Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

Some drives have modified firmware that helps when ripping.

https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=19

> The numbering of the uploaded episodes seems to be off by one versus wikipedia.

That’s because there are two hard things when it comes to uploading content.

- Off by one errors.

You'd be surprised. "Hacker" doesn't mean what it once did, and the spirit of the old hacker culture is all but dead here.

Blu-ray version is definitely not perfect but I wouldn't call it mangled. It is presented in 4:3 which might be an issue for some viewers but it is absolutely the best this show has ever looked: https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Babylon-5-The-Complete-Series...

The CGI was preserved well enough for the fans who got access to some of it to re-render it in HD and upload to YouTube [0]. If WB cared even a little, fully CGI-rendered scenes could have been remastered relatively easily. The only scenes that are truly un-recoverable without redoing from scratch are those composited ones.

But like the others said, the BDs are fine, by far the best the series has ever looked, even if the difference between the crisp live action and the blurry upscaled CGI is rather jarring.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlDaygRhrg8

I watched a chunk of the version on Tubi which I believe was the same as the BluRay, and I thought it looked great. They just do the whole thing in 4:3 which is maybe not the ideal solution to the problem but is seamless. CGI shots are obviously upscaled but it looks good enough not to intrude.

You know, AI might actually be able to fix this!

> I think the aversion to subscribing to a streaming service for a single series has more to do with the recurring nature of the subscription than it does the price.

I think it's about not necessarily getting what you pay for. Shows are constantly leaving streaming platforms which is a problem if you want to watch something specific as opposed to just being happy to pay to watch whatever they feel like letting you see this week. Then they'll also silently censor content or remove entire episodes so you can't be sure if you've even watched the entirety of whatever show you intended to see if they have it at all.

They also like to reorder shows and even renumber seasons which can result in confusion and spoilers. Netflix is horrible when it comes to this. One example is the The Great British Bake Off. For some reason they insist on reordering them so that it starts with whatever the newest series is and then plays them backwards which is a pretty big problem. At the start of one series they even recap all of the winners of previous series spoiling them all for everyone watching the show on netflix.

If you just want to watch "something" by all means pay a monthly fee for a streaming service. If you want to watch a specific show and you want it to be there for you the next you want to watch it you're better off getting physical media or doing a little research and getting everything off the high seas.

As if they want to help people sign up for short periods of time. You might as well suggest drug dealers sell non-addictive crack.

Yeah 100% this. I want to watch Endeavour without ads, and I couldn't get some of it on Bittorrent (which is a first). It's available on ITVX for a subscription but there's literally nothing else I want to watch on there and I don't want to deal with cancellation & time pressure to watch it all.

I did consider buying a Blu-ray player and buying it on Blu-ray but it seems like they never actually released all the series on Blu-ray.

In the end I ended up figuring out how to download it without ads from ITVX. There's a tool which will bypass Widevine, download all the segments and splice them together without ads. Quite a pain to get working but still less annoying than yet another subscription. We already have Netflix, Disney, Prime, and a TV license.

I always felt that Ron Thornton and his team at Foundation Imaging were sadly underrated and overlooked in computer graphics history.

B5's SFX had a dynamism and color that was unmatched at the time. I recently rewatched the series, and the later seasons still hold up just fine, graphics-wise (created by a different company, but reusing Foundation Imaging's original assets and esthetic).

And I love how the Star Fury's design was so carefully thought out - even NASA took an interest.

Having also been alive at the time, I can tell you I thought the effects looked hokey and cheap.

It was just pulled from Tubi a few days ago. Still on the Roku channel, though (for now).

It would be easier to list b5 actors without drug or alcohol issues.

Talking about a show that aired 30 years ago isn't "spoilers". Anyone who wanted to not be spoiled has had plenty of time to go rectify that situation by now.

If you want to know something about the series, then ask.

I will upvote you now.

Edit: Vir waves.

The Vorlons are really a_____!

