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Movies Media

Free Internet Movie Archive 109

Posted by Hemos from the lotsa-good-movies dept.
Andy Tai writes: "In sharp contrast to the music and movie industries' attempts to control access to content, the Internet Moving Image Archive aims to keep movie content freely available to the public. It provides 359 movies online and will add 642 more. The content is encoded in MPEG2 format and can only be converted to Open Source MPEG4 formats. The content is either public domain or owned by Prelinger Archives. So come and get your free movie now!" This reminds me of Project Gutenberg - anyone else know of good repositories around the Web? Post 'em below.
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Free Internet Movie Archive More

Free Internet Movie Archive

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  • Keep it real with AdCritic. Now there is a repository with good "content" (Ok, yeah, it's all commercials, but still, they are funny!!)

  • Yeah but... (Score:5)

    by krmt ( 91422 ) <therefrmhere@yah o o . com> on Friday February 16, 2001 @09:29PM (#424976) Homepage
    When are they going to make a subsection of adult film archives? ;-)

    "I may not have morals, but I have standards."
  • They are surely futuristic and will surely gain much. Our support is with you.
  • free's good by me. . .how's the selection?
  • It's been said before but it's worth saying again, Textfiles.com [textfiles.com] is a terrific repository of a ton of the ol' BBS files. Go on and check out the coffee faq, woo!

  • Not for those lacking in bandwidth! (Score:3)

    by Black Art ( 3335 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @09:32PM (#424980)
    What is not mentioned is that these movies are BIG.

    For example, the AEC movie on radioactive fallout is about 194megs for 8 minutes of film. At least they did not cop-out and put the films in an unwatchable postage-stamp sized picture.
  • This will destroy intelectual property as we know it! It will destroy innovation in the movie industry! We have to keep movies closed so no one can see them... I err...

    Well some people try to use that argument for software...

    Seriously though, you *KNOW* the MPAA is going to be coming down hard on them.
  • Do they expire like books?

    I seem to remember Xoom/Nbci [nbci.com] had some free movies on their site (free if you became a member that is).Hmm, Looks like they are gone now. I want an MPG archive of all the Marx Brothers Movies =)
    --

  • Amazing (Score:4)

    by Kara B. ( 315771 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @09:38PM (#424983) Homepage
    This group has really captured the spirit of the early days of the web. Content nobody wants to see with bandwidth requirements nobody can handle.
    Amazing.
    It's 1994 again and I'm trying to view a graphics rich page on a 14.4 modem.
    Thanks for the nostalgia!
    --Kara
  • They even have my favorite movie, The Chicken of Tommorrow! Hehe, well maybe someone will make use of these movies with a cheap(er) rippoff of mst3k.
  • I'm not really sure how you can classify this as being "in sharp contrast to the music and movie industries' attempts to control access to content". Most of these "movies" are quite short, and date back from the 40s and before (although there are a few newer ones).

    The movie and music industries are trying to control attempts to download free music or videos which are still currently "hot" things. It's sort of like downloading the newest Metallica song versus downloading Mozart. One produces money for a specific artist or company, the other is available from many different sources and doesn't guarantee anyone specific money.

    It's almost 2am, so I hope I made sense. On the other hand, it is a cool resource, and I guess what will really make the difference is the content of the next 600 or so additions.


    ---
  • Not for anyone, no matter how much bandwidth they have once word gets out and they're /.'ed. It's not even 11PM on the Pacific coast...

    --

  • Most of these are from the 40s through the 60s and are basically free of copyright encumberance. The descriptions echo the post war and cold war mentality and provide a fascinating look at what 'they' would have us believe. From our vantage point they seem hopelessly naive and optimistic.

    There is probably a great deal of good material to be edited into some funny/creative/musical/artistic works.

    The real question is, what would the same types of film from the past ten years tell someone 50 years from now?

  • ahh, the good ol'days...
    the days of trn and netscape .98 :)

    ( although i do disagree on the graphic intensive content... that really started going late '95 )

    :P
  • spunk.org has got some good t-files too.

