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coreyp_1 | 1 year ago

I feel the same towards the "Computer Chronicles", which, IMO, is the best example of unbiased tech reporting that I have ever seen. I still love to watch the old episodes. Unfortunately, even though I have most of the 20 year history of episodes, many are still missing.

Internet Archive, Individual episodes. Unorganized except for seasons. Many different video versions. 965 Gigs: https://archive.org/details/Computer_Chronicles

Internet Archive, single zip file. Re-transcoded, better organized and documented as to Repeat, Missing, and foreign language versions. 83.5 gigs: https://archive.org/details/computer-chronicles-full-epidose...

If downloading from the Internet Archive, there is a CLI tool called "ia".

discuss

order

boomboomsubban|1 year ago

>If downloading from the Internet Archive, there is a CLI tool called "ia".

As that's not the easiest search target, https://archive.org/developers/internetarchive/cli.html

coreyp_1|1 year ago

Thanks! I was in between meetings so didn't have time to elaborate.

I love the `ia` tool, but it drives me crazy that it can't resume a failed download. Some files are fast (~30 meg/sec). Others are painfully slow (~100 kb/sec). The same collection can contain fast and slow downloads.

I had a file that kept failing when using ia, after about 6 hours of downloading at the slow speed. I switched to Chrome, which still downloaded at the slow speed, but Chrome would attempt to automatically resume the download, and if that failed, you can press a button to ask Chrome to try to resume it again. I have had to fall back to that clunky solution several times.

My only other concern is that ia does not download files in parallel.

Aside from my minor complaints, I'm thankful that it exists, and I have told other about it since discovering it myself in the last few months.

dfxm12|1 year ago

There are a lot of episodes on YT as well, if you haven't already looked there.

https://www.youtube.com/@ComputerChroniclesYT

coreyp_1|1 year ago

I know about it, but I haven't looked yet. In the large episode group, there are 658 episodes. The YouTube listing doesn't make it easy to search for a particular episode, though, and YouTube's compression is horrible.

I face the same dilemma on Bob Ross' The Joy Of Painting. I would love to download them, and they are on YouTube, but the compression makes them look really bad. Well, that, and I'm not sure how to download a huge number of vids from YouTube like that. :/