This could be a huge deal for anyone working on video codecs or display tech. Finding legally clear, high-quality, uncompressed (or mezzanine) 4K HDR footage to test encoders against is surprisingly difficult. Most test footage you find online has already been stomped on by YouTube or Meta compression.
Having the raw EXR sequences and the IMF packages for Sol Levante and Meridian means researchers can finally benchmark AV1 vs HEVC vs VVC using source material that actually has the dynamic range to show the differences. The fact that they included the Dolby vision metadata is the cherry on top.
Don’t most camera manufacturers (like ARRI and BlackMagic) have test footage for their raw and/or log formats on their websites? Here’s ARRI’s (which includes ProRes in addition to their proprietary formats) https://www.arri.com/en/learn-help/learn-help-camera-system/...
Anyone can freely license a work to the public, and copyright holders were doing that long before modern computers were invented.
“Open source” (other than, say, in the context of open water sources or intelligence or journalistic sources, where it was rarely used) as a descriptive term did not enter the common lexicon until 1998 and that was specifically to refer to software source code.
You’re correct but words and phrases can evolve in their meaning over time. If the licensing terms for this are analogous to open source software licensing terms then calling it “open source media” is pretty reasonable.
I used to work at a company developing an independent H.264 decoder implementation. We would have killed for this kind of source content, especially if the license allowed showing it at trade shows.
Funny how how all the links, including the ones to their own pages, are routed through google.com/url, e.g. the link "Assets Available to Download". Usually tracking isn't quite this visible.
The ios gmail app does the same thing, but why? I would assume the app could just transparently relay the click through its already-open grpc channel to google's servers, and it would be faster for them and (more importantly) for me.
The reason for the intermediary is because the clickthrough sends the previous URL as a referer to the next server.
The only real way to avoid leaking specific urls from the source page to the arbitrary other server is to have an intermediary redirect like this.
All the big products put an intermediary for that reason, though many of them make it a user visible page of that says "you are leaving our product" versus Google mostly does it as an immediate redirect.
The copy/paste behavior is mostly an unfortunate side effect and not a deliberate feature of it.
Quoting web standards, you are more optimistic than I am, unfortunately, nobody uses them consistently or accurately (look at PUT vs POST for create / update as a really good example of this - nobody agrees) its a shame too, there's a lot of richness to the web spec. Most people don't even use "HEAD" to ensure they aren't making wasteful REST calls if they already have the data.
> All the big products put an intermediary for that reason
Surely whoever maintains the big products can add headers if they want?
And this is about people who care enough about not showing up in Referer headers to do something about it rather than people in general not understanding the full spec .
Referrer-Policy is a response header, so in this case it would be Google sending it, and the browsers who would be honouring it. You have to hope that the browser makers get it correct... Unless I misunderstood?
It sees periodic major updates to keep it in line with standards. That's not much more than maintenance mode, but it's more than just keeping the servers running. It seems like someone at Google pays attention to it and keeps it from falling behind, but I suspect the same was true of Google Reader until it wasn't.
>someone at Google pays attention to it and keeps it from falling behind
I feel like it's the same for Google My Maps. They even discontinued the Android app, so you can only use it on the web. It totally feels like there's a single guy keeping the whole system up.
And when I click them I get a page with "Did you mean netflix.com?
The site you just tried to visit looks fake. Attackers sometimes mimic sites by making small, hard-to-see changes to the URL." which then sends me to the Netfçix home page. Chrome on MacOS.
it's because their s3 bucket is called "download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com". the subdomain makes chrome think it's pretending to be "netflix.com"
I was curious about this recently. I was wondering about open files of well known artists.
Unlike netflix/YouTube its not immediately clear to me which Organisation would spearhead something like this out of their own interesting. Closest I know of is the MuseGroup, which are doing this "growing of the pie" with open source music creation Software.
Do not give netflix -too- much credit for this. Netflix permanently closes distribution of most content they touch and kills the very physical media ownership options for content that they built their empire on.
You will be hard pressed to find a blu-ray or dvd release of any netflix show in the US.
As someone that enjoys having a physical offline media collection, and who does not want to support netflix, I am often forced to buy japanese copies or bootleg copies of netflix shows whereas I can buy legitimate US copies from virtually all other studios.
Even hits like K-Pop demon hunters, netflix has forbidden physical purchase or ownership, so piracy is the only option for those who are not netflix customers or want to watch offline on a blu-ray player on an airplane.