This is the first loony conspiracy theory I’ve seen posted on HN

There's more to this line of thought. The pilot movie isn't space opera so much as it is a murder mystery in space, and it's not the only episode like that. The security chief, Garibaldi, is a hard-bitten alcoholic detective from film noir (and there are plenty of film-noir-like visual elements: fans, shadows, run-down industrial sectors unimaginable in Star Trek), and he plays a much larger role solving crimes than do his counterparts in other science fiction shows. The writing style, a long arc that drops clues up front to pay off in revelations down the line, also leans heavily on mystery writing.

> Season one it was a traditional adventure of the week style show that was popular at the time and before. because having a multi season story arc was unheard of and still more or less is today so the first season was traditional TV and only when mildly successful did it have the ability to spread its wings. and it did so so well that it forced other shows like DS9 to also have seasonal story arcs.

Unfortunately incorrect! JMS had the entire plot and "bible" written out start to finish before the show was produced, and the show was approved based on that bible. It had all the room it planned for and needed at the start. There were even built-in "escape hatches" planned for if actors had to drop out (which happened to Michael O'Hare, unfortunately)

From what I've read, DS9 was heavily based on the Babylon 5 Bible which was pitched by JMS to Paramount years before. You might charitably say DS9 was the Guix to the Nix of Babylon 5: Same core ideas mapped onto different story universes. The earlier B5 Bible apparently even had a changeling security officer which evolved into the "changeling net" plot shown in the pilot episode.

While I agree, there's plenty of people who refuse to watch anything that's not sharp. I think there's room for both to exist, just clearly labeled as "original" and "AI Upscaled to 4K"

If you watch the popular streaming services on a Linux PC then you'll be lucky to get more than 720p and some only seem to provide SD anyway - even for content from the HD era. This despite obviously having access to more detailed versions that they'll serve you for the same money if you watch on one of their preferred platforms.

IME this becomes quite jarring if you're watching on a modern high-res screen - even something like a quarter-sized browser window or PIP on a 4K monitor - with other much sharper content visible nearby. If you're watching either full-screen or in a smaller window but without other more detailed visuals around it then personally I find it less jarring and I can still become immersed if the material itself is good. It's still noticeable if you're used to watching HD or 4K content on other devices but I'd rather watch something good in SD than not watch it. The same goes for old shows that were only made in SD originally.

Just wait, they'll soon demand that their favorite soap operas be AI-restarted to generate slop streams indefinitely, and will throw their hard-sat-on-a-sofa UBI credits at that.

- Hey, have you watched that Game of Thrones S1723E1122?

- Nope, I'm not paying until they upscale it to 64K!

> Seems like films mostly switched over to "modern" acting in the 70s

Can you elaborate on this point? I think I agree with you, I just don't know why.

They definitely aren't 1/4 SD (DVD) though... The original series was SD, shot in SD for the early seasons with 1/4 res CGI.

The HBO Max release was 1080p with some wife screen usage... The extra pixels came from somewhere.

For me, the appeal of DS9 was that certain episodes In the Pale Moonlight etc. are a bit like a play, very self-contained even if they are in a certain setting. Babylon 5 is kind of the opposite, no plays, just parts of a long arc.

I think both have their appeal, but it's easier to timebox the enjoyment of a play. It's also easier to discuss, or think about.

I watched all of TNG, Voyager and DS9. To me DS9 will always be behind the other ST series.

I felt like it was a bit too much of the social stuff, maybe because it plays mostly on a station instead of an exploration vessel, but I guess that is exactly what people like about it. The characters and their development and so on. I liked the Garak character for example, but disliked Zisko being some chosen one for the wormhole gods or something. I much prefer Data, or Picard or most of their crew, even if they don't develop as much.

Well, to each their own, they are all good series to watch.

I probably agree but my emotional attachment to DS9 keeps it in front.

It's also crazy how relevant to modern times the plot of B5 is and how many parallels you see.

