Secret Life Of Machines update update!
A new, better-than-ever opportunity to watch Tim ‘n’ Rex’s outstanding Secret Life Of Machines (previously mentioned here and here) has arrived:
The Exploratorium science museum has made every single episode available for straightforward download from their site!
[UPDATE: Or, at least, they did. There was unexpected demand, so they took the files down again. Their Webmaster quietly reinstated them in a different location for a while, but then word got out and he took ‘em away agin. Never mind, though: I got them all, and made a torrent! The Exploratorium direct-download page came back up after the initial rush was over, so you should be able to get the episodes there now - but you might as well still give their server a break and use the torrent.]
There are QuickTime streaming versions which seem to be broken at the moment, but never mind those - the ones you want are the “iPhone” versions. They’re standard iPhone video format (480 by 360 pixel, MPEG4 video, 128 kilobit AAC audio, M4V container), which is playable on PCs without much messing around. If you don’t happen to have the right codecs and don’t want to faff about installing QuickTime or something, just play ‘em with the all-in-one VLC media player.
(The iPhone format is also 30 frames per second, not the 15fps of the old iPod Video format.)
I presume these rips are from the DVD edition, because they look a lot nicer than the VHS rips that’ve been doing the rounds before now. And they’re less than 192Mb per episode, so all 18 episodes will fit with room to spare on one DVD-R.
Once again, I love this show. It would probably do good to come back.
Comment by emrikol — October 31, 2007 @ 11:07 pm
Anyone succeeded in getting these files down?
I tried to get one to checkout the quality and it went painfully slow for about 12hours before stalling at 49%
Is this some kind of dan-dot effect at work?
Comment by Chris Lineker — November 1, 2007 @ 6:29 pm
Yeah, they've taken the downloads down again on account of how they apparently didn't expect many people to, you know, download them.
I got three episodes; after that the clogged server was only sending me a few kilobytes per second so I stopped trying, seeing as I do actually already have this show in about four formats already :-).
Perhaps someone's mirrored or torrented the iPhone-format files; I'll have a look around.
Comment by Daniel Rutter — November 1, 2007 @ 7:07 pm
I managed to get the full first two seasons before the hosting server melted a hole in the floor (or they were pulled).
It does appear to be duplicated from some sort of tape (perhaps a master?) as there are a few bits where the tracking goes out etc.
Comment by Devar — November 1, 2007 @ 8:02 pm
Amazing sci-fi technology indeed.
Perhaps they should have just done like the cool guys, and made a deal with The Pirate Bay to distribute their bits and pixels.
Comment by magetoo — November 1, 2007 @ 9:41 pm
I got them... but, I did have to do some looking around to find them, it seems they changed the directory name that the files are located in, breaking the links... all I had to do was delete parts of the url until I got the directory listing to get them all!
Comment by AndyF — November 2, 2007 @ 7:52 am
AndyF, what's with the jealousy-making sans method for doing likewise?
Comment by erikpurne — November 2, 2007 @ 11:58 am
They are all now here:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/ronh/SLOM-orig/
but shhhhhhhhhhhhh!!! ;-)
Comment by Devar — November 2, 2007 @ 8:18 pm
So they are.
Three cheers for Ron Hipschman!
Comment by Daniel Rutter — November 2, 2007 @ 8:39 pm
Somebody make a torrent, quick!
Comment by magetoo — November 2, 2007 @ 9:00 pm
The link posted in comment 8 now 404s
Comment by Jonathan — November 4, 2007 @ 10:35 pm
I'd already downloaded all of the files by the time the page went down, so I've made my own torrent of them now.
Comment by Daniel Rutter — November 5, 2007 @ 12:17 am