Show HN: Play20Back – MTV as It Looked 20 Years Ago | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Play20Back – MTV as It Looked 20 Years Ago

play20back.com

61 pointsnotgood37 comments

Hi people of HN, I'm glad some of you like this little project of mine! BTW in case is not clear it (automatically) shows videos from exactly 20 years ago, so right now is showing videos from July of 1995.

If you wonder where I get the data is by a script scraping an awesome forum called ukmix. I also filter out low-quality videos by calculating the likes/dislikes ratio and view count (data from YouTube's API), it also tries to filter out lyrics videos and other non-official music videos. Feedback is welcome.

Enjoy.

Very cool project. Can you let us adjust the time? I'd really like to see MTV from 30 years ago.

10, 30 and 40 are easy to do because I have sources for those, so I will add that functionality soon (any other time frame would be a lot of work so probably not going to do it)

Your time travel portal works really well!

How do you avoid ads being inserted into the stream?

I think AdBlock may help. BTW those ads are added by YouTube (not me)

Congrats! I think this is a cool idea! It looks like you're pretty much committed to a 20 year target but would it have been possible to allow the user to set that target themselves (within a given range, of course)? Instead of 20 years being the default, they could specify 25, or 15, or whatever.

This is awesome! Will definitely use it to throw a quick stream of older Music Videos up on the television. It would be cool to see a list of that month's videos or be able to customize the stream a little.

For those who miss place to discover current artists through music videos, I built http://kikbak.tv. It goes through blogs hourly to create a top 100 chart for the day. Artists spend so much money on music videos and there are no popular discovery platforms! I truly miss mtv, so let's rebuild it somehow.

Awesome! Yeah I miss good music video channels and that's why I created this; and I think there is an opportunity to make video channels better than ever, with a little help of algorithms you can do things like checking user patterns (e.g. this guy always skips country music, lets ask him if the app should always avoid country music, and so on)

I actually think that's the exact opposite of the original point, and it simply should be left alone to be what it is. By "customizing" the selection, it loses a large majority of the nostalgia.

Maybe... just maybe... have the default be this way, and a tiny tiny link saying "click here for the new web 2.0, users are in control, why not just search youtube yourself, upvote this, downvote that... empowering... customizable... have it your way, right away at burger king now version"

I like it, but I don't remember half of these songs/videos ever being on MTV.

This is more of what I remember: http://www.mtv.com/music/yearbook/index.jhtml?contentId=1536...

and:

The Real World

Beavis and Butt-head

Singled Out

This is from July 1995, so the very early songs (eg January) are probably not in the site, also no music videos released after July are there right now.

Also many of the songs in that list are currently on the site, maybe you didn't got lucky (is random) and you didn't get the ones that were played enough times to be memorable (for you)

And no to mention human memory is very bad ;) ... (only half joking: http://science.time.com/2013/11/19/remember-that-no-you-dont...).

20 years ago I had just graduated from high school. 120 Minutes was still the best thing on MTV and yeah, Beavis and Butthead and the rest of Liquid Television were great. I still consider "The Real World" the start of when MTV (and TV in general) started moving in a direction I personally didn't like. It was MTV's big move toward scripted and unscripted dramas and away from music videos and some other "experimental" video like the aforementioned Liquid TV.

I get that it was a market-driven move. Networks show what gets the viewers and viewers wanted Real World/Road Rules. Just bummed me out when those shows started pre-empting or replacing the stuff I enjoyed like Beavis and Butthead and Sifl and Olly before eventually replacing the music videos themselves.

At least there are way more avenues for finding music and videos these days so I can't really be too annoyed outside of curmudgeonly nostalgia.

Ahh back when the "M" in MTV stood for "music" (and the odd Beavis and Butt-head episode).

Not "Mediocre," as it is now.

By that time, I think I saw more music videos during Beavis and Butt-head than other times of the day.

Pretty much entirely unusable in germany due to, roughly, half the videos being blocked. :(

I think YouTube is one of my main reasons for using a VPN here in Germany. I try not to use the german internet without my VPN switched on for a couple of reasons but that's definitely the most annoying one.

What service do you use? I've considered it from time to time, but i don't know which ones are reliable/useful/sanely priced.

I just use a small Kimsufi dedicated server with Gentoo running OpenVPN. I also use a small edis.at VPS in case I need an austrian IP.

What are the other reasons?

- Privacy on shared Wifis (at University)

- Shady law firms sending mass letters

- Geo blocked content

netflix

Yeah sorry, it uses the API of YouTube with USA marked as origin. I could fix it by using the JavaScript client API of YouTube for non-americans visitors; it has a rate limit so it may not work so well though.

I don't think there'll be a lot of official videos left here in Germany even if you switch to the non-american API. Most official music videos are blocked.

Now I can look forward to 2021 when this will be Imitation of Life non-stop.

So good.

Feature request! intersperse classic MTV intros like these https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajbSFYV-maQ

Keeping the artist and track title visible at all times would be the only usability thing I would change. I'm often going to the youtube link to find this. I keep this as a tab open in Chrome while I'm doing other work so being able to go back when I find something good and just having that information available would really help.

I like the idents you've added as well. Was the style you used one of the styles on the American MTV? One of the big things I remember about MTV (Europe, at least) were the idents, including the track/artist ident at the start/end of songs.

I haven't been able to find a decent archive of them though.

You're awesome.

To make it really authentic, the text that states the artist and track title shouldn't be so sharp. It should look as blurry as the video.

Other than that this is a perfect bit of fun. I love the Internet.

20 years ago is when I graduated high school. We used to actually watch MTV. Talk about nostalgia.

Feeling like a teenager again! But on the other hand, thanks for making me feel old! ;)

Video quality is a bit too good though :)

Never play music or sound on load. Even if it's your page only purpose, put on a simple "play" button in the middle of the screen, and start playback after user clicks it.

Ok seems reasonable, I will change that soon.

I prefer it this way. When you changed your TV channel to MTV, there was no play button.

Don't change it. i prefer it the way it is too.

Bookmarked it. Ad pops up every time you get a new video. Deleted bookmark.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com