logoalt Hacker News

A searchable library of forgotten public-domain film clips from 1915 onward

74 points • by momentmaker • last Thursday at 4:11 PM • 17 comments • view on HN

Comments

paweladamczuk • today at 7:32 PM

This is really lovely. I think it's pretty obvious that it bases on sources like Internet Archive and the Library of Congress, but it does add value.

I just wonder if it can survive - is there a business model here? If not, it's just a tech demo and then it doesn't have value as the hosted version, it would have it if the whole processing/indexing pipeline was open sourced so that anyone can host it themselves and pay for their own infrastructure.

➕ show 1 reply
akiselev • today at 8:14 PM

Just found an amateur video of San Francisco from 1940: https://www.movingimagearchive.com/sources/amateur-film-san-...

And 1932! https://www.movingimagearchive.com/sources/san-francisco-by-...

➕ show 2 replies
shevy-java • today at 9:35 PM

Page loads way too slowly IMO. Even the youtube page loads somewhat slowly, but it is about 10x faster than that webpage. There is no need for these fancypants animations really. I am not going to wait for slow animations to finish.

USeyller • today at 6:41 PM

Sounds rally cool. How and where are the movie clips collected, and how is it verified that they are in public domain?

➕ show 1 reply
Animats • today at 6:52 PM

This looks like a collection of clips from the Internet Archive. "General Aviation - Fact or Fiction" is on the Moving Image Archive at [1], and the full version is in the Internet Archive at [2]. Most of the content is from the Internet Archive. What's the point?

At least they don't slap their logo on public domain material, like Periscope Films does.

[1] https://www.movingimagearchive.com/sources/general-aviation-...

[2] https://archive.org/details/gov.ntis.ava12749vnb

➕ show 2 replies
pmdulaney • last Thursday at 5:00 PM

I don't see how to access the search function. All I see are example videos.

➕ show 1 reply