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Comment by mopenstein | Hacker News Reader

They do encode old content but also add the biggest and ugliest watermark in the lower third of the media advertising their website in everyone of the videos. Doesn't preservation usually mean not destroying the works with tacky advertisements that can't be removed without permanently altering the original content?

I consume (and share) a lot of old video and I don't see this as a big loss since you can't enjoy the original works as they were intended to be.

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Exactly my thoughts.

I had a look at the channel and wondered why there was no true archival version provided by either:

1. The channel org itself via "Internet Archive" and/or torrents.

2. The community. It is trivial to create archival copies of youtube channels and most rare true archival footage on youtube will be mirrored elsewhere, even if "illegally".

(1) does not exist and (2) is non existent either, no one considers these encodes valuable enough to preserve, which does seem odd considering it is unique data.

Load up the videos, and you see a giant watermark, thus destroying any archival usage.

No one will fight for this channnel, no one will bother mirroring it, because every encode is ruined and flawed.

If the channel/org has the originals, consider talking to Internet Archive

Oh come on... I read these comments and was thinking I'd see something ridiculously large--maybe even taking up a third of the video--not something that's only like a tenth the vertical space. Yes: it would be better to not have it, but a lot of TV stations had watermarks on TV shows at the time! This isn't that large, I can see through it, and the audio is (of course) fine.

The reason no one is mirroring these things isn't because of the watermarks: it is because all of this content was already just ephemera that most people consider trash in the first place. Hell: I care a lot about this stuff... but do I want to personally spend the money to carry it around forever? This is a lot of content that I will never personally watch much of. But is that because of the URL watermark? No.

(edit: Oh god... I started watching some of this stuff and realized it isn't just commercials but local Chicago news reporting on important historical topics and now I am in fact frantically archiving parts of the channel, though I am definitely doing so selectively; but like, they clearly themselves were uploading somewhat selectively, so the hit rate is higher than I had initially hoped even though it is still certainly a small fraction of the channel.)

It's not high art, I'll concede that point, but it has some value in its unaltered state. There's been countless times I was looking for something only to have my hopes dashed because it was being made available from this channel alone. I'll also concede I'm not the average consumer of entertainment. But if this stuff isn't for people like me, then who? If no one cares, why produce it all? If all it does is frustrate the people that do care, why produce it all?

Watermarks have their place, if you're the original creator, but to take works from others and slap your ad on it is pretty despicable (relatively).

Sure: I am not defending that they added the watermark, and agree that that sucks (and would even accept "despicable" as a good adjective to describe it)... I am merely defending that, if the only copy I have access to has a watermark, it has effectively zero impact on any use case I can fathom for the video.

The watermarks signify that these are trash, and the real copies are archived elsewhere. That’s why nobody is rushing to mirror them: it’s inconceivable that anyone would go to the trouble of making these and not preserve the non watermarked versions.

And are they going to upload it somewhere we can find it easily later? I dunno: I ended up hand selecting just over 200 of these videos that I'd be sad to not have access to later, and am downloading them (almost half of those are going to take me hours to finish) so I have a copy.

I do think that's a reasonable thing to do. Higher quality copies almost certainly exist but too much of digital archiving is fragile in the sense that someone might have taken all the precautions and... that single person might just pass away at some point.

You can archive from a GCP VM, then rsync the results. Way faster than trying to archive from a home connection, even at 1G.

It'd probably be best if it were a dedicate logo screen before the content. The content remains unaltered.

TV station watermarks are usually a lot less intrusive than this www.fuzzymemories.tv wordmark (URL-mark?), and logos are arguably timeless compared to URLs — this one seems to be dead already, says “External Error” when I visit.

To me, the TV station/network watermarks from the original broadcasts are actually part of the history.

Lmao. Okay, every channel mirroring it adds their own watermark in a different spot. 10 years later it had a dozen watermarks.

It's like you've not been on the internet...never seen an imgflip&ifunny&etc&etc branded meme?

Few people who upload old video to YouTube have any clue what they’re doing, and even without the watermark, these videos were most likely not archive-quality. It’s exceedingly rare to see all 60 fields per second preserved.

It's impossible by definition interlaced footage has to be de-interlaced to work on YouTube.

Not entirely - you could upload a 50/60 frames per second video where every other frame only has half of the lines. It would probably look terrible without the smoothing effect that a phosphorescent display offers, but it would accurately preserve the information to as high a level of precision as you design the recorder's ADC to measure.

So you deinterlace to 60fps with something at least yadif quality. Done and done.

>"I consume"

I prefer to watch (talking about video)> I mean those marketing vultures can call me whatever the fuck they want but I do not give a shit. I do not consume, I watch, read, eat, drink and so on.

Mod parent up!

Also the video still exists after watching it so it has not been consumed.

Though its corresponding anti-video in your mind is consumed when you watch it. As in, you can't watch it twice "for the first time", and the first time is always special.

"Consume" is a generic economic term that encompasses any use of a good or service.

I know that. And I understand when marketers use it in their business internally. When the person says I consume in relation to say watching a move as in this case, reading a book etc. it is different in my opinion.

Perhaps such a person has been consuming too much marketing speak.

I also feel a little sad whenever I hear somebody describe themselves as a content creator. They are giving in to the idea that their work exists just to sandwich ads around in somebody else’s CMS.

Actually I think if you put your comment and the parent comment together, you can see why they use that term. Because the alternative to the phrase “content creator”, for a single online person, might be: I am a YouTube video creator; an X tweet, photograph and video creator; an Instagram post, photo and video creator; also an ebook writer… obviously this gets unwieldy fast. “Content creator” conveniently covers it all. What I think using “read/write/record” misses, is that the format is not materially important.

I run a 1980s TV station in my house so I need large amounts of video. I have close to 9,000 individual 80s commercials that get reinserted back into 80s television shows. I don't think I've yet to see all 9,000 commercials but I have consumed them into my system.

Where can we find out more?

https://github.com/mopenstein/raspberry_pi_tv_station/tree/m...

I've released the project on GitHub but by doing so I am not implying it's good or worthy of others use. Maybe it will inspire smarter people to make something better.

But it works perfectly for me and my situation.

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