YouTube isn't a good place to preserve found media. The video quality decreases every time it's uploaded there, and it's very vulnerable to copyright strike. I wouldn't even argue torrents are that great for preserving found media, as they tend to die out after a few years. IMO the best place to upload found media in the hopes it will stay around are file lockers like MEGA, MediaFire, Google Drive, kiwi6, DepositFiles, 4shared or ulozto . They're not completely foolproof either but if you mirror it on a lot of them, it's probably your best bet as a long term option.
Of course, if you can, the safest place to keep it is your own external drive.
Maybe there should be a module on found media pages to allow multiple links to found media. It's typical for an article to contain screenshots, as well as external links to information about the media, but it'd be nice if links to mirrors of the found media was a built in feature.
Last Edit: May 11, 2017 4:00:42 GMT by tomysshadow
I watched TreehouseTV a lot when I was a kid. There is one thing I remember but have never been able to find. Sometimes between shows they would play these shorts which were in the same format as their commercials, but they weren't commercials for anything. They were called "Get Up and Go Go" and were simply a bunch of clips of shows on the channel played over music that encouraged you to "Get Up and Go Go." It was so weird because they rarely showed them and when they did you just weren't expecting it. For example, they took part of the Berenstain Bears show where they are dancing to a record and put this music to it. At the end of the clip they would encourage you to "Get Up and Go Go" and say "Now it's your turn." The clips were on treehousetv.com for a short time but were removed when they updated their media player. They also had one for Max and Ruby, Franklin, and others I'm sure. I want to say there was around 7-10 of them total.
How long ago were they on? I might remember them
It was such a long time ago. I want to say around 2005, towards the end of the time I was watching the channel. Looking at the Wayback Machine, I recognize their 2005 site layout, so it would have to be around then.
I watched TreehouseTV a lot when I was a kid. There is one thing I remember but have never been able to find. Sometimes between shows they would play these shorts which were in the same format as their commercials, but they weren't commercials for anything. They were called "Get Up and Go Go" and were simply a bunch of clips of shows on the channel played over music that encouraged you to "Get Up and Go Go." It was so weird because they rarely showed them and when they did you just weren't expecting it. For example, they took part of the Berenstain Bears show where they are dancing to a record and put this music to it. At the end of the clip they would encourage you to "Get Up and Go Go" and say "Now it's your turn." The clips were on treehousetv.com for a short time but were removed when they updated their media player. They also had one for Max and Ruby, Franklin, and others I'm sure. I want to say there was around 7-10 of them total.
It's pretty much a guarantee there's FTP access to that folder, even if Braxton hadn't said so - I highly doubt they upload everything with a file manager.
videotapes recommendation is a good one, but I'd like to elaborate a little more.
While saving Flash games, you'll learn a lot of the typical conventions they often use to load faster, save data, etc.
My first recommendation is, don't "go to the Flash tab" as per what videotapes said - a lot of games using Flash or other plugins are not entirely self contained and need to download components, such as mp3s for the music etc. from other URLs on the web. Saving games using only the Flash tab will cause you to miss these extra files. Not to mention, there are also other plugins such as Shockwave, and the file extensions may be missed if you use any sort of filter.
Here is a quick list of some file extensions to look out for. Maybe some others could be contributed:
.swf, .fla - Flash Files, the most common export format used by Adobe Flash on the web (the SWF stands for Small Web Files, not ShockWave Flash as you may think, as Shockwave and Flash are two entirely different products) .dir, .dxr, .dcr - Director Files, which contain Adobe Shockwave movies .w32, .carb, .ppc, .x32 - Xtra Files, often these contain components needed for Director Files to work .swa, .w3d - Shockwave Audio and Shockwave 3D files, often used as assets in Shockwave games .xml, .txt - plaintext files, these files often contain miscellaneous data such as the layout of levels or settings .flv, .wav, .mp3 - video/audio files, commonly used by Flash games externally .vmo, .nmo, .mpbin - 3dvia Player files, used by the notoriously difficult to set up Virtools/3D Life Player .grv - 3D Groove files, contain scripts, models and sounds for old 3D Groove games
Now, off the top of my head, there are three very common conventions you will run into trying to get these games to run offline.
1. External Files
Often, Flash games will try and load parts of the game as you play through them. This saves the initial loading time but poses some issues. The first issue is that there is a distinct possibility you will have to complete the entire game just to back up all the files required for it. The second has to do with how the files are loaded. There are typically two ways to load a URL: absolutely and relatively.
Absolutely means the Flash game will always look for external components on a particular site. If you had a game located at example.com/game.swf which tries to load music from example.com/music.mp3 , absolute loading means the Flash game will always look for the music at example.com/music.mp3 . This is a problem because if example.com goes down, even if you have music.mp3 backed up the game will be unable to load it because it's still looking for it at example.com . The general way to fix this is to use XAMPP in combination with the Windows hosts file in order to "spoof" example.com still being online. Users generally don't like installing XAMPP just to play a Flash game, so if you can, try finding a more creative approach. You may be able to use JPEXS, a free Flash decompiler, to edit the URL things are loaded from.
