Info & Help Wanted: Episodic versions of Futurama movies...

So it’s come to my attention through a friend on Facebook that Hulu apparently has the episodic broadcast versions of the Futurama DVD movies. I don’t have Hulu, a way to capture streaming media, or (currently) a properly functional internet connection - does anyone here have a way to capture these versions of the DVD movies through Hulu?

Also, do TV/HDTV captures of the original broadcasts of these movies on Comedy Central exist? I’ve searched for years and never found them, but I admit I don’t have access to every private site that might be hoarding these or the patience to sift through every public site. If anyone has such captures I’d love to know/get my hands on them - they’d certainly be useful to compare to the Hulu versions to make sure those are accurate to the original broadcast and not a “syndication cut” if nothing else.

That is, of course, assuming capturing Hulu video is feasible and worth doing.

I’d be interested in this as well.

It’s certainly possible to capture Hulu, that’s not an issue. I’ve checked, and it appears Hulu does indeed have the episode length versions of the movies (They’re titled as Bender’s Big Score, Part 1, Part 2, etc).

The DVD versions are four 90-minute long movies. The TV/Hulu versions are sixteen 22-minute long episodes, which are edited differently, with some jokes cut, some added, and new opening credits “tagline” jokes that aren’t in the DVD versions (since they have one opening credit sequence for each film, rather than four for each when they were edited into episodes for syndication).

I haven’t seen all of the episodic versions, so I don’t know what all is different in detail.

True, but wouldn’t a Hulu capture be a better source if it is the TV edits of the movies than SyFy, which would have station logos and ads plastered all over the screen the whole time?

ChainsawAsh said:

The DVD versions are four 90-minute long movies. The TV/Hulu versions are sixteen 22-minute long episodes, which are edited differently, with some jokes cut, some added, and new opening credits “tagline” jokes that aren’t in the DVD versions (since they have one opening credit sequence for each film, rather than four for each when they were edited into episodes for syndication).

I haven’t seen all of the episodic versions, so I don’t know what all is different in detail.

You can find the differences listed on Infosphere, the Futurama Wiki.

For example, here are the film to episode edits for Bender’s Big Score, Part 1:

https://theinfosphere.org/Bender's_Big_Score_Part_1

The introduction is moved to the beginning and instead of the whole cast, only Zoidberg is still seen in a character shot. The Ambulance is also removed.
There is now a sponsor by Torgo’s Executive Powder prior to the first commercial break.
Various “minor” bits of scenes, usually with dialogue, are removed and some music is adjusted to fit the re-edit:
There is less lingering on the nudists at the beach.
The scene that first shows the “Box” executives is shortened to less than a second.
Leela isn’t seen giving her credit card number to save pygmy rhinos.
West Johnson Porniversity’s home page isn’t seen, and most of Bender’s dialogue about porn is cut.
Zoidberg says less about his supposed royal relative.
Bender doesn’t announce that he’ll handle Nudar when he shows that Planet Express is now his.
There is less lingering on the office set up in the hangar.
Lars’ estimate on Hermes’ body taking up to a year to fix is gone.
Nudar doesn’t ask Farnsworth to “do more things”.
Amy doesn’t call Nibbler adorable.
The owl’s flight is slightly slower than it is on the DVD.

Oh, that’s good info! It’s not quite detailed enough to do a proper reconstruction using the DVDs/Blu-Rays, unfortunately, and there are quite a few TV-cut-only shots that would require a capture of the Hulu versions, but it might be a good reference to make sure the Hulu versions are the initial broadcast cuts and not, for instance, syndication cuts that are even shorter than the original broadcast cuts.

So what is the best way to capture Hulu video? Do you have to do a capture over HDMI or is there software to rip the stream itself? If it’s the latter and someone can point me in the right direction as far as capturing/ripping/downloading software goes, I’ll get myself a Hulu subscription and get these over Thanksgiving while I’m at my grandma’s with decent wifi.

Then I’ll probably rip my Blu-Rays of movies 3 and 4 and do a high-quality reconstruction of episodes 9-16 - too bad movies 1 and 2 are only out on DVD…

ChainsawAsh said:

Then I’ll probably rip my Blu-Rays of movies 3 and 4 and do a high-quality reconstruction of episodes 9-16 - too bad movies 1 and 2 are only out on DVD…

Pretty sure all the movies are available in HD.

If you can point me to Bender’s Big Score and The Beast with a Billion Backs on Blu-Ray in any region, I’ll gladly purchase them right away and be forever grateful to you.

They’re available in HD for digital download (on iTunes for example).

Any luck with the Hulu?

I know, I have those. I’m looking for high-bitrate, lossless-audio Blu-Rays, like movies 3 and 4. If I can get the Hulu episodes capped, then IMO there’s little point in replacing the Hulu video with another digital download since any quality difference would likely be marginal at best.

And no, no luck. I can confirm that the Hulu copies are the sixteen 22-minute episodes rather than the four 90-minute movies, but I can’t figure out any software to capture and download the stream.

Freemake Video Downloader and KeepVid both no longer seem to work to capture Hulu streams, and I don’t know that I trust the quality of screen recording software. I also have zero idea how to capture video over HDMI, or even if I can with a laptop with no capture card.

