7mo ago

i think Hulu speeds up parts of Futurama episodes.

watching Wild Green Yonder with a friend, me watching the movie on my Plex, them watching the version broken into episodes on Hulu.

i pulled Hulu up to make sure i stayed synced, and the Hulu version quickly pulled ahead of mine. i didn't notice a missing scene but i wasn't paying close attention to the Hulu version.

when Hulu auto-cycled to the next episode, even with outro and intro credits, it brought it back to sync with my version. we're ⅓ through episode two, and Hulu is currently 14 seconds ahead, although we started this episode synced.

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The ones broken up for televised airing like normal 23 minute long episodes is the main reason. They'd have a time difference from watching them on adult swim compared to the DVDs too. They cut some jokes out and inserted commercials. I really can't even stand watching Bender's Big Score in the episodic format, since much of the stuff I liked most was cut or shortened.
- Pretty sure this is exactly the answer. Production Season 5/Broadcast Season 6 was made as 4 dvd movies that were then cut up into four episodes each for broadcast.

My math is rusty, but this sounds like their original source files were at a different framerate than whatever their streaming standard framerate is. E.g., a 25 fps PAL source, playing at a 30 (or 29.976) NTSC rate.
- It could be 24fps video sped up to 25fps for PAL. If it was 25fps sped up to 30fps, it would be very noticeable and the episodes would be about 3 minutes shorter.
- 25 to 30 fps would absolutely be noticeable. NTSC to 30.0 maybe. If I did my math right that's 7 minutes of difference across the entire movie.
  
  That shouldn't change the time of the movie. FPS = frames per second. The second part is still one second. It's the number of frames you see in that one second that is different.

Its common, here's an example with seinfeld apparently its to increase ad time lol. Also I guess a lot of companies now are assuming people are gonna put the show as background noise, not as if you're actually paying attention
- right but like, they were only broken up into episodes for streaming in the first place, they can make their ad breaks as long as they want

It's for ad time. At some point, the TV industry realized though couldn't get studios to make "30 minute" shows shorter then they already were (for ad breaks), so they artificially compress those show times to fit more seconds of ads in addition to the ad breaks they already had time for.
So say a studio releases a 20 minute episode of content for a 30-minute time block, distribution companies like Hulu will take that 10 minutes for ads,, plus compress (by speeding up) the 20 minute episode, too. It wouldn't even surprise me if they use an algorithm to determine which parts of the episode they can speed up more aggressively than others, to hide that impact from the viewer.
- I get that for broadcast, but for streaming it doesn't make any sense, it's not like ad breaks on streaming used to be the same length as on cable. on top of that, I wasn't getting ads when watching this on Hulu
  
  Hulu is owned by broadcast networks, they could just be using the same media, pre-condensed.

That's interesting. If you document more discrepancies please share. I could totally see Hulu or other platforms doing this type of thing to somehow get more favorable metrics - showing more ads maybe?
- well, just noticed the Family Guy Star Wars episode 6 episode is 44 minutes on Hulu and 53 minutes on my Plex.
- More ads and possibly less server costs due to reduced streaming time

TV stations used to do this in the late 90s and early 2000s (maybe they still do it, idk) to increase ad space given the fixed time formats of the medium. Hulu doesn’t really need to do that, they can just make the ad breaks longer.
they could be doing it, it could be for nefarious reasons like making longer ad breaks seem perceptually shorter, it could be something stupid like they’re use the masters that were destructively edited by the above process (see 90s cartoons like ren and stimpy, Rockos modern life, Beavis and butthead, etc that retain censorship to this day because the original masters no longer exist unmolested), or (imo most likely) it could just be a technical issue. Most/all streaming networks have totally garbage apps and it wouldn’t shock me at all if their player introduced issues that fucked with timing at the expense of draconian drm or just bad lowest bidder coding. Of course, it could also be a problem with your setup
Easiest way to resolve these issues is piracy. You already have a plex server, nice. I recommend jellyfin to anyone starting out. Plex is fine but they ~~have~~ reserve the right to snitch on users in certain situations so fuck plex. If media companies stop being greedy and splitting catalogs all over the place then maybe reconsider. The music industry figured out how to have multiple vendors that all have 95+% of each others catalog, movies and tv can do the same. They’ve even gotten to the point where the apps are as good or better than my pirated library. My flac library is imperceptibly different from apple lossless, they have lyrics ready to go for the overwhelming majority of tracks and most are time synced (which I can’t be bothered to do for a 2tb music library, automated lrc downloaders are often wrong in my experience), their app has great ui, and with recent updates I can even remove vocals from literally any song. I’ll happily pay $120 a year to not bother with maintaining a ratio on red or dealing with mislabeled shit on soulseek
- Plex is fine but they have snitched on users in certain situations
  Can you cite any examples? I've been using Plex for over 10 years and while I've heard plenty of conspiracy theories along these lines I've never seen any actual evidence of it happening.
  