I think because B5 had already a story to tell from the beginning while DS9 was a setting at first.

I doubt that the changelings and the dominion where planned from the beginning.

DS9 and B5 came out at roughly the same time and shared a similar concept: The (mis)adventures of the crew of a bustling space station. The divergence from there is extreme.

DS9 very quickly brought in the Defiant so that its characters could escape the station and go on more traditional Star Trek adventures. The station was home base, but the crew got out a lot. It typically felt like the station was well under control, with only minor differences between it and a star-fleet vessel. (Toss Quark and Garak out an airlock and you'd pretty much have a standard starship.)

B5 did send its characters on excursions, but they were fewer and far between. The station was not a safe home base. It was a bigger and wilder place than DS9 ever was. It always felt like some crisis or another was ready to spiral out of control and the staff generally needed all hands on deck to deal with whatever was happening. DS9 had the occasional crowd scene, but B5 had bigger crowds (in record shattering amounts of alien makeup) every episode. DS9 felt like a sleepy frontier fort. B5 felt like a city.

Then there's the continuity. There just wasn't a lot of continuity in anything other than soap operas in the mid 90's. TNG occasionally had multi-part episodes and sometimes referenced earlier episodes, but it was always careful to explain things so you could jump in anywhere and not be lost. DS9 was initially episodic, but had some larger arcs in later seasons, perhaps as a response to what B5 was doing. B5 broke the mold. The first season seemed episodic at first glance, but each episode advanced the central story-line. You could jump into Season 1 at any point and be a little confused, but figure things out. That swiftly changed. Later seasons became completely continuous, and frequently relied on bits of story that happened in earlier seasons without any kind of hand-holding. This caused big problems that probably prevented B5 from being as well received as it should have been.

This is for the young whippersnappers out there who grew up with the internet, streaming, and home video: Today, if you decide to jump into a show, you can call up every episode on demand. If it's not on a streaming service, it's on DVD or VHS. Failing that, there's always piracy. When B5 came out, it was not a given that a TV series would be released on VHS or DVD. The internet was there, but it wasn't yet up to distributing video. There was no such thing as streaming. The era of Netflix mailing you physical discs was years in the future. If you wanted to watch a TV show, you had to tune in when it was broadcast. It was, essentially, live TV.

The kicker is that most broadcasters were utterly irresponsible in how they aired shows. Episodes would frequently be pre-empted or aired out of order. Broadcasters were used to purely episodic content. Who cared if people saw episode 5 before episode 2, or missed episode 3 until it got reran the following year? This royally fubar'd people's ability to follow B5. My personal memory of B5 when it first aired was fragmentary and frustrating. I'd watch an episode and really enjoy it, try to tune in next week only for it to be pre-empted by golf, and then be lost when an episode from much later in the season was aired the week after that. It wasn't until B5 came out on DVD (years later) that I was finally able to watch the show in order and finally appreciate how special it was.

Continuity between episodes is normal now. Everyone is used to shows that play out as one long narrative instead of hitting the reset button every week. B5 blazed the trail for them before TV distribution was really ready for continuity. There are a lot of warts to overlook. CG was in its infancy back then. DS9 was still using physical models in its first few seasons. B5 looks like it came out of somebody's Amiga because it literally came out of somebody's Amiga. There probably won't ever be a quality up-scaling of the special effects because a lot of the files from that Amiga were lost. The set design is clever, but stagy. The budget of B5 doesn't even add up to half a shoestring by modern standards for a show with 10 episodes a season, and B5 had 22 episodes a season! The story is so grand and detailed that it still feels rushed at times. (They thought the show would be cancelled at the end of S4, so they crammed most of S5's plot into S4. The result is fantastically dense and frenetic!)

