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.<p>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) <a href="https://www.arri.com/en/learn-help/learn-help-camera-system/camera-sample-footage-reference-image" rel="nofollow">https://www.arri.com/en/learn-help/learn-help-camera-system/...</a>
I used to work at a company developing an independent H.264 decoder implementation. We would have <i>killed</i> for this kind of source content, especially if the license allowed showing it at trade shows.
More recent content from Netflix is part of the ASWF Digital Production Example Library.
<a href="https://dpel.aswf.io/" rel="nofollow">https://dpel.aswf.io/</a>
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.
It's because their blog is hosted on blogger.com (yeah, weird decision), which is owned by Google and does that by default.
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.
It is very odd. I don’t see a good reason, not even tracking.
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"
...how is that even possible?
(2022)?<p>(Or earlier? <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801075">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801075</a>)
The last addition was made in 2020.
I was curious about this recently. I was wondering about open files of well known artists.<p>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.<p>Anyone know of something else?
How do I play back the EBU STL subtitles on Linux?<p><a href="http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html?prefix=ElFuente/subtitles/" rel="nofollow">http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/ind...</a>
34gb for a 5min short film, crazy. High fidelity though
I would like to see them give us an option to turn HDR off. In some situations it is just too bright and in others too dark.
I’m still rocking a plasma tv which sidesteps the matter altogether :)<p>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.<p>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.
Newish QD oled finally hit that threshold of upgrading for me. Plasma definitely had a hell of a run though.
Wouldn’t that be handled on your TV and/or streaming box? That’s how I control it, at least.
Is this for some sort of a formal compliance or being able to point out "we host things free of charge too?
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.
It costs them little and what's in it for them is better codecs -> lower bandwidth expenses. Interests are aligned with the public, it's fine.
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.
Quite surprising. It does seem like you can get an https download with<p><pre><code> aws s3 cp --no-sign-request s3://download.opencontent.netflix.com/sparks/creative-commons-attribution-4-intl-public-license.txt .
</code></pre>
Which is hitting the bucket path route at: <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.opencontent.netflix.com/sparks/creative-commons-attribution-4-intl-public-license.txt" rel="nofollow">https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.opencontent.netflix.com/sp...</a><p>"aws s3 ls" similarly requests: <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.opencontent.netflix.com?list-type=2&prefix=sparks%2F&delimiter=%2F&encoding-type=url" rel="nofollow">https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.opencontent.netflix.com?li...</a>
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.
> The page almost seems like someone’s pet project that didn’t have any explicit funding<p>It probably is, given that it's just a static page hosted on blogger.com
From the names mentioned in the most recent blog post, they left late 2022.
I'm surprised they didn't use BitTorrent, with these HTTP links as web seeds. That'd make the most sense.
The page look like zero effort given anyway, like one of the free templates you can find.
this is hosted on s3 which doesn't support HTTPS, that said - if they used cloudfront in front of this bucket, they could save $$$ and have a SSL
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
There’s basically zero innovation in online video.<p>Such a pity startups can’t innovate on the content stores of the big companies.
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.<p>I miss director commentary, I loved re-watching movies with that audio track.<p>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?
> Is there just too much content now?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).
DVD extras existed as an incentive for users to re-buy films they already had on VHS.<p>No such incentive is necessary with streaming, the format competes so well on convenience it doesn't have to invest in extra content.
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.<p>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.
Disney+ has quite a bit of this actually. I agree though that overall most streaming services don’t offer this.
DVDs were iirc 480p which would look absolutely terrible on a modern TV.
> There’s basically zero innovation in online video.<p>AV2 is coming out this year.<p>> Such a pity startups can’t innovate on the content stores of the big companies.<p>What do you mean?
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.
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.<p>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.
>AV2 is coming out this year.<p>Which has less than 48 hours to go.
Cool! I'm looking forward to going through some of these, looks very interesting!
I love it just because squid game.
With all that $500K talent, you would think they could make a better looking website.