I absolutely torrent as a way to discover new content, but I want favorites on a shelf on very long shelf life media where it does not require internet access and is never going to get altered or deleted as streaming services often do, or end up unavailable in the future with no seeders.
There are piles of obscure things for which physical (sometimes bootleg) media exists but no seeders.
For example the mexican hacking drama Control Z, I found 0 complete rips even on private trackers, but I did find some nice blu ray bootlegs with cases and cover art.
Even with blu-ray rips in hand, burning a disk myself and putting it into a nice recognizable case that fits in my blu ray wall cases is a pain in the ass and I would rather pay someone else for this service.
Plus it makes it way easier to hand select shows to hand a kid to play in a portable media player, and avoids the need to give them unrestricted alone time with an internet capable device.
I prefer official copies but if the studios do not allow them and thus do not want my money then bootlegs it is.
Slightly off-topic, but I notice Cosmos Laundromat (2016) is on that page. One of my favourite animated shorts ever. Something so unique about it. It would be nice to get a feature length version of it, but alas.
Not that crazy. The cost of storing the film—even 2 hour features—is dwarfed by the rest of the production costs. You can afford a dedicated HDD when you're done.
The cost to generate a future kind of film from some template (script, characters, art choices, etc in some kind of source file) won't be much more than the cost to store it.
When this happens, perhaps we will cache the results but later dump them. Assuming storage costs don't drop faster and more significantly.
Maybe 30 years?
Edit: Lots of downvotes. I'm a filmmaker, I've made lots of photons-on-glass films. Most of us are experimenting with this tech and aren't thumbing our noses at it like people outside our industry. We don't really have a choice but to adapt, and I find it funny that casual observers on the outside are so morally opposed. It's actually an incredible tool for pitching and has utility for some SFX, compositing, and B-roll shots today. It's really going to help mid market and below, for films that don't have Disney budgets.
It's funny to me that I work in film and have more hope and imagination over the use of this technology than people who (presumably) don't make films at all.
As long as humans have dreams it won't be like that. The human spirit and desire to connect to others and tell stories doesn't just suddenly die.
I think the very best lens to look at it is that all of the tens of thousands of kids that go through film school and never get to bring their VFX-heavy fantasy to life now suddenly have voice to match their ambition.
The downvotes are a good sign. If AI didn't promise massive artistic disruption -- the sort that threatens to put real creative power into the hands of outsiders -- no one would object.
Look at the history of photography itself to see an example. "But... but... but my portrait-painting skills will be obsolete! Somebody do something. Waaah."
I’m still rocking a plasma tv which sidesteps the matter altogether :)
Best tv tech to date, though OLED improvements in the past year mean we might see good panels hitting the market in a few years. The race to produce the brightest panels (and putting them on display for comparison and testing in brightly lit electronics stores in environments that couldn’t be further from the actual viewing experience) resulted in a bunch of mass market crap.
Took down my Pioneer Kuro a couple of weeks ago. OLED is so good now.
Agree with the in store crap and all the processing that’s turned on for the TVs on display. But brightness is useful - can help combat ambient light, and HDR can look amazing.
It's all technical test footage used to test their media pipelines – presumably, they're sharing it to create industry standards, particularly for partner and open-source library implementations.
Anyone else surprised that the download links are plain HTTP without SSL? I know it's a page that in the past I would have typically not worried about securing - but nowadays it's SSL everything or else your browser yells at you.
Yeah, this is bad. The page almost seems like someone’s pet project that didn’t have any explicit funding and they got bored or left Netflix in 2020. I’m not sure how that would explain the lack of SSL cert except for just general lack of thoroughness.
It's actually a regression overall compared to physical media like DVDs and Blurays. No director commentaries, no behind the scenes, no silly menu games, etc. Streaming would theoretically allow for tons of this type of content to be made and connected to a film at any time but instead we have this stagnant recreation of cable TV. C'est la vie
The lack of director commentaries and behind the scenes content on streaming has always baffled me as the rights to that must be much cheaper to acquire and would result in more minutes of streaming watched for less licensing money.
It's telling that VFX subcontractors are putting out their own BTS content on YouTube now as promotional material, since the primary production companies for shows and films (with a few exceptions) have completely stopped doing this.
I miss director commentary, I loved re-watching movies with that audio track.
Is there just too much content now? Or has streaming become such a "content mill" that the creators aren't inspired enough about their own work to sit down and talk about it after it's complete?
I would guess this is the reason. Before there was unlimited content or ways to entertain yourself on a screen, having additional content on a disc would have been a marketing point to make people feel like they’re getting more for their money.
