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One of the great things about Sneakers is that the McGuffin's core concept still holds up as reasonably credible 30+ years later.
I first saw this movie in the mid-90s, and it sparked a mild fascination with how cryptography (specifically, RSA) works, that arguably influenced my career path.
Fun fact: Leonard Adleman (the A in RSA) drafted the words and slides used for the lecture scene: https://molecularscience.usc.edu/sneakers/
I love the joke about being snubbed for mathematical consulting at the oscars.
I was shocked when I rewatched this recently just how good the cryptography technobabble is in this movie. Specifically the scene where the professor is presenting on breaking public key cryptography. The very first thing he mentions is a number field sieve. Nice work hiring whatever cryptography consultant that got for this scene.
I think the only part that really pulled me out of the movie was when they were testing the device and it was decrypting a dial-up feed random character by random character on the screen. It wasn't "Hackers" bad but it was still pretty unbelievable.
It was none other than Leonard Adleman of RSA fame.
This movie helped me:
1. Relate to a blind student in our school when they could hear things differently than the rest of us.
2. Realize that social engineering is thing and I tried to practice it in high school to gain access to computer rooms where the "fancy" computers were.
3. Realize that a government can steal or in general can be sneaky/secretive.
Re: negative re-masters
I can’t help but notice that a number of older and very prominent shows on streaming services are clearly ripped from a video cassette.
For example, the older Simpsons episodes on Disney Plus. Some of the episodes have very prominent dot crawl which is unacceptable for a digital format that you pay for.
I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape. Were studios really that reckless with their properties?
>I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape.
So many shows very much were composited to analog video tape. I personally worked on edit sessions where multiple film-to-tape transfers were composited to 1" then BetacamSP then digital formats like DigiBeta and everything that followed. I get it is hard to grok for eople without direct experience only ever knowing digital comping with modern software packages without ever hitting tape. But us ol'timers remember the pain
> Were studios really that reckless with their properties?
yes. while it might not have been done out of malice, but just lack of future thinking. for a studio making the first season of an animated title, they might not have even considered their show would be so successful. also, there's no way that they could have predicted HD=>4K and digital streaming. they are only human and just trying to stay on schedule with barely enough time to meet deadlines. meeting air date deadlines are much more strict than whatever dot release your PM is pushing for in whatever software product you might be working.
Funny some of the best "home theater" experiences I have lately are VHS tapes which, when decoded by something Dolby Pro Logic compatible, have a great 5.1 soundtrack.
Contrast that to DVD-era 5.1 soundtracks which are usually nerfed because they are afraid you'll play them on a 2 channel system or Blu Ray-era 5.1 soundtracks which are nominally 7.1 or 9.1 but are illegible on any sound system whatsoever because modern movies don't care if you can understand what the actors say. You're going to watch with the subtitles on anyway. But heck, even downmarket platforms like Tubi are crammed with subtitled Italian crime dramas and subprime anime, so every cloud has a silver lining.
The X-Files went the opposite way: The streaming release was remastered from higher quality originals that had been prepared ahead of time for the eventual arrival of higher resolution TV.
I’m not surprised that some shows were never archived at higher quality, though. The entertainment industry has a lot of people who just want to get their job done and go home, just like any other industry. Many classic series were not instant classics, they were shoestring operations trying to get a product out the door on too little budget. Getting anything across the finish line was the objective, not archiving the highest quality for future generations.
> The entertainment industry has a lot of people who just want to get their job done and go home, just like any other industry.
I think another reason, in addition to yours, is that the entertainment industry sees their products are disposable, or want them to be disposable. This way they can pull the drain plug from the pool, so they can pump in new content into it. Otherwise, listening same good old songs will inevitably eat into profitability of the new releases, because you can watch/listen for so long in a given time.
BTW, I don't share the same views with "the entertainment industry". You can't get the good old albums from my cold, dead hands.
> I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape.
