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Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

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Re: Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

#31

Post by mindslight »

serf wrote: post #26
mindslight wrote: post #24

Why would I want to mess with using a web browser for video in my living room, probably getting hassled over its (lack of) digital restrictions management lockdown, signing into a Google account with all of the surveillance pwnage that implies, ads (including ads for senile political ragebait) plastered all over my experience, while becoming dependent on a UI that can change at any time, likely to demand money? Youtu…

okay, then be happy there will be some new injected life into the fandom or re-read the release as "B5 now available for download via YT-DLP for free!"

Sure, there is value to corporate top-down synchronization telling everyone to focus on a specific piece of media at the same time. I wasn't really complaining about that. In fact it would be interesting if we could recreate the effect some way in a more distributed culture.

But no, in my experience yt-dlp no longer just works unless you make your identity legible to Google (eg naive residential IP or supplying a logged-in session cookie).

Re: Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

#32

Post by WorldMaker »

jefc1111 wrote: post #10
account42 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that disclaimer really needed? As someone who watched the series the first time last year, the acting and humor seem fine for TV honestly. The CGI dated of course but not offensive either. If anything I found the later seasons more disappointing than 1 and 2 as smaller scale stories are replaced with moving the big plot forward, which still feels rushed somehow.

The disclaimer is just based on my own opinion, so inevitably there will be people to whom it does not apply. Some of the acting in season 1 is great, I would just say there are some spots where it kinda briefly falls through the floor. It may be just because I have seen it several times so am spotting things that I wouldn't have first time round. With season 4, I believe what happened is that towards the start of pr…

Yeah, Season 4 is acknowledged for compressing a lot of the story that would have been Season 5 in the original plan. The series finale ("Sleeping in Light") was even shot as a part of Season 4 and delayed once Season 5 was picked up to keep it the series finale. The epilogue it tells spins out enough past the show that it mostly isn't that noticeable, but the big tell is a brief appearance of Ivanova rather than Lochley, which doesn't really break the episode because of the out-of-order storytelling of the whole episode and the glimpses of the crew are "timeless" flashbacks, but it is interesting.

Re: Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

#33

Post by krapp »

kouteiheika wrote: post #17

I would give my left kidney for either a continuation or a reboot of Babylon 5 under the helm of J. Michael Straczynski with full creative freedom. Or hell, even an entirely different show. In my opinion he's one of the few people in the industry who actually knows how to skillfully write a coherent TV show. And by that I mean: he actually pre-planned the story (spanning multiple seasons!) of B5 right from the beginn…

>I would give my left kidney for either a continuation or a reboot of Babylon 5 under the helm of J. Michael Straczynski with full creative freedom.

I don't know. I loved Babylon 5 but I also found it kind of corny. And then Crusade was just a D&D campaign in space. The ship was even called the Excalibur FFS. I feel like "full creative freedom" would ruin it the way it did with George Lucas and Star Wars.

>and I wish more writers/showrunners would adopt this approach (instead of the usual writers' room + only plan until the end of the season approach which is so common today.

What else can you do when you don't know if you're getting renewed? You can't push the conclusions to your storylines forward into seasons you might never even have to resolve them.

Re: Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

#34

Post by WorldMaker »

kouteiheika wrote: post #17

I would give my left kidney for either a continuation or a reboot of Babylon 5 under the helm of J. Michael Straczynski with full creative freedom. Or hell, even an entirely different show. In my opinion he's one of the few people in the industry who actually knows how to skillfully write a coherent TV show. And by that I mean: he actually pre-planned the story (spanning multiple seasons!) of B5 right from the beginn…

The CW picked up a Babylon 5 reboot "recently", but it seems like it got trapped in development hell and caught in the cross-fires of the ugly WB-CBS divorce of The CW and the ugly merger of WB and Discovery and what is shaping up to be an ugly divorce of WB and Discovery.

