alt.hn

12/30/2025 at 10:11:57 AM

Netflix Open Content

 https://opencontent.netflix.com/

by tosh

12/30/2025 at 1:46:08 PM

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.

by Fiveplus

12/30/2025 at 2:15:00 PM

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/...

by Uehreka

12/30/2025 at 2:50:39 PM

yeah but distributing them is probably not just “oh it’s open source!”

by randall

12/30/2025 at 3:39:56 PM

These are motion pictures, not software. “Open source” is about the latter.

by otterley

12/30/2025 at 10:30:55 PM

They're "we won't sue you for using these" bytes. The terminology might be fuzzy but I feel like everyone in this thread understands the concept.

by saghm

12/30/2025 at 4:04:25 PM

But... you'll see Netflix calls it "OPEN SOURCE CONTENT" if you click the link.

by clbn

12/30/2025 at 4:10:12 PM

You are right! At least the link title got it right.

by otterley

12/30/2025 at 5:07:11 PM

I believe open source is about the law. Software is one way it can be applied.

by nipponese

12/30/2025 at 6:07:04 PM

IAAL (but this is not legal advice).

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...

by otterley

1/3/2026 at 1:03:38 PM

IANAL, but I think open source started with software since software has source and binary form. Now with compression and other shenanigans, probably even videos or images could be argued to have a source and binary form. I don't know a thing about multimedia, but people here saying this "open source" release is a good thing mention specifically the fact that it's the uncompressed version, or as the FSF would call it, "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it".

by p91paul

12/30/2025 at 7:12:17 PM

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.

by scott_w

12/30/2025 at 7:36:04 PM

I’m all for linguistic evolution as long as it decreases ambiguity and confusion, as opposed to exacerbating it. See: “literally.”

by otterley

12/30/2025 at 11:07:42 PM

It's awful what happened to literally. The enormity of the change in meaning is so egregious. When it literally gets used with both meanings in the same conversation, decimating my brain, I have to wonder how nonplussed anyone trying to learn English must be. I'm sure there are plenty of words it's happened to, but this must the most egregious example.

by kennyadam

12/31/2025 at 4:50:15 AM

Is it decimating your brain literally or figuratively? You only have one, after all.

by efreak

12/30/2025 at 4:24:45 PM

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.

by jwr

12/31/2025 at 8:43:27 AM

Finally? This content has been up since 2018.

by matteocontrini

12/30/2025 at 11:14:37 AM

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.

by _flux

12/30/2025 at 12:57:32 PM

It's because their blog is hosted on blogger.com (yeah, weird decision), which is owned by Google and does that by default.

by reddalo

12/30/2025 at 4:06:32 PM

I also have a blogger.com blog.

Why? Because I had it for 20+ years, and I still didn't find an easy way to automatically migrate it to WordPress.

by XCSme

12/30/2025 at 4:40:36 PM

You're also presumably not a $400m+ company, which makes it more intestesting.

by wijwp

12/30/2025 at 5:51:00 PM

I assure you no amount of capital trivializes the endeavour of migrating to/from Wordpress.

GP speaks wisdom.

by yunnpp

12/31/2025 at 5:02:28 AM

In my experience, the blog usually falls in some weird space where the marketing team owns it somehow. It’s best to leave them be and let them handle it, because if you suggest an alternative and then something goes wrong or isn’t to their liking you’ll never hear the end of it.

by Aurornis

12/30/2025 at 4:54:26 PM

My point was that it's not trivial to migrate away from blogger.

by XCSme

12/30/2025 at 9:32:47 PM

Clearly engineers at Netflix have more important work to do.

by jonny_eh

12/30/2025 at 11:32:25 AM

It is very odd. I don’t see a good reason, not even tracking.

by afandian

12/30/2025 at 12:42:15 PM

Aren't those just the URLs in google search results if you copy from the results page instead of clicking through to the destination?

by jmathai

12/30/2025 at 2:07:12 PM

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.

by esrauch

12/30/2025 at 2:12:01 PM

I don't understand. They are redirecting to their own S3 bucket, so who would be the recipient of the leak?