Happens more than you'd think (in the past, at least - it's obviously much easier now with digital storage.) Couple of examples I remember off the top of my head:
re: Adrian Maben making a Director's Cut DVD of "Live In Pompeii"[0]
"While searching in the French and English film laboratories for the unused negative we learnt of a disaster. On the initiative of the French Production Company, MHF Productions, the 548 cans of 35mm negative and prints of the rushes had been stored at the Archives du Film du Bois d’Arcy outside Paris. One of the employees, a certain Monsieur Schmidt, "le Conservateur," unfortunately decided that he wanted to make extra storage space on his shelves for more recent films and that the Floyd footage was without interest or value. The 548 cans of negative and the prints of the Pink Floyd unused rushes and outtakes were incinerated."
re: Dr Who missing episodes[1]
"Further erasing of Doctor Who master videotapes by the Engineering Department continued into the 1970s. Eventually, every master videotape of the programme's first 253 episodes (1963–69) was destroyed or wiped. The final 1960s master tapes to be erased were those for the 1968 serial Fury from the Deep, in August 1974."
[0] https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/adri...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes
Tell me you haven’t worked in entertainment without actually…
My experience in entertainment has given me the following perspective: be happy anything gets made. The entire industry is so awash in drugs, egos, and money that pushing ANYTHING out the door is an accomplishment.
> Were studios really that reckless with their properties?
Some were. Once the film made its money in the theaters it was then put in a vault and forgotten about. The theaters were supposed to return the release prints but sometimes the projectionist would "lose" them. The studio vault those films sat in sometimes catch fire or water leaks in. If the originals are destroyed then hopefully a few release prints are floating around in the hands of theaters, individuals (where those lost prints end up), or television stations. If not, then its gone forever.
It doesn't even take destruction of the property to keep media locked up forever, sometimes even just IP rights. For example original Brave Little Toaster film has never seen an official release in HD because it was produced as a joint venture and nobody has (apparently) been willing or able to hammer out a deal between the various rights holders for a new home video or streaming release.
In 2023 a 4K scan of a theatrical print was uploaded to Youtube and despite the slightly rough state of the print it remains the best quality you can view the film today. There's even a pinned comment under the video from the original director thanking the person who uploaded it to Youtube for preserving their film!
Sometimes it happens by accident. See the 2008 Universal Studios fire, which destroyed music and film masters:
...and is covered up for years.
> can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape
The first few seasons were meant to be just a segment inside a sketch-based tv show (i.e. some of the most disposable, worst-aging, least-resyndicated material that tv studios will ever produce) and the budget was very small.
Nothing that anyone’s watching on Disney+ was from The Tracy Ullman Show. And by the second or third season of the show proper it was already a bona fide cultural phenomenon, so one would hope (hah) Fox might’ve been a bit forward thinking by then. Alas.
I believe Technology Connections on YouTube did a video on film vs video where he touched on this. Film was much more expensive, and people weren’t always thinking about remasters 30 years later. If something was being shot just to air on TV, sometimes VHS was all they did.
Shows like The Simpsons that were only made for broadcast never had a film negative. It was likely mastered to analog tape.
They're solidly pre-digital. Somewhere, the individual frames were drawn/painted on cel, were they not? In principle, remastering should still be possible.
I shouldn't have said never had a film negative. They likely scanned hand-drawn cells to film, then transferred that to tape. At the time they likely saw the NTSC tape as the master.
Assuming the cels weren't lost or destroyed. Or auctioned off to fans/collectors, as was often done: https://www.animationconnection.com/original-production-cels
In fact there's an episode of the Simpson's where Bart buys an Itchy & Scratchy animation cel and is disappointed when it's just a segment of Itchy's arm (or something like that).
EDIT: https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Itchy_%26_Scratchy_animation_c...
The cel had Scratchy's arm, and it was in the episode "Lady Bouvier's Lover" (S05 E21).
Speaking of, I am desperately trying to get hold of Then Came Bronson that is of reasonable quality. Great and well known TV-series that came out in 1969. It's simply impossible to get a good rip though.
