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World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

torrentfreak.com

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Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with some color correction and other odds and ends. So they removed Luca's artistic touches and replaced them with their own?

No, the goal is to remove Lucas' artistic touches and get as close as possible to the original theatrical releases. Color correction means reversing all the color changes that Lucas made to the movies. Where higher quality film of a scene exists, they splice it in. Etc. If you google a bit you can find a detailed explanation of the changes.

Ok, the way it was worded it sounded like the color corrections were embellishment and not restoration.

Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

#52
post #12
post #8

I'd be interested to learn about the software that created the ASCII version of the movie. Is there a simple way to do this, or would they have made something custom?

aalib + mplayer would be my guess.

I remember reading about it back in the day, it was aalib and mplayer, but the conversion was done frame by frame with a patched version of aaview. Here's the write-up of how it was done: https://web.archive.org/web/20150311033450/http://onyx.chatt...

Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

#53
post #19

Slightly off topic, but I find the fascination with ASCII-arting things interesting. I grew up in the days of 2400 baud modems and even ran a BBS briefly. At the time, ASCII art was the only thing you could do to differentiate yourself. Nowadays I suppose it's a combination of nostalgia and ease of transferring since pretty much every system ever has a way of reading ASCII. But I wonder how long the trend will last -…

When I read Twitter was going to allow longer tweets, my first thought was "ASCII art". Unfortunately, I don't think you can force a fixed-width font in Twitter clients.

(Unicode has a full-worth alphabet, but that is a bit limiting. On the other hand, that may be in the spirit of ASCII art)

Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

#54

I really like the idea of torrents being used to distribute anonymous derivative works of copyrighted media. I recently created a fan edit of "Star Wars: Episode II - The Phantom Menace" for my dad for Christmas. I removed Jar Jar Binks and the entire Gungan subplot. I tried to keep the edits as subtle as possible, and I learned a lot about the editing techniques and transitions used in the film. I wanted to release…

I was shocked when I discovered that if you just removed every scene with Jar Jar + pod race, the movie REALLY tightened up. Not because Jar Jar is offensive/stupid, but because a lot of of the pacing and tension are thrown off. It's like he was added into an existing decent script, with minimal effort made to integrate the new parts. (No idea if that's true, but that's how it feels)

I watched Ep 1 again recently and IMHO Anikin is the worst part, not Jar Jar. Most of Jar Jar's scenes are blissfully short and at least the kids enjoy slapstick. Anikin entertains nobody, and he's critical to the plot.

And he destroyed the enemy force by accident.

Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did I not know that existed? I named mine "The Gungan Minus". We watched it together on Christmas Eve.

There's a bunch of Phantom Edits; the name's been reused several times. The one I watched was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9LEhOZZbuk All three prequel movies edited down into a single 2-hour film. And you know what? It's actually... still not what you'd call good. But it's embarrassingly better than the originals. But there are others, like the Phantom Re-edit, which tries to improve on characters like Jar…

Could someone do this for Transformers? Not for the Bots, for the Humans. Dub Japanese or German in there and subtitle it. 1000% better movie.

Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

#57

I really like the idea of torrents being used to distribute anonymous derivative works of copyrighted media. I recently created a fan edit of "Star Wars: Episode II - The Phantom Menace" for my dad for Christmas. I removed Jar Jar Binks and the entire Gungan subplot. I tried to keep the edits as subtle as possible, and I learned a lot about the editing techniques and transitions used in the film. I wanted to release…

"I really like the idea of torrents being used to distribute anonymous derivative works of copyrighted media."

This reminds me of fan-provided (third party) commentary tracks.

Are those still a thing ? When I first heard of this, many years ago, I was very excited about the idea of seeing interesting films with interesting background/commentary/metadata provided by well-informed commentators.

Did that ever go anywhere ? Do people still do that ? Any golden examples of this kind of work that I should look into ?

Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

#58
post #57

I really like the idea of torrents being used to distribute anonymous derivative works of copyrighted media. I recently created a fan edit of "Star Wars: Episode II - The Phantom Menace" for my dad for Christmas. I removed Jar Jar Binks and the entire Gungan subplot. I tried to keep the edits as subtle as possible, and I learned a lot about the editing techniques and transitions used in the film. I wanted to release…

"I really like the idea of torrents being used to distribute anonymous derivative works of copyrighted media." This reminds me of fan-provided (third party) commentary tracks. Are those still a thing ? When I first heard of this, many years ago, I was very excited about the idea of seeing interesting films with interesting background/commentary/metadata provided by well-informed commentators. Did that ever go anywher…

There is RiffTrax: http://www.rifftrax.com/

Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

#59
post #38

I really like the idea of torrents being used to distribute anonymous derivative works of copyrighted media. I recently created a fan edit of "Star Wars: Episode II - The Phantom Menace" for my dad for Christmas. I removed Jar Jar Binks and the entire Gungan subplot. I tried to keep the edits as subtle as possible, and I learned a lot about the editing techniques and transitions used in the film. I wanted to release…

You should probably also know about the "Despecialized" editions of the original trilogy which removes the CGI crap and restores the original movies (more or less) as they were, with some color correction and other odds and ends.

And Han Solo shoots first!

Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

#60
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bunch of Phantom Edits; the name's been reused several times. The one I watched was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9LEhOZZbuk All three prequel movies edited down into a single 2-hour film. And you know what? It's actually... still not what you'd call good. But it's embarrassingly better than the originals. But there are others, like the Phantom Re-edit, which tries to improve on characters like Jar…

Could someone do this for Transformers? Not for the Bots, for the Humans. Dub Japanese or German in there and subtitle it. 1000% better movie.

One of the most surreal experiences of my life was watching one of the old Godzilla films, dubbed into fluent Australian.
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