Beware Hollywood’s digital demolition: it’s as if your favourite films and TV shows never existed

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨thirdBreakfast@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/01/hollywood-digital-demolition-films-tv-shows-wiped

Last June, fans of Comedy Central – the long-running channel behind beloved programmes such as The Daily Show and South Park – received an unwelcome surprise. Paramount Global, Comedy Central’s parent company, unceremoniously purged the vast repository of video content on the channel’s website, which dated back to the late 1990s.

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sj_zero ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Absolutely, if you care about historical works you should make sure that you have a copy that you control.

A large portion of the things on my jellyfin are like that, because once they take away media ownership, and they can change or take away your stories at any time.
beefbot@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Someone bought ALL the thrift store DVDs in all my small city’s thrift stores, like four of them. People are starting to know that self-ownership is where everyone is going

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NicolaHaskell@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Here’s a random paranoid tangent before lunch! I was reading recently about the evolution of theater in England over a hundred years from ~1550-1650. Elizabeth ruled during the first part of that interval, and Shakespeare wrote. His plays included perspectives from wide slices of society and were performed for royalty and commoners alike. Elizabeth died and private theatrical commissions began to outgrow public theater, which according to wikipedia “sustained themselves on the accumulated works of the previous decades”.

Starting in 1642 theaters were closed entirely by act of a Puritanical Parliament. That ban lasted 18 years and once the audience was Quite Thirsty, the English Restoration restored theater abstractly and filled it with bawdy raunch.

Yada yada, Disney then hired a crew of weepy Christian writers in the 20th century to repackage folk tales into Little Mermaid and Iron Man, which seems parallel enough to Shakespeare retelling Ovid. Film flourished, and in the early days of broadcast TV anybody could star in their own very own program. The Writers were on the brink of delivering us Heroes, but they up and left before they could save the cheerleader.

Now this age of regurgitated, computer animated-and-written, crowdsource produced art seems familiar, too. We’re filling the gaps with what we know, and the Appalachians wielding the pen are finding gaps they didn’t know were there. It’s odd being here, but my point is that if we are stuck in a loop then there’s the potential that on the horizon is a period of Hollywood producing a bunch of light hearted Boob Comedies.

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- ScrotusMaximus@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  You honor I object that he interrupted me while watching Ow My Balls!
  
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bigsailboat@r.nf ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
That’s a real bummer, right? It’s like all this stuff we love just vanishing into thin air. But honestly, with all the streaming platforms popping up, maybe it’s just the dawn of a new way to keep us entertained. It could also be a sign for us to cherish and support physical media while we still can, so start stocking up on DVDs and Blu-rays like it’s 2005!

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- NickwithaC@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Or just save it to one of those 16tb hard drives we have nowadays. They can’t remove it from your own collection either way.
  
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MonkeMischief@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
They’re editing entertainment history to begin with. Deletion is bad enough, but possibly even more nefarious is the blatant, unapologetically sneaky editing of existing media mentioned in this thread. Jussst a little bit at a time.

Adjust for today’s-sensibilities here, remove a now-naughty-word there…“oh, we don’t wanna pay for that song that released in 5 years before this 36 year old television program…better it never existed!”

Their goal seems to be relegating the Internet to simply being a flow of “What’s trending and making money NOW” and nothing else. Every byte has a dollar value.

They want generations growing up in a world where the corporate narrative is all that ever was and will be.

Today it’s talk shows and cartoons.

Tomorrow it’s biographies and documentaries. Family histories? Newspapers?

We need to stop this NOW.

Media conglomerates can’t even be relied on to be stewards of their own legacy. They’re coming for ours.

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- InverseParallax@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Image
  
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- Jarix@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Edits arent exactly new
  
  Han shot first
  
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  - MonkeMischief@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Fair. Can also cite all the Islamic iconography and sound removed from Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
    
    As for Star Wars, wasn’t that by Lucas’ whims? I’d say there’s a distinction between a creator editing his own work and say, Disney going “We lost the rights to John Williams, so we removed the score from the entire franchise.” Lol
    
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Kalysta@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The simple answer to this is to change the tax code to not allow for write offs for completed projects. And to shorten how long copyright lasts (fuck Disney so much for that one)

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- Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Also set up a standardized licensing process that breaks the mini-monopolies of exclusive content.
  
