"Like A Rolling Stone" – Interactive Video | Hacker News Reader

"Like A Rolling Stone" – Interactive Video

video.bobdylan.com

239 pointsjmduke50 comments

I was beyond skeptical when I saw this link earlier, but this is outstanding.

The commenters on RollingStone and other sites, seem to have wanted some magical rose-colored nostalgia trip to 1965, but the whole point of contemporary Dylan is that you can't have 1965 back (and even if you could, you don't want to).

The lyrics to this song are like the anthem of Holden Caufield... a wry, disillusioned, antisocial, anticonsumption, post-war love song. Anyone who ever thought otherwise, is a turd who only loved this song because it was Top 40 and reminiscent of some lost High School dance, despite the fact that the song itself is completely anti-pop.

There are so many little easter egg mashups you can find as you click through: the CNBC styled wall-street guy ("threw the bums a dime, in your prime, didn't you?"), the QVC home-shopping girl's deadpan delivery ("take your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it babe"), reality TV girls desperate for attention ("how does it feel / how does it feel/ to be without a home/ like a complete unknown").

I think this is really the only video this song could ever have :)

and Danny Brown shows up

The shot at the end with Danny Brown's fro sidelit to look like the Dylan's Greatest Hits picture is pretty hilarious.

edit: http://i.imgur.com/BkQaAIt.png

"The lyrics to this song are like the anthem of Holden Caufield... a wry, disillusioned, antisocial, anticonsumption, post-war love song. Anyone who ever thought otherwise, is a turd who only loved this song because it was Top 40 and reminiscent of some lost High School dance, despite the fact that the song itself is completely anti-pop."

I sorta hate to break it to you but we knew all that back then. I don't think any other point of view was even considered.

You're preaching to the choir on that one, but maybe we should tell the commenters on RollingStone.com, HuffPo, etc? They seem confused (I like to read their stupid in an MST3K styled riff off; you can be TomServo, dibs on Crooow though).

"It's just a bunch of commercials. Bah" / "This is totally lame and does no justice to a great song" / "I grew up in the 60's and this is not the Dylan I know" / "I found the word VAGINAS in the video" / "This is a vapid mess. It's sacrilegious to give such lyrics this treatment!"

I sorta hate to break it to you but this happens to songs all the time. Greatest example ever: Springsteen's 'Born In the USA'.

>The lyrics to this song are like the anthem of Holden Caufield... a wry, disillusioned, antisocial, anticonsumption, post-war love song. Anyone who ever thought otherwise, is a turd who only loved this song because it was Top 40 and reminiscent of some lost High School dance, despite the fact that the song itself is completely anti-pop.

Thanks for the most cliched and tired interpretation of the song that could be...

It looks like there are many 1-second long .flv (Flash Video) files for each channel.

This is second 37 on channel 3: http://content.interlude.fm/video/dylanLive/rc2/ch3/c3s37.fl...

Here's second 125 on channel 6: http://content.interlude.fm/video/dylanLive/rc2/ch6/c6s125.f...

and so forth.

You can run this in your terminal to download all of the files for a given channel:

  curl -O http://content.interlude.fm/video/dylanLive/rc2/ch6/c6s[0-284].flv

FFMPEG should be able to join FLV files but I haven't tried it yet.

Interestingly enough it seems to pre-cache the channel immediately above and below the channel you're on, so if you're on channel 11 it will download the next couple seconds of channel 10 and 12, so you can switch channels without having to re-fill your buffer.

The instructions under "concat demuxer" on this page work for the video but no so much for the audio:

http://ffmpeg.org/trac/ffmpeg/wiki/How%20to%20concatenate%20...

I wonder why they gave audio tracks to all those chunks when they could instead be smaller video-only files. Just stream/buffer/sync the full audio track independently.

What a lovely experience. Took me a moment to get into it and then I smiled the whole way through. I just love the different feelings you get from the different channels.

Absolutely beautiful - I love the history channel in particular

Yeah this was the first channel I really stopped on and it was hilarious when I realised the bearded chap was mouthing along.

Easy instructions on How to Hack and Download Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ Interactive Video: http://www.cyberculturegallery.com/how-to-hack-bob-dylans-in...

You can't help but smile and ⇧⇩

This made my day - thought of this clip from the Pennebaker film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY4HtQ-XJQE

This looks awesome, and I love Dylan and this song... too bad my internet is way too slow to keep me from enjoying this, it buffers every 5 seconds and it kills the effect.

Is there a blog that explains how this works? I'm assuming they either have a ton of video that is instantly available and use the closest match or some magical CG...

Seriously?? It's just a few fake TV show clips they recorded specifically for this video. And for me, the channel buttons do nothing but bring up a description of the current "channel."

[edit: the channels do change after a delay]

Aside: I'm sure I've heard it all throughout my life, but it was only a few days ago that I looked up the lyrics and backstory behind this song. For a song written just shy of 50 years ago, it blows my mind how good it is.

http://rock.rapgenius.com/Bob-dylan-like-a-rolling-stone-lyr...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_a_Rolling_Stone

There's a brief delay between pressing a key, the channel banner changing, and then the video stream changing, but it definitely responds.