Also, isn't this what Referrer-Policy is for? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

by afandian

12/30/2025 at 3:18:50 PM

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.

by giancarlostoro

12/30/2025 at 6:35:39 PM

I was replying to

> 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 .

by afandian

12/31/2025 at 12:52:22 AM

I worked on these big web products before and the answer then was that no, you couldn't trust it to be honored and it would have been considered a privacy incident so better off just having the redirect and having no risk. You can't trust the useragents for example.

Not sure if the reliability of the intentional mechanism has improved enough where this is just legacy or if there's entirely new reasons for it in 2026.

by esrauch

12/30/2025 at 8:04:51 PM

The other problem is if you're too big like Google, you cannot assume everyone will honor this, which is why they do these redirects.

by giancarlostoro

12/30/2025 at 8:31:25 PM

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?

by afandian

12/30/2025 at 3:44:16 PM

Blogger predates the existence of this header by many years. Blogger, I believe, has also been in maintenance mode for many years.

by otterley

12/30/2025 at 4:44:28 PM

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.

by Kye

12/30/2025 at 5:39:57 PM

>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.

by reddalo

12/30/2025 at 3:58:06 PM

Not if you use the ClearURLs addon ;)

by lionkor

12/30/2025 at 2:52:41 PM

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.

by cfn

12/30/2025 at 3:37:01 PM

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"

by bstsb

12/30/2025 at 4:47:35 PM

But they said it sends them to Netfçix? That seems incorrect

by IggleSniggle

12/30/2025 at 3:15:57 PM

...how is that even possible?

by giancarlostoro

12/30/2025 at 5:35:01 PM

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.

by philsnow

12/30/2025 at 1:40:43 PM

More recent content from Netflix is part of the ASWF Digital Production Example Library. https://dpel.aswf.io/

by 332451b

12/30/2025 at 8:16:05 PM

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.

by lrvick

12/30/2025 at 8:18:50 PM

Why buy Japanese bootlegs when webrips are on popular torrent sites?

by calt

12/30/2025 at 8:28:57 PM

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.

by lrvick

12/31/2025 at 3:30:02 PM

Warm storage with checksums and redundancy is the only long-term safe option. I would recommend making a pair of HFS boxes, that storage will last far longer than pressed cold media.

by TsiCClawOfLight

1/1/2026 at 1:36:28 AM

I mean, I do both. But physical disks make it easier to stay away from the internet when I want a simple entertainment experience without distractions.

by lrvick

1/10/2026 at 8:12:17 PM

Fair enough, that I can understand :) Maybe a LAN-only box that boots into jellyfin could help, but there definitely is something unique to physical media.

by TsiCClawOfLight

12/30/2025 at 10:14:08 PM

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.

You're on a site called Hacker News, and don't know how to burn a video file to DVD?

by reaperducer

12/30/2025 at 11:13:35 PM

Writable DVD longevity seems to be a bit of a crapshoot. There are stories of people reading 20 year old burned DVDs just fine and others getting errors on discs only a few years old.

If I were worried about longevity, I would not personally rely on a bunch of DVDs I burned.

by dpark

12/31/2025 at 8:29:45 PM

If I were worried about longevity, I would not personally rely on a bunch of DVDs I burned.

So load the files onto hard drives as a backup. That's what I do.

It doesn't seem like you're looking for a solution, just a method to hear yourself complain.

by reaperducer

12/31/2025 at 9:37:01 PM

I was responding to your implied advice to burn media onto DVDs for long term storage. I never asked for any solution.

It seems like your intent here was just to be condescending and rude.

by dpark

12/31/2025 at 12:26:38 AM

To be fair, pressed discs have succumbed to disc rot as well.

by ThePowerOfFuet

1/1/2026 at 1:39:20 AM

I literally burned and sold bootleg software to churches as one of my go to hustles as a kid, and have a blu ray burner handy.

Knowing how, and being willing to do it for piles of titles and make cases that are nice to display and browse in the real world alongside mass produced copies, takes a lot of effort and I have better things to do with my limited time.

As is tracking down very rare titles in blu ray quality. Often easier to just buy the most decent cased copies I can and rip for long term storage.

by lrvick

12/31/2025 at 6:39:17 AM

Blu-ray regions are different from DVD regions. US and Japan in Blu-ray regions belong to the same group.

by numpad0

1/1/2026 at 1:42:40 AM

Exactly this is why Japanese blu ray releases of streaming shows that lack physical US releases are a great backup option.

by lrvick

12/30/2025 at 10:33:52 AM

The last addition was made in 2020.

by carschno

12/30/2025 at 11:45:23 AM

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.

