This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own.
This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own.
This really sucks when you have to explain this kind of thing to your kids…
That’s the horrible thing about online services. You never really own it, it can be taken away from you at any time. If you want to preserve something, you need physical and/or offline access.
And in addition to that sentiment, compression from moving or sending a copy of a copy is known to very slowly degrade digital media, so physical is almost always preferred.
Err, no. Lossless compression is lossless and there are a bunch of techniques to ensure that a copy is bit-for-bit identical to the original
As long as you are very serious about your backup system, digital can outlast physical.
Sure, it’s possible, but it’s unlikely. A properly kept laserdisc compared to, for example, a YouTube Video isn’t even a competition. Physical media not exposed to radiation or impact can last decades if not centuries. Don’t even get me started on Vynil.
Piracy is a pretty great backup system for everyone. You’re welcome.
Somebody somewhere is archiving it or it has the same problem.
Literally every seeder is part of that archive. You can look at individual trackers in the microcosm as individual archives and indices, but it’s the culture of piracy that causes the wide scale collection and preservation of media.
We’re actually at this kind of interesting cross-generational point of guerilla archival where it’s become easier to find certain obscure pieces of media history. I suspect this is in large part due to things like bounties, where suddenly a forgotten VHS of a 35 year old HBO special that aired once or twice could be a step toward a higher rank and greater access to a wider range of media.
Modern piracy has a strong incentive toward finding lost material that’s no longer readily available. Zero day content is great, but have you seen the RADAR pilot or both seasons of AfterMASH?
They belong in a museum. Indie would be proud, even if Harrison wouldn’t. Not that I know his perspective on piracy.
Constantly moving compressed files are not the same as a physical media archive, literally the entire point of this discussion.
It is literally the other way around.
There is no way for digital media to degrade, unless it is the physical media.
Compression and transmission of data causes loss of parity. We lose or flip some 1s and 0s. Over time the effects become very noticeable. The best visual example I can think of are experiments where YouTubers downloaded and reuploaded their own video 100 times, it very quickly degrades. In a more reasonable scenario, near lossless file types and compressions would degrade much more slowly.
This has nothing to do with copying a file. YouTube re-encodes videos whenever they are uploaded.
A file DOES NOT DEGRADE when it is copied. That is something that happened to VHS and cassette tapes. It does not happen to digital files. You can even verify this by generating a hash of a file, copy it 10,000 times, and generate a new hash and they would be 100% identical.
You should perform that exact experiment with a sufficient number of bits, you’ll be surprised.
No I won’t be, because I’ve done this before for various reasons, but not a single but was changed.
Let me put it this way. A computer stores programs and instructions it needs to run in files on a drive. These files contain exact and precise instructions for various components to operate. If even a SINGLE bit is off in just a couple of the OS files, your computer will start throwing constant errors if not just crashing entirely.
And this isn’t just theory. It’s provable. Cosmic rays have been known to sometimes hit a drive and cause a bit-flip. Or another issue is a drive not being powered on for a long time causing bit-rot
At this point I’m starting to think you’re a troll. There’s no way someone believes what you’re saying.
Edit: autocorrect
I’m going to stop responding to you few left in this thread because I don’t think you’re trolls, I know you are.
You’re referring to a video codec degrading as it keeps rendering the video again, not just copying and pasting the bits. There is no degradation from copying and pasting a file as-is.
No, I am not referring to that. YouTubers have the option to download their own videos. Not steal it with a video downloading tool.
That’s YouTube’s processed video not the original.
And when you download the processed video and reupload it, it’s a 1 to 1 conversion of the same video codec, and every generation it gets worse. That example is a low hanging fruit, but the concept applies to everything.
Games don’t get lossy compressed when sent. They aren’t films or photographs.
Also even if you’re using lossy compression you don’t recompress things every time lol.
If you use most digital formats for media and compress them with something like .7z or Winrar, then it might take years or decades to noticeable degrade, but it is still a matter of when not if.
Holy crap. File compression is not the same thing as lossy media compression.
File compression uses mathematical algorithms to create definable outcomes. Meaning it doesn’t matter how much you compress/uncompress a file, it will always be exactly the same.
5 X 2 will always give you 10 and 10 ÷ 2 will always give you 5.
Nah