Completely understandable. Time zones bite. Read and experiment whenever you have time.
I can’t always work on this project when I want to either. After all we all have day jobs, many or at least some probably have families and then there is always that little thing (like an email from a friend or someone asking you to give them a hand) that blows up to be much more and … bam - you’re side tracked again.
But since we are all doing this for free, I think we’re coming ahead pretty well.
And yes, the netflix version is … I don’t think a word has been invented yet to accurately describe my feelings on that one, but I would like to paraphrase Garak: “To see that one burn wouldn’t exactly be tragic”.
But then again, times move fast and physical storage mediums are becoming more and more a thing from the past, streaming and online cloud storage is where we are headed with warp speed.
A friend of mine who used to be the manager of a classical “video store” (yes, they even had VHS tapes until about 2012) said “The way things are going, DVDs will suffer the same fate as VHS; BluRay will probably indure still but streaming will replace that as well some day.” The rate things are going, he expects the DVD to be more of an collectors thing within the next 5-10 years.
And that is (in my eyes) something to be sad about, since there are many show and movies that never made the jump from dvd to bluray, and even if they are available at streaming services, they are being transferred so carelessly/badly, that the original source is still a better way to go (if you can still find it).
The same said friend had the opportunity to take any vhs tapes he wanted for free when they were cleared out.
I can still remember him carrying boxes into his small car, afterwards telling me he couldn’t belive how insane it was by the company that owned the store chain to go like “Well, that’s that, no one wants that old stuff, so collect it and throw it out”.
Thankfully, he managed to “sneak out” a lot before that happened and luckily no one noticed (or perhaps even cared). He still feels sorry today for not being able to save them all - he rescued about 3.000 tapes, among them old disney classics, movies and so on (can you imagine what his place looks like?).
But he told me that pales in comparison to the total stock they had (which was about 8.000 with the last inventory he did back then).
And there are still those gems sometimes, like extended versions or “prints” that were done once and forgotten.
Anyway, let’s hope our efforts will matter to people/fans.