Norwegian public broadcaster torrents 7-hour, hi-def trainride

Espen sez, "The Norwegian broadcaster NRK recently made a 7 hour program about the very scenic train journey from Bergen to Oslo. The program was hugely successful (the TV version offered interviews and various things along the ride). The raw film from the front camera is now being offered as a free Bittorrent download under a CC license and there is even a competition (in Norwegian) for best reuse.

Download Bergensbanen in HD (Thanks, Espen)

Previously:

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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thebrix

Downloading … more slowly than the journey.

This reminds me of an experiment with seat-back screens several years ago on the Great Western line (London to Bristol, Cardiff and Swansea). It failed because nobody cared about the “premium content”, but the (free) video feed from the camera mounted on the front of the train was even more interesting than the view out the window.

(However, if at first you don’t succeed … my train had a similarly-equipped carriage last week, but I couldn’t get a seat in it. From what I could see, most people were looking at what appeared to be an interactive London Underground map).
Alex_M

Bah, everyone knows Scandinavia’s coolest railway is Malmbanan/Ofotbanen.. The EU’s northernmost railway with some of the EU’s heaviest locomotives, hauling ore through the wilderness over 100 miles north of the arctic circle.

http://de.academic.ru/pictures/dewiki/73/IORE_beim_Tornetrask.jpg
Binaryloop

Three comments (after watching the YouTube footage):

1. That ‘spot’ on the camera lens in the upper left was driving me nuts. What was it? A bug? Dirt? Lint? You figure if they’re going to shoot 7.5 hrs. of HD they’d at least clean the lens.

2. When going through tunnels it is pitch black. Do they not have headlights on the train? It’s pretty disorienting when they pass through a long tunnel.

3. Is anyone going to produce a scaled down version of manageable size? (Maybe Divx or other highly compressed format?) I could do maybe a 10 GB download. But, 22 is quite large (and 165 is insane!).

I’d be willing to buy a DVD of this if they cropped out the spot on the lens. (Otherwise I’d spend 7.5 hrs trying to wipe it off my television screen.)
Godot

They also have an English version of the article.
http://nrkbeta.no/2009/12/18/bergensbanen-eng/

This was broadcast on the 100 year jubilee of the Bergen-Oslo line.
frankeivind

Thanks to the CC-license provided with this video, I’ve made a 7 minute 14 seconds time laps (fast forward) version of the video.

The video and description of the process making it, can be read on my blog: http://blog.technofranki.net/2009/12/24/bergensbanen-in-only-7-minutes-and-14-seconds/
johnny_action

Finally finished downloading it!
Anonymous

I want my Bahn TV
Anonymous

Trivia: the preview on the website (which the screencap above is taken from) is from Finse, the Location for the Hoth exteriors in the Empire Strikes Back.
Anonymous

This is perfect for something to fall asleep to. And with PS3 Media Server I can stream it at almost lossless quality. Thanks!
Anonymous

My wife and I were married on Dec 26 of 1998 and flew to Oslo the next Day. Spent 6 hours in downtown Oslo waiting for this train. Even though it was dark, and we were often sleeping, whenever we woke up we were treated to views of the moon reflecting off mountain lakes and cottages tucked into woodland hills with their Christmas candles in the window. An amazing journey by night. Can’t wait to see what it looks like by day.
pentomino

Rails shooter? How about a Sonic the Hedgehog third-person 3D platformer?
Dave Faris

I’d heard that there was going to be a movie released this weekend that was going to revolutionize the movie industry.

This must be it?
- Church
  
  “I’d heard that there was going to be a movie released this weekend that was going to revolutionize the movie industry.
  
  “This must be it?”
  
  Wait. This is in 3D?
dumbeast

I’ve never understood why there isn’t a camera pointed straight down from the belly of commercial jets. I’d rather watch what we’re flying over in real time than last year’s Sandra Bullock romantic comedy.
- octopod
  
  don’t most flights have a satellite map now ? it’s maybe not as cool as a camera, but it works at night , and over cloud.
  
  d/l n – would prob (~1.0) never bother to watch it anyways.
  - adamnvillani
    
    JetBlue has it, IIRC, but it’s hardly universal.
Kerov

Took this train a few years back, but an incessantly talking American tourist cornered me and made me miss the last half of the scenery.

Now I get to see what I missed.
johnny_action

Entranced by this..