Suggestions and/or help would be appreciated!

OK. I guess I’m a little unclear what you’re doing with this project?

End goal would be to make a “Season 5” Blu-Ray set with the episodic versions of the movies for preservation purposes, as close to the quality level of the Blu-Rays of seasons 6 and 7 (volumes 5-8) as possible, since the episodic versions have never been made available for purchase or download anywhere, just the movie versions. To my knowledge, Hulu is the only place they’ve been made available in any form outside of airing them on TV.

Got it. So would you just put the Hulu versions on BD as they exist, or try to edit some of the snipped bits from the movies back in?

Well, ideally I’d like to convert the Blu-Ray video to lossless Lagarith, convert the audio to uncompressed WAV, then throw that and the capped Hulu episodes into Premiere and reconstruct the episodic versions using as much of the Blu-Ray video and audio as I possibly can.

Shots and audio that are exclusive to the episodic cuts will use the Hulu captured video/audio, which is why I want to get the Hulu episodes captured in as close to 1:1 quality as I possibly can.

For the first two movies, I’ll probably upscale the DVDs to 1080p, then throw the upscales, the 1080p iTunes downloads, and the Hulu episodes into Premiere and use the best quality version of each shot to recreate the 22-minute versions in HD (or near HD) with as close to Blu-Ray quality as I can.

Finally, once I have lossless Lagarith video and uncompressed WAV audio copies of my reconstructions of the 22-minute episodes, I’ll encode those to Blu-Ray format with (hopefully) DTS-HD lossless audio (which I might need assistance with), then use Encore to create menus that emulate the Volume 5/6/7/8 BR menus as closely as possible and author a Blu-Ray disc or two with all sixteen episodes on them.

End result will be a “Volume 4.5” Blu-Ray set to put between the official Volume 4 DVD and Volume 5 Blu-Ray releases, which can either sit alongside or replace your copies of the four unedited movies.

Overall, it’s about preserving the sixteen episodes as originally aired on TV in the best possible quality, since they’re currently only available to own as four 90-minute movies.

Waste of time? Maybe, since the movie versions are longer and the 22-minute versions have bits cut out, but it’s an alternative version that isn’t widely available outside of (as far as I know) one region-locked streaming service.

To be clear, this will not be the episodes with cut stuff from the movies restored - it will be the episodes as they aired, so whatever Fox/Comedy Central cut out for the episodic versions will remain cut.

I may do a “fan edit” of the episodes that does restore these cut bits down the road, but the first goal is preserving the episodes as originally aired in Blu-Ray quality.

Got it.

I have to say, I’m not sure I see the point, since the 22 minute episodes are available in HD on Hulu anyway (or is the Hulu just SD?).

I mean, other than maybe the lossless audio, how would your project be an improvement?

It’s not an improvement, it’s preservation. They would be accessible if and when Futurama gets removed from Hulu, or the episodes get changed to the 90-minute versions. This is the first time to my knowledge they’ve been available in this form outside of the TV airings.

If they only exist on one streaming site, and they’ve only been made available recently, there’s zero guarantee they’ll consistently be available. And it’d be nice to have them offline anyway, even if they stay on Hulu.

OK, but then why not just rip the episodes from Hulu and be done with it? Why would you need to upscale the DVD’s, etc?

Sorry, probably my fault, but I’m just missing something. 😃

Well, that’s the whole reason I started this thread - I don’t know how to do that! 😄

Obviously capturing from Hulu is the first step. The rest is to have a Blu-Ray set to put on my shelf that sits next to the official episode Volume sets - preserve this season as it aired the way those sets (mostly) preserve those seasons as they did. And in that scenario, I’d want them to look and sound as good as possible, and streaming Hulu will always be inferior in both respects to a Blu-Ray.

But as you say, the most important part of all of this is capturing from Hulu in the first place, so like my first post about this says…does anyone have any ideas on the best way to do that?

I think via a Google search you’d find a ton of commercial products that would do it. But why just not start a thread asking how to rip Hulu? There’s a LOT of technical expertise on this site, and Hulu gets ripped all the time.

Might get more hits than something about Futurama, which (sadly) might get limited eyeballs due to lack of interest.

I created this thread for it rather than in the technical section because I felt creating a “How to capture video from Hulu” thread might be misconstrued as a “How to pirate shit from Hulu” thread, which would very much be against the rules here. That and the tehnical how-to’s section is one of the least frequently browsed section here. I thought this might get more traction.

Nick66 said:

I think via a Google search you’d find a ton of commercial products that would do it.

Just saw this edit to your post.

I mean…do you think I haven’t done this? I already said that KeepVid and Freemake Video Downloader didn’t work, and I’ve also already said that I have a crippled-at-best internet connection at home, so I don’t exactly have the ability to test out a bunch of different methods myself. That’s why I’m asking here, where a lot of talented people have a lot of experience in stuff like this, so if someone here were to say “Yeah, X program works perfectly!” I can just get that one instead of wading through mountains of adware eating up my limited data alottment trying to figure it out myself.