on archiving and preservation
and why we must for future generations
Contents:
If the system breaks down, what will happen to the art museums with their priceless paintings and statues? Or to the great libraries with their vast stores of books? Who will take care of the artworks and books when there are no organizations large enough and rich enough to hire curators and librarians?
- Technological Slavery, Letter to David Skrbina, August 29, 2004 - Kaczynski, Theodore J.
In my Ken Burns stupor, I became an addict. Incorrigible, unstoppable I needed more, more information, more knowledge, we have to go deeper, what do the numbers mean I had to pay penance. You start The Vietnam War and make your way to World War Two then to The Civil War but no it gets deeper; what about Native Americans in the United States and the Gold Rush of California? I wish Ken Burns and David Icke can collaborate so we can find the true origin of man. A ten-part documentary series on the Annunaki, the reptilians that dwell beneath the earth’s core being interviewed and having their side of the story told, please we must sit them in a room together.
Who will be the brave patriot that will start the go fund me? O7 Godspeed Marine.
Because I'm so terminally unemployed I decided to take up a little pet project a surrogate activity if you will. Now for the sake of history and preservation, I decided to upscale a real obscure torrent. A Ken Burns documentary called The West, the valiant crusader who uploaded it before I delivered a fine release with 10bit audio, subtitles and chapters in each .mkv file. It was good but not good enough.
What this previous uploader didn’t understand is that I am in fact built different. I have a memory foam mattress and an IKEA bed frame with an £80 projector mounted on top of it. With an Amazon Fire TV stick trying to monitor my every move but because it’s hooked up to a Raspberry Pi 3 with a 6TB Western Digital Red hard drive running plex media server and pi-hole sadly it can’t.
tl;dr: I am probably autistic.
My friend calls it a cave. Good, I am the reptilian who dwells beneath the earth’s core. (who also fucks)
Why we must archive
Bro I get that Marvel’s The Punisher season 2 was trash and the show probably had to be cancelled after that but was it really necessary to nuke it off the entire Netflix platform, it’s literally a Netflix original show it truly makes no sense to me.
Now contrast that to my own media centre.
This shit is not endemic to Netflix too every single streaming service can just dissapear content at anytime for any reason, its weird.
One of the most important albums of 2008 is just removed from the largest streaming service with no explanation.
But not in my iTunes.
I think I made my point etc…
How to share your files
I think the easiest way of sharing your files is with peer to peer software such as Soulseek, “Soulseek is used mostly to exchange music, although users are able to share a variety of files.”
Now this is where you come in, you will download soulseek and you will share any small file of note, now I share my book library, my fonts and all my music files. If you have slow internet make sure to include an upload limit or only share small files. The general rule of soulseek is to let anyone have access to your files and if you have to prevent someone from accessing your files you do it on the basis that this person themselves is not sharing anything so why should they be entitled to accessing your files? Selfish!
Another absolutely cuntish Soulseek faux-pas is making every single one of your files private and only letting people download if they have a certain file you want. These people fill me with so much rage because it feels like you are subverting the freedom of an open source peer-to-peer file sharing app for your own selfish gain rather than the collective goal of making all content available for everyone.
Do not do this.
How to restore old footage & rebuild the .mkv file
Some pieces of media will never be released in HD or blu-ray so this where is you come in, it's your duty as a person who owns a computer to make sure that you not only preserve but you remaster for future generations.
Alright here’s my guide on how to restore old footage and rebuild the .mkv
.mkv files made from DVD’s usually have subtitles and chapter information and other metadata embedded in them so our aim is simply to remaster the footage and then stitch the audio, subtitles and chapter information.
Upscale video with Topaz Video Enhance AI
To upscale footage we are using a program called Topaz Video Enhance AI, this basically uses AI to accurately upscale your footage and it’s very impressive I can’t lie, it’s a very simple process, but very time-consuming. Select the .mkv that you want to upscale and then the output folder. Make sure you have a strong enough computer to do this as it pretty much took me almost 2.4~ seconds per second of footage as it has to AI remaster frame by frame. So half an hour of footage would take like 72 mins to render. Make sure you turn off the sound because we’re going to take that from the source anyway.
I did a short experiment if to see if outputting video in MP4 H.264 or an uncompressed format would change the speed of the upscale. both renders seemed to say (0.10 — 0.11 seconds per frame) so there was honestly no effect. So it’s simply an issue of saving file size.
Convert file to x265 with handbrake
Now that we have our AI-enhanced video we want to transcode it from h.264 to x265 this will ensure a drastically smaller file size. While still retaining the same quality. h.264 has more compatibility with legacy devices but honestly who the fuck cares we’re preserving for future generations their devices will play this shit just fine.
I don’t want to go into in-depth on how to use handbrake cus it would take way too long and I’m lazy but basically go to the video tab and change the encoder to H.265 (x265) and the framerate to Same as source and you can play with the quality slider if you want. You should probably look online for more detailed settings but for the sake of brevity, you should make sure these settings are set this way.
Start the encode and compare the filesizes it’s frankly insane.
Stitching the file back together
This is where I bait and switch Kojima-style on you from that Simpsons clip to Ken Burns The West. So I’m using a program called MKVToolNix. Now, this is really simple drag the SD file that has all the subtitles, audio and chapter information in it, and then drag the h265-encoded video we made in handbrake.
It should look like this, what you’re going to do is untick the video from the SD .mkv and make sure everything is checked. Set the output folder and go to Multiplexer > Start multiplexing.
This will create a brand new .mkv with the upscaled footage but with the audio, subtitles and chapter information of the old SD file.
Congrats! you have just remastered your first file and not cut corners or compromised on a single aspect!
(OPTIONAL) LARP like a hacker
If you plan on sharing your brand new creation dont forget to make a cool .nfo with some ASCII art and how you want to thank everyone involved etc.