The only copy that exists (as far as I know) came from a VHS recording of a TV-channel in the 1980s. But surely the film rolls still exist?
> But surely the film rolls still exist?
I just watched a video revealing that many multichannel masters of big artists have gone up in flames in a big warehouse fire in 2008 [0] [1], and a comment told that a film company burnt down their silent film archive to get insurance money.
So, I don't bet.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9eXk4o35UI
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-m...
A while ago I found a few episodes of a 1950s crime drama/noir series called M Squad (the M is for "murder") on Youtube. I don't recall exactly how but probably because someone mentioned it was a direct inspiration for short-lived Police Squad series and later the Naked Gun films.
Anyways, I went to see if there was an official DVD release of it, and there was but several of the episodes were sourced from off-air TV recordings from reruns in the 1980s because those were the only copies the distributor could find! They were originally planning to release the set without them but asked fans if they could source copies which is how they ended up with those recordings. I didn't end up purchasing it because even the episodes where they had a better quality source weren't mastered particularly well to the point where several reviews said they were borderline unwatchable due to the image getting crushed into murky darkness thanks to the noir lighting and DVD MPEG-2 compression.
If you look close at the early silent movies: the campfires are burning the film from even older movies that are thus completely lost.
Same for older family guy episodes also on Disney +… maybe it’s a Disney + thing where they can’t be bothered?
Film begins degrading immediately even if well stored. Television was seen as largely disposable and was treated as such.
I recall reading that they assumed TV shows did not have as much long-term value as films.
They're at their best when they're reckless... it gets so much worse. There was a 4th tv network in the 1950s that died quite soon, and they had a Jackie Gleason show of their own that is now lost to time. At some point in the early 1960s, they had a board meeting to discuss what to do with the accumulation of taped archives (quadruplex I guess?), and the lawyer spoke up "I'll take care of it". He loaded them up into his car that weekend and dumped them in the river.
If they were only careless, one might be relieved that there was no intention of being so destructive. Often though, they're criminally negligent or malevolent. And that was back when things were easy... now days they have to contend with digital materials that need a petabyte array.
> Were studios really that reckless with their properties?
The first two seasons of Monty Python’s Flying Circus were almost erased because the BBC wanted to reuse the broadcast tapes. [0]
[0] https://www.cracked.com/article_42008_monty-pythons-flying-c...
When I was a kid we had a VHS recording of Sneakers, with the beginning of an episode of Letterman at the end. I remember my mom liking it. Fond memories. I need to watch it again.
A couple of scenes:
Carl: We've got customers.
Martin: Shoes?
Carl: Expensive.
Martin: *fixes tie* Look busy, guys.
*after apparently inconveniencing Liz, the group is walking out*
Cosmo: We'll call you a cab.
Liz: "Thank you. This is my last computer date."
*Cosmo stops walking, falling behind*
Cosmo: "Wait."
*the group stops and turns*
Cosmo: "A computer matched her with him? I don't think so."
*Liz's face falls as Cosmo's henchman start slowly walking up behind her.*
*dramatic music as we cut and zoom in to Cosmo's face*
Cosmo: "Marty."
*Cosmo turns and runs toward his office*I saw Sneakers when it first came out in theatres and at the time I was in high school and working part-time in a shoe store..
I had learned from the store owner that you can tell so much from someone's shoes, often more than from their clothes.
Combined with that line in this very formative movie (for me), I still to this day can't help but check someone's shoes when I first meet them.
> you can tell so much from someone's shoes
You can make educated guesses based on apparel of all sorts - but you are always guessing.
Yes but many times, these can be quite valuable inferences.
Shoes are indeed a valuable source of information about a person. I knew at least one BH case manager who really paid attention to them.
Shoes are expensive, very durable, and typically one of those items that people have only a few pairs of. So while someone can easily change their outfit to match a situation, place, or mood for the day, they may be less likely to change their shoes to match more than a basic purpose.
And shoes tend to accumulate evidence of where someone's been. Are they muddy, dusty, spit-polished?
