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/...
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/...
yeah but distributing them is probably not just “oh it’s open source!”
12 replies →
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.
Finally? This content has been up since 2018.
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.
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.
5 replies →
It is very odd. I don’t see a good reason, not even tracking.
Aren't those just the URLs in google search results if you copy from the results page instead of clicking through to the destination?
11 replies →
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"
1 reply →
...how is that even possible?
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.
More recent content from Netflix is part of the ASWF Digital Production Example Library. https://dpel.aswf.io/
(2022)?
(Or earlier? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801075)
<https://netflixtechblog.com/engineers-making-movies-aka-open...> (2018)
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.
Why buy Japanese bootlegs when webrips are on popular torrent sites?
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.
9 replies →
Blu-ray regions are different from DVD regions. US and Japan in Blu-ray regions belong to the same group.
1 reply →
The last addition was made in 2020.
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?
34gb for a 5min short film, crazy. High fidelity though
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.
Well, hopefully two.
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.
12 replies →
How do I play back the EBU STL subtitles on Linux?
http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/ind...
Closed Caption Creator has a desktop version of Linux that can read EBU-STL files.
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.
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.
Firefox refuses to open the download links with an error like:
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 :(
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.
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 :)
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.
Newish QD oled finally hit that threshold of upgrading for me. Plasma definitely had a hell of a run though.
I wish there was a rubber ducky like thing to give you as a fellow plasma TV user.
Wouldn’t that be handled on your TV and/or streaming box? That’s how I control it, at least.
Unfortunately iPads also don’t allow you to turn off HDR
2 replies →
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
Which is hitting the bucket path route at: https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.opencontent.netflix.com/sp...
"aws s3 ls" similarly requests: https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.opencontent.netflix.com?li...
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
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.
Why is it bad tho?
I'm surprised they didn't use BitTorrent, with these HTTP links as web seeds. That'd make the most sense.
Politically it would be an interesting choice for Netflix to encourage people to use their BitTorrent clients..
But technically, you're right.
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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
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...
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no Big Buck Bunny...
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They have downloadable files that you don't need an account for.
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Cool! I'm looking forward to going through some of these, looks very interesting!
There’s basically zero innovation in online video.
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.
6 replies →
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.
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.
2 replies →
> 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?
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.
3 replies →
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.
2 replies →
>AV2 is coming out this year.
Which has less than 48 hours to go.
I love it just because squid game.
With all that $500K talent, you would think they could make a better looking website.