    New worlds are not born in the vacuum of abstract
  • it's not like it's hard to find one. I went to Altavista (just for giggles though, real men use Google [google.com]), hoping to get a good link for the story, entered in movie archive mpeg and got mostly porn anyway. Hell, at altavista, searching for Franklin Roosevelt would turn up porn.
  • Most of the movies used in MST3K, from what I understand, weren't public-domain, which is why they can't show some of them on TV anymore. They lost the rights to them.

  • Right... (Score:3)

    by Fervent ( 178271 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @09:51PM (#424992)
    from the lotsa-good-movies dept.

    Taking the "X" out of X-Rays
    ca. 1940s
    Running time: 9:14
    Sponsor: General Electric Company

    *In Dr. Evil's voice* "Riiiiiight."

  • Actually, MST3K flat-out didn't have good ratings. That's why they don't show them on TV anymore.

    It's too bad. I thought MST3K rocked.

  • How can any modern film hope to compete against the subtle beauty of Self-Conscious Guy (1951), a movie that "shows how feelings of self-consciousness keep a high school boy from doing his classwork well or making friends easily."

    Or Suggestion Box (1945), the nail bitingly suspenseful telling of "How war plant workers made suggestions that resulted in efficiency and economy".

    And don't forget About Bananas (1955), the touching story about the banana industry. My eyes tear up even thinking about it.

    All the big budget action flicks will never be able to withstand the awesome beauty of 1950's hygene flicks.

  • Quicktime is a hell of a lot better than RealPlayer.

    RealPlayer doesn't work right on Mac or Windows...and the UI of RealPlayer is way, way, way worse than QT.
  • This is only the beginning. In case no one knows, there is a strike coming real soon involving the writer's guild for Hollywood (I don't know the actual title.) It also is probably going to involve the directors and actors as well. The reason? They want residues from Internet Distribution.

    That's right. The Major Studios are going to be distributing stuff on the internet soon, and it's going to be a big deal for the movie industry in terms of revenue and business model.

    Stuff like this is like 1994, and as such it's only the beginning.

    "I may not have morals, but I have standards."
  • Just before I saw this article I was reading an article in the latest Linux Journal [linuxjournal.com] about the history of MPEG, an interesting read on video and audio compression.

    Anyway, the site looks interesting enough. The files are big, to be sure. I'm downloading right now a movie [archive.org] shown to Cold-War elementary school children about atomic warfare.

    My cable modem usually gets 50-100 K/sec, but I'm getting about 16 K/sec from this site. I think it's definately a candidate for several good mirrors if it gains any sort of popularity - the 10 min. movie is 246 MB.

  • This is a kick ass idea! I wonder when/if we'll get some old classics like Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy or Chaplin?

  • How about a site to convert formats? (Score:4)

    by JoeShmoe ( 90109 ) <askjoeshmoe@hotmail.com> on Friday February 16, 2001 @10:05PM (#424999)
    I've had this idea for a long time that what the Internet needs is a "file in file out" type site that can use large processing farms (or perhaps distributed computing) and turn a link to a file into any size/format you want.

    For instance...as much as I like the high quality image of MPEG-2 streams, I just don't want to download them and find out they aren't in SVCD-compliant format. It's way to much work to reencode them. If they aren't ready to burn as SVCD they are just going to park on my hard drive and chew up space. If they are staying on my hard drive, I'd rather have some nice compact MPEG-4 files. Of course, since the quality on this old films probably isn't that great, maybe I would want VCD versions?

    So imagine there's this site with a form. I type in the link to the file (like "http://www.archive.org/oldmovie.mpg" or anything). Then I use radio buttons to choose my preferred format (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Quicktime, AVI, RealMedia...although why the hell anyone would choose that is beyond me). Last, I choose the sub-format. If I pick MPEG-1, I can choose VCD-compliant, or XVCD maybe. Or I can type in a custom width/height. I can alter pretty much anything you can do in your basic home video editor (resize, crop, basic effects).

    Then I hit go. The converter site connects to the link I gave it, and starts downloading the file. If the file is streaming, it hands the processing off to the pool of servers and immediately hands me a link to the final stream. With enough hardware, this could be real time. Of course, if it isn't a streaming format, it would have to download the file and then process it and hand me the link.