Personally, I own about five pair of shoes. I have a pair of Oxford dress shoes, a very nice pair of white New Balance with hook-and-loop, some hiking boots I picked up at JC Penney, and a few others. My clothing, on the other hand, is mostly Adidas and Columbia and some tee shirts, but I don't own any Adidas or Columbia shoes. So you can tell a lot about me, no matter what I'm wearing, by studying my shoes for a while.
I met another BH professional who said he owned 52 pairs of Crocs. He said that he'd kicked an addiction habit, but it seems he traded something unhealthy for perhaps a less-detrimental dependence on collecting shoes. To each his own, I suppose, and surely a lot of information could be gleaned about this fellow if you paid attention to which pair of Crocs he'd selected for the day.
> Shoes are expensive, very durable, and typically one of those items that people have only a few pairs of.
Maybe that used to be true, but modern shoes while expensive are not very durable, and most people have several pairs today.
BH professional?
My best guess is Behavioral Health
I still remember that goofy looking run, haha
Dude, your mom just wanted to see Robert Redford. The guy was a chick magnet.
Plenty of good Sneakers comments, but I was also excited to learn from this article that Uncle Buck has also recently gotten the same treatment!
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Uncle-Buck-4K-Blu-ray/342214/...
Also "Live At Pompeii"[0] (although to my disappointment, it's the cinema version with the DSOTM studio clips - my original experience was the Laserdisc and VHS versions which omitted those because IMO they're not interesting and just get in the way. I'd probably watch "Pink Floyd: DSOTM: BTS" as a standalone thing but it has no place, for me, in "Live At Pompeii".)
[0] https://superdeluxeedition.com/news/pink-floyd-at-pompeii-mc...
I listen / watch Live At Pompeii every now and then. My son used to enjoy it when he was between four and ten-ish.
Those deep bass parts of Echoes are magic, when the camera is panning past the speaker stacks.
Wonder how fast we're gonna get the torrent
LE: weird, my local private torrent has a 4k version from 18 April while the site had it on 22 April
My voice is my passport. Verify Me.
I totally say this under my breath every time I have to enter sensitive information while other people are around.
Heavily referenced in Uplink, the hacker video game by Introversion Software.
Just before I left the UK in 2018 there was starting to become this trend for voice verification on some services, in one particular one I had to go through the setup of (perhaps it was Virgin Media? I forget), they had me say "My voice is my passport" to train it on how I sound. I smiled to myself.
I had to do it on either Atom Bank or Starling (signed up for both at a similar time).
Monzo also have you recite something but it's something far less exciting like "My name is X and I bank with Monzo".
Charles Schwab does this, but tweaked it to, “my voice is my password.”
This is always the first thing I remember about the movie...
COOTYS RAT SEMEN
"No, I don't."
"No. No."
One of my cover/shell companies for privacy purposes is an anagram of that phrase. :D
Let me guess your password...
"Too many secrets"
I was pretty sad the other day when I chose 'Setec Astronomy' for a trivia team name & nobody got the reference
I have a sticker for it on my laptop. You're not alone out there.
Sneakers and Setec Astronomy became my go to for example encryption code for years. If you're not familiar with Setec Astronomy, you're in for a treat. <3
I think you keep too many secrets.
The question is, can you guarantee my safety?
Comment was deleted :(
Setec Astronomy is also the name, obviously inspired by the movie, of a successful MIT Puzzle Hunt group.
"The dialog is clear, sharp, stable, and easy to follow." if we didn't already know it was an older film this would be the thing that nailed it.
That, and its cousin the shaky cam.
"Let's make things difficult to see and hear. That makes for better cinema!"
Jackie Chan once discussed action scenes in US movies versus his movies. Western films: cut before the punch lands, maybe cut a few more times. Hong Kong moves: just show the action in one scene.
A great example of this is Hard Boiled 1992, the Hospital Shootout.
I think audiences are beginning to appreciate continuous scenes and are becoming more frequent in western films. The most recent one I can think of is John Wick 4, when it goes top down.
