Half a terabyte of public domain video, free for the downloading

Posted by Cory Doctorow, February 2, 2009 11:43 PM | permalink

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

Public.Resource.Org released a 1/2-terabyte public domain stock footage library. This is 438 high-resolution MPEG2 files we obtained from the federal government. The footage ranges from WWII Disney productions to Army training films to Fish and Wildlife Service documentaries of wilderness areas.
For a small studio or a student filmmaker with a half-terabyte free, we thought you might appreciate the convenience of simply downloading the whole thing as NTSC MPEG-2 files all at one time and sorting it out later. We include the metadata files from the Internet Archive, and our servers support http, ftp, and rsync.
If you just just want to browse the video, you can use our depots on YouTube, the Internet Archive, or our own NTIS agency page. But, if you'd rather slurp the source for your video library, have at it.

Public Domain Stock Footage Library (Thanks, Carl!)

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Discussion

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#1 posted by Anonymous , February 3, 2009 12:57 AM

When you say "..federal government" do you mean the federal government of the U.S.A.?

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#2 posted by arkizzle , February 3, 2009 1:09 AM

Thaa-aank yo-ou Internetz!

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#3 posted by Takuan , February 3, 2009 1:22 AM

half a terabyte - free. I honestly remember a time when "terabyte" had a reverent pause before it - like when people said: "the Promised Land".

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#4 posted by Tom Hale , February 3, 2009 1:57 AM

Terabyte. Yeah, I remember when my wife's work computer's hard drive was upgraded to 80 Mb. The computer tech told her, "You will never be able to fill this drive up." That was close to 20 years ago. My first laptop had only a 2 Gb HDD. I now have a few programs that take up more than 5 Gb.

Will we reach a point when you can imagine looking at a used computer at a garage sale saying, "look,it only has a 5 terabyte hard drive, 75 bucks is too much, I'll give you 50."

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#5 posted by Zhent , February 3, 2009 2:51 AM

Wonderful, now if only I lived in a country where ISP's would give you enough quota to download half a terabyte.

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#6 posted by Javier Candeira

, February 3, 2009 3:29 AM

Takuan:

I remember when the same pause went in front of "megabyte". And I am sure you can still find people that remember that pause in front of "kilobyte".

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#7 posted by eaddict , February 3, 2009 5:28 AM

I went to the site and there is no way to purchase it. I'd buy the DVD set to help pay to support efforts like this. If they don't have DVDs maybe someone can set up some torrents.... hmmm... something to do when I am at home...

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#8 posted by eaddict , February 3, 2009 5:30 AM

Update on my boneheaded comment earlier. Duh. Gotta read everything before posting!

These data are available via:
- BitTorrent at http://torrent.resource.org
- Rsync at rsync://bulk.resource.org
- FTP at ftp://bulk.resource.org
- HTTP at http://bulk.resource.org

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#9 posted by CarlMalamud , February 3, 2009 8:49 AM

#7 - don't have torrents going (yet) on that particular archive, but the ftp/http/rsync should all be working.

(If you really want onesies and twosies of these films, highly recommend the Internet Archive interface, which has the same mpeg2 files as have on our bulk site. The filename is usually the archive.org identifier.)

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#10 posted by Takuan , February 3, 2009 9:15 AM

(where are the Four Yorkshire men of Memory?)

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#11 posted by trr , February 3, 2009 12:30 PM

The first PC I paid for (actually a Mac) had a 230 MB HD. Seemed pretty big at the time.

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#12 posted by Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Community Manager

, February 4, 2009 9:02 AM

EAddict, thank you for the great recovery and the links.

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#13 posted by Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Community Manager