    Anyway, think about how cool this would be, for text documents, sound files, anything. A legally questionable extension would be, if someone requested a VCD version of a file, could the site cache that file and then offer it immediately the next time someone else requested it?

    Anyone want to fund this type of venture? All we would need is a few good server farms, or a good distributed processing client.

    Please discuss if you think this is a good idea and lets see if we can't get something started!

    - JoeShmoe

  • mst3k did rock. i and many of my friends watched it religiously. (some still do; it comes on certain channels still.)

    eudas
  • Short dancing movie. [torrez.org] (6.1 megs, Realplayer)

    -- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!

  • QuickTime is fully functional on Windows, with Sorrenson codec. It's also fully functional on *NIX as well, probably Linux specific.
  • oh, and for those of you interested in some more mst3k action, check out this link:

    http://brie.bmsc.washington.edu/people/merritt/b oo ks/Eye_of_Argon.html

    it is a truly awful sci-fi story called 'the eye of argon' as it would have been hacked to pieces by the mst3k guys, had they ever actually read it.

    eudas

  • Who can resist claymation for the common man, i.e. the lego film [topcities.com]? I'm quite fond of 2001: A Lego Odyssey [umass.edu].

    Unfortunately, they're in Quicktime, mostly. If you're without, it's worth finding someone with a Mac or Windows to watch the better of them.

  • Things never change (Score:3)

    by Spunk Junkie ( 310106 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @10:11PM (#425005)
    Just saw the following movie listed on the site.

    Destination Earth 1956 Running time: 13:36
    Producer: Sutherland (John) Productions
    Sponsor: American Petroleum Institute

    In this corporate-sponsored cartoon, Martian dissidents learn that oil and competition are the two things that make America great.

    Change the sponsor to Microsoft and the word "oil" to software and I think I see a good promotional tool for Gates to try after the little speech yesterday from his underling...

  • for the sake of history (Score:5)

    by Barbarian ( 9467 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @10:12PM (#425006)
    The most important reason for these sort of archives is to show history that many would like to pretend did not exist or simply erase.

    For example, #19585, a WWII era propaganda film on Japanese internment.

  • Oh, I forgot to mention one thing...

    I think this type of project could actually be turned into a commercial venture. It doesn't have to be a dot-com that bleeds money and tries to throw ads at people while they download the converted file.

    Convertion tools can cost hundreds of dollars. True, there are some nice free ones, but is anyone else sick of having ten different programs to do ten different file formats?

    Imagine paying a fee and then having a site that can convert thousands of different files. If someone sends you a format you've never seen, sends it to the site for identification and conversion into something you can read. The first time someone gave me a .PS file I had no idea how to view it. I hate installing Acrobat and I'd love for a site that can send me TIFF file of the pages instead of a PDF file.

    This type of functionality is easily worth $10 or $20 a month, in my opinion.

    - JoeShmoe

  • Re:Right... (Score:3)

    by leviramsey ( 248057 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @10:18PM (#425008) Journal

    Or this one:

    About Fallout (1955) [archive.org]
    Sponsor: US Dept. of Defense
    Attempt to dispel many common myths and fallacies about radioactive fallout.

    All I can say is, put your head under your desk to avoid the radiation!

  • Places to download *good* movies (Score:3)

    by eulevik ( 258261 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @10:19PM (#425009)
    If you want entertainment instead of education, try these carefully chosen web sites:
    • NBCi Classic Movies [nbci.com] has 'Killer Bats' and more
    • Cinemapop [cinemapop.com] has Bruce Lee movies and more
    • MovieFlix [movieflix.com] has Three Stooges and more
    • Cinemanow [cinemanow.com]has great movies like 'Killer Klowns from Outer Space'
  • They have not only cold war 'duck-and-cover' films,
    but also some of those old Encyclopedia Brittanica flicks they showed us in elementary school!
    (FWIW, I'm not even that old...I saw those wacky educational movies on *16mm film* in the mid 80s.)

    God this rocks.
    --K
  • Do they [copyrights on movies] expire like books?