Some of the recent Michael Bay movies are so aggressive when it comes to cuts, the average shot length must be 2 or 3 seconds.
Michael Bay are basically not worth watching for me. Things move around the screen too fast to know what's going on. The Transformers movies are especially bad due to it because it can be hard to tell which robots are on which side; and , if you're bouncing all over the screen so you never get a chance to focus on one, it becomes impossible.
Modern live music edits are like this as well. When the guitarist is rocking a solo, I don't want to see the back up singers or the lead singer in rapid fire edits. I want to see the guitarist.
The top down John Wick scene had me flabbergasted in the theater. The choreography, the camera tracking, the flame thrower like shells from the shotgun all just made for one incredible scene that as you say definitely goes against modern editorial styles.
Reminds me of Adolescence on Netflix - 4 episodes, each nearly an hour, with no cuts.
I once sat in on a TV production class, early in the schoolyear before my schedule got sorted out and it turned out I couldn't take it. So I was in it for one day.
But the teacher had the incoming students do a very simple exercise: He turned on some broadcast TV, and told us all to bang our fists on our desks every time there was a scene cut.
Then he changed the channel a few times. Soap opera. Newscast. PBS. Cartoons. Movie. Commercial break.
Our hands were sore by the end of it, but it stuck with me -- every time I watch older or foreign cinema, I am cognizant of how much longer the shots are.
Gasland was unwatchable for me.
One of my favorite hacker movies! Saw it in at the cinema and numerous times on dvd. Will definetely get this.
The comment about the shoes, stick with you ;)
Great movie! So many big named actors in it! The director also did Field of Dreams!
I'm not a fan of baseball, but I liked Field of Dreams (at the age I was back when it would have made it to Australian TV).
I am a fan of baseball, and in 2021, there was a real MLB game played at the original filming location. It started with Kevin Costner leading the players out of the cornfield.
I had goosebumps, they nailed it.
Ironically, I think this movie is better suited to being watched on VHS quality.
If you have a high-quality digital version of a movie, you can use one of the CRT shaders from modern emulators to make it look like any old TV you want.
I just watch it with my eyes closed
It sounds like a cocktail party.
Indeed, sound mix is rather amazing. Incredible stereo picture and depth, something you seldom hear in modern movies.
the audio quality of the popular streaming versions is pretty bad
Definitely in my top 5, if not first. Feels right seeing so much appreciation for it here—very fitting for HN.
This came out when I was in high school and it's been one of my favorite movies ever since. I still watch it from time to time.
I work at a company whose legal name is Monterey's Coast, Inc.
Here I was thinking I was clever also naming one of my companies an anagram of that phrase.
1. relevant username ... since 2010. you found your thread for sure
2. hey man you can still be clever, you just... also have birds-of-your-feather out there. :D
oystermen coast ;)
amnesty scooter
coyote smartens
economy tasters
Love this movie! So many iconic San Francisco scenes!
There are some great stills from that movie. In particular the close up of a person's face with reflections of computer text in glasses often sticks with me. I know Timecop also has a similar scene just after the time jump. I think it looks really cool.
My brain is weird.
I always liked how they framed the gun being jammed into Gregor's back at the opera, the entire scene carries a certain tension that modern films often fail to sustain or rely on things like explosions or handcannons rather than a .38 and a well acted angry whisper that you will be quietly exiting this theater or your brains will be exiting your fucking skull that is a much more accurate depiction of what it's like to operate under non-official cover.
Sadly, the movie really shows it's age when the "cultural attaché" starts lecturing Robert Redford's character that "our countries are friends now". It's hard to suspend disbelief watching it nowadays.
To swing the discussion back to cinematography:
I'm going to avoid spoilers despite it being an older movie since a disturbing amount of folks in the hacker scene have not seen it but the later scene in the tunnel, arm extended was another great cinematic... shot :-)
> Sadly, the movie really shows it's age when the "cultural attaché" starts lecturing Robert Redford's character that "our countries are friends now". It's hard to suspend disbelief watching it nowadays
But it's set in the past, when relations between the countries were much friendlier. Do you have trouble suspending disbelief during fictional movies set in WWII, because the U.S. and Germany are now allies?