  Personally, I’d also limit copyright to specific works and not the characters, setting, etc. Then protect trademarks and use those to establish canon. Like in the MCU and DC universes, Spiderman and Batman don’t exist together, but in the Superhero Fan Universe, they are roommates and play genius billionaire vs superhuman with a sixth sense prank wars on each other.
  
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- Ajen@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  What does this have to do with write-offs? I don’t think they can write off episodes of South Park and the daily show that have already aired.
  
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  - Kalysta@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    It’s more for things like the batgirl movie that is finshed but will make more money in tax write offs to never release it. But if they lose ad revenue from removing a back catalogue, that may also let them post a loss and claim tax breaks.
    
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  - SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I think the suggestion is that if they leave the content available, they can still write it off.
    
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FollyDolly@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I still have dvds and a dvd player like an old person for just this reason.

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Nuke_the_whales@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Wait until you realize that most of your favorite movies and shows have been re edited or messed with.

I was watching the office for the 100th time and one of my favorite jokes was just straight up removed from the show during this rewatch. So just in the last few months they’ve gone back and edited the show.

I was also rewatching breaking bad and they’ve changed some of the music as well.

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- MonkeMischief@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Wait what? What joke? :O That’s ridiculous!
  
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  - Nuke_the_whales@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Don’t know why they cut it honestly since it’s been there forever, but when Michael is trying to set people up he sets Kevin up with Erin and when Erin looks disappointed Kevin says:
    
    “you will learn to love me”
    
    Michael: “ok Kevin, you gotta let the cookies cool before you pop em in your mouth!”
    
    That whole exchange is now gone.
    
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- RinseDrizzle@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Music licensing in media like this gets bullshit quickly. If it was signed in for the original run, fucking leave it.
  
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  - MonkeMischief@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Dude, Halo: Master Chief Collection removed a LOT of perfectly timed tracks from key moments of Halo 2, because they were Breaking Benjamin songs.
    
    I remember when a pair of Hunters is just about to bust open these massive gates in New Mombasa…here comes the sick instrumental from “Blow Me Away”…!
    
    …No, just some vaguely Halo-esque drumbeat on loop.
    
    The music licensing industry has pretty much always been Satan.
    
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  - BlitzoTheOisSilent@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I had a coworker who cited music licensing as the sole reason he can’t find his favorite show anymore: The Drew Carrey Show. Whatever schmuck owns the music licensing refuses to cooperate with the rest of the show owners, so it can’t be streamed or distributed anywhere.
    
    Another example would be Scrubs, most of the songs used in the show (including key moments and the OG songs were perfect for them) have been edited out and replaced because of licensing issues. Unless you’ve got the DVDs or pirated older versions, you’re stuck with the new music and it’s not the same.
    
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Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
This is why I still download movies and try to keep them. They make up the bulk of the crap I keep on my hard drives.

And there was a time when the computer science world wanted to avoid this… and it was 1990 (yes, almost 35 years ago) when the term digital dark age was coined. It was in response to several things. Firstly: the first voyager probe was sent and the code used to store the information could not be disciphered by (then) the latest computers, which resulted in a problem. The second thing is that governments all around the world were starting to be heavily computerized and the older computers used in the 1960s were 100% incompatible with newer systems.

In the US and UK in 1960 the first census were done by computers, and by just 1976 there were only two computers in the world that could read that data, and one of them was a museum piece.

The FOSS community has done far more to combat this with emulation over the past 30 years than any corporation has ever done. Whether it is for video games like MAME, MESS, or whatever console emulator you want to mention, or by OSes like MS-DOS and Amiga Lemon and countless others that emulate almost every system ever created.

Now these fucks are just shitting all streaming media and forcing normal people to have to break the law by pirating the stuff just to keep the stuff from vanishing into oblivion.

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Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The only way to watch the original Star Wars movies before George completely fucked with them is piracy.

The 4K77, 80 and 83 editions are what you’re after. Enjoy. There are apparently reduced noise versions as well, but I thought it was perfect as is. It’s old. It’s supposed to have noise and grain. The desert scenes in the first one are really noisy and I’m not 100% sure why. Maybe he filmed those on cheaper film stock in smaller cameras, but that’s just a guess.

