Netflix Open Content
opencontent.netflix.com
opencontent.netflix.com
Having the raw EXR sequences and the IMF packages for Sol Levante and Meridian means researchers can finally benchmark AV1 vs HEVC vs VVC using source material that actually has the dynamic range to show the differences. The fact that they included the Dolby vision metadata is the cherry on top.
Anyone can freely license a work to the public, and copyright holders were doing that long before modern computers were invented.
“Open source” (other than, say, in the context of open water sources or intelligence or journalistic sources, where it was rarely used) as a descriptive term did not enter the common lexicon until 1998 and that was specifically to refer to software source code.
https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source...
The only real way to avoid leaking specific urls from the source page to the arbitrary other server is to have an intermediary redirect like this.
All the big products put an intermediary for that reason, though many of them make it a user visible page of that says "you are leaving our product" versus Google mostly does it as an immediate redirect.
The copy/paste behavior is mostly an unfortunate side effect and not a deliberate feature of it.
Also, isn't this what Referrer-Policy is for? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
> All the big products put an intermediary for that reason
Surely whoever maintains the big products can add headers if they want?
And this is about people who care enough about not showing up in Referer headers to do something about it rather than people in general not understanding the full spec .
Not sure if the reliability of the intentional mechanism has improved enough where this is just legacy or if there's entirely new reasons for it in 2026.
I feel like it's the same for Google My Maps. They even discontinued the Android app, so you can only use it on the web. It totally feels like there's a single guy keeping the whole system up.
Why? Because I had it for 20+ years, and I still didn't find an easy way to automatically migrate it to WordPress.
GP speaks wisdom.
(Or earlier? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801075)
You will be hard pressed to find a blu-ray or dvd release of any netflix show in the US.
As someone that enjoys having a physical offline media collection, and who does not want to support netflix, I am often forced to buy japanese copies or bootleg copies of netflix shows whereas I can buy legitimate US copies from virtually all other studios.
Even hits like K-Pop demon hunters, netflix has forbidden physical purchase or ownership, so piracy is the only option for those who are not netflix customers or want to watch offline on a blu-ray player on an airplane.
There are piles of obscure things for which physical (sometimes bootleg) media exists but no seeders.
For example the mexican hacking drama Control Z, I found 0 complete rips even on private trackers, but I did find some nice blu ray bootlegs with cases and cover art.
Even with blu-ray rips in hand, burning a disk myself and putting it into a nice recognizable case that fits in my blu ray wall cases is a pain in the ass and I would rather pay someone else for this service.
Plus it makes it way easier to hand select shows to hand a kid to play in a portable media player, and avoids the need to give them unrestricted alone time with an internet capable device.
I prefer official copies but if the studios do not allow them and thus do not want my money then bootlegs it is.
You're on a site called Hacker News, and don't know how to burn a video file to DVD?
If I were worried about longevity, I would not personally rely on a bunch of DVDs I burned.
So load the files onto hard drives as a backup. That's what I do.
It doesn't seem like you're looking for a solution, just a method to hear yourself complain.
It seems like your intent here was just to be condescending and rude.
Knowing how, and being willing to do it for piles of titles and make cases that are nice to display and browse in the real world alongside mass produced copies, takes a lot of effort and I have better things to do with my limited time.
As is tracking down very rare titles in blu ray quality. Often easier to just buy the most decent cased copies I can and rip for long term storage.
Unlike netflix/YouTube its not immediately clear to me which Organisation would spearhead something like this out of their own interesting. Closest I know of is the MuseGroup, which are doing this "growing of the pie" with open source music creation Software.
Anyone know of something else?
The cost to generate a future kind of film from some template (script, characters, art choices, etc in some kind of source file) won't be much more than the cost to store it.
When this happens, perhaps we will cache the results but later dump them. Assuming storage costs don't drop faster and more significantly.
Maybe 30 years?
Edit: Lots of downvotes. I'm a filmmaker, I've made lots of photons-on-glass films. Most of us are experimenting with this tech and aren't thumbing our noses at it like people outside our industry. We don't really have a choice but to adapt, and I find it funny that casual observers on the outside are so morally opposed. It's actually an incredible tool for pitching and has utility for some SFX, compositing, and B-roll shots today. It's really going to help mid market and below, for films that don't have Disney budgets.
Just distribute the prompt and I'll generate my own movie on the fly, with my own tweaks of course.
As long as humans have dreams it won't be like that. The human spirit and desire to connect to others and tell stories doesn't just suddenly die.
I think the very best lens to look at it is that all of the tens of thousands of kids that go through film school and never get to bring their VFX-heavy fantasy to life now suddenly have voice to match their ambition.
Look at the history of photography itself to see an example. "But... but... but my portrait-painting skills will be obsolete! Somebody do something. Waaah."
> If AI didn't promise massive artistic disruption -- the sort that threatens to put real creative power into the hands of outsiders -- no one would object.
Putting creative power into the hands of outsiders isn't important. In fact, creative power is currently in the hands of outsiders. You do not need a cinema studio to make a good film. There is nothing stopping most people from making a good feature length film and putting it up on YouTube except for their willpower, spirit, and creativity.
The bottleneck on great art has never been technology but the creative vision of the individual. Increased AI presence in art will do nothing to alleviate that bottleneck.
With that said, I am not bothered by the emergence of AI or its applications for any kind of art. I'm just a realist. It will enable equally enable both the great and the shitty, so in the end it is a wash.
>You do not need a cinema studio to make a good film. There is nothing stopping most people from making a good feature length film and putting it up on YouTube except for their willpower, spirit, and creativity.
