[Marxism] "The Quiet Mutiny" (1970)

[Joaquin Bustelo]

Horacio Oliviera wrote: "Just a hint for those of us that like to get
material from all over the world. You can get players such as the Oppo"

I'd only vaguely heard of this brand before but they appear to be quite
reputable. They make high-end upconverting (to HD TV) DVD players and have
been highly rated by various comparative reviews.

The big plus in my eyes --apart from upconverting and being free of regional
encoding-- is that mostly their players are DIVX-certified. This means that
they play AVI video files on data disks with various flavors of MPEG-4
encoding, which is the standard in downloadable video files (and is also the
encoding that next-generation BluRay and HD-DVD use, although to read those
disks you need and HD player, and those disks are encrypted). Of course,
they also play VCD (video CD), normal DVD and just the plain old MPEG-1 and
MPEG-2 files those standards use.

I wouldn't give a second look at a DVD player or recorder that did not
support AVI files encoded with DIVX or similar programs. Life is too short
for transcoding. And politically it is useful. 

Take, for example, the acclaimed documentary series on the Black Civil
Rights Movement, "Eyes on the Prize." You can buy a USED set of VHS tapes
for $500, or new for $1,000. The reason for this is that they can't be made
"legally" any more. The Black producer who made the documentary series
didn't have enough money for long-term licenses for the footage and the
rights have inspired. Just think of the obscenity of it. The footage is all
of Black people's struggling for freedom. A bunch of white folks'
corporations now claim to "own" this history. And as a result a bunch of
eBay and Amazon scalpers can sell this for $1,000 or more. Someone is
claiming to have the DVD set for $2,500 -- quite a surprise, since the
series went out of print BEFORE DVD's came on the scene. 

Maybe it's legit because stranger things have happened. For example, CNN's
24-part documentary series on the Cold War never came out on DVD. But on the
file sharing networks, what appear to be the files DVD's would have been
made from --MPEG-2 files with PAL-standard encoding-- are available. The
only things I can think of is at some point these files were made from the
master tapes from the series (my guess would be in a format called digital
beta), because these are definitely higher quality than VHS, but the project
to put out DVD's was abandoned. Or perhaps someone with access to the
masters made these expressly for online sharing, but it seems odd to use the
antiquated MPEG-2 standard instead of the higher quality and more compact
MPEG-4.

But back to eyes on the prize. If you google the following:

"eyes on the prize" ext:torrent

You'll get 30 hits of places to download it freely using bittorrent.

Ditto for Pilger's new documentary about Latin America, the War on
Democracy. If you're in the U.S. and want to see it, it'll cost you hundreds
of dollars minimum, because you've got to either cross the Atlantic or the
Pacific to do so. It's not been released in this hemisphere, at least not in
the United States -- I don't know why, but I can guess. But it IS available
--everywhere in the world where the are fast internet connections-- through
bittorrent.

Another example is the Battle of Chile. That's $800 for two VHS tapes.
That's insane. 

Joaquín