Relatively means the Flash game will look for external components on the same server the game is hosted on. This does make the game easier to back up, but this can pose an issue. Some plugins prevent reading files on your local hard drive. This is for security reasons, for example to prevent Flash from uploading personal files. However, this means if you download the game's files to your hard drive and it loads URLs relatively, it might not work for this security reason. To get around this, all you need to do is upload the Flash game to any website of your own - or again, use XAMPP.
2. Loaders
In the search for the Trapped in Hyperspace game, I've probably repeated myself about loaders around a dozen times. The annoying thing about loaders is that they can initially appear to be found media, but in reality they are not - so you'll often get a tonne of people claiming they've found a long lost Flash game, but it's just a loader. So let me explain what they are.
Loaders are a lot like a bit.ly URL - they're just a URL redirect. They don't work unless the place it redirects to is still up. The purpose of a loader is to display a simple loading screen while the real game takes a while to download. For example, in the case of Trapped in Hyperspace, there is a loader which displays a Cartoon Network logo. The idea is to display the CN logo while the game is downloading. This way, users aren't faced with a blank white screen while the game hasn't loaded yet. Loaders themselves aren't useful - they contain no game content, they only attempt to load the game content. If the game content is gone, a loader is of no assistance.
In the case of Trapped in Hyperspace, the Wayback Machine managed to capture the loader for the game, a file called toon.dcr , but not the game content itself, a file called toon0.dcr . I've had some people report that they've found the game and present toon.dcr to me, but without toon0.dcr it is useless. I've also been asked if it's possible to recreate toon0.dcr so the game will load, but this is a misunderstanding of what a loader does - recreating toon0.dcr would mean recreating the whole game from scratch, defeating the purpose of finding the lost media, because toon0.dcr would contain all the game content such as scripts, models, textures etc.
If a playable file such as a .swf or .dcr is less than 20 KB, chances are it is nothing more than a loader and is utterly useless to a search.
3. Leech Protection
One of the most annoying things you'll deal with trying to run Flash games offline is Leech Protection. This comes in the form of a message along the lines of "Sorry, you can't play this game here, but you can play it on our website!" which then stops the game. This is a style of DRM that prevents games from being played on any website but the one it was originally hosted on. The reason a game creator might want to do this is if they always want people to be on the latest update or, more importantly, if they don't want other people to mooch off their server by hotlinking the game, costing the game creator ad revenue. However, if a Flash game is going to go down soon, it's safe to say this is no longer a concern for the original creator - so how does one get around Leech Protection?
Well, the annoying thing about this is that there is no one size fits all solution. For Flash games, you can usually use the aforementioned JPEXS decompiler to edit the script that normally performs the leech protection. For other games, however, with no known method of editing their code, you just have to be crafty. You can sometimes get away with doing the same thing you can do to fix absolute URL loading, which is using XAMPP and the Windows' hosts file. However, sometimes the game code is even more clever than that, and will only validate after a receiving a code from a PHP file on the server or something similar. This overkill leech protection is what Robotduck games use. These are very specialized cases and will require just a lot of trial and error guesswork to see what the game wants - for the time being.
In other cases, you can simply skip the frames that do the leech protection. In you have Adobe Director, you can use Lingo's go function to load a movie and skip to a particular frame. This is how I managed to get around Ezone.com's fairly relaxed leech protection.
Most of the time, leech protection automatically disables itself if you download the game to your hard drive for the sake of archival. This means that although you can't play the Flash game online, you can still play it offline. There are also games where leech protection will be disabled if you try playing them in Shockmachine.
Ultimately getting around leech protection will require observation, trial by fire, and trying to find a weak spot in the protection.
I could probably go into even more detail, but I thought I'd share some of my experiences with backing up Flash games. Sometimes you don't have to worry about any of these things, which is great when it happens, but I guarantee if you plan on backing up a lot of Flash games you'll run into these issues.
Last Edit: Apr 10, 2017 4:34:34 GMT by tomysshadow
I think the majority of people would answer this question with articles that are either poorly formatted or completely fabricated. This is also a lot of the reason people hate LMA, it falls into that category. Some people don't seem to understand that this wiki is for legitimately lost media, not campfire stories.
With that said, what annoys me the most personally are people who only come here for the one particular piece of lost media they're interested in, but don't care at all about lost media as a whole, not finding any of it interesting and only settling here because they want everyone else to help their particular cause. Admittedly, I arrived at this wiki because of one particular article - the 3D Groove article - but I find a lot of the other topics here to also be interesting, and try and do what I can if I believe I can help.
People who claim to have found something but actually haven't (or only are willing to give it out under a certain ridiculous condition) are also annoying, but I wouldn't say they top the list.
Last Edit: Apr 10, 2017 3:36:59 GMT by tomysshadow
I do really hope they have the same password for every folder, so it would cut down the number of guesses significantly, such as "cartoonnetwork" or "hyperspacegame"
Considering they are using FTP, the passwords are most likely per user. However it's entirely possible each user only has access to specific folders.
