Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

torrentfreak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 114 posts

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

#61

Post by sawwit »

david-given wrote: post #48
deckar01 wrote: post #37

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…

How come this is still on YouTube? Isn't this copyright infringement?

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

#62

Post by asveikau »

iDemonix wrote: post #15
projct wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ffmpeg can output ascii videos

Whilst this statement is true, the torrent predates the earliest versions of ffmpeg, so it wouldn't have been what was used (which was what the OP was asking).

I remember using this program in 2001:

http://linux.die.net/man/1/ttv

aalib + video4linux = TV tuner outputting as ASCII.

[Shockingly I actually used this for a useful purpose - I had a messed up graphics card that couldn't run X stably due to machine lockups, but Linux console worked fine - so I used this to watch TV. I was a teenager at the time so it was a while before I replaced it.]

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

#63

Post by stordoff »

rsync wrote: post #57
deckar01 wrote: post #34

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…

Giant Bomb have been dabbling with this in their "Film & 40s" podcasts (more for entertainments sake than being well-informed though).

For anyone with a GB Premium account, links are:

Rocky IV - http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/film-40s-rocky-iv/1600-115...

Hunt for Red October - http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/film-and-40s-the-hunt-for-...

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

#64

Post by CWuestefeld »

dudurocha wrote: post #36
deckar01 wrote: post #34

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 can send to him "The Phatom Edit" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Edit . It is already widespread all over the internet (even in youtube) and has the same objetive of your edition (Jar Jar binks is gone as well).

Another movie I'd love to see something like this for is Fast Times at Ridgemont High. There exists a TV-friendly cut that removes all nudity, and inserts a couple of extra scenes (like Spicoli in the boys' room bragging to his stoner buds about what he's going to do to Mr. Hand). I'd love an edit that starts with the R-rated release, and adds in the extra TV-friendly footage.

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

#65

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

jedberg wrote: 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 -…

It still has a use. I occasionally put figlet text into project headers that are likely to end up copied around to other codebases. That makes it more obvious that the file in question comes from an outside source.

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

#66

Post by MikeNomad »

MarkSweep wrote: post #58
rsync wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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/

Wasn't that originally MST3K?

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

#67

Post by sixothree »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #64
dudurocha wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can send to him "The Phatom Edit" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Edit . It is already widespread all over the internet (even in youtube) and has the same objetive of your edition (Jar Jar binks is gone as well).

Another movie I'd love to see something like this for is Fast Times at Ridgemont High . There exists a TV-friendly cut that removes all nudity, and inserts a couple of extra scenes (like Spicoli in the boys' room bragging to his stoner buds about what he's going to do to Mr. Hand). I'd love an edit that starts with the R-rated release, and adds in the extra TV-friendly footage.

I'd like Breakfast at Tiffany's without the racism.

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

#68

Post by cesarb »

Speaking of fan-made and Matrix, a long time ago there was a fan-made film in the Matrix universe called The Fanimatrix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fanimatrix). Around a decade ago, I downloaded it through BitTorrent. Then a few years ago, I found it in my old files, still next to its original torrent file. Ever since then, I seed it on and off, in the vain hope that anyone knows it exists, has its torrent file (or magnet link), and wants to get a copy of the full file.

If somehow this torrent becomes live again, it's even older than the Matrix ASCII mentioned in this article, by a few months.

  Name: The-Fanimatrix-(DivX-5.1-HQ).avi
  Hash: 72c83366e95dd44cc85f26198ecc55f0f4576ad4
  Created by: 
  Created on: Sat Sep 27 23:08:42 2003
  Piece Count: 516
  Piece Size: 256.0 KiB
  Total Size: 135.0 MB
  Privacy: Public torrent

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

#69

Post by ergothus »

Pxtl wrote: post #54
ergothus wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't argue about any of that - I just found that Jar Jar was STRUCTURALLY problematic, not plot problematic.

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

#70

Post by j3097736 »

liotier wrote: post #50
petra wrote: post #2

Actually torrents are pretty bad for storing "rare" files. Maybe someone should offer a fix.

In the good old days of using (Napster|Audiogalaxy|Gnutella) I could point the file-sharing application to my collection and presto - it was all shared and available to whoever was interested. Nowadays, I just share whatever torrent I have participated in lately, plus a few that seem popular but rare (those most uploaded from my client) - but I have a whole lot of rather rare music that I fail to share for lack of a…

eMule and derivated have the .emulecollection format, which is just a binary file grouping together multiple ed2k links to files.

As for the network eMule/KAD seems do be doing ok with 200K+ peers while Gnutella nowadays seems to be populated mostly by slightly-compatible chinese clients, which bootstrap from traditional gnutella but are incompatible.

Post reply on HN