In the end, DS9 was a fantastic show but felt a lot like the station featured in it. It was always well under control and its creators got everything they needed to deliver a compelling show. They knew how far to reach and chose their battles wisely. B5 feels like a wild and overreaching fever dream by comparison. It nearly span out of control, much like its titular station was always threatening to. If they decided to re-make B5 today, they'd probably simplify it immensely. It's story still seems too ambitious for a single TV series to tell. If you can get past the warts, B5 is still a unique and rewarding series to experience. Nothing quite like it has come along since.

It's probably worth watching TNG before DS9. The contrast between TNG and DS9 with DS9's darker tone is an important part of the show. Probably the best episode in the whole series, "In The Pale Moonlight", is made all the better when you've seen what they're contrasting against.

Probably you should really watch TNG first, lots of characters and lore that would be needed to fully appreciate a lot of things that would otherwise fall flat at best or be outright not understandable. I don't think they matter to understanding the main arc but then the main arc is only a small part of the show.

(Voyager is entirely optional but a much welcome addition that happens concurrently at later seasons; I would recommend it on its own anyway.)

For all these shows, let them grow on you, the first season of each can be a bit awkward but then things start to fall into place, both in terms of characters/lore/setting/story/world building as well as actors themselves getting the hang of characters.

And yes there are absolute duds of episodes, but don't let that make you miss the absolutely fantastic ones.

Yes, you can watch DS9 without having seen the other series. I hope you enjoy DS9 and also the other series should you continue.

There are occasional TNG references but they are not important to the plot.

You can start with DS9 and understand what's going on with the characters. Like many series it takes a couple of seasons to figure out what's going on and who the characters are, but in the end the payoff is fantastic. It was the first series produced after the death (and overall creative control) of Gene Roddenberry, which allowed it to step away from a utopian vision and address real issues in a complicated ugly universe.

I went on this journey with my son during COVID.

Watch a handful of classic trek to get the idea. Balance of Terror, city on the Edge of Forever, maybe Mirror Mirror or Trouble with Tribbles. They will seem very cliched.

Start TNG in the third season and just focus on the best episodes, the ones that are 8s or 9s on IMDB. Be sure to see The Best of Both Worlds I and I, the original season finale climax.

Skip a lot of the first season of DS9. Low IMDb will tell you which ones. But watch almost all of the later seasons.

Then play Star Trek Attack Wing!

For me DS9 is the best Star Trek series. It's hard to admit since I adore TNG but overall DS9 is better. A few characters in TNG become main characters in DS9. You don't necessarily need the history but it may seem odd watching DS9 and then TNG. As some of these DS9 characters play a much smaller part in TNG.

TNG introduced various civilisations that drive much of the plot in DS9.

Season 1: Ferengi

Season 4: Trill, Cardassians

Season 5: Bajorans

Also, Chief O'Brien and his wife Keiko who were recurring minor characters in TNG have more important roles in DS9.

You can but you'll miss important context.

TOS and TNG explain the Federation utopian universe, the ongoing conflicts and races, the moral dilemmas of the captains... I feel that starting with DS9 might get you miss the point a bit.

I would say to at least try to watch a curated selection of TNG episodes.

If you have the general idea about this universe you can just jump in and then watch other shows later. But mind that DS9 is a different kind of show when it comes to Star Trek. Personally, I find it much more appealing than the rest because of the core premise.

Babylon 5 explores some aspects deeply which were just glanced over in DS9 and that makes it an amazing show as well.

It's the best starting point in many ways!

There are some characters from TNG who cross over into DS9, and one of the main characters in DS9 has a grudge against one of the characters in TNG due to events in TNG, whose effects offscreen relative to TNG are explored onscreen in DS9, for example. However, there are small flashbacks that act as explainers in DS9 for those who haven’t seen TNG, and the story focuses on the impact to DS9 characters and their motivations, so you might only have half of the story for those small details, but you’ll have the half that is relevant to the story that DS9 is trying to tell. You could easily watch the one or two TNG episodes involving Wolf 359 if you wanted to get the other side, though you could make do without, and come back to TNG after DS9 if you wanted afterward.