I used to love 3dvia! It was one of the few sites that didn't have a pesky "you must be over 13" box, so it's one of the earliest sites I would frequent. I created so many models there, a lot of which were total garbage... lol
There are far too many 3dvia Virtools/3D Life Player games to list. It'd be like trying to make a list of Unity games. There's thousands of them, whether or not you realize they're made in the engine. With that said, there seem to be a few favourites.
A couple of my backups can be found here: mega.nz/#F!Q4AnVZRa!bkeWzRrM8KQuOr66T0F8Ng And here: mega.nz/#F!VhhkSTLD!ykrHfI09tZ4gAaYRWkt0jA
You will need an NPAPI supported browser blah blah blah.
Also, I apologize these folders aren't quite up to my standard when it comes to organization and ease of use. I primarily made these backups for myself, if anyone has trouble getting them running, feel free to contact...
Oh yes, and considering 3dvia's site is down right now, here is the 3D Life Player installer. mega.nz/#!I9Aj3QaK!-LjoQM0BqaXZg6u8_zUtdHpvnhU_AKo55KFPuGaJ6BI
Last Edit: Mar 27, 2017 19:45:59 GMT by tomysshadow
This one is so obscure, I'd be incredibly surprised if anyone other than myself knew about it on this forum. That's because this website was made particularly for the residents of Edmonton, Canada. The website was called VR Edmonton, and was online around 2002 or so. The site contained a number of Quicktime VR panoramas of various places in the city, often with multiple locations linked together - it was a lot like Street View before Street View was a thing, which fascinated my young self. I don't even remember how I found it.
Unfortunately, while the Wayback Machine did grab the site, it didn't grab any of the actual Quicktime movies, which are of course the main attraction. Another minor thing, but it really bugs me, is that it didn't grab the really catchy music - which was only a short loop, but I still remember the notes to it! There was also a CD-ROM version according to one of the ad banners - I don't know why you'd buy it considering the whole thing was online anyway, but the fact it came in physical form gives me the most hope that VR Edmonton is still out there somewhere. No, it's not available on any online stores, I checked that too.
The site used to be located at vredmonton.ca but got replaced with a GoDaddy "parked domain" message around 2008. It was made by VR2C Studio, whose site has since been replaced by something else but used to be located at vr2c.com sharing the same dark red and orange background theme as VR Edmonton's site. The VR Edmonton site in the Wayback Machine has an @shaw.ca email address, but I never received a reply from it. The VR2C site had a phone number, but calling it went to an answering machine and they never called back either (it's been around a month.) The site also says it's copyright Andrej Orzelski. Doing a Google search for this name turned up only one result, a PDF talking about sites made in Alberta - but nothing like a Facebook page or any contact details. I don't think I'll ever see VR Edmonton again due to its very specific target audience, but would love to know if anyone at least remembers it. If indeed anyone does have the CD, I'd obviously be very interested in a copy.
I vividly remember there was a robot fixing game.. Or was it a robot building game?
I definitely remember that too. It was a game that presented you with a bunch of parts and you needed to pick the best ones to build a robot that could do a task. The tasks were all chores - I remember one of them was taking out garbage and one of them was washing dishes. The game's story is that Crash the robot wants to go to the movie theatre but can't because he has chores, so he decides to build other robots to do the work for him.
The game was supposed to teach about Simple Machines, which was part of the grade four curriculum at the time.
I tried to link to a wiki page on a forum post, but I got this message: Fatal error: Call to a member function getPrefixedDBkey() on a non-object in /home/lostmediawikidw/public_html/extensions/Comments/CommentClass.php on line 511
This happens when the page linked to doesn't exist; it's likely you accidentally left out a character, such as a closing bracket, resulting in an invalid link.
Shouldn't that give a 404 error instead of a PHP error? The PHP error only occurs if logged out. If logged in you get a proper 404. You should probably be checking that in PHP and giving the proper error just to be safe.
I too am Canadian so I have a bit of a different set of shows I watched when I was little and Treehouse was usually the channel, I don't remember the specific show you mentioned at all though. I do remember Crazy Quilt (which my parents found quite annoying) , The Magic Boombox, Ants in Your Pants, The Toy Castle, Mamemo, Tipi Tales (blech, those puppets looked disgraceful) , Mighty Machines, Big Comfy Couch, Postman Pat, The Adventures of Dudley the Dragon (snorefest) and the now infamous Nanalan. Some... interesting low budget shows got on there! Probably the reason why so many cheap shows were on there was the lack of advertisements. These are probably well documented enough though.
Last Edit: Jul 26, 2016 23:50:25 GMT by tomysshadow
I would kill for Marble Blast Evolved, a version of the game Marble Blast Ultra that never got released but that there are videos of and some leaked levels from. I know it exists and it's still out there and from all the videos of it, it looks amazing. Sadly it's copyright that prevents that from happening.