Anyone know of something else?

by jcattle

12/30/2025 at 3:09:23 PM

34gb for a 5min short film, crazy. High fidelity though

by 0xbrayo

12/30/2025 at 3:37:30 PM

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.

by ronsor

12/30/2025 at 3:52:31 PM

Well, hopefully two.

by stavros

12/30/2025 at 4:17:56 PM

This will at some point in the future invert.

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.

by echelon

12/31/2025 at 1:59:18 AM

> I find it funny that casual observers on the outside are so morally opposed. ... It's really going to help mid market and below, for films that don't have Disney budgets.

Agreed. I also have a few decades of experience in film and television production, mostly in creating and deploying new digital tooling paradigms from 'desktop video' in the 90s to virtual sets to real-time 3D environments. New digital production tools have almost always had the biggest impact enabling low-end and mid-tier creatives, not big budget studio productions. In the early 90s the Amiga-based Video Toaster enabled upstart productions like Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Babylon 5. The Toaster also enabled about 95% more cable-access crap and bad porn but the other 5% was fantastically creative new stuff which couldn't have existed on indy budgets. Dramatic new production paradigms tend to unleash both democratization and disruption. Most people welcome the democratization yet reflexively fear the disruption. Today, few recall the early 90s predictions from the professional production industry of desktop video causing economic and creative doom, despite being widespread and echoed across mainstream media.

While machine learning-based production tools aren't flexible or granular enough yet for more than limited experiments, there's no reason they won't become increasingly useful for real work. IMHO they'll likely have the same kind of democratizing impact as desktop video and the Toaster - 95% more regrettable crap, some of which we're already starting to see but, eventually, also 5% more wonderfully creative stuff which wouldn't have existed without it. The crap will quickly fade away but the bold new stuff will remain pushing creative frontiers and shaping tomorrow's classics.

by mrandish

12/30/2025 at 5:18:19 PM

If this (tragic, dystopian, abominable) future comes to pass, why would we store movies at all?

Just distribute the prompt and I'll generate my own movie on the fly, with my own tweaks of course.

by hamdingers

12/30/2025 at 5:43:03 PM

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.

by echelon

12/30/2025 at 11:42:29 PM

Is this meant as a response to my comment (which was an obvious joke) or were you just looking for an opportunity to soapbox?

by hamdingers

12/30/2025 at 6:23:29 PM

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."

by CamperBob2

12/30/2025 at 9:40:36 PM

Your comment left me incredibly annoyed because I think you fully misunderstand the relationship of AI to art.

> 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.

Putting creative power into the hands of outsiders isn't important. In fact, creative power is currently in the hands of outsiders. You do not need a cinema studio to make a good film. There is nothing stopping most people from making a good feature length film and putting it up on YouTube except for their willpower, spirit, and creativity.

The bottleneck on great art has never been technology but the creative vision of the individual. Increased AI presence in art will do nothing to alleviate that bottleneck.

With that said, I am not bothered by the emergence of AI or its applications for any kind of art. I'm just a realist. It will enable equally enable both the great and the shitty, so in the end it is a wash.

by jayers

12/30/2025 at 10:16:12 PM

Your comment left me encouraged, just because there are so few people left around here who would say something like

>You do not need a cinema studio to make a good film. There is nothing stopping most people from making a good feature length film and putting it up on YouTube except for their willpower, spirit, and creativity.

That being said, it's not true. Even Robert Rodriguez had to exercise a modicum of management skill and spend a non-trivial amount of money to get El Mariachi made. And even then, the available resources severely constrained what he could do with $7000 (about $20000 today).

The next Rodriguez is probably already using half-baked, primitive tools like WAN 2.2 to blow us all away. We just don't know who he or she is yet.

Something else that's not true is:

>It will equally enable both the great and the shitty, so in the end it is a wash.

The great works add far more to our culture than the shitty works take away. Before AI, 90% of everything was crap. After AI, 99% of everything might be crap. But the remaining 1% is all that matters.

by CamperBob2

1/2/2026 at 3:47:45 PM

My reaction to your original comment was probably too ornery.

