Posted by Peter 'Rattacresh' Backes on August 19, 192001 at 21:29:19: In Reply to: Re: About VideoTapes off the show !! posted by Gilberto on August 19, 192001 at 13:06:39:
: I really think it should be made available on DVD !!
: But i guess until anyone picks up on my idea of distributing the episodes
: like they do with the movies (DivX...) were out of luck !!
I once tried to capture the series. It's a damn lot of work to
even get a single episode on disk. I captured in raw YUY2 color space, no
compression and it required a dedicated 20 GB hd to avoid
frame drops. And by the way, the encoding. (I used MPEG VCD, not a looser
format like 'DivX 3' which is in reality some crappy microsoft code with
exchanged FOURCC code and removed VfW lock.) It took eight hours,
and besides there is also a file size limit of 2 GB on FAT filesystems
which is just not enough for raw video data if you don't use tricks
like file chunking etc. BTW, at that time YUY2 could only be captured,
not decoded, so I needed to use convert it on a Linux PC over network to
a more usable format, which took two days for the 11 Gigabytes used by the
single episode. The conversion program was written by myself and
required some intimate knowledge about the structure of AVI files
which to find out took also one and a half day. After all it was
one week of work to get a single episode done, where two computer were
working even while I slept.
Conclusion: The project to get the series onto a digital media is a full
time job and requires you to be a computer wizard. Ah, I forgot, you need
a fast PC, otherwise the encoding might take longer (some days!) than the
time until the next episode is being broadcast!
Now let's talk about the distribution on Internet: The resulting episode
was exactly 251,038,480 Bytes. All 78 episodes would take about 20 GB
of storage. This means you'd have to host it on a dedicated server because
no ISP offers this much space on a single web space account, especially
not for free. Such a 'Co-Location' aka 'Server-Homing' costs
about $100 per Month, the server itself about $1000. One Gigabyte of
traffic is at about $10. If one person would download the whole
collection, it would cause 20GB of traffic, resuting in costs of
$200.
This is about $1000 fixed costs and $300 per month, if you assume that
only a single person downloads the set of episodes per month!
I hope that explains why there aren't any full episodes in a reasonable
quality for download.
This was about the technical issues, now we'll go to the legal ones.
: (i think it wouldn't even be illegal, cause it's something that it is not
: for sale, no one will ever loose money over it, and anyone could do it
: privately anyway, so...)
I think you have misunderstood copyright. If something has been released
under a copyright (like Ocean Girl), NOONE except the author has any rights
on it. The author can then grant anyone he wishes a license, either for a
fee or for free (Freeware). Generally (depending from the country you
live in) you have been given the right to watch it and *maybe* to record it on tape.
But what you don't have for sure in the case of ocean girl is the right to
distribute it, where it is irrelevant whether you are
doing this for profit or not and whether 'anyone looses any
money over it'.
It might be possible that distributing their work is tolerated by some
authors, but as long as you don't have a written permission to do this
the author could sue you for distributing it anytime he likes.
For example there are two pictures by me on the I think it was the
ocean-girl.net page. If I wanted I could sue the webmaster, especially
because he removed the part of the picture with a copyright notice, if
I wouldn't silently tolerate it. Or maybe I could even sue MediaWorld for
using the ocean girl font made by me in their ocean girl animated series
and on their web site.