| ▲ | cosmic_cheese 3 hours ago |
| I've only barely skimmed the surface of the preservation world, but the irreverent attitude taken by the industry towards audiovisual media releases frustrates me greatly. That more accurate older releases are made unobtainable in favor of newer botched versions just adds insult to injury. I'm grateful that diminishing returns were hit earlier with audio, though, which limits the blast radius for music releases. Most classic albums have a range of different masterings available on audio CD, many of which are available cheaply secondhand, which makes getting ahold of a good/accurate release considerably less daunting. Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got. |
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| ▲ | haunter 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got. TV shows are even worse because of the soundtrack. Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music Even video games are not exempt from that. GTA games has tons of music removed from the radios with later digital re-releases so currently the original console disc versions are the only way to play the games as they were released back then https://www.reddit.com/r/GTATrilogy/comments/1gsqdc5/what_so... |
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| ▲ | Xirdus 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This isn't even the worst outcome. There are hundreds of video games that are never re-released at all and have never been available for sale digitally, entirely because of soundtrack licensing. | | |
| ▲ | throwaway219450 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | There is a similar case with Top Gear. Aside from the popularity of Clarkson/May/Hammond and the fantastic cinematography, the show had great editors with an ear for soundtracks. Unfortunately it seems a lot of the tracks were only licensed for broadcast TV and the DVDs have some stock music where the rights were no longer available. There are also some gags which don't work any more because the audio doesn't make sense. I believe the only place you can watch them as originally produced is iPlayer, but at least the BBC has copies somewhere. | |
| ▲ | RunSet 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > the worst outcome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniracers#Lawsuit | |
| ▲ | mahboi 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Or 007 GoldenEye where Microsoft for some reason bought the rights only to throw them into a paper shredder |
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| ▲ | AbsurdCensor 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music Even slightly more modern shows I think have had that happen as well. The Drew Carry show would have been a great example. | | |
| ▲ | xp84 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Yup. Daria is one of the most tragic ones, given how it was an MTV show and thus featured music iconic to the era and familiar to the audience. Replaced with muzak in the DVD releases, and a bunch of pirates have cobbled together best-effort mash-ups based on audio from TV rips, which sometimes were of very low quality, but for some episodes, all that had survived in the piracy scene was like, a RealVideo file with a 64kbps audio stream. | |
| ▲ | sillyfluke an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Can someone give me more examples? I didn't realize this was a thing and am kind of facinated. | | |
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| ▲ | cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah, I'm in agreement with the blog post in that I don't advocate for dismantling of copyright, but there are absurdities within the system like this that are in dire need of attention. | | |
| ▲ | mopsi an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Shortening of copyright would fix many of these issues. Games and movies make almost all of their lifetime earnings in the first few years, and the dribble that's left afterwards is less important than preservation and public access. It's very hard to justify copyright in 2026 over music used in a 1980s TV show. Shows were aired once or twice (summer reruns), with additional syndication runs for particularly popular shows, and that was it. Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later. Copyright has grown absurdly out of proportion of the economic reality for which these works were originally produced. | | |
| ▲ | xp84 38 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later. Probably? But to devil's advocate here, I grew up watching reruns in 1990 from the 1950s on Nick at Nite or UHF stations. You could make a case that not only the actors but bands who allowed music to be used would deserve residuals, and with reruns that worked fine. The format change from TV to DVD and then to Streaming is what blew it all up. Home video releases of whole series weren't envisioned until basically the 2000s. Most TV shows that did have releases on video would just pick a couple good episodes at a time, and sell those. A reasonable job to track down a half-dozen rights holders, and if you couldn't find them or get the rights, I assume they'd just pick a different episode. The way the original terms were negotiated, the rights were just licensed specifically "for television" because that seemed like all that was needed, and the amount of work to locate each rightsholder to renegotiate is just astronomical. Thankfully now every show is making sure to get rights for streaming (and physical media... Right? Right?) but it's a shame what happened to everything from the 1970s-1990s. Only piracy can save us. |
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| ▲ | mahboi 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Honestly I think it's fine. If corps are going to make poor decisions with their IP, oh well, their choice and their loss. There's plenty to go around. |
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| ▲ | LostMyWords 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Video games sign terrible licenses even for their most core parts. Many of the millions selling Forza games disappeared from the digital stores because they couldn't use the cars anymore.[0]
It's almost unbelievable since cars and their makers are actually getting a big marketing push from those games, but studios cannot get better conditions. [0] https://kotaku.com/forza-horizon-4-delisted-xbox-licensing-1... | |
| ▲ | mahboi 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah I bought GTA IV and still pirated it. As a bonus, don't have to launch that Steam shit every time I want to play it. |
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| ▲ | Namahanna 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Movies especially with re-releases. Star Wars with Lucas tinkering and blocking old copies. But we have this - https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/ "97% of project 4K77 is from a single, original 1977 35mm Technicolor release print, scanned at full 4K, cleaned at 4K, and rendered at 4K." Opening scene comparison - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1b47UP6ZGI |
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| ▲ | jgord 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | to my eye there is quite a difference .. in favor of the 4K77 remaster ! |
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| ▲ | opello 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got. Star Trek: TNG was a bit of a special case though, because it had to be re-cut and new digital special effects created and edited into scenes. I think this perspective holds more true for things that were broadcast in HD but only got commercial DVD releases. That's a disappointing lapse in high quality availability where HD content was distributed, just not in a persistent form for home use. In those cases the best quality available is an HD TV or satellite recording which might not have been preserved even in online media sharing communities. |
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| ▲ | juiceland 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got. Don’t get your hopes up. That release is very special. It happened at just the right time: discs were still selling and streaming had not yet taken over. There is simply not sufficient market for such restorations any longer. They probably didn’t make back the cost of the remaster. |
