6 ms·

Netflix Open Content

667 points by tosh 11mo ago

carschno 11mo ago
The last addition was made in 2020.
HelloUsername 11mo ago
(2022)? (Or earlier? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801075)
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- pwdisswordfishy 11mo ago
  <https://netflixtechblog.com/engineers-making-movies-aka-open-source-test-content-f21363ea3781 https://netflixtechblog.com/engineers-making-movies-aka-open...> (2018)
Adesany 11mo ago
[flagged]
- Adesany 11mo ago
  [flagged]
danielktdoranie 11mo ago
[flagged]
- FartyMcFarter 11mo ago
  They have downloadable files that you don't need an account for.
_flux 11mo ago
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.
- afandian 11mo ago
  It is very odd. I don’t see a good reason, not even tracking.
  - jmathai 11mo ago
    Aren't those just the URLs in google search results if you copy from the results page instead of clicking through to the destination?
    - esrauch 11mo ago
      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.
      - afandian 11mo ago
        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/Headers/Referrer-Policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
        giancarlostoro 11mo ago
        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.
cooper_ganglia 11mo ago
Cool! I'm looking forward to going through some of these, looks very interesting!
FunnyLookinHat 11mo ago
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.
- mrtksn 11mo ago
  The page look like zero effort given anyway, like one of the free templates you can find.
- ronbenton 11mo ago
  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.
  - reddalo 11mo ago
    > 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
  - gregoryl 11mo ago
    From the names mentioned in the most recent blog post, they left late 2022.
  - therealdrag0 11mo ago
    Why is it bad tho?
- robingchan 11mo ago
  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
  - 8organicbits 11mo ago
jcattle 11mo ago
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?
niceboy2 11mo ago
I love it just because squid game.
andrewstuart 11mo ago
There’s basically zero innovation in online video. Such a pity startups can’t innovate on the content stores of the big companies.
- philipallstar 11mo ago
  > 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?
  - afavour 11mo ago
    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.
    - olyjohn 11mo ago
      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.
      - afavour 11mo ago
        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.
    - philipallstar 11mo ago
      Can a startup not make a bandersnatch-like web page with video on it? What would stop them?
  - walterbell 11mo ago
levibev 11mo ago
[dead]
332451b 11mo ago
More recent content from Netflix is part of the ASWF Digital Production Example Library. https://dpel.aswf.io/ https://dpel.aswf.io/
everlier 11mo ago
Is this for some sort of a formal compliance or being able to point out "we host things free of charge too?
- bwilliams18 11mo ago
  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.
- ahartmetz 11mo ago
  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.
Fiveplus 11mo ago
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.
- Uehreka 11mo ago
  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/camera-sample-footage-reference-image https://www.arri.com/en/learn-help/learn-help-camera-system/...
  - randall 11mo ago
    yeah but distributing them is probably not just “oh it’s open source!”
    - otterley 11mo ago
      These are motion pictures, not software. “Open source” is about the latter.
      - rib3ye 11mo ago
        I believe open source is about the law. Software is one way it can be applied.
        otterley 11mo ago
        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-software https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source...
game_the0ry 11mo ago
With all that $500K talent, you would think they could make a better looking website.
sapphirebreeze 11mo ago
[dead]
0xbrayo 11mo ago
34gb for a 5min short film, crazy. High fidelity though
- ronsor 11mo ago
  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.
  - stavros 11mo ago
    Well, hopefully two.
  - echelon 11mo ago
    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.
    - hamdingers 11mo ago
      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.
      - echelon 11mo ago
        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.
ysangkok 11mo ago
How do I play back the EBU STL subtitles on Linux? http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html?prefix=ElFuente/subtitles/ http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/ind...
- Ndeshpande 11mo ago
  Closed Caption Creator has a desktop version of Linux that can read EBU-STL files.
caseyf7 11mo ago
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.
- floydnoel 11mo ago
  Wouldn’t that be handled on your TV and/or streaming box? That’s how I control it, at least.
  - caseyf7 11mo ago
    Unfortunately iPads also don’t allow you to turn off HDR
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - swiftcoder 11mo ago
      For a long time putting them in low power mode killed HDR, but it seems they patched that bug (feature)
- ComputerGuru 11mo ago
  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.
  - assimpleaspossi 11mo ago
    I wish there was a rubber ducky like thing to give you as a fellow plasma TV user.
  - Lord-Jobo 11mo ago
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
aurelien 11mo ago
[flagged]
dom96 11mo ago
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.
zaptheimpaler 11mo ago
Firefox refuses to open the download links with an error like: Blocked loading mixed active content “http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/?delimiter=/&prefix=SolLevante/ 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 :(
lrvick 11mo ago
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.
- calt 11mo ago
  Why buy Japanese bootlegs when webrips are on popular torrent sites?
  - lrvick 11mo ago
    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.
    - reaperducer 11mo ago
      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?
swypych 11mo ago
no Big Buck Bunny...
nvarsj 11mo ago
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.
Tad_Waganag 11mo ago
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.

