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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

I’m involved in a project to digitize “lost” episodes of Computer Chronicles that were missed in the first pass at the Internet Archive.

You can watch newly digitized episodes here. More are coming in the new year.

https://archive.org/details/@davidga/lists/2/computer-chroni...

We’re also building a comprehensive metadata database of every episode. Notably the TVDB metadata is not accurate or complete.

You can see that here, noting that it is still a work in progress.

https://computerchronicles.karpour.net/

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Searchable transcripts would be a fun addition! I would love to be able to find mentions of specific software (in addition to a formal segment on it)

I've had this on my back burner! Glad to see someone else wants this as well. The Internet Archive already has transcripts generated by whisper.cpp, so it's (just) a matter of gathering them into one place and making a good search feature.

Example transcript (JSON): https://archive.org/download/episode_1109/episode_1109_whisp...

Screenshot from a month ago: https://wonger.dev/assets/chronicles-screenshot.png

I can reach out to their project to see if they're interested.

The issue with Whisper is that it messes up both names of both products and guests. What we aim to do is make new subs, but including all the product names and guest names as hints, so Whisper will get them right.

Thank you for the interlacing-preserved files!! For archival's sake I hope you have some sort of Lagarith/ProRes/etc versions stashed instead of just h264, although those would be prohibitively large to share.

The tapes are not in good enough condition that any intermediate codec would contain any extra information. In most cases, they’re not master tapes, they’re copies Stewart made for his own collection.

How do you find the missing episodes?

We were granted access to the collection of Stewart Cheifet's tapes.

Thank you for your team’s work to preserve this collection.

Thank you for doing this

Thank you for doing this.

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