I’m seeing download speeds ranging from 7kb/s to 143kb/s

I want to watch this all the way through first but I have some ideas on how to use this…
Anonymous

This Is Made of Awesome Sauce but jeepers 22gb!!! The original was 165 GB! Ubuntu Deluge don’t fail me now.
Anonymous

I watched about half of the youtube 10-minute excerpt – soporific would be putting it kindly.
Anonymous

Does it include a side trip to FlÃ¥m on the FlÃ¥msbana?

Even more scenic and a fraction of the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamsbana
Bevatron Repairman

Sweet. My Dad’s model train magazines always have adverts for these DVD sets of a given route. Just a real time, six-DVD set of Chicago-St. Louis, or Sacramento-Salt Lake. I guess they’re mostly to get ideas about what to do when you set up a specific-route themed layout, but I imagine they aren’t bad if stoned.

I totally want to watch this one.
turtlecrk

I can’t wait for the time-lapse version!
derekja

I sure hope that people start seeding the torrent. It’s going to take weeks at this speed. I’m totally looking forward to projecting the train trip on the wall as background art, though!
apoxia

This would consume almost my entire month’s data cap. Yes, in NZ we have data caps, mine in 30gb a month.
Anonymous

This would be awesome to watch while running on the treadmill. You’d feel like you were actually getting somewhere!
Anonymous

The first person to turn this into an on rails shooter wins the prize.

And apoxia, if you want it that badly I’ll download it and post it to you on a CD. I have 110gb off-peak that I barely use in AU.
Jack Squat

dang,,only 46 days left to download! This dang thing iz runnin’ backwards,back to the daze of dialup,,no wait dial up waz bettern this!!
adamnvillani

I think it’s a music video for an extended remix of Kraftwerk’s “Trans Europa Express.”
manicbassman

oh wow… a 22GB file… too big for most external drives…

and too big for me to even start downloading as one file as both the hard disks on this old Linux box are only 10 GB in size!!! I re-use old hardware and rely on USB external drives for stuff I don’t watch or play that often…

any chance of someone splitting it up into smaller standalone sections? say 1GB each? then I can pull it down in small sections, seed each section to 1:1 and then get the next section… (can still be in one torrent file though)
Anonymous

If I remember correctly, parts of this trip, shot from the front window just like the above, took up the entire opening sequence of a 2007 Norwegian film called “O’Horton”.

The film was about a Norwegian train conductor on his last day before retirement. It was pretty quaint and contemplative. Not at all like Lethal Weapon.
- djn
  
  Tiny correction: The movie you’re thinking of is “O’Horten”. I’m from Horten/Norway (though the titular character isn’t), so it sort of sticks out. :)
  
  Incidentally, Horten just tore up its old rail line. The town is a bit awkwardly located, so we were on a branch line, but there’s not really a market for a 5 km branch line to a town of 10-15 thousand people. Especially when there’s a bus service to the station on the main line. The last trains on it were freight: Horten has a harbor, and still receives shiploads of steel and aluminium that get shaped and processed. Most of the steel goes to what little is left of the local shipyards; most of the aluminium is, I believe, made into high-voltage power lines. Both leave the harbor in trucks, now.
  
  I did have the luck of seeing one of the last freight trains while biking home from school about ten years ago, and I’ve even been a passenger on another train on it once, even earlier. Our local Sesame Street-related series was set on a train station, and they took their specially decorated trainset around the country for promotions. This coincided with the birthday of a friend of mine, probably when he turned 9 in 1992. I believe that’s the last time anyone pulled a passenger wagon on that route, so in hindsight I’m happy to have caught it. Shame I dont have pictures of it.
  
  These days, another friend of mine is working for the company that pulled the old rails. They are being shipped to rebuild a historical railroad in another part of the country, I believe – and the railbed itself will be turned into a sorely needed bike path.
  
  This was todays random tangent.
Anonymous

You can buy the DVD with stations info, side cameras etc. at this link: http://cdon.eu/movie/bergensbanen_minutt_for_minutt_(2dvd)-7724062
Donal

Love the idea but I’m getting errors trying to start it. I’d prefer a Rapidshare link though, at least that way I’d save it in less than 24 hours but no sign of one right now.
johnny_action

I’ve downloaded 17.5 gigs of it so far. :)
Anonymous

I took this trainride, it was very pretty but I couldn’t enjoy it because I had just lost my iPhone in FlÃ¥m before boarding. I think I’ll download it just to experience some of it again without the stress.