spare_account 8y agoThere's another comment at the same level as yours that you might be interested in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19855812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19855812
- pronoiac 8y agoI recorded much of AMP.
- 11thEarlOfMar 8y agoAlso recently seen on HN: This gentleman recorded 55,000 boxing matches over 40 years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19471312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19471312
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- DoubleGlazing 8y agoTransdiffusion, a small UK based group of TV presentation enthusiasts, have been recording and archiving material related to TV logos, idents and presentation since the 1950s. https://www.transdiffusion.org/ https://www.transdiffusion.org/
- trixie_ 8y agoAnyone know if this has been digitized yet or when it will be available? I am so impressed by this woman’s work. So much of our history is being lost, forgotten, or is inaccessible by the general public.
- yitchelle 8y agoIt was mentioned in the article that the Internet Archive is in the process of digitizing it. No mentioned of a time frame.
- dredmorbius 8y agoIn the US there is the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, dating to 1968: The core collection of the Archive consists of regularly scheduled newscasts from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox News. Special news reports are recorded in addition to these newscasts, including material from other networks. We record broadcasts as they are televised, provide the widest access allowable within copyright for scholarship and research, and preserve the content for future generations. The database currently includes 1,116,752 records, including abstracts at the story level of regular evening newscasts and catalog records for each special news report. https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/about https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/about The archive itself is not publicly viewable online, but the rundowns are (including national advertising spots running with the programmes), and are text searchable. Trends in programme length, topics, and to some extent quality and bias, are evident. It's a hugely useful, little-known, treasure. Example; every nightly news story on "privacy" since 1968: https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/search?utf8=&query=privacy&button= https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/search?utf8=&query=privacy&but... Archives, including (again, text-searchable) close captioning, here at the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/tv https://archive.org/details/tv), are hugely useful to researchers and even investigative reporters. Here at WashPo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/08/television-news-coverage-democrats-is-uneven-not-way-you-might-think/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/08/televisio... Andrew Tyndall, independent news analyst, has monitored TV news since 1988, publishing review and data at The Tyndall Report: http://tyndallreport.com http://tyndallreport.com
- t0mek 8y agoIt's gonna be awesome to learn history in the next 100, 200 or 500 years. Video records for all the major and minor events, archived since the second half of 20th century. Although they may complain that it's "just a video", not a virtual reality or something. Also, we need to last that long.
- NateEag 8y agoNow that video forgery is easy [1], I think the mountain of video footage will make learning history in a few hundred years painful and difficult. How would you have any idea what happened and what didn't, from the 21st century on? Yes, historians worked without video or photography for centuries, but most people aren't as rigorous as a historian, and it's going to take a long time for our cultural norms to adjust to video being "default untrusted". Furthermore, the written word and eyewitness testimony aren't nearly as important in our culture as they used to be, precisely because of the "pics/video or it didn't happen" mindset. Again, that's what historians have relied on for centuries, but it's considered unacceptable now in favor of technology that's just become completely untrustable. There won't be trustable records for people studying our near-future. Finally, since we've all given up on "primitive" technology like dead trees, most information is stored digitally now. That's great for convenience but terrible for long-term archives [2]. Digital information will vanish if not tended actively and carefully, and historians have long relied on physical artifacts like letters that largely don't exist any more. Our culture is a nightmare for future historians. Edit: expanded on why it will be hard to study history in a few centuries 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake 2: http://howicode.nateeag.com/data-preservation.html http://howicode.nateeag.com/data-preservation.html
- legooolas 8y agoWould be interesting to know if those tapes have Teletext info which can also be recovered, as well as the news video: https://github.com/ali1234/vhs-teletext/ (Not sure whether this works in the US, as I'm in the UK)
- jimktrains2 8y agoThe US never used Teletext, but we do have closed captioning, which should be recoverable and would provide some machine-processable date. Much less than Teletext would, though, for sure.
- ris 8y agoIt's funny you should mention this - it's exactly what is on my mind at the moment too. I'm trying to resist the temptation to trawl ebay for peoples old VHS collections (search "used VHS" gives good results) and start building an archive. Pity there doesn't yet seem to be any centralized effort to this though. I can imagine a wayback machine-like archive being an amazing resource.
- williesleg 8y agoAnd you know what? Nothing's changed in 30 years. So keep watching the news and get worked up over everything!