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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

#271

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 watched all of TNG, Voyager and DS9. To me DS9 will always be behind the other ST series. I felt like it was a bit too much of the social stuff, maybe because it plays mostly on a station instead of an exploration vessel, but I guess that is exactly what people like about it. The characters and their development and so on. I liked the Garak character for example, but disliked Zisko being some chosen one for the wor…

>it was a bit too much of the social stuff

Because clearly none of the other series focused on social stuff, except...

TOS, which featured an interracial cast (and kiss) in the 1960s, where nearly every episode was thinly-veiled commentary on communism, where they visited a literal Nazi planet, where they had a black woman as a bridge officer (in the 1960s)...

TNG, which went into deep moral arcs, looked into military tribunals, witch hunts, had entire movies about mindless bloodlust and environmentalism/colonianism, and so much more...

VOY which.....honestly, if you don't get the point by now I'm not going to spend more time listing examples.

Star Trek was BORN "woke" and has always been there, and anyone who claims otherwise was never really paying attention. Star Trek EXISTS because Gene Roddenberry put social commentary into his show "The Lieutenant" which was too controversial for the actual US Military so he had to make a new show set in the future to make all the same points but with less oversight from crusty generals.

Re: Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

#272
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would I want to mess with using a web browser for video in my living room No need for all that. Just use yt-dlp ( https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp ) to download them as video files, and then just play the video files as you would any other video file. Just tested yt-dlp on s1e1 to verify it worked, and it worked perfectly to download the video.

Nope. > ERROR: [youtube] Y235YEQstLo: Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot. Use --cookies-from-browser or --cookies for the authentication. See https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/FAQ#how-do-i-pass-cook... for how to manually pass cookies. Also see https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/Extractors#exporting-y... for tips on effectively exporting YouTube cookies That's the latest version of yt-dlp, just downloaded. I…

Interesting, that's not my experience at all. So they are doing something different for you and/or your IP address vs. mine.

Re: Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

#273

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.

I thought that project got turned into the animated film that got released not too long back? I got the impression JMS was done with B5 after he went back to focusing on comics again with his run on Captain America.

Re: Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Blu-ray collection appears to be available for about $100. It saddens me that people aren't willing to pay a pittance in cash (about $1 an hour) for entertainment. They're willing to spend their time, but not their money. This isn't just buying a 100 episode box set, it applies to people complaining "I'd have to spend $10 on $streaming_service to watch that 5 hour miniseries, that's terrible" too.

I'd be delighted to spend that for a Blu-ray of the series but I'm afraid of getting the mangled version that they released on DVD. For background, JMS knew the widescreen transition was coming so filmed everything in 16:9. As he put it at the time, it didn't really cost more, you just had to pay more attention to lighting at the wings. All CGI was done in 4:3 because it was thought to be easy to rerender in the futu…

The CGI was preserved well enough for the fans who got access to some of it to re-render it in HD and upload to YouTube [0]. If WB cared even a little, fully CGI-rendered scenes could have been remastered relatively easily. The only scenes that are truly un-recoverable without redoing from scratch are those composited ones.

But like the others said, the BDs are fine, by far the best the series has ever looked, even if the difference between the crisp live action and the blurry upscaled CGI is rather jarring.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlDaygRhrg8

Re: Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

#275
post #22
post #6

If you decide to watch Babylon 5 for the first time, I suggest giving it a chance to get under your skin. There is quite a lot to get in the way of that such as mediocre acting, cringey humour, low budget fx (all particularly prominent in season 1). But the pay off in seasons 3 and 4 is huge if you take the time to let affection grow for the characters. Babylon 5 was my first 'favourite series' that 'changed my life'…

Low budget? I seem to remember it was lauded (but made on Amigas, if I'm not mistaken) I sure loved it, at least on my crappy 21" tv

One issue w/sci fi is that sci fi takes place in the future and/or has advanced technology then it is more likely to look dated than a typical sitcom where the sets are offices and living rooms.

Re: Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

#276
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised. "Hacker" doesn't mean what it once did, and the spirit of the old hacker culture is all but dead here.

The "hacker" here is a soulless techbro willing to sell more parts to make a buck. Of course, since he has no more parts of his own, he sells yours. Naturally, theres no permission.

You're going to get flagged to death for saying that. Only lassie faire libertarianism is allowed here. Libertarianism is apolitical you see

Re: Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

#277
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. > ERROR: [youtube] Y235YEQstLo: Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot. Use --cookies-from-browser or --cookies for the authentication. See https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/FAQ#how-do-i-pass-cook... for how to manually pass cookies. Also see https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/Extractors#exporting-y... for tips on effectively exporting YouTube cookies That's the latest version of yt-dlp, just downloaded. I…

Interesting, that's not my experience at all. So they are doing something different for you and/or your IP address vs. mine.

For sure, this is why my original comment said "make your identity legible to Google". They're apparently happy enough with the identity signal of your specific IP, but they most certainly no longer allow general anonymous access. Reddit has not been generally publicly accessible for quite some time, and imgur even longer. Reddit at least still seems to work through TOR (no idea about imgur or Youtube).

The "AI" bot scare has really kicked the surveillance lockdown into overdrive. These days I get hassled merely trying to browse online stores. Like their goal is to advertise and sell things - yet they somehow care if it's "to a bot" ? rolls eyes.

Re: Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

#278
We quote Babylon 5 on an approximately daily basis in this house. Definitely my favorite sci fi series. Well, that and Firefly. B5 won not one, but two Hugos, which were highly deserved.

Whenever I get the itch to watch the whole thing again but I don't want to spend the time, I watch this (which is so thick with spoilers that you shouldn't watch it unless you've seen the series so many times that the Vorlons make sense now). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHpMAubwfQg

Re: Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

#279
post #53

It's great that they are releasing these episodes on YouTube. But what a lot of OG fans would love even more is a proper remaster of some of the classics. Unfortunately the lukewarm response to the TNG remaster proved to media companies that such undertakings are not worth the effort. But I wonder if the advent of AI tools has made remasters more economical. I do know there is an ongoing effort by fans to remaster VO…

There's an AI upscale of ds9 in torrent land. Looks pretty good other than certain scenes.

It was never about the graphics though, at least for me. As long as the writing, the stories, the acting, and so on was stellar, I don't mind how it looks (to an extent).

That said, I found the DS9 upscaled you talked about on a torrent site now, and I'll give it a shot.

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