    Yep. Copyright law (in America, at least) applies to everything equally. So copyrights on movies do expire. But they don't expire until 70 years after the last surviving author's death. The good thing about Project Gutenburg is that so much "great liturature" was written such a very long time ago that the copyrights have long expired. Not so with movies, which are a relatively new medium. Have fun waiting around.
  • http://www.spiteyourface.com/one/index.html QT4, though :p

    ----
  • Wow! Gaddamn.. I dint see that there, but I honest-to-goodness have the 16mm film print of that.. Gonna' drag out the ol' bell and howell and take another look at it..
    -

  • slashdotted takes on a new meaning.

  • http://come.to/iz nuff said (tm)
  • LOL, I love it but...

    What has changed? =P

    I look at your post and I see a perfectly apt description of the current state of the "web" - content I don't care for, requiring bandwidth I have no way in hell of obtaining.

    Fun fun fun!!

    -Kasreyn

  • Has anyone ever seen the movie 'Roger and Me'? This sounds like some of the footage Michael Moore probably used in the film!

    Achievement USA 1955 Running time: 10:45
    Producer: Sound Masters
    Sponsor: General Motors Corp.

    General Motors celebrates production of 50 millionth automobile with a parade through Flint, Michigan.

    -- juju

  • The time is now... (Score:4)

    by Usquebaugh ( 230216 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @10:59PM (#425018)
    I've been saying for a long time that the commerical companies who hold the copyrights to music/films should start to investigate a flat fee for entertainment.

    Turner et al have a huge stock of old films that are not making them money. They should set up a system where I pay $5 for the rights to a movie for life no matter what the media. I can download it, play it in my home, see it in a cinema etc etc VHS/DVD/VCD whatever, of course I'd have to pay duplication costs. But how long before my DVD rentals are burnt in store for $2-50?

    I would gladly pay for a huge number of old out of print movies. All they have to do is provide the hardware/bandwidth.

    Given that any form of encryption is breakable and that most film stock is decaying would this not gnerate huge profits for them and give the consumers what they want?

  • Repositories (Score:3)

    by harmonica ( 29841 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @11:04PM (#425019)
    This reminds me of Project Gutenberg - anyone else know of good repositories around the Web? Post 'em below.

    If you're looking for texts, see The Open Directory's etext section [dmoz.org]. Typically, if I need similar resources for something, I enter the address of the resource that I have in dmoz.org's search engine and browse the category where they put that resource. Very useful, most of the time!
  • This ain't about some lil' grainy *.avi you can download in a couple of minutes and chuckle to yourself over.. This is about full-quality video, freely availiable online. Now I don't know about you, but I like the possibilities inherent in full quality archival video footage availiable online to use in wacky video projects.. Some of us deal with a reality *beyond* bandwidth as you know it. ...

    (ooh.. that sounded a bit conspiratorial..)
    -
  • I've never heard of a Sorenson player for *n?x, and it doesn't seem that freshmeat has either.

    Or are you just talking out of your ass?
    Cheers,

    Rick Kirkland
  • They also have a film archive section [dmoz.org].

    Well, post early, post often ;-)
  • Well, yes and no. In theory copyrights expire after a set time. Oddly enough though, ever time the old Mickey Mouse movies come up to their time to be public domain, the copyright law period magically gets extended. Its almost like disney is able to get the laws done their way... hmm...

    I believe It used to be a set period after the creation of the work (15 years?), then it was changed to a set period after the authors death, and since then has gone from 15 years all the way to the current 70 year span. Its a shame that greed is so powerful...
  • Despite what all the nay-sayers say (which is most frequently "nay"), I think I may have to get a bigger hard drive. Definately gonna start downloading some of these as soon as my school gets my connection back up to full speed.

    Shouldn't the famed Zapruder(SP) film be in there, or does Time still own that?
  • There is a security hole in slashdot. If you use IE4 or IE5, it is possible to get your password (you need to be authenticaded).
    I submit a story about this hole 2 days ago. The hole is still there. Demonstration of this hole [mycgiserver.com]
    Can somebody alert slashdot ?
    If you use IE4 and IE5 you should better change your password.
    Slashdot is not to blame, many web sites have this hole.
  • Thanks to /. this movie site is totally crashed. I can't download anything. Dammit...if only I saw the posting a little sooner...