Re: Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

#35

Post by em-bee »

kouteiheika wrote: post #17

I would give my left kidney for either a continuation or a reboot of Babylon 5 under the helm of J. Michael Straczynski with full creative freedom. Or hell, even an entirely different show. In my opinion he's one of the few people in the industry who actually knows how to skillfully write a coherent TV show. And by that I mean: he actually pre-planned the story (spanning multiple seasons!) of B5 right from the beginn…

you are right about straczynski, but i'd prefer to see a new scifi series by him rather than a reboot or continuation. ok, a spin off maybe. jeremiah was pretty good. (i haven't seen sense8)

but i just see that he was approached to direct star trek: enterprise. star trek by straczynski is something i'd really love to see.

Re: Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

#36

Post by jefc1111 »

jeffwask wrote: post #25
stuxnet79 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a DS9 fan myself I felt like B5 was the better show. DS9 had greater variance throughout its run, the standout episodes were phenomenal but also lots of weak episodes & filler. If there was tighter editorial control over the episodes & at least 30% of them got cut then it could be a contender.

I probably agree but my emotional attachment to DS9 keeps it in front. It's also crazy how relevant to modern times the plot of B5 is and how many parallels you see.

I hear this a lot about B5, and I get a _sense_ of it myself, but I'd love to know what people specifically mean. I.e. "X plot line is like Y thing" in real life right now.

Re: Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

#37

Post by WorldMaker »

Apocryphon wrote: post #16
account42 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only the live action shots were recorded with a wide aspect ratio, and perhaps not even that for the pilot. The CGI was rendered in 4:3 and the final cuts including transitions and VFX where composited in 4:3. The remaster combines cropped 4:3 but high resolution scans of the original live action footage with (sometimes badly) upscaled versions of CGI and VFX'd shots -- except for the pilot which is fully upscaled an…

So just what is the optimal way to watch this show

There sadly isn't one. The 4:3 Blu-Ray remasters are about as good as it gets in visual quality, but there's a "cinematic" feel lost from the 16:9 DVDs, but the quality difference is noticeable and unfavorable. It's a bit of a dealer's choice at this point if you want "best available quality" or "best available widescreen."

Babylon 5 was filmed at a weird moment where they were prescient about HD TV and the coming widescreen home television boom and planned for/shot for 16:9 releases, but also had to shoot and composite first and foremost for 4:3 to meet TVs where they were. They had even had plans to preserve the special FX masters to make it easier to recomposite the show. WB's Archives team lost those files at some point. (The general story is WB Archives sent a copy of the masters to Vivendi [Sierra, proto-Activision Blizzard] for the eventually cancelled videogame and discovered they sent the original copy by accident only after Vivendi claimed to have wiped their copy out of respect for the contract terms when the game was cancelled.)

Re: Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

#38

Post by jeffwask »

jefc1111 wrote: post #36
jeffwask wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably agree but my emotional attachment to DS9 keeps it in front. It's also crazy how relevant to modern times the plot of B5 is and how many parallels you see.

I hear this a lot about B5, and I get a _sense_ of it myself, but I'd love to know what people specifically mean. I.e. "X plot line is like Y thing" in real life right now.

It's fascism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imMGchI1EWY

Re: Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

#39

Post by lantastic »

t312227 wrote: post #14

hello, as always: imho. (!) ah ... babylon 5 :)) this was one of the best scifi shows back in the mid 1990ties. it introduced a lot things which we take for granted today ... together with startrek "deep space nine" which roughly aired during the same time: * telling a "story arch" over multiple seasons * 2 parallel story-lines within episodes * causally show people doing "every-day" life things, like going to the to…

> if i remember it correctly: they used a software called "lightroom"

Afaict, it was Lightwave3d, that I just learned still lives to this day. Last release June 11 2025. Also used to make SeaQuest :) Oh, the memories...

Re: Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

#40

Post by t312227 »

lantastic wrote: post #39
t312227 wrote: post #14

hello, as always: imho. (!) ah ... babylon 5 :)) this was one of the best scifi shows back in the mid 1990ties. it introduced a lot things which we take for granted today ... together with startrek "deep space nine" which roughly aired during the same time: * telling a "story arch" over multiple seasons * 2 parallel story-lines within episodes * causally show people doing "every-day" life things, like going to the to…

> if i remember it correctly: they used a software called "lightroom" Afaict, it was Lightwave3d, that I just learned still lives to this day. Last release June 11 2025. Also used to make SeaQuest :) Oh, the memories...

yes, you are right ... its been a few years :))
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