That being said, it's not true. Even Robert Rodriguez had to exercise a modicum of management skill and spend a non-trivial amount of money to get El Mariachi made. And even then, the available resources severely constrained what he could do with $7000 (about $20000 today).
The next Rodriguez is probably already using half-baked, primitive tools like WAN 2.2 to blow us all away. We just don't know who he or she is yet.
Something else that's not true is:
>It will equally enable both the great and the shitty, so in the end it is a wash.
The great works add far more to our culture than the shitty works take away. Before AI, 90% of everything was crap. After AI, 99% of everything might be crap. But the remaining 1% is all that matters.
You are right that not everyone can make a great film, but I would still contend that most everyone (in the US and Europe) has the right material conditions to make a great film (access to a camera, editing software, people, and locations). You'd need great discipline, leadership, creativity, and charisma to get it done. Most people lack one or more of those qualities.
They can be safely ignored... at least here, and at least for now.
As it currently stands, most things are crap. The speed is not the bottleneck.
Agreed. I also have a few decades of experience in film and television production, mostly in creating and deploying new digital tooling paradigms from 'desktop video' in the 90s to virtual sets to real-time 3D environments. New digital production tools have almost always had the biggest impact enabling low-end and mid-tier creatives, not big budget studio productions. In the early 90s the Amiga-based Video Toaster enabled upstart productions like Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Babylon 5. The Toaster also enabled about 95% more cable-access crap and bad porn but the other 5% was fantastically creative new stuff which couldn't have existed on indy budgets. Dramatic new production paradigms tend to unleash both democratization and disruption. Most people welcome the democratization yet reflexively fear the disruption. Today, few recall the early 90s predictions from the professional production industry of desktop video causing economic and creative doom, despite being widespread and echoed across mainstream media.
While machine learning-based production tools aren't flexible or granular enough yet for more than limited experiments, there's no reason they won't become increasingly useful for real work. IMHO they'll likely have the same kind of democratizing impact as desktop video and the Toaster - 95% more regrettable crap, some of which we're already starting to see but, eventually, also 5% more wonderfully creative stuff which wouldn't have existed without it. The crap will quickly fade away but the bold new stuff will remain pushing creative frontiers and shaping tomorrow's classics.
http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/ind...
This feels to me like an intentional obfuscation-- like the studio didn't actually want to open-source anything meaningful, or netflix didn't pay them enough to justify collecting huge project files.
Blocked loading mixed active content “http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/?de...”
It seems to be something like blocking loading any HTTP request from an HTTPS page. Very annoying :(
Best tv tech to date, though OLED improvements in the past year mean we might see good panels hitting the market in a few years. The race to produce the brightest panels (and putting them on display for comparison and testing in brightly lit electronics stores in environments that couldn’t be further from the actual viewing experience) resulted in a bunch of mass market crap.
Agree with the in store crap and all the processing that’s turned on for the TVs on display. But brightness is useful - can help combat ambient light, and HDR can look amazing.
It probably is, given that it's just a static page hosted on blogger.com
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/exampl...
But technically, you're right.
aws s3 cp --no-sign-request s3://download.opencontent.netflix.com/sparks/creative-commons-attribution-4-intl-public-license.txt .
"aws s3 ls" similarly requests: https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.opencontent.netflix.com?li...
Such a pity startups can’t innovate on the content stores of the big companies.
AV2 is coming out this year.
> Such a pity startups can’t innovate on the content stores of the big companies.
What do you mean?
This is technically possible today but blocked by DRM and closed apps/players. Innovation would be unlocked if 3rd party apps could create custom viewing experiences based on licensed and purchased content files downloaded locally, e.g. in your local Apple media library. The closed apps could then sherlock/upstream UX improvements that prove broadly useful.
For two video streams with different encodings, swapping between two media players + prefetch can give a close approximation of a continuous video stream.
Which has less than 48 hours to go.
I miss director commentary, I loved re-watching movies with that audio track.
Is there just too much content now? Or has streaming become such a "content mill" that the creators aren't inspired enough about their own work to sit down and talk about it after it's complete?
I would guess this is the reason. Before there was unlimited content or ways to entertain yourself on a screen, having additional content on a disc would have been a marketing point to make people feel like they’re getting more for their money.
But now, I doubt even 1 in 1,000 people would respond to that, since there is always something else that can be instantly switched to watching or playing, so why go through the effort?
It was funny how the sound engineers remoted in for the podcast and had extremely low quality mics, despite it being a show with fantastic sound (really it’s an excellent show in general, just really good).
I liked it quite a bit.
It is funny that these things often just get released on podcast platforms and aren't really integrated into the streaming service.
Especially since this show, and the shows mentioned in these parent comments are all produced by the platforms they got released on. So they also have a whole lot more control to actually integrate this extra content.
These streaming platforms often state they are competing to keep you on their platform consuming things, and it seems odd to me that they wouldn't want to try and capture people for longer with these kinds of extras. Especially since as the other user indicated, these would be much lower cost to produce and license compared to the original content. And for someone who really enjoyed what they watched it would be a pretty appealing extra to have.
No such incentive is necessary with streaming, the format competes so well on convenience it doesn't have to invest in extra content.
Rare movies and film documentaries from the 20th century still can be found on rutracker, for example. The Russians really did create a dedicated community of archivists, with the quality varying to a certain degree depending on the uploader's reputation, but they certainly created a notorious collection of movies, even the ones relatively unknown or sometimes censored to death on western countries.