  So I will concede that I can’t find any after 5 minutes of searching. I could’ve sworn I read an article about sharing user data to German authorities but I can’t find it all. I did find articles about them banning entire hosting providers in Germany they found suspect because of high rates of pirate servers on said hosting, maybe that’s what I was remembering. Either was I was w-w-w-w-wrong on that point, edited original comment.
  I still maintain fuck plex. They are trying to whitewash away their association with piracy with ugly decisions and policy. I don’t trust their software.
  First from plex themselves:
  “It is Plex’s policy to document all notices of alleged infringement upon which Plex decides to take action. As with all legal notices, a copy of the notice may be sent to one or more third parties who may make such notice available to the public, including as a part of legal proceedings.”
  https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/plex-copyright-policy/
  While you can (for now) opt out of targeted advertising related data collection you cannot opt out of all data collection unless you delete your account and specifically request your data to be erased. Even then they may not honor this request if there is a legal issue regarding copyright
  “After verifying your identity, Plex will delete Personal Data associated with your account except that we may retain archived copies as required by law. Keep in mind that this option will result in the full deletion of your Plex account itself (including any subscriptions associated with that account such as TIDAL or Plex Pass). The account will no longer be accessible once you do so”
  https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/
  They can and will ban you for hosting pirated content servers to others because it reflects poorly on them. This would be whatever except a plex pass is like $140
  https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/26/24084116/is-plex-banning-people-for-sharing-their-libraries
  The aforementioned note of them banning an entire hosting company because of a high rate of pirate servers, catching legitimate users in the crossfire:
  https://cordcuttersnews.com/plex-is-cracking-down-on-pirated-content/
  Plex is more mature than jellyfin and has a ton of financial backing but in my experience jellyfin is 90% of the way there (especially if you use kodi as a frontend to make up for jellyfins weakest attribute, the inconsistent and often weak player apps). Plexamp is probably the biggest disparity, jellyfin has music players that are somewhat there but Plexamp is really good. That said it’s worth it, imo, to forgo that to have a solution that is entirely local and not reliant on a company that is increasingly worried about their association with media piracy
- I also want to hear about the snitching.
  I'd heard most famously Seinfeld was sped up by 7% in syndication to sell more advertising space. I do it to my own videos sometimes just to shorten them for today's attention span
  
  You're doing it wrong, you're supposed to slow your videos down to milk those precious view seconds!

I think it's for ads. I first discovered this watching "Interview with the Vampire". In the UK, it's available on BBC iPlayer, but that version runs faster than the pirated version. I didn't notice until we took a break from watching and notice we were out of sync. I decided to test it by playing the pirated version at the exact same time as the BBC version. It was uncanny to hear them start out synced but gradually diverge.
The BBC iPlayer version doesn't have ads, but when playing on live TV it does have ads, so I assume that's why.
- BBC live TV doesn't have ads either?
  I'd be less surprised if the pirated version was slowed for some reason but equally BBC could have got it off another network who do run ads

Doctor who gets edited when it goes to BBC America, due to the 47 minute episodes, America wants that extra 5 minute ad break.
- Yes but which doctor was it?
  
  The ONLY Doctor! (Mostly David tenant and Matt Smith...)

obligatory QI clip about this.

- watching Wild Green Yonder with a friend, me watching the movie on my Plex, them watching the version broken into episodes on Hulu.
  i pulled Hulu up to make sure i stayed synced, and the Hulu version quickly pulled ahead of mine.

That’s weird. I haven’t noticed that.

Micro cuts
They would cut frames across a whole episode; so they could fit in extra ads.
But odd to see that on Hulu …
- They probably got the cut versions when they put them on Hulu and nobody noticed or cared enough to change it.
  
  Ah… actually yeah. 👍
  No doubt they would not care

I think this video or its second part mentions this or might have mentioned something about this but I can’t remember right now.
https://youtu.be/PNKdfvpFvgA
- No SI please. Drag wants to watch the video but doesn't want to be tracked by Google.
  
  Getting in the habbit
  
  You might want to look at the LibRedirect browser extension. You can have it convert all YouTube links to point to your preferred Invidious instance instead.

44 comments