What media have you found in best quality or even only with the methods of the high seas?
I am not looking for: “I only use my super jellyfin and so on setup because its almost free”. But rather I want to hear if you found rare pieces of media which are maybe even lost otherwise.
Star Wars despecialized edition.
In 1997 George Lucas updated the original trilogy with new special effects, and every release since then has been the new special edition.
Fans have gone through a painstaking archival effort to track down the “despecialized” original release in as high quality as possible.
For a short period of time GTA 3, VC and SA were removed from storefronts… replaced with the “GTA Definitive Edition” which was essentially a buggy mobile port, ported back to PC, not supporting any of the existing mod ecosystem.
During that time the only way to get your hands on the real “definitive” versions of these games was the high seas.
I believe the originals are restored now, but IMO Take2/Rockstar have fully lined pockets already so 🏴☠️🚢
Sorry, this is longer than I thought it would be. Bear with me…
At some point iTunes “upgraded” to include artist avatars that you couldn’t switch off or choose your own images for. Anyone it couldn’t find had a placeholder grey microphone icon, which was bad enough. If you had some obscure artist that happened to share a band name with a more popular act, it would default to their image. Unforgivable.
It pissed me off enough to seek another option and I eventually settled on Foobar2000, which was everything I had loved about Winamp and OG iTunes in one. Also, fully customisable, albeit with a learning curve. Moving everything into Foobar, I realised I needed to redownload all album cover art, for my 40,000+ song collection, in as high a resolution as possible (discovering albumartexchange, and Advanced Google Image Search, in the process).
Halfway through this task, I realised I should probably also redownload anything I had that was less than 192k bitrate, and maybe in some cases I should go flac, just to “make sure”. Fast forward a year and I have about 70,000 songs, mostly meeting those requirements, and mostly totally replacing the collection i had been building since 2001. God bless Soulseek and RuTracker.
Now, in answer to your actual question, on this journey I found (or, rather, didn’t) a whole bunch of stuff that I have from the early 2000s which doesn’t seem to exist online, anymore, or only does in poorer quality than I already had it, most of it old UK HipHop from that time. It was a real validation of one of the most important reasons for piracy, though I can’t claim it as the reason for my original (or ongoing) obsession!
The original DVD release of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 riff of Godzilla vs Megalon. MST3K licensed the film from a company that did not actually own the rights to it, and only discovered when Toho sent out a cease and desist following the release of MST3K volume 10. Production was stopped, but a few hundred copies were still sold.
Funnily enough some of those copies were actually sold to Blockbuster, who somehow were allowed to keep renting them out even after the C&D went into effect. I made sure to rent a copy ASAP once I found out.
Maybe not what you’re looking for, but fanedits are that thing to me. No body will ever see them on any streaming service or in a DVD bin at the store. They’re like treasures I can share only with other people who truly love movies as much as I do.
Also, I have the original special edition slip-case DVD of Dogma, which currently goes for as high as $19.95 on eBay!
