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Comment by twoodfin | Hacker News Reader

This is why sometimes some music is replaced or a scene with a particular guest actor is cut from the streaming version of an old show.

I’m aware of, for example, the unfortunate theme song switch for Dawson’s Creek, but I haven’t heard about particular actors being cut from streaming releases. Any notable examples in mind?

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One show I loved from the 2000s the US version of Queer As Folk. I have been unable to find an HD version with the original soundtrack, which to me is 100% critical to the show. you can stream in HD online but the replacement 'music' completely ruins it for me. I've always wanted to spend the time to dupe my SD tivo audio copy with HD video!

I used to rewrite music like this. Always tried my best to do a good job and target the same emotional intent as the original score, but there was a lot of music to write on a tiny fraction of a “real” budget.

Same thing happened bringing Daria to DVD. The soundtrack was a big part of the show and MTV had access to whatever music they wanted so regardless of how long it took to write/animate an episode when the show aired you might hear a song that had just been released. Trying to secure the rights to all those songs decades later was impossible so they replaced nearly all of it with generic music. It's just not the same. The creators know it, and the DVD actually shipped with an explanation and apology.

if the runtimes and all that are the same, it wouldn't be difficult or very time consuming to do this with FFMPEG or even MKVTOOLNIX.

I'm obsessed with commentary tracks for movies and television -- and rarely does one copy have everything in one realistic-to-archive file size. Typically the offset between the two sources will be identical (assuming their respective sources are also consistent), which makes the entire process a breeze.

For years, the only legal copies of Married... with Children had the theme song (Sinatra's Love and Marriage) replaced with a soundalike. Luckily, between 2013 and 2015, Mill Creek Entertainment obtained the rights to rerelease the show on DVD and were able to restore the original music.

WKRP in Cincinnati got hit hard though. Still not sure if it's even possible to watch in it's original form, unless you find some old VHS captures from it's early syndication days.

Or not having Teardrop as the theme song for House.

Nothing notable. I don't even remember the exact scene, I just remember it happened.

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