It’s hard for me to be entirely unbiased myself, as I watched the the original series (TOS) films without watching much of the OG series itself, and then watched TNG when it was airing, so I already had the context to watch DS9.

All of that is to say, I don’t think you necessarily need to watch TNG to appreciate DS9. The shows are mostly standalone and self contained. Also, I don’t think this is much of a spoiler, as the double episode premiere of DS9 pretty much includes all of what I’ve said above, in some form or fashion, with the exception of the introduction of some character crossovers of the TNG cast. I think it’s nice to know where those characters came from and what they went through prior to DS9, as the two shows were running concurrently, but neither show is written in such a way that you’ll feel lost if you don’t watch TNG first, though others may disagree.

What's the evidence? Star Trek came out before B5 and in the ST universe there were several deep space stations. Do you mean they copied characters or story lines?

And how is DS9 a soap opera? I associate soap operas with sh!t acting and not really exploring deeper philosophical topics.

DS9 had amazing actors, character development and story lines. Take Garak for example, amazing character.

DS9 has its philosophical moments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feh_Y_Q_WpE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seid0z1nKjM

I heard the same back then, plus IIRC B5 did or tried to sue Paramount for copying their plot for DS9. I believe the series was offered to Paramount first but they said no.

There were a few news articles about that in various entertainment publications.

Yeah, Season 4 is acknowledged for compressing a lot of the story that would have been Season 5 in the original plan. The series finale ("Sleeping in Light") was even shot as a part of Season 4 and delayed once Season 5 was picked up to keep it the series finale. The epilogue it tells spins out enough past the show that it mostly isn't that noticeable, but the big tell is a brief appearance of Ivanova rather than Lochley, which doesn't really break the episode because of the out-of-order storytelling of the whole episode and the glimpses of the crew are "timeless" flashbacks, but it is interesting.

> smaller scale stories are replaced with moving the big plot forward

This is pretty common in TV shows, from what I've noticed. It takes a few seasons for a show to find its footing.

It pains me how important TKO is for Ivanova's character because it's otherwise got to be one of, if not the worst episodes in the whole show's run.

TNG was using mainly practical effects early on, which had benefit of higher visual quality but meant not as much could be done within the budget.

Babylon 5 early and very enthusiastic use of CGI meant that the scope of what it could see was ridiculously bigger without reusing clips as much as some other places did.

Only the live action shots were recorded with a wide aspect ratio, and perhaps not even that for the pilot. The CGI was rendered in 4:3 and the final cuts including transitions and VFX where composited in 4:3.

The remaster combines cropped 4:3 but high resolution scans of the original live action footage with (sometimes badly) upscaled versions of CGI and VFX'd shots -- except for the pilot which is fully upscaled and cropped from the original 4:3 broadcast masters with zero high resolution live action footage. I don't know if the pilot footage was actually shot widescreen but if it was then you don't get any of it in the "widescreen" pilot included in the remastered versions.

DS9 and Voy have the same issue. For DS9, Season 1 was shot wide screen compatible then they switched to 16:9 but none of the effects are widescreen ready.

You can still see the CRTs behind LCARS, but I have to admit it is pretty cool in general. They had a bigger budget.

But for space scenes, IMO the later episodes of B5 were amazing and beautiful. They just need a modern render and to turn down the saturation. TNG era ships and camera framing were much more boring, partly due to the smaller story.

I just had to add more, because I remember they used DEC Alpha systems at some point.

" Alphas for design stations serving 5 animators and one animation assistant (housekeeping and slate specialist). Most of these stations run Lightwave and a couple add Softimage. VERY plug-in hungry. PVR's on every station, with calibrated component NTSC (darn it, I hates ntsc) right beside.

P6's in quad enclosures for part of the renderstack, and Alphas for the rest, backed up 2x per day to an optical jukebox.

Completed shots output to a DDR post rendering and get integrated into the show.