  • I've never heard of a Sorenson player for *n?x, and it doesn't seem that freshmeat has either.

    There is one, it's called 'QuickTime 4' and the only *NIX it supports is Mac OS X. ;P

    As for a free Sorensen-compatible player, sorry.
    You can play QT files encoded with different codecs using xanim on *NIX, but Sorensen is not supported anywhere but (AFAIK) Mac and 'Doze.

    --K
  • Snob, The 1958 Running time: 13:18 Producer: Centron Productions Sponsor: Why is a high-school girl such a snob? Descriptors: Social guidance -> I'm hoping to get some anwsers out of this one..
  • It'd be really nice if they ported that to Linux and the other BSDs.
    Cheers,

    Rick Kirkland

  • The copyright law was changed in 1992 to protect the trickle of income from movies made in the 1930s.

    Of course, as this article states [asu.edu], this copyright law's unfortuante consequence is the literal decomposition of a portion of our culture before it can be preserved for future generations.

    Imagine if great, but not world famous oil paintings now hanging in local museums, courthouses, etc. were left in humid cellars for a hundred years to crack and peel.

    Copyright law beyond 30 years has the same net effect for great, but not still profitable film-based media. Imagine if film students didn't study Citizen Kane and Modern Times. We probably wouldn't have a surviving copy of them today. How many other great films we don't even know about have already been lost?

    The films on this site are not "great", but taken collectively, they are great cultural and historical repository like any of our libraries or government archives.

  • I think we've found... (Score:3)

    by Mzilikazi ( 115009 ) on Saturday February 17, 2001 @01:23AM (#425031) Homepage
    ...the secret stash of all the Troy McClure movies ever made!

    Seriously, have you guys read the titles? I'll use some in a sentence: "Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You might remember me from such educational films as The Adventures of Junior Raindrop and Goodbye, Mr. Roach."

  • Why do you think so many movies have gratuitous baby scenes? It's not just for the "Awww, cute" factor. Then there's using multiple baby actors to play each baby used onscreen, under the guise of labor/child welfare laws. Maybe it's just a matter of playing the odds that at least one of the rugrats will live to a ripe old age. I just saw an interview with some actress in the past few days saying that they used eight (might've been six) different baby actors to portray her kid. I have no idea if what you said is true or not, but it would be a good explanation for all those damn baby actors. Oh well, at least they can act better than Demi Moore and her decrepit plastic melons...


    Cheers,

  • It is it just me or do all these not work. I keep getting 505's not supported any ideas why ?
  • Destination Earth 1956 Running time: 13:36
    Producer: Sutherland (John) Productions
    Sponsor: American Petroleum Institute
    In this corporate-sponsored cartoon, Martian dissidents learn that oil and competition are the two things that make America great.
    Descriptors: Economics Oil industry Advertising: Animation

  • CinemaPop [cinemapop.com] (www.cinemapop.com for those who dare not click on links here anymore) has a lot of movies and TV classics, in both free and pay-per-view formats — and no, the good stuff isn't all confined to the PPV areas.

    Filmspeed [filmspeed.com] (www.filmspeed.com) doesn't have as many (at least not that I've yet found), but I think they're all free, and quality ones, too. For download or streaming. Plus, you can download 'em to play on your PocketPC, which is always good for kicks and surprising the guy sitting next to you on a plane. The've got Fists of Fury, Nosferatu, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Chinese Connection, A Christmas Carol, and Night of the Living Dead , among (not too many) others. Unfortunately, Night of the Living Dead isn't available for the PocketPC for some reason...


    Cheers,

  • ova.zkm.de & orang.orang.org (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    there is a open video archive with over
    10 days of video content contributed by the
    community reachable under http://ova.zkm.de

    and audio system of the same kind ist reachable
    under http://orang.orang.org/

  • I watched a bunch of the xoom movies a while back and wondered what happened to them. Someone in this discussion found em - looks like they got sold to NBCi.

    NBCi Classic Movies [nbci.com]

    Killer Bats, Green Hell and some fun "rocket ships on bits of string" style sci-fi. All movies in streaming Realplayer format.

