[dizzy9]

Excellent news. Babylon 5 is underappreciated, but it has mainly good episodes and several amazing ones.[0]

However, if I can be cynical for a moment: The article title is misleading. Only a few episodes have been uploaded so far. At the current rate of one episode per week, it will take until March 2028 to conclude all five seasons. That's assuming they post every episode, and allow the episodes to remain up in the long term.

For some reason, the first episode of season 1, Midnight on the Firing Line, is missing from the YouTube upload, which is a pretty critical omission. YouTube is also a minefield of spoilers in the video recommendations. I can't recommend the YouTube uploads to newcomers right now. The Blu-ray collection appears to be available for about $100.

[0]: https://seriesgraph.com/show/3137-babylon-5

[Izkata]

Fun fact: The S4 finale that rates merely "good" is actually a rapidly put together alternate finale when they got renewed for S5, using some of that season's budget. This was so they could delay the real series finale to S5 (originally filmed for S4, when they were unsure they'd get an S5).

[JLO64]

Definitely not my favorite episode, but I got a kick out of the similarities to A Canticle for Leibowitz during one of the segments in it.

[Groxx]

Yeah, so far I see mislabeled-pilot, and episodes 3 and 4.

That... does not (currently) look like "Babylon 5 is now free to watch". That looks like a minor probing to see if they can charge for it again somewhere. That kind of thing happens constantly, and it's rare that it ever finishes.

[watwut]

Based on other articles, the plan is to release an episode a week. They are giving us 90ties experience, I guess. They just somehow managed to screw it up.

They did not released episode 1, which gives an authentic 90ties experience In 90ties people missed episodes. And misnamed the pilot movie as episode 1 and mislabeled other episodes.

And they dont use playlist and will be simultanepusly releasing clips from episodes, so it will be wonderfull mess.

[1970-01-01]

Without understanding the motive behind it, you should assume it is not good news. You're right to be skeptical of the upload count. All they're doing is sheltering the show on YouTube until the view counters rise to the point of another streaming service making a charitable offer. Then, poof all episodes are moved to another service without notice.

[pseudohadamard]

This is why I bought everything on DVD years ago, I can watch and re-watch as often as I like and there's nothing some "rights holder" can do about the content that I paid for with my money.

[wiradikusuma]

Isn't the linked YouTube video title literally "Season 1, Episode 1"?

[thinkingemote]

yes, somewhat incorrectly as its the pilot / first movie, that came out before season 1 started

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5#Pilot_film_(1993)

The numbering of the uploaded episodes seems to be off by one versus wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Babylon_5_episodes#Sea...

[nobody9999]

>Isn't the linked YouTube video title literally "Season 1, Episode 1"?

Yes and no It's the pilot (and consequently the first[2]) episode "The Gathering", which actually doesn't have an episode number.[0]

The first aired episode was S1E1 "Midnight on the Firing Line".

The former was released as a "TV Movie" even though it was the pilot episode.

[0] http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/eplist.html for the episode listings.[1]

[1] Be careful, a wrong click can end up giving you spoilers. :(

[2] I'd note that the pilot episode has significant personnel, prop and make-up differences from the rest of the series.

[iso1631]

> The Blu-ray collection appears to be available for about $100.

It saddens me that people aren't willing to pay a pittance in cash (about $1 an hour) for entertainment. They're willing to spend their time, but not their money.

This isn't just buying a 100 episode box set, it applies to people complaining "I'd have to spend $10 on $streaming_service to watch that 5 hour miniseries, that's terrible" too.

[squeedles]

I'd be delighted to spend that for a Blu-ray of the series but I'm afraid of getting the mangled version that they released on DVD.

For background, JMS knew the widescreen transition was coming so filmed everything in 16:9. As he put it at the time, it didn't really cost more, you just had to pay more attention to lighting at the wings. All CGI was done in 4:3 because it was thought to be easy to rerender in the future. Alas, the digital assets were not preserved properly and when the time came for DVD, nobody wanted to pay for more work. There may be places where they used the 16:9 masters, but anyplace where there was CGI, particularly where they were compositing over live action, basically chopped the top and bottom of the 4:3 resulting in a sub-VGA mess.

It made everyone weep.

[cosmic_cheese]

I think the aversion to subscribing to a streaming service for a single series has more to do with the recurring nature of the subscription than it does the price. You have to remember to cancel it when you’re done, which is easy to forget with so many things bring for our attention these days. That $10 could easily multiply several times over if it slips your mind, at which point congratulations, you’ve paid a significant portion of the box set’s price to rent the series.

All streaming services should offer prepaid options, so you can add time in 30/60/90 day increments. Less mental overhead and it better matches how a lot of people pay for streaming anyway.

[Uvix]

When I buy the box set, at least I'll be able to watch it in perpetuity. $10 to own a 5 hour miniseries would be more than reasonable, but I don't want to have to pay $10 each time I want to watch it. (If I even can watch it, and they haven't lost the license in the interim.)

[jl6]

It’s not just pure value analysis, it’s a lack of confidence that the money will go to the people that deserve it.

[wat10000]

I’m not going to spend a hundred bucks to try a series I may not even like. It would be one thing if I loved it and wanted to watch it again, or if I had seen enough to know that I want to watch it all. But that’s a lot of money for an unknown quantity.