667 points by tosh 11mo ago

carschno 11mo ago

The last addition was made in 2020.

HelloUsername 11mo ago

(2022)? (Or earlier? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801075)

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
pwdisswordfishy 11mo ago
<https://netflixtechblog.com/engineers-making-movies-aka-open-source-test-content-f21363ea3781 https://netflixtechblog.com/engineers-making-movies-aka-open...> (2018)

Adesany 11mo ago

[flagged]

Adesany 11mo ago
[flagged]

danielktdoranie 11mo ago

[flagged]

FartyMcFarter 11mo ago
They have downloadable files that you don't need an account for.

_flux 11mo ago

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.

afandian 11mo ago
It is very odd. I don’t see a good reason, not even tracking.
- jmathai 11mo ago
  Aren't those just the URLs in google search results if you copy from the results page instead of clicking through to the destination?
  - esrauch 11mo ago
    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.
    - afandian 11mo ago
      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/Headers/Referrer-Policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
      - giancarlostoro 11mo ago
        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.

cooper_ganglia 11mo ago

Cool! I'm looking forward to going through some of these, looks very interesting!

FunnyLookinHat 11mo ago

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.

mrtksn 11mo ago
The page look like zero effort given anyway, like one of the free templates you can find.
ronbenton 11mo ago
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.
- reddalo 11mo ago
  > 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
- gregoryl 11mo ago
  From the names mentioned in the most recent blog post, they left late 2022.
- therealdrag0 11mo ago
  Why is it bad tho?
robingchan 11mo ago
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
- 8organicbits 11mo ago

jcattle 11mo ago

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?

niceboy2 11mo ago

I love it just because squid game.

andrewstuart 11mo ago

There’s basically zero innovation in online video. Such a pity startups can’t innovate on the content stores of the big companies.

philipallstar 11mo ago
> 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?
- afavour 11mo ago
  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.
  - olyjohn 11mo ago
    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.
    - afavour 11mo ago
      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.
  - philipallstar 11mo ago
    Can a startup not make a bandersnatch-like web page with video on it? What would stop them?
- walterbell 11mo ago

levibev 11mo ago

[dead]

332451b 11mo ago

More recent content from Netflix is part of the ASWF Digital Production Example Library. https://dpel.aswf.io/ https://dpel.aswf.io/

everlier 11mo ago

Is this for some sort of a formal compliance or being able to point out "we host things free of charge too?

bwilliams18 11mo ago
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.
ahartmetz 11mo ago
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.

Fiveplus 11mo ago

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.

Uehreka 11mo ago
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/camera-sample-footage-reference-image https://www.arri.com/en/learn-help/learn-help-camera-system/...
- randall 11mo ago
  yeah but distributing them is probably not just “oh it’s open source!”
  - otterley 11mo ago
    These are motion pictures, not software. “Open source” is about the latter.
    - rib3ye 11mo ago
      I believe open source is about the law. Software is one way it can be applied.
      - otterley 11mo ago
        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-software https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source...

game_the0ry 11mo ago

With all that $500K talent, you would think they could make a better looking website.

sapphirebreeze 11mo ago

[dead]

0xbrayo 11mo ago

34gb for a 5min short film, crazy. High fidelity though

ronsor 11mo ago
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.
- stavros 11mo ago
  Well, hopefully two.
- echelon 11mo ago
  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.
  - hamdingers 11mo ago
    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.
    - echelon 11mo ago
      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.

ysangkok 11mo ago

How do I play back the EBU STL subtitles on Linux? http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html?prefix=ElFuente/subtitles/ http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/ind...

Ndeshpande 11mo ago
Closed Caption Creator has a desktop version of Linux that can read EBU-STL files.

caseyf7 11mo ago

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.

floydnoel 11mo ago
Wouldn’t that be handled on your TV and/or streaming box? That’s how I control it, at least.
- caseyf7 11mo ago
  Unfortunately iPads also don’t allow you to turn off HDR
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - swiftcoder 11mo ago
    For a long time putting them in low power mode killed HDR, but it seems they patched that bug (feature)
ComputerGuru 11mo ago
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.
- assimpleaspossi 11mo ago
  I wish there was a rubber ducky like thing to give you as a fellow plasma TV user.
- Lord-Jobo 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

aurelien 11mo ago

[flagged]

dom96 11mo ago

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.

zaptheimpaler 11mo ago

Firefox refuses to open the download links with an error like: Blocked loading mixed active content “http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/?delimiter=/&prefix=SolLevante/ 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 :(

lrvick 11mo ago

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.

calt 11mo ago
Why buy Japanese bootlegs when webrips are on popular torrent sites?
- lrvick 11mo ago
  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.
  - reaperducer 11mo ago
    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?

swypych 11mo ago

no Big Buck Bunny...

nvarsj 11mo ago

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.

Tad_Waganag 11mo ago

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.