You are right that not everyone can make a great film, but I would still contend that most everyone (in the US and Europe) has the right material conditions to make a great film (access to a camera, editing software, people, and locations). You'd need great discipline, leadership, creativity, and charisma to get it done. Most people lack one or more of those qualities.

by jayers

12/30/2025 at 8:03:42 PM

We could market books as movies by marketing them as long consistent prompts. Moviebooks.

by deadbabe

12/30/2025 at 5:40:42 PM

The thing about the ludds is that as a rule, they don't understand that their perceived enemies are threatening to make their lives better.

They can be safely ignored... at least here, and at least for now.

by CamperBob2

12/30/2025 at 8:54:21 PM

Yes I'm sure that when we start pumping out 10 movies/minute the quality will only increase.

As it currently stands, most things are crap. The speed is not the bottleneck.

by array_key_first

12/31/2025 at 2:18:06 PM

I found the Sol Levante AE project files to be a huge nothinburger. Like there's nothing there... it's literally just a background and two character layers, no effects or camera moves or anything that would be remotely interesting to a VFX person.

This feels to me like an intentional obfuscation-- like the studio didn't actually want to open-source anything meaningful, or netflix didn't pay them enough to justify collecting huge project files.

by Tad_Waganag

12/31/2025 at 12:45:53 AM

Meridian is a great way to see what high quality HDR content should look like. The dark parts of the film are beautiful. A shame the rest of Netflix’s catalogue isn’t the same.

by nvarsj

12/30/2025 at 7:43:22 PM

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.

by dom96

12/30/2025 at 4:42:21 PM

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.

by caseyf7

12/30/2025 at 4:54:04 PM

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.

by ComputerGuru

12/30/2025 at 7:24:57 PM

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.

by timc3

12/30/2025 at 5:10:38 PM

Newish QD oled finally hit that threshold of upgrading for me. Plasma definitely had a hell of a run though.

by Lord-Jobo

12/30/2025 at 9:18:15 PM

I wish there was a rubber ducky like thing to give you as a fellow plasma TV user.

by assimpleaspossi

12/30/2025 at 4:46:45 PM

Wouldn’t that be handled on your TV and/or streaming box? That’s how I control it, at least.

by floydnoel

12/30/2025 at 5:02:20 PM

Unfortunately iPads also don’t allow you to turn off HDR

by caseyf7

12/30/2025 at 6:11:55 PM

For a long time putting them in low power mode killed HDR, but it seems they patched that bug (feature)

by swiftcoder

12/30/2025 at 1:40:53 PM

Is this for some sort of a formal compliance or being able to point out "we host things free of charge too?

by everlier

12/30/2025 at 1:48:50 PM

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.

by bwilliams18

12/30/2025 at 1:52:13 PM

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.

by ahartmetz

12/30/2025 at 11:39:32 AM

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.

by FunnyLookinHat

12/30/2025 at 12:14:09 PM

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.

by ronbenton

12/30/2025 at 12:58:52 PM

> The page almost seems like someone’s pet project that didn’t have any explicit funding

It probably is, given that it's just a static page hosted on blogger.com

by reddalo

12/30/2025 at 1:22:43 PM

From the names mentioned in the most recent blog post, they left late 2022.

by gregoryl

12/31/2025 at 2:12:44 AM

Why is it bad tho?

by therealdrag0

12/30/2025 at 12:32:51 PM

I'm surprised they didn't use BitTorrent, with these HTTP links as web seeds. That'd make the most sense.

by uyzstvqs

12/30/2025 at 1:03:46 PM

Politically it would be an interesting choice for Netflix to encourage people to use their BitTorrent clients..

But technically, you're right.

by alex_duf

12/30/2025 at 8:30:57 PM

I didn't even know Netflix had a bit torrent client!

by abustamam

12/30/2025 at 11:51:08 AM

The page look like zero effort given anyway, like one of the free templates you can find.

by mrtksn

12/30/2025 at 12:25:50 PM

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

by robingchan

12/30/2025 at 12:33:15 PM

S3 absolutely supports HTTPS. I think they set their bucket policy to forbid HTTPS. The whole thing is odd.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/exampl...

by 8organicbits

12/30/2025 at 3:52:53 PM

so, isn’t this using the s3 static website hosting feature - (im assuming due to the dir listing) which i dont believe does support https

by robingchan

12/30/2025 at 9:44:06 PM

no Big Buck Bunny...