Ok. I was getting confused by the delay and the initial lack of control. I couldn't tell the difference between a delayed change and an automatic change. Thanks.... point still stands that it's simply a bunch of fake tv clips, probably all the exact length of the song.

No doubt. It seems each "channel" is a complete music video in and of itself, and the channel buttons switch between synchronized streams. And, like my TV, it feels like it takes too long to switch channels. ;)

How long did you stick with it? It cycles through the same few channels at the very beginning and starts you on the same channel (food channel?) each time, but after that I think you're in control.

EDIT: OK, so I messed with this some more. It does appear to change channels on its own from time to time, so it doesn't seem possible to see whether they recorded the entire song for each channel. Also, it didn't start me on the food channel this time. Nevertheless, it's not the same each time you do it. I suspect that each channel only contains portions of the song and there are enforced channel changes as a result

I think once you change the channel once, it let's your stay on a certain channel for the entire song. I was able to watch a single channel for the majority of the song. And the first channel that is chosen for you seems to be random, it's been different the 3 times I watched it.

The ESPN set is real with Steve Levy anchoring and obviously "The Price is Right" and Drew Carey are the real deal.

They're the real sets/hosts, but not real broadcasts of those shows.

Evident in the quality of play in the channel showing tennis...

As pure speculation, I'd expect they recorded each channel singing the full song and then switch stream and sync the times when you change channel.

It would be really interesting to see how they dealt with the buffering on slower connections, since presumably the video can't prefetch too much ahead as the channel is likely to change regularly.

I can help answer that:

They didn't, changing channels or even leaving it playing is awfully slow, though the site's probably getting hammered by Reddit/HN. Great concept though.

EDIT: Or apparently they did and my connection is still too slow to catch up.

They probably use a HTTP Live Streaming-like approach to test the connection quality before serving you a set of clips. Changing channels is more like changing playlist files starting at whatever index.

There are 16 custom videos, one for each channel: http://video.bobdylan.com/credits.html

I enjoyed that a lot - well done!

This is just wonderful. On so many levels.

Steve Jobs is smiling down from wherever he might be. As we all are.

And wow, comments on HN that all agree with each other. No bashing. No hate. What a wonderful thing.

Beautiful

Steve Jobs? Wut?

It's well known that Steve Jobs was a huge Dylan fan. As well as the Beatles. I don't know if he'd be smiling though. This is flash based after all.

This is flash after all

That was great. Insanely great.

This is fantastic. I like the VH1 channel.

Just watched it a second time. This is legitimately beautiful.

The Rolling Stones (which names themselves after this song) also have an innovative video for their cover:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziRR5h3b4YU

It's 183,000 photographs, morphed into each other.

That number doesn't sound right. It's a 4:21 minute long video, or 261 seconds. At 30 frames per second, that's only 7,830 frames for the whole video.

Maybe that was the total source material they filtered through?

Citation needed. The Rolling Stones started in '62. Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" is from '65.

Wikipedia attribute the band's name to the Muddy Waters song, "Rollin' Stone".

I didn't say Dylan's version of the song was original, just that the Rolling Stones are named after it.

>> The Rolling Stones (which named themselves after this song)

> Citation needed.

Sure. Here are two, from the wikipedia article you just read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rolling_Stones#CITEREFNelso...

- Jagger, Mick; Richards, Keith; Watts, Charlie; Wood, Ronnie (2003). According to the Rolling Stones. San Francisco, California: Chronicle Books. ISBN 9780811840606. p42

- Nelson, Murray N. (2010). The Rolling Stones: A Musical Biography. Santa Barbara, California: Greenwood. ISBN 9780313380341. p3.

Like A Rolling Stone is most definitely an original Bob Dylan song. Dylan may have been inspired by Muddy Waters at best.

Running flash is a terrible security risk.

I won't do it even for Dylan.

Bummer. Someone should've told his dev team that the times, they are a-changin'...

It can be played with the Interlude Player on mobile (at least on iOS), just hit the page on the mobile device for the download link.

I tried it on my iPad first, and it gave me a flash error.

How do you watch youtube videos without flash?

Thanks to mobile devices, most are available with HTML5 video.

I've been using the YouTube5 Safari extension. I find it a lot nicer than the flash player. Scrubbing actually works, you can expand a video to its native resolution, and fullscreen works better.

youtube-dl: https://yt-dl.org/downloads/

You'll need Python to run it.

Or just write a script yourself in your language of choice.

I wrote one using only shell, sed and ftp.

  1. Download the video with your script of choice.
  2. Watch it with your video player of choice.

No flash needed. And you'll never have to wait while some silly pre-roll commercial plays before the video.

VLC plays YouTube videos. Media > Open Network Stream and then paste the URL. Even removes the ads ;)

  Running flash is a terrible security risk.

I won't disagree, but this is bobdylan.com and not free-videos-online.ru. Risk of a zero-day Flash Player exploit hosted from there is probably acceptable for most people who walk outdoors.

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