prelinger-films

Mirror of the explicitly public-domain subset of the Prelinger Archives (Internet Archive), prepared for batch video captioning with uv-scripts/video (Marlin-2B on HF Jobs).

Selection: collection:prelinger AND mediatype:movies AND licenseurl:*publicdomain* — 1,876 items, ~381 hours. Every item carries an explicit Creative Commons public domain mark in its IA metadata; see each film's sidecar for the per-item rights basis. Context: the archive states ~65% of its holdings are US public domain, and materials hosted on IA carry a standing public-domain dedication supporting commercial and non-commercial reuse. PD status is a US determination.

Layout

• films/{identifier}.mp4 — best available MP4 derivative per item (512kb preferred)
• meta/{identifier}.json — per-film sidecar: identifier, licenseurl, title, date, runtime, source URL, fetch timestamp. Sidecar-exists == film fully copied.
• chunks/{identifier}/c%04d.mp4 — ~60s stream-copy segments (keyframe-snapped)
• chunkmeta/{identifier}.json — actual segment boundary times (offsets for timestamp remapping are these recorded values, not assumed 60s multiples)
• captions/ — saturate output: resumable parquet, one row per chunk (scene, caption, events JSON with global-time <start – end> events)

Built 2026-07-30 with HF Jobs; pipeline scripts archived in hf://buckets/davanstrien/prelinger-sample/scripts/.