    +++++
  • It seems people are stuck more on the subject of movies than the "free repository" part, so here comes my contribution...

    I think the Movie Mistakes [movie-mistakes.com] page is quite funny. Unfortunately when the big budget blockbusters have 115 entries, many of them are just "making of" trivia and so on instead of the hilarius Mystery Science Theatre 3000 badness that I crave. It seems that people submit more "mistakes" about famous films rather than about those really badly made films that are packed with errors of logic, continuity, special effects etc.

    Also, even though I rarely buy stuff from them, I find it very fascinating to go to Amazon [amazon.com] and just click around different reviews, "page you made", user made listmania lists and so on to find good stuff I might not have heard about before. It made me interested in old movies again, I have started to collect Kurosawa on DVD and I'm currently thinking of getting La Grande Illusion, Orson Welles films, The Third Man, lots of Noir detective films. Too bad Amazon doesn't stock more foreign films.

    ************************************************ ** *

  • No, he was right Xoom did have old movie on thier site that you could watch. I watched "The Green Hell". about giant killer wasps in Africa.
  • Old entertainment compete's with new entertainment for out entertainment dollar. Thus, by using long copyright terms to keep old artistic works away from people, they help to insure high sales of their newer and more expensive wares.

    Yet another reason to show why long copyright terms are bad.

  • And they want to keep old content from competing with their new content.

    They make money by insuring that you do not have a choice of old public-domain videos to watch.
  • Many years ago, it was really cool to sample bits off old films like "Reefer Madness", or do cut-ups from stereo demonstration records (how many times have you heard ("This should be played at high volume - late at night - in a residential area"?)
    Time to start again...
  • If you focus your content on a specific subject (in this case 20th century North American culture and history), you can't call your site 'the Internet Moving Image Archive'. This implies that it is a more complete, and broader oriented collection.
    Therefore, I think their name is misleading, and should be changed.

    jdv
  • Actually, the very first movie listed on that page, "Design for Dreaming", *was* on MST3K. It was a short sometime in the early Mike days, IIRC.

    Not a good sign... ;)
  • Although it's aimed more at content publishers, this is what GenericMedia [genericmedia.com] seem to be doing. You send them a master copy in your favourite format, they serve it up in whatever format/bit rate/etc your users actually want. There's more info on it here [maccentral.com].

    -dair

  • I happened to come across a free streaming contents site at like television [liketelevision.com] when I was trying to find An Occurrence at Owl Creek [liketelevision.com], a movie I watched in elementary school in my youth -- an excellent movie which somehow surfaced in my mind while looking at the movie archive discussed by this story.

    Only problem I have with 'like television' is that I can't seem to download and save, locally, the video streams, for smooth playback later.

  • My password isn't "rien," although after going to your site I am strangely logged out of slashdot. Hmmm.

    If you want to alert them can't you just email them?
  • Throttlebox [throttlebox.com] has some nice classics (La planète sauvage, as an example), but they use a proprietary file format that can only be watched with Windows. Nonetheless, interesting selection.

    ------------------

  • There are more free movie sites.. (Score:3)

    by xmedh02 ( 100813 ) on Saturday February 17, 2001 @05:52AM (#425049) Homepage
    Like http://www.movieflix.com/ [movieflix.com] or http://www.ifilm.com/ [ifilm.com]. They carry much more and much better films (lots of feature films since the silent era till cca 50's).
  • the internet movie database [imdb.com] has mistakes for tons of the movies they list. be sure to check out the goofs for "hackers". probably the funniest I've ever read.
  • Do they also have controversial(not at the time) cartoons and such like Little BLack Sambo, or the WW2 Warner brothers toons? I wanna see Daffy Duck go to war!
  • I see your Tunak Tunak Run

    and raise you a hatt-baby

    http://user.tninet.se/~prv247p/hatt/hatten.swf
  • Technically this is cool, but I wouldn't want to put any capital in it ...