Shots to composite go to the Macs running After Effects, or the SGI running Flint, depending on the type of comp being done, and then to the DDR (8 minutes capacity on the SGI)."[0]

[0] http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/effects.html

Thanks for the correction and link.

>What would be the equivalent of B5 in a fantasy? A floating sky island? A neutral world in a multiverse?

Imagine a typical fantasy setting in which humans live amongst other races - elves, dwarves, goblins and the like (but substitute them for aliens, the archetypes are mostly the same) Humans are still venturing out into the greater world and were nearly being wiped out in a war with the elves (Minbari) when their intitial meeting went poorly. Humans create a city called Babylon where representatives of various races could come together to talk, trade and interact peacefully at the outer boundaries of what humans knew to be "the world," near the countries of wild magic where eldritch and ancient things were known to dwell, which even the older races fear to speak of.

The fourth Babylon vanished without a trace. Humans have barely begun to master even the simplest of magics but this is far beyond their understanding, and the elves, who always seem to know more than they say, say nothing. But, humans being perhaps too stupid or prideful to know when to quit, simply built it again, and tried again.

But there are prophecies of an ancient enemy called The Lords of Shadow which have slumbered deep underground for so long that they have become mere legend to all but the oldest races, if not forgotten altogether. A profane force of the deepest and darkest magics which was beaten back by an alliance of older races and the Lords of Light, the divine high elf mages who still watch over the younger races and regard humans with bemusement.

Or they seem to. It's hard to tell with them. Their faces are always obscured by masks, and everything they say is a riddle.

The prophecies say the time is drawing near for the Lords of Shadow to awaken again, and the dark magic to return... and strangely enough, within this city where humans, elves, dwarves, angels and devils all walk amongst one another, the key to the fate of the world and the coming of the New Age may be this weak, naive, plucky race called humans, whose nature seems to stand between the darkness and the light, and in whom the Elves have taken a particular interest, for reason they refuse to reveal.

It really isn't that difficult. Not every element has to have a precise 1:1 match, so many of the themes and motifs are right out of fantasy. You have an ancient immortal named Lorien, a mysterious broker of dark wishes named Morden who serves the Shadows, a group of elite warriors called Rangers who trained under the Elves (Minbari) and fought in the last great war against Sauron-sorry The Shadows. The Technomages are literal space wizards.

You could do some Norse Mythology thing and say "hyperspace" is a magical form of travel between the "realms" of these various races, and have the story take place when humans have just discovered the magic that allows access to the world tree. Add a Tower of Babel analogy and say the city of Babylon already existed and was already a place where different races commingled because it's where the portal was, making it both an international and interdimensional hub, but one day the old Tower of Babylon (which is where the portal is) just disappeared (probably those damned elves) but they built a new one.

>>[I prefer] TNG because it’s about the future, about science, rationality, open-mindedness and new perspectives

>TNG isn't actually about science

I agree with your point that Star Trek is very bad at being scientifically realistic (e.g., in its plots) but Star Trek -- at least TOS and TNG -- was very good at creating positive feelings about scientific and technological progress.

Technological progress is one of the few things that large numbers of people have become so enthusiatic about that it becomes a sort of lens through which they decide the goodness or badness of almost everything that happens. Jesus and dismantling capitalism and other forms of oppression are two other examples.

In other words, the first two Star Trek shows (i.e., the shows that Roddenberry exerted direct control over) seemed to have been extremely good at attracting people to the technophilic ideology.

(TNG is also a potent advertisement for communist ideology: Roddenberry was at the time interested in communism and insisted that money was absent (or rare and unimportant) inside the Federation and that crime and strife between people had mostly been eliminated.)

Interesting, that's not my experience at all. So they are doing something different for you and/or your IP address vs. mine.

> But no, in my experience yt-dlp no longer just works unless you make your identity legible

You need to upgrade your yt-dlp then. The newest versions still work without any session cookies or other such nonsense.