[account42]

The problem with that logic is that the people who have the most time (kids/students) often don't tend to have a spare $1 per hour. Thankfully there are other options for them, yarr.

[deknos]

i would pay if it is in a format, which is not also trying to deceive me like bluray with its fucking DRM in its player.

[poisonarena]

for me, its downloading the torrent and keeping it forever on my hard drive and not paying 100 dollars.

[sylario]

I am incredibly out of the loop in the world of blu-ray. Do you still need to buy a terrible video player to read them legally on windows ? I give so little attention to physical media that I do not even know if 4k blu-ray use the same blu-ray storage format or if it is some sort of upgraded blu-ray with more storage.

[chocochunks]

Officially? Yes, unfortunately. 4K is even more complicated. Technically 4K is the same discs, but sometimes they use the rare BD-XL 100GB discs that not all drives can read. There's also a bunch of extra DRM junk, so for 4K you need a new drive, new software and an Intel CPU from a specific time period as new ones don't include the bits for 4K Blu-ray DRM.

Unofficially you use MakeMKV and just rip the disc.

EDIT: Oh, apparently PowerDVD no longer supports UHD Blu-ray either so even the official way is dead now.

[dangus]

Don’t bother with trying to use a player on a computer. Use MakeMKV and a blu-ray drive. Use modified firmware to rip 4K titles. Details can be found on MakeMKV forums.

After you rip them you can re-encode them to save storage space using Handbrake.

Either that or buy a 4K player designed for a TV, like a PS5 or the two most popular Sony and Panasonic players on the market.

- PS5 is a good choice if you need a vertically mounted behind-TV type of setup.

- Sony UBP-X700U is value 4K, just get the updated version which fixes some annoyances of the previous model (I think U is the updated US model)

- Panasonic UB820-K, widely considered to be the best one without spending a thousand bucks.

Overall though, as much as I want blu-ray to be a thing, the market is just dire. I tried to get into it and it’s frustrating.

New release titles often skip blu-ray entirely, especially for demographics that don’t care for the format like kids content. Either that or new titles will skip 4K so you’ll be paying $25 for 1080p when $10 will get you 4K digital. Then when you redeem the movies anywhere code, you don’t get 4K because your blu-ray is only 1080p.

I thought it would be cool to get into some classic 4K upscale cinephile releases like Lawrence of Arabia but it turns out that I can buy the 4K version on Apple TV for like $5 where getting your hands on the disc is like a hundred bucks.

I certainly appreciate the disc releases from outlets like Criterion but $40+ for a movie seems so hard to justify.

The 4K experience on providers like Apple is so excellent, the benefits of blu-ray are so minimal if any at all.

Another random example, my Studio Ghibli transfers on blu-ray are clearly worse quality than HBO Max, and there are no 4K blu-rays except for The Boy and the Heron. There is no motivation to re-do any disc releases of those movies on 4K UHD because nobody is going to buy them.

My feeling is that despite the licensing pitfalls of digital ownership, I’ve concluded that it just makes more sense compared to physical media. Don’t bother with blu-rays. If a license gets revoked from me in the future I’ll just shrug my shoulders and pirate the title.

[nikanj]

Babylon 5 has never been easy to watch which is a large factor in the underappreciation. Hard to appreciate something you can’t watch legally

[MrMember]

It's very easy to watch. When I wanted to watch it a few years ago it took only a few minutes to find a torrent of the full series and less than an hour to download.

[roywiggins]

It was easy to watch on Tubi (with ads), though apparently as of very recently it was pulled.

[moffkalast]

I find it hard to believe anyone on this site has a problem with piracy, nor technical nor moral.

[Supermancho]

Tubi stopped carrying all of B5 this month.

B5 has now appeared on Youtube.

Roku has all of B5 - with less commercials than the others

[Throaway1982]

I really enjoyed it until they shoehorned in an attractive human + wierd alien romance to compete with Odo & Kira (barf) on DS9

[wat10000]

Didn’t B5 do it first, by years? Kira/Odo didn’t become an item until B5 was off the air.

[lolive]

Didn't rewatch it for decades. But isn't this romance a very background narrative arc until the very latest season?

[toomuchtodo]

Recommended link to the Blu-ray collection for archival purposes?

[Akronymus]

Also, it seems like piracy is still yhe superior form to watch it over YT because, quite frankly, YT's quality is crap.

[roywiggins]

fwiw the whole thing is free to watch on Tubi and the quality there is very nice.

[nephihaha]

It's let down by its effects which even appeared ropey at the time. However, some good storylines.

[Telemakhos]

Having been alive at the time, I can tell you that the effects were amazing then. B5 was one of the first shows to use computer graphics and partially-virtual sets. It wasn't limited by the number of times you could re-composite a handful of models together, so it showed whole armadas of ships. Windows didn't open onto a black felt field of stars but a green screen that allowed ships to pull up right outside the window.

The effects don't hold up to what has followed in the past quarter century, and they weren't preserved in a good resolution, so they'll never look very good on a high-resolution monitor instead of an old CRT. But, at the time, they were amazing.

[alienbaby]

If I remember right, the graphics in early episodes were rendered on commodore amigas