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.
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.
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?
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
havereserve 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 soulseekPlex 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.
obligatory QI clip about this.
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.
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.
That’s assuming that they didn’t just keep the same number of frames, but something made it run at the full 30.0 FPS to get that speed. I’ve absolutely had software that fucked that up in the past.
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