Cinemateca Brasileira archives engulfed in flames, Yahoo Groups archivists are hunting for fandoms and new tools to adapt to a YouTube with far fewer unlisted videos.
The Cinemateca Brasileira was ravaged by a fire last Thursday, on June 27. A core institution for preserving Brazillian cinematography, the Cinemateca was estimated to house over 2000 films and 4 tons of documents in its archives. Artists and conservationists had expressed their concerns on the frailty of the material housed in the Cinemateca, as early as April of this year, noting for instance, the risk of self-combustion of cellulose nitrate films.
According to the local fire brigade, the fire began after maintenance on the air-conditioning system. After assessing the damage, Fire captain Karina Paula Moreira announced -regrettably- that “we will only know for certain after the experts (i.e. forensics), but, probably, nothing was preserved”. A grim end, to remind us all how media preservation is NOT a thing postponable.
New Projects
YouTube finally privated pre-2017 unlisted videos last week, after a delay of a few days. But that wasn’t the end of the story, we still have a few archiving projects and tools to talk about.
Our good friend Jopik has made a TamperMonkey script for revealing the original name and uploader of privated videos in your playlists, not unlike a certain other project from a few months ago.
Data Horde’s Unlisted Video Countdown Playlist
Jopik was also behind the filmot collection) and that’s actually where the info is being fed in from. You can install the filmot Title Restorer script from here.
Protip: If you have TamperMonkey installed, you will be able to automatically load the Title Restorer. If not, you will be prompted to save the script like any other download.
Another WIP project is rebane2001’s playlist restorer which will also be able to grab thumbnails and even the videos themselves, if available. Unfortunately, this tool is undownloadable at this time so we will have to settle for the Reddit trailer for now.
Updates
Speaking of YouTube’s unlisted videos, Archive Team’s grabs have landed in the ArchiveTeam Inbox collection on the Internet Archive. In case you are out of the loop, Archive Team grabbed 200 TiB of data on 5,739,754 videos! Titles, comments and low-resolution copies of the original videos!
Last year, when Yahoo Groups shut down archivists pooled together data on different groups and published them on the Internet Archive. Now, the Save Yahoo Groups! project is looking for help in identifying fan groups.
TV Shows, literature, games… If you have had any history on Yahoo Groups prior to its shut-down, or consider yourself a fandom enthusiast, we implore you to head over to the SYG Discord Server or their fandom identification spreadsheet.
The latest version of MAME (0.234), the arcade machine emulator, focuses on 3D arcade games. You are in luck if you were in the mood for some GTI Club! Read more about it on MAME’s blog!