    What are you going to pay for this service ? It's currently not possible to do this for free (just think about the HUUUUGE amount of bandwidth it would take -- not even beginning to think of the processing power required to serve a decent amount of people). If it's $2/2 hour movie I might even consider it. If the quality is good and I get to say _exactly_ what the file has to look like. If it's more along the lines of $20, well, screw you ;-)

    Just look at all those disk-space providers (freediskspace, streamload, idrive, etc.) ... Basically, they are either new or they suck. And if you want them _not_ to suck, you have to pay some decent money ... ($8 if you want to transfer 3gbytes -- less than a decent-quality mpeg2 fulltime movie (streamload.com)). Add to that the processing and man power ... Big numbers. Way too big for me.

    In conclusion : a cool idea, bad prospects for my money. I'd rather have something like a rencod'o'matic to which I feed an URL and a desired format and it encodes it for me on my _own_ computer/server ... That would be viable. Still some coding to do, but viable ... And in the times of broadband internet, it doesn't really concern me whether the movie comes in at a few mbit/sec -- Most likely the encoder couldn't keep up with the full data rate, anyway).
  • Thanks eulevik, I was looking for sites just like this. You probably know the drill, DSL and a little adapter to pop it up on a tv. My parents love the "classic" movies. Now they at long last have a use for the computer I set up for them.

  • 80 plus dance step clips at LOC (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You can view over 80 short film clips for all types of dance steps at Memory.Loc.Gov [loc.gov]. It's a nice collection. There are many other sujects in the American Memories Collections.
  • Of course there's always the newsgroups and hotline for a whole bunch of good DivX movies ;)
  • Check this [cmu.edu] out. It does all sorts of formats (even lists MPEG and quicktime). I've only really used it to convert .doc files to .ps files so I don't know how well the rest work, but at least that conversion works great :)
  • I just been waitin to see 'The Sheet Metal Worker'! God, I can't wait to download THAT one! Unfortunatly, those movies seem to be very bad, old, 'movies' they showed in school.
  • and the UI of RealPlayer is way, way, way worse than QT.

    Ugh. To each his own, I guess. I find the Windows Quicktime player has the worst UI of any program I've ever used. I hope the person who invented the volume "knob" was sent to bed without dinner.

  • Andamooka [andamooka.org] is a repository of Open Content books. Readers can read, annotate, and discuss the books online.

    Many of the books relate to open source software. KDE 2.0 Development [andamooka.org], GTK+/GNOME Application Development [andamooka.org] by Havoc Pennington, and The Cathedral & The Bazaar [andamooka.org] by ESR are among them.

  • Actually, these movies are a great part of history (a generation of children grew up under the watch of the mental hygiene film industry). I recommend checking out the films made by Centron (also made some movies under the Coronet brand). You probably aren't aware that around 1960, a few Centron employees left Lawrence, Kansas and took a jaunt up to Salt Lake City to film "Carnival of Souls," one of the most innovative horror movies ever (Romero claims this was his biggest influence for "Night of the Living Dead.") Sure, I might be unable to find "Dude, Where's my Car?" on the page, but personally I prefer the several "Japanese Relocation" films available at this site (assuming it gets unslashdotted at some point.) Lest you think that this is just a phenomenon of the past, be aware that children are still subject to this type of brain-washing today. Just two days ago in my high school, we watched a "multimedia extravaganza" titled "G2" - apparently meaning generation 2000. It used popular music and movie clips to overshadow it's actual messages of good, Christian values. Sure, they may be presented using high-definition projection with a thumping soundtrack, but mental hygiene films still exist. I definitely see your point, but I don't think we'll ever see a company intentionally hosting unlicsensed copyrighted material on a website. This is definitely a step in the right direction - perhaps we'll see out-of-print studio works available in a similar format (possibly for a fee) in the future.
  • They still make the same types of films - they are just presented with a pop music soundtrack and deemed a "multimedia presentation" by the production company. This Thursday, we had our yearly multimedia presentation, thanks to Motivation Media (or something like that.) Basically it was just some company's (possibly government funded... they have to get money somewhere for the speakers and projectors) attempt at forcing Christian values down our collective throat under the guise of movie clips and a thumping soundtrack. Topics included parental relations, having good friends, and abstaining from drugs/alchohol and sex (until marraige of course). Interestingly, though we are allowed to skip pep assemblies and hang out in the commons, they refuse to allow students to miss these propaganda extravaganzas. I've also watched videos before in sexual education classes ("Billy has a wet dream" or something similar) that evoke memories of the old mental hygiene films. This genre is definitely not gone, just reinventing itself to brainwash another generation.
  • This already exists for text and image formats. Check out http://tom.cs.cmu.edu/intro.html [cmu.edu] at CMU. You basically give it a file or a url to a file and specify the result filetype you want back. I use this all the time for converting word documents into pdf files when I'm on a solaris box.