by swypych

12/30/2025 at 1:26:49 PM

[dead]

by levibev

12/30/2025 at 3:09:01 PM

[dead]

by sapphirebreeze

12/30/2025 at 10:51:40 AM

[flagged]

by danielktdoranie

12/30/2025 at 10:57:08 AM

They have downloadable files that you don't need an account for.

by FartyMcFarter

12/30/2025 at 6:13:22 PM

[flagged]

by aurelien

12/30/2025 at 10:36:23 AM

[flagged]

by Adesany

12/30/2025 at 10:37:14 AM

[flagged]

by Adesany

12/30/2025 at 11:25:13 AM

Cool! I'm looking forward to going through some of these, looks very interesting!

by cooper_ganglia

12/30/2025 at 12:47:12 PM

There’s basically zero innovation in online video.

Such a pity startups can’t innovate on the content stores of the big companies.

by andrewstuart

12/30/2025 at 1:09:15 PM

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

by gibsonsmog

12/30/2025 at 1:18:17 PM

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.

by michaelbuckbee

12/30/2025 at 1:43:08 PM

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?

by sbarre

12/30/2025 at 2:47:59 PM

> Is there just too much content now?

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?

by lotsofpulp

12/30/2025 at 1:44:51 PM

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).

by wincy

12/30/2025 at 4:51:03 PM

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.

I liked it quite a bit.

by filoleg

12/30/2025 at 11:23:58 PM

The Chernobyl tv show had a nice podcast that went with it as well. I think these kinds of extra features are especially nice when it is for a show based on real life. They get to point out things that may not have been 100% historically accurate due to budget/time, and also get to bring in experts to speak about things related to developing the show.

It is funny that these things often just get released on podcast platforms and aren't really integrated into the streaming service.

Especially since this show, and the shows mentioned in these parent comments are all produced by the platforms they got released on. So they also have a whole lot more control to actually integrate this extra content.

These streaming platforms often state they are competing to keep you on their platform consuming things, and it seems odd to me that they wouldn't want to try and capture people for longer with these kinds of extras. Especially since as the other user indicated, these would be much lower cost to produce and license compared to the original content. And for someone who really enjoyed what they watched it would be a pretty appealing extra to have.

by Fogest

12/30/2025 at 5:21:40 PM

DVD extras existed as an incentive for users to re-buy films they already had on VHS.

No such incentive is necessary with streaming, the format competes so well on convenience it doesn't have to invest in extra content.

by hamdingers

12/30/2025 at 3:11:13 PM

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.

by weslleyskah

12/30/2025 at 2:34:28 PM

Disney+ has quite a bit of this actually. I agree though that overall most streaming services don’t offer this.

by treesknees

12/30/2025 at 1:47:27 PM

DVDs were iirc 480p which would look absolutely terrible on a modern TV.

by expedition32

12/30/2025 at 9:24:48 PM

Remember those DVD releases that had plastic edges and cardboard fronts/backs? That's an era for you. They're always max 480p, sometimes even 480i, and often single layer, dual sided. Those came out when the Sony was still making Trinitron CRTs that could barely do 720p.

by k12sosse

12/31/2025 at 4:39:14 AM

Depends on the DVD. Some of them do look terrible, but some aren't too bad. Probably depends on how it was transferred and mastered and what bitrate they used on the disc.

by toast0

12/30/2025 at 12:59:49 PM

> There’s basically zero innovation in online video.

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?

by philipallstar

12/30/2025 at 1:05:34 PM

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.

by afavour

12/30/2025 at 3:30:35 PM

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.

by olyjohn

12/30/2025 at 4:21:14 PM

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.

by afavour

1/2/2026 at 10:09:29 AM

Can a startup not make a bandersnatch-like web page with video on it? What would stop them?

by philipallstar

12/30/2025 at 1:52:51 PM

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.

by walterbell

12/30/2025 at 3:21:36 PM

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.

by phantomathkg

12/30/2025 at 3:55:48 PM

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.

by walterbell

12/30/2025 at 2:21:54 PM

>AV2 is coming out this year.

Which has less than 48 hours to go.

by ksec

12/30/2025 at 12:46:31 PM

I love it just because squid game.

by niceboy2

12/30/2025 at 2:08:10 PM

With all that $500K talent, you would think they could make a better looking website.

by game_the0ry