Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway_ab | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.)

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'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.

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com