>But it's set in the past, when relations between the countries were much friendlier. Do you have trouble suspending disbelief during fictional movies set in WWII, because the U.S. and Germany are now allies?
Were they?
Related. Others?
Sneakers – The Team's Demands [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41493927 - Sept 2024 (2 comments)
Sneakers Film Promotional Floppy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38585213 - Dec 2023 (54 comments)
No-more-secrets: recreate the decryption effect seen in the 1992 movie Sneakers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36799776 - July 2023 (257 comments)
Happy 30th anniversary to ‘Sneakers,’ a cult classic that was ahead of its time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32788136 - Sept 2022 (47 comments)
Cracking the Code: Sneakers at 30 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31378418 - May 2022 (76 comments)
Memories of the “Sneakers” Shoot (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29840802 - Jan 2022 (198 comments)
Sneakers: Robert Redford, River Phoenix nerd out in 1992’s prescient caper - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29620095 - Dec 2021 (7 comments)
Sneakers (1992), the Film - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26111977 - Feb 2021 (2 comments)
Tool Recreating the “Decrypting Text” Effect Seen in the Movie “Sneakers” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11643270 - May 2016 (54 comments)
Sneakers - movie about pen testing, crypto/nsa, espionage, and deception (1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196379 - Aug 2013 (5 comments)
What it was like shooting the movie Sneakers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4498985 - Sept 2012 (46 comments)
Sneakers (Film, 1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1499298 - July 2010 (1 comment)
Joybubbles: the blind phreaker whom Whistler was based off of in Sneakers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443241 - June 2010 (1 comment)
Hey dang, do you do this manually or semi-manually or is it just automated from your a/c?
Semi-manually, so I'm glad you included that option :)
This question comes up a lot - here's an answer that goes over it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40564558
StackOverflow has this feature that when you write a new question, it tries to fuzzy-match that up against existing questions. I wonder if an approach similar to yours, using search, could be employed on HN as well to reduce the number of dupes?!
This would be helpful especially for those cases where the same story gets covered on multiple places on the internet and so URL matching doesn't help.
Wonder if ML could help automate merging of duplicate (or similar topic) threads? (I don't know much about ML)
LLM's would be absolutely amazing at this actually. With their current ability - it's basically their sweet spot.
I was kinda hoping it was manual (sorry). I was fired up at the opportunity to build something tiny that solves a pain, but...man you have a solid setup there :D
Wow that is cool! Any chance you could share that Arc extension?
very cool movie love the e-commerce website for online purchase of said movie
I love this movie so much. I know there are parts that don't make sense but everyone in it is excellent and it's very quotable.
"Practice, Practice, Practice" "You...won't know...who to trust" "No more secrets"
The soundtrack is great too.
The parts of the soundtrack are on one of my coding playlists.
my voice is my passport
Awesome, now do one for the Die Hard series, particularly Live Free or Die Hard.
I know the first Die Hard is 4k, but the others are not.
Anyone noticed that streaming services start to compromise on quality? With Netflix it's been like that for a while. Apple TV+ seems to be the best. I really want to get into Blu-ray now, looking for a decent player.
Life is great on the high seas. I've spent nearly 16 years "Passing the Popcorn" and couldn't be happier.
Question: what's the streaming budget for the big platforms? Can they offer 50-100 mbps? For example, a 70 gb video for a 2.5 hour movie would need 67 mbps to stream. Having access to a rip like that for a popular movie (meaning new or classic) is normal "on the high seas" and it has a detectable difference on my budget-tier setup compared to a ~20 gb rip. I'm wondering if streaming platforms can afford to offer something like that.
Sony Bravia Core has movies up to 80mbps.