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- superkret@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  There was a storm in the desert where they were filming which destroyed a lot of the equipment and almost doomed the film.
  I think I remember reading that they had to use cheaper film stock in those scenes for that reason.
  
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- Flocklesscrow@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  The late 90s dvd versions are gold.
  
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  - Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I do have a double set with original (or as much as you could get) along with the post-prequels completely broken one. I think there was a pre-prequels version as well. But then that is DVD quality, which is getting on a bit.
    
    The likes of Disney+ doesn’t even acknowledge the originals even exist.
    
    Same with their Alien and Aliens versions as well. No director’s cuts at all, which is a shame as I far prefer them. They should have both.
    
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- janNatan@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  The director was an amateur, and he didn’t align the grains of sand with the grain of the film.
  
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  - kjaeselrek@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    It’s not his fault that sand is coarse, rough, and irritating, or that it gets everywhere.
    
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  - Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    They were course and irritating and got everywhere.
    
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ivanafterall@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Thanks, Obama.

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ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It’s going to be a fun historical period to look back on when there are just huge gaps where IP/product control became so powerful that no record of certain things were allowed to exist.

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- mPony@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Orwell didn’t know he was also writing about the Entertainment-Industrial Complex.
  
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SomeGuy69@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Enshittification continues

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x0x7@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
This is why pirating is justified. If you want your shows to last forever, torrent them, and keep them seeded.

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- chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I’ve looked around quite a bit for The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. No one seems to have the complete series. The show ran nightly for 30 years and amassed 6714 episodes so it would be quite a large torrent.
  
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  - PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Most of the episodes aired before at-home VHS was common, and TV stations weren’t in the habit of archiving their old footage. It’s likely that a lot of them aren’t available simply because nobody (including the tv station) has recordings.
    
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  - celsiustimeline@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    It’s likely that most episode aired before the dawn of home video recording (early 80s) are completely lost media. NBC and other networks weren’t in the habit of archiving tape-to-air media.
    
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- el_abuelo@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I wish this worked, but it only does for things that are popular.
  
  As it stands I think I’m just going to have to back up my entire media collection for fear of not being able to get a copy during retirement - when I plan to watch a shit tonne of TV.
  
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  - mynameisigglepiggle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    It’s a shame there is no plan to make consumer grade glass storage.
    
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ikidd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
/r/datahoarders

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- HurlingDurling@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Is there a data alternative?
  
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  - Evotech@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Letting others hoard for you. Torrents, usenet
    
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  - GhiLA@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Well there’s borrowing, but I feel that’s what we’re all already doing.
    
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4am@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Can’t keep archives of Saturday morning cartoons we all grew up with and loved; will sue you for keeping copies of them.

Definitely ok to being three mile island back online for AI though, that’s the ticket to a better humanity!

For real why has everyone with any kind of money gone psycho? Have the bad guys started winning even harder?

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- Invertedouroboros@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I’m not against nuclear power, but could they have concocted a worse set of motivations? Restarting Three Mile Island to power Microsoft’s AI ambitions? Shit reads like something a super villan would cook up.
  
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  - Breadhax0r@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Wait, the three mile island thing wasn’t a joke?
    
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- jaybone@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Yes
  
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- datavoid@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Line go up
  
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theshatterstone54@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I’ve just realized there’s an animated series on Youtube, that I’ve had a really hard time (read: impossible) finding anywhere else, and if LEGO (yes, I’m talking about Ninjago) decides to delete these videos from their channels, the OG seasons are nowhere to ve found as far as I can tell. Yes, there are some cartoon streaming services but those are few in number and getting fewer, so I wouldn’t bet on them or any new ones that spring up having that content available in 5-10 years. And that’s worrying. Time to download all 15 seasons and store them somewhere! (oh shit, I don’t have enough space, do I)

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- kureta@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Don’t be scared. Embrace the data. Let it flow through the fiber optic cables and into your RAID array. Dew it!
  
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- jaybone@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Get a 2tb or 3tb external USB drive. They are pretty cheap.
  
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  - theshatterstone54@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    What’s a safe place to buy storage online? I’ve seen horror stories of an sd card in a drive enclosure, and modifying the storage to make it appear larger than it is.
    
