The Computer Chronicles – Microchip Technology (1983) [video] | Hacker News Reader

The Computer Chronicles – Microchip Technology (1983) [video]

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The creator and presenter of Computer Chronicles, Stewart Cheifet, donated his personal copy of every single episode of the show to the Internet Archive. It was one of the first, if not the first, video content to be archived there.

https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles

And we must thank him for this, for it is an invaluable history of the rise of information technology. It ran weekly from 1983 to 2002, documenting the remarkable technological (and often social) change in that time.

Side note: It is remarkable that the first few years were co-presented by Gary Kildall, creator of CP/M and founder of Digital Research. He had no presenting experience at all, but still agreed to join the show to provide a more technical perspective.

I wish the Archive would provide an easier way of getting their Chronicles archive. They offer the show in a seemingly uncompressed MPEG-2 format, roughly 2GB/episode.

Every file IN the archive is available as a Torrent file, which pulls from the Archive's own mirrors as well as other users

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way of bulk-downloading the torrent files for import. If you try to grab the Chronicles as a "collection" using the "IA" downloader, it only offers the MPEG-2 version

I assume the IA downloader was designed for HTML and the like, it seems to be capped at roughly 150KB/s on downloading. Which is fine for old websites. But the Chronicles (after downloading for literally weeks) sits at a hefty 645GB!

If I were to re-encode it to H.265 and put it up as a single unified "collection" torrent, would this be something others may be interested in downloading? It would likely be around 100GB then (or possibly less)

I’ve been down this road, re-encoding is always lossy, you’ll end up with smaller files with no “noticeable” compression artifacts, but the original MPEG2 will still be of superior quality.

This is true and is probably why IA doesn't re-encode them. However, if you just want your own personal copy to re-watch them I don't think this is really that big of a problem. Ideally IA would keep the originals for archival purposes and make re-encoded versions available as well, but I expect they don't because they have limited resources.

A few weeks ago I bulk downloaded every single MPEG-2 file and transcoded them all into deinterlaced h264/aac files.

If anyone has any suggestions as to how to re-share these converted versions in bulk, I'd be very happy to.

A torrent upload would probably be the easiest bet. That was my plan for an H.265 version, though it'll take a few days to encode it all

Indeed, I rented a high-CPU DigitalOcean VPS to do it.

I would like this. Especially if you can get the filenames mangled into Plex-friendly form. Willing to seed out of 55 Marietta.

Many fond memories of watching these shows as a kid during the 80s on Channel 60.

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