But now, I doubt even 1 in 1,000 people would respond to that, since there is always something else that can be instantly switched to watching or playing, so why go through the effort?
We’ve started watching Pluribus on Apple TV and it seems like when they’re making the show Apple contractually obligates them to make a podcast about each episode. Some of them are very interesting (like costume design) and some are less so.
It was funny how the sound engineers remoted in for the podcast and had extremely low quality mics, despite it being a show with fantastic sound (really it’s an excellent show in general, just really good).
I noticed the same with Severance (also Apple TV). After every episode, there is a short director commentary/crew interviews about random episode specifics or more higher level thoughts.
Exactly. And this is why a whole dimension of collecting rare footages is quite dead now. This is why piracy through these great public trackers still matters.
Rare movies and film documentaries from the 20th century still can be found on rutracker, for example. The Russians really did create a dedicated community of archivists, with the quality varying to a certain degree depending on the uploader's reputation, but they certainly created a notorious collection of movies, even the ones relatively unknown or sometimes censored to death on western countries.
Can’t speak for OP but personally I’m thinking of things like the ability to actually add new features. Like what Netflix did with the Bandersnatch episode of Black Mirror years ago. Online video is extremely locked down when compared to the web.
Probably because there are over 9000 different TVs with their own proprietary apps on each one. So the easiest thing to do is just go with the lowest common denominator which is just giving you a menu to play a simple video.
For sure. But something like Bandersnatch shows that it is technically possible. Not for all devices of course. But there could be some kind of open standard companies implement and startups innovate on. But no one with power has an interest in doing that.
20 years ago, it was possible to seamlessly merge video clips from multiple streaming RealPlayer servers into a single composite video stream, using a static XML text file (SMIL) distributed via HTTP, with optional HTML annotation and composition.
This is technically possible today but blocked by DRM and closed apps/players. Innovation would be unlocked if 3rd party apps could create custom viewing experiences based on licensed and purchased content files downloaded locally, e.g. in your local Apple media library. The closed apps could then sherlock/upstream UX improvements that prove broadly useful.
It is not blocked by DRM but different codec.
Even if you have two MP4 files, but if they were encoded differently ffmpeg will still need to do some computation to join them.
Gapless playback with MSE would require identical encoding, which is likely more prevalent in the Apple catalog than the wild west of Youtube. Client-side transcode would require DRM cooperation.
For two video streams with different encodings, swapping between two media players + prefetch can give a close approximation of a continuous video stream.
Having the raw EXR sequences and the IMF packages for Sol Levante and Meridian means researchers can finally benchmark AV1 vs HEVC vs VVC using source material that actually has the dynamic range to show the differences. The fact that they included the Dolby vision metadata is the cherry on top.
Anyone can freely license a work to the public, and copyright holders were doing that long before modern computers were invented.
“Open source” (other than, say, in the context of open water sources or intelligence or journalistic sources, where it was rarely used) as a descriptive term did not enter the common lexicon until 1998 and that was specifically to refer to software source code.
https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source...
Why? Because I had it for 20+ years, and I still didn't find an easy way to automatically migrate it to WordPress.
GP speaks wisdom.
The only real way to avoid leaking specific urls from the source page to the arbitrary other server is to have an intermediary redirect like this.
All the big products put an intermediary for that reason, though many of them make it a user visible page of that says "you are leaving our product" versus Google mostly does it as an immediate redirect.
The copy/paste behavior is mostly an unfortunate side effect and not a deliberate feature of it.
Also, isn't this what Referrer-Policy is for? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
> All the big products put an intermediary for that reason
Surely whoever maintains the big products can add headers if they want?
And this is about people who care enough about not showing up in Referer headers to do something about it rather than people in general not understanding the full spec .
I feel like it's the same for Google My Maps. They even discontinued the Android app, so you can only use it on the web. It totally feels like there's a single guy keeping the whole system up.
(Or earlier? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801075)
Blocked loading mixed active content “http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/?de...”
It seems to be something like blocking loading any HTTP request from an HTTPS page. Very annoying :(
Unlike netflix/YouTube its not immediately clear to me which Organisation would spearhead something like this out of their own interesting. Closest I know of is the MuseGroup, which are doing this "growing of the pie" with open source music creation Software.
Anyone know of something else?
You will be hard pressed to find a blu-ray or dvd release of any netflix show in the US.
As someone that enjoys having a physical offline media collection, and who does not want to support netflix, I am often forced to buy japanese copies or bootleg copies of netflix shows whereas I can buy legitimate US copies from virtually all other studios.