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- ancoraunamoka@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Do it. Buy an hdd, start to understand how to store the data safely, how to torrent and how to contribute to the community.
  
  You’ll learn a lot, and I am guessing that you are very young, all this knowledge will be very useful in the future. Every cent spent now, will multiply in the future
  
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- assaultpotato@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  My brother in christ you have less than a TB of storage. you’re very far from being a hoarder.
  
  I still have my first 512GB HDD from when I was in high school and I’ve got over 32TB on my latest build, plus my archive of old drives I leave off until I need to access them. Join us, it’s better.
  
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  - Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    About to build my first really nice homelab NAS for Jellyfin, archiving, etc. targeting between 30-40TB if all goes well :)
    
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- coaxil@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Storage is relatively cheap, and don’t stress becoming a data horder, added bonus, leaning to manage it well is a nice skillset to develop… Looks over at the 700tb rack!
  
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- BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  You buy as much space as you’ll need in the next few years and make a plan for proper duplication/backup, such as 3-2-1 Backups.
  
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- cm0002@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  105 gigs is nothing, you can get a 1TB external drive for ~60$
  
  I’m getting to the point of becoming a data hoarder
  
  What’s wrong with that‽ Join us on the dark side (according to giant corporations anyways), we have milk and cookies!
  
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- Grimy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  You might be able to convert to hevc (x265) and trim it down by quite a bit.
  
  You will always lose a bit of quality converting though, even from 1080p to 1080p, but I consider it pretty acceptable for cartoons and things of that nature.
  
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  - InvertedParallax@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Have my main server back home, while I’m traveling I have a script to reencode to av1 onto my local machine, works beautifully and the quality drop isn’t too bad (colors look weird but think that’s the Intel xe encoder)
    
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- kaboom36@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  You can have large amounts of storage without being a hoarder, tbh in this day and age its just prudent to have an offline DRM free copy of your favorite media
  
  If you have a bit of spare cash I can’t recommend building a NAS and setting up a jellyfin server enough, its really nice knowing that everything on it won’t disappear unless you will it
  
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  - theshatterstone54@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    If only. I’m a student living in student accommodation. I can’t set up a NAS because hosting things on the network is against their policy, and I also wouldn’t feel comfortable having that type of hardware in my room. And if electricity bills skyrocket because of me, I’ll be forced to pay them.
    
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  - kalpol@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    You don’t even need much cash. An old N40L and four 250gb ssds will get you 750gb running Truenas and raid.
    
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- pezmaker@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  If you have an m.2 slot, 2gb drives are cheap and don’t worry about it for a while
  
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  - theshatterstone54@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    Are cheap
    
    Yeah, right. I know they’re cheaper than they were but they can’t be that cheap.
    
    finds a high-speed 2tb m.2 from Kingston (a brand I trust) for £120*
    
    I stand corrected.
    
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foggy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
🖕 my home server disagrees 🏴‍☠️

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- GhiLA@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Yep, my shelf of DVDs of movies I loved growing up became 4TB of media on a Jellyfin server, cloned to a cold drive I leave in my closet.
  
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possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Get the physical medium

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sc2pirate@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Yo ho yo ho…

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- TseseJuer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  fill upp those hard drives me hearties yo ho!
  
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yesman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Preservation is an invasive and destructive process. Recreating the experience of watching ‘The Daily Show’ in the 90s or early '00s is already impossible. Language and culture mildew and rot just like leather and wood.

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- aesthelete@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Sure, “no man sets foot in the same river twice”, but that does nothing to argue against the preservation of cultural items.
  
  Take music, for instance, I never feel the same way the second time listening to a song as I did the first time, but that doesn’t make the music less special or change anything about it at all, and it certainly does nothing to advance a hypothetical argument that music shouldn’t be recorded or that the recordings of it shouldn’t be preserved for future enjoyment or different audiences.
  
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Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Recent events with streaming services has really been the best argument for self hosting your own content

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empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The more they delete, the more they can resell every few years as “new” while charging ever more exorbitant prices for!

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paysrenttobirds@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Used to be considered simply prudent to back up the vhs tapes you bought and people were encouraged to tape their favorite shows off the tv. Now some random CEO of the month has the right to bury decades worth of creative works?

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