Sure, they could. But given that the average consumer really doesn’t care that much about picture quality (DVD _still_ outsells Blu-ray for example), why would they bother? Increased storage and bandwidth costs, for what exactly? To cater to the small group of consumers that have good enough hardware (and eyes) to distinguish/care about 20Mb versus 100Mb? Those people are probably buying physical media anyway.
Is it self-evident to you that that's not cost-prohibitive with what people pay today?
Capitalism doesn't care whether it's cost-prohibitive.
It needs to make extra money or lose money in order to affect change.
How is the life on the private tracking seas? I mean, I'm asking for a friend.
Some butter with your popcorn? Here let me pass.
Yeah. I see overcompression on a lot of shows. Dark scenes and star fields tend to make it obvious. Three Body Problem was the worst -- I imagine it would have been consistently visually spectacular if they hadn't compressed it to shit. I've seen it on Apple TV too though-- e.g. really visible on Silo title screens. Love, Death and Robots on Netflix quality was great.
Disney's Coco did it for me. There were so many scenes with so much visual detail, streaming compression absolutely wrecked it. I've seen it on Blu-ray since and it's an entirely different experience.
How they allowed the release to streaming without manually adjusting the compression for those scenes, I don't understand, but someone was slacking.
In my experience, HDR format makes the most difference. There's a dramatic difference between HDR10 and DV.
And sometimes you just hear it. They compromise on everything, and a lot of people won't complain if the audio quality is low.
We actually had the opposite idea, where we'd steal a few kbps from the video to increase the audio. If you hear poorly compressed audio, the video feels bad too. Hearing clean audio made the video feel better. However, this was way back in the early days where 700kbps total bitrate were on the high end pre-AAC
Netflix is "4K Ultra HD: Up to 7 GB per hour". Blu ray is 25GB per side, so max 50GB for 2 layers. Typical movies are 35-50GB. So, BR, and think even DVD still looks much better than any streaming service!
Sony’s streaming service is 80 Mbps or 36 GB per hour.
We’re going to have to disagree about DVDs though. They look awful on modern (big) televisions.
> Blu ray is 25GB per side, so max 50GB for 2 layers
Are pressed Blu-Rays limited compared to writeable ones?
I have 100GB BDXL blanks (single-sided) I use as one of the archives for my family photos/videos.
Couldn't a film BluRay also be 100GB on a single side?
Plenty of movies have been released on BD100.
Very out of date list: https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=294596
On a site that I am a member of there are nearly 1300 BD100 rips available.
Interesting. I was looking back at my BluRay collection (physical) the other day, looking for a UHD movie to test with, and in my memory, all BDs with UHD, but to my surprise, very few of them were actually UHD, with most just being HD (1080p). I doubt there's in in my collection that are BD100; could I even play them? Currently using a PS5 as my BD player, and PS4 and PS3 before that.
A lot more practical than having to deal with physical media. I'd even pay them for it, to have that kind of premium access.
100GB discs won’t work on standard Blu-Ray players, the basic standard predates BDXL discs. Ultra HD 4K player can play them.
And Netflix HD (1080) is hardly what one would expect. It may be technically 1080p but the bit rate is often quite low. Most people don't notice or care.
They all give you "4k", but ATV+ has by far the best bit rate.
I mostly see a lot of stuttering. Either during high action scenes or when there's little happening at all. It's especially noticable on HBO / MAX at 4k DV. I assumed it was due to aggressive encoding.
I would describe Disney as barely 720p when used in any web browser.
Seems to vary between shows. Been watching Andor on a good system (LG OLED 4K) and it's spectacular. No compression artifacts or splotchy dark areas.
That might be a DRM thing, I know some streamers will only send 720 to Linux x Browser combos.
Sneakers could absolutely be remade with the box being a quantum computer. ‘No more secrets’ being breaking all the pre-quantum encryption.
I wouldn't fully remake it. It's a classic. Just watch it with that explanation in mind. It makes it more plausible.
Maybe what the mathematician did was crack a gigantic outstanding problem in scaling quantum computers that allowed e.g. extraordinarily effective quantum noise reduction at scale.