  • What can I use to play these in Linux? mpeg_play doesn't work, and neither does mtv.
  • A good archive on the web is Ibiblio [ibiblio.org]:

    "Ibiblio is a diverse and expansive collection of information on the Internet, created and maintained by the public, for the public. It is the ultimate collection of freely available information, the future of Internet librarianship, and a collaboration between the former MetaLab.unc.edu (formerly known as SunSITE.unc.edu) and the Red Hat Center for Development."

    Along with a huge Linux FTP archive, it hosts a few hundred 'collections' of information off the web.

    Disclaimer: I'm not entirely impartial here because I'm currently moving my website, Astrobiology: The Living Universe, to the Ibiblio servers. At the moment we're still setting it up at its new home (www.ibiblio.org/astrobiology [ibiblio.org]) and implementing a new interface. The working version is at http://library.thinkquest.org/C003763 [thinkquest.org].
  • A number of movies have been computer animated over the last few years, is there any fairly easy to learn movie making software around?

    If so, Open Sources movies would be a cool idea... I'm more of a programmer, but have a lot of Artist friends (with whom I have NOTHING in common with).

    What could do more for Linux on the desktop?

    -- Matthew C. Tedder

  • Re:Linux player? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Try xmovie:

    http://heroinewarrior.com/xmovie.php3
  • http://www.atomfilms.com

    Independent shorts and animation. Some good stuff. Some awful stuff.
  • Let's shoot this puppy here and now.

    If a copyright is owned by a corporation, as is the case with most modern cinema, music, books, and software, the copyright term is now 95 years.

    Yes, Windows 95 won't be public domain until the year 2093.

    Personally owned copyrights, like those in most GPL software, and the kind savvy musicians and writers keep rather than sell, are good for life plus 70 years.

    Meaning that (assuming Linus lives a long, healthy life avoiding the Microsoft Mafia) the Linux kernel v. 0.1 won't be available as public domain for a century and a half.

    Live long, Linus Torvalds!

    (ps: I ANAL. Oops. I mean, I Am Not A Lawyer, and so if in doubt ask an attorney.

    Final clarification: Personally means owned by a human being or a group of human beings not hiding behind another legal identity. Corporate means either a formal business partnership, corporation, or other artificial person.)


    Ruling The World, One Moron At A Time(tm)
    "As Kosher As A Bacon-Cheeseburger"(tmp)
  • Generic Media [genericmedia.com] stores your content in QuickTime for and transcodes it to the player of your choice and streams it to you. This allows one original to be kept and easily roll with new technology/players/formats as they arrive. The just had a press release a few weeks ago. Its founded by one of the original QuickTime Engineers, Peter Hoddie [hoddie.net].

  • Re:Bah! (Score:1)

    by cymen ( 8178 )
    The "About Bananas" is listed as only 11 minutes long but it's a 268 meg download! WTF!
  • I would like to try my hand at ripping apart 1950s propaganda films, ala mst3k. Not sure what you would need. --Joey My friends and I considered doing this but gave up because of the editing problems, however a I found a piece of software that does blue screening. Let me know if you are interesting in trying this my /. and aim name are the same.
  • Everything has been converted to MPEG-4 files (.1 the size of MPEG-2). Some are up already (you have to check directory, as I have not yet updated website); the rest will follow as additional movies are put up. I expect 800-850 titles to be there within next month.

    Rick
  • It protects companies that still make money from a creation from losing a lot of money. If the first Mickey Mouse film was to go into the public domain, Disney would lose all control of Mickey Mouse. This, of course, is their own fault for not progressing as a corporation and finding other ways to make money, but it's a lot cheaper to buy laws than to explore new revenue streams. To hell with fair use and common sense.

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