Even hits like K-Pop demon hunters, netflix has forbidden physical purchase or ownership, so piracy is the only option for those who are not netflix customers or want to watch offline on a blu-ray player on an airplane.
There are piles of obscure things for which physical (sometimes bootleg) media exists but no seeders.
For example the mexican hacking drama Control Z, I found 0 complete rips even on private trackers, but I did find some nice blu ray bootlegs with cases and cover art.
Even with blu-ray rips in hand, burning a disk myself and putting it into a nice recognizable case that fits in my blu ray wall cases is a pain in the ass and I would rather pay someone else for this service.
Plus it makes it way easier to hand select shows to hand a kid to play in a portable media player, and avoids the need to give them unrestricted alone time with an internet capable device.
I prefer official copies but if the studios do not allow them and thus do not want my money then bootlegs it is.
http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/ind...
The cost to generate a future kind of film from some template (script, characters, art choices, etc in some kind of source file) won't be much more than the cost to store it.
When this happens, perhaps we will cache the results but later dump them. Assuming storage costs don't drop faster and more significantly.
Maybe 30 years?
Edit: Lots of downvotes. I'm a filmmaker, I've made lots of photons-on-glass films. Most of us are experimenting with this tech and aren't thumbing our noses at it like people outside our industry. We don't really have a choice but to adapt, and I find it funny that casual observers on the outside are so morally opposed. It's actually an incredible tool for pitching and has utility for some SFX, compositing, and B-roll shots today. It's really going to help mid market and below, for films that don't have Disney budgets.
Just distribute the prompt and I'll generate my own movie on the fly, with my own tweaks of course.
As long as humans have dreams it won't be like that. The human spirit and desire to connect to others and tell stories doesn't just suddenly die.
I think the very best lens to look at it is that all of the tens of thousands of kids that go through film school and never get to bring their VFX-heavy fantasy to life now suddenly have voice to match their ambition.
Look at the history of photography itself to see an example. "But... but... but my portrait-painting skills will be obsolete! Somebody do something. Waaah."
They can be safely ignored... at least here, and at least for now.
As it currently stands, most things are crap. The speed is not the bottleneck.
Best tv tech to date, though OLED improvements in the past year mean we might see good panels hitting the market in a few years. The race to produce the brightest panels (and putting them on display for comparison and testing in brightly lit electronics stores in environments that couldn’t be further from the actual viewing experience) resulted in a bunch of mass market crap.
Agree with the in store crap and all the processing that’s turned on for the TVs on display. But brightness is useful - can help combat ambient light, and HDR can look amazing.
"aws s3 ls" similarly requests: https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.opencontent.netflix.com?li...
It probably is, given that it's just a static page hosted on blogger.com
But technically, you're right.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/exampl...
Such a pity startups can’t innovate on the content stores of the big companies.
I miss director commentary, I loved re-watching movies with that audio track.
Is there just too much content now? Or has streaming become such a "content mill" that the creators aren't inspired enough about their own work to sit down and talk about it after it's complete?
I would guess this is the reason. Before there was unlimited content or ways to entertain yourself on a screen, having additional content on a disc would have been a marketing point to make people feel like they’re getting more for their money.
But now, I doubt even 1 in 1,000 people would respond to that, since there is always something else that can be instantly switched to watching or playing, so why go through the effort?
It was funny how the sound engineers remoted in for the podcast and had extremely low quality mics, despite it being a show with fantastic sound (really it’s an excellent show in general, just really good).
I liked it quite a bit.
No such incentive is necessary with streaming, the format competes so well on convenience it doesn't have to invest in extra content.
Rare movies and film documentaries from the 20th century still can be found on rutracker, for example. The Russians really did create a dedicated community of archivists, with the quality varying to a certain degree depending on the uploader's reputation, but they certainly created a notorious collection of movies, even the ones relatively unknown or sometimes censored to death on western countries.
AV2 is coming out this year.
> Such a pity startups can’t innovate on the content stores of the big companies.
What do you mean?
This is technically possible today but blocked by DRM and closed apps/players. Innovation would be unlocked if 3rd party apps could create custom viewing experiences based on licensed and purchased content files downloaded locally, e.g. in your local Apple media library. The closed apps could then sherlock/upstream UX improvements that prove broadly useful.
For two video streams with different encodings, swapping between two media players + prefetch can give a close approximation of a continuous video stream.
Which has less than 48 hours to go.