I do the same thing with Prometheus - I watch the Weyland TED Talk before the film and view the film as a man that considers himself a god trying to meet god.
Best keypad hacking tutorial
Featured here often.-
... particularly sadly, at Earl Jones' passing.-
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41493927
Greatest movie :)
PS. The quote on "goowill not being something the government does" reads so poignant now ...
Part of my headcanon for Sneakers is that Agent Abbot (Jones) is actually Admiral Greer (Jones' character from The Hunt for Red October/Patriot Games/Clear and Present Danger), set a bit earlier in his career, and going under a codename while working CyberOps for NSA ;-)
That is just so spot on :)
(There's a whole James Earl Jones "pluriverse" out there, ain't it? ...)
Same!
I’m sorry, but could someone please elaborate on the significance of this post?
Sneakers is a very popular movie in the HN community. It's a great movie, well written, well cast, well acted, suspenseful, interesting, funny.
It beautifully captures the golden age.
Hacker culture.
Comment was deleted :(
The link points to a Full HD Blu-ray review. Here is the review for the highest quality 4K Blu-ray review: https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Sneakers-4K-Blu-ray/343185/
I was surprised to read they're not affiliated with Blu-ray RTM (registered trade mark) - I guess Blu-ray RTM are unusually choosing not to bite the hand that feeds them.
https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00...
What's the relevance of this?
It appears to be a subtle announcement that the film has been restored and will be rereleased on Blu-Ray soon
The best movie about physical pentesting and grayhat hacking in general.
It was the previous generation's "Mr. Robot"
In a movie format, like they used to. Not a series that keeps on going... seemingly never ending.
And no real questions about the reliability of the narrator.
Sneakers is a popular show with folks interested in tech.
If you haven't seen it I think it is worth a try. Great cast, from that exciting age of computers when everything felt like it was just on the edge of possible.
Even for folks not of that time, the cast and script are so good it's worth a watch.
hacker movie news on hacker news. seems pretty straight-forward...
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I never understood the love for this movie, it just seems lame to see all of these caricatures being created that reinforce hacker stereotypes - and not even in a good way.
The movie was partially responsible for creating the stereotype. This was 1992 and hacker culture wasn't yet mainstream.
Hacker culture was quite mainstream in the 80's, already. This was a refactoring of it. War Games and Tron and other movies got there first.
I think that's the reason I don't have the affinity for this movie that many do - it created incorrect stereotypes which still persist today.
The movies you mentioned were far from any type of hacker culture. They were much more about the power of computers, then a mysterious machine people knew little about.
_incorrect_ stereotypes?
Stereotyping isn't inherently bad, it's just lazy. That having been said, I think Sneakers gets them all correct.
I feel like those films were sort of "along side" the hacker world. Sneakers to me was more on point.
Do you love the movie Hackers? I submit there are two camps of moviegoing nerds: those who love Sneakers and those who love Hackers. I will admit though, many many years later I softened to the sheer goofness of Hackers (which offput me much initially).
I love both, for similar but different reasons. Hackers captures the naive idea of the scene really quite well. It's goofiness allows the naivety to remain, past the overwrought characters and Hollywood's downright misunderstanding.
It feels like it's accidentally great.
But then again, maybe it just tickles to the surface the sense of wonder I had way back then.
Accidentally great, yeah. If I allow myself to believe that the producers of Hackers knew they were making a spoof of Hollywood hackers in general, I can sit back and enjoy it as a masterpiece.
But at the time, that was not at all clear. And I'm still not actually convinced. It certainly wasn't marketed as a comedy; it seemed to be drinking the same drama-aid as The Net and other breathless wankery at the time. In which case it's a terrible movie that only becomes watchable as an exhibit of wankery.
This feels like a special case of "suspension of disbelief".
It's really hard to believe that anyone took "The Plague" seriously as a character.
Compared to stereotypes I thought it was an interesting mishmash of lively / different characters.
Crafted by Rajat
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