Su	Mo	Tu	We	Th	Fr	Sa
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	1	2	3	4	5

BBC - Britain's Whale Hunters: The Untold Story (2014)

Posted By: notbanned

Date: 17 Aug 2014 00:48:10

Writer Adam Nicolson is granted rare access to the ruins of the whaling stations on the remote British island of South Georgia. Amazing rarely-seen archive footage and first-hand testimony from the last of Britain's whale hunters reveals what it was really like to have been a whale hunter in Antarctica, providing Europe with essential oils for soap and food. Putting our modern environmental guilt to one side, this provocative series looks at how and why whale populations were so drastically reduced in the 20th century, and attempts to see whaling through the eyes of the time. A few hundred years ago the oceans were home to millions of whales, but then we found that they were incredibly useful for everything from lighting and fashion to soap and food. Adam discovers the remarkable, forgotten tale of Britain as a major whaling nation right up to the 1960s, while exploring the incredible ruins of its largest centre on the remote British island of South Georgia.

Part 1: The Rise
Adam starts his journey on the west coast of Scotland, his favourite place to escape to since boyhood. It's his realisation that these waters would have once been home to many whales that has prompted him to find out about whaling. He sails up the coast to Stornoway harbour, where there's a vivid account of a traditional hunt of pilot whales. He discovers how whaling was commercialised to supply Britain's growing cities with a vast range of products: from corsetry and umbrella stays to street lighting. Adam travels via the Falkland Islands to the remote and spectacular Antarctic Island of South Georgia. This uninhabited British outpost very quickly became the centre of the world's whaling industry, with six whaling stations. The biggest, Leith Harbour, belonged to the world's largest whaling company at the time - Christian Salvesen from Edinburgh.

Part 2: The Fall
In the mid-1920s up to 8,000 whales a year were being processed on South Georgia to satisfy Europe's demand for fat. The whalers describe the dangers of using industrial machinery to process whales, and Adam explores the hospital that treated the unlucky ones, still stocked with 1950s medicine. Meanwhile, some scientists in Britain were aware of the threat of the industry to whale populations, and a hugely ambitious piece of marine biology - the 'Discovery Investigations' - were launched. Adam visits a legacy of this program, the new ship Discovery, and learns how the original attempted to build an argument for sustainable whaling. While exploring an abandoned whale catching ship and taking a peek behind the scenes at the Natural History Museum, Adam examines the tussle between the industry and science. War-ravaged Europe was desperate for fats, and new attempts to regulate the industry proved completely inadequate to protect whale populations. It wasn't until population dynamics experts were included in the 1960s that the industry began to take action to seriously reduce catches. And by then, whale stocks were in a disastrous state with some species near extinction.

MediaInfo

General
Unique ID : 177118177302474014644631815959103949560 (0x853FB85AD8C837E3BF37ED7FBC204AF8)
Complete name : BBC.Britains.Whale.Hunters.The.Untold.Story.1of2.The.Rise.mkv
Format : Matroska
Format version : Version 4 / Version 2
File size : 1.43 GiB
Duration : 59mn 2s
Overall bit rate : 3 467 Kbps

Video
ID : 1
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : High@L4.1
Format settings, CABAC : Yes
Format settings, ReFrames : 6 frames
Codec ID : V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC
Duration : 59mn 2s
Width : 1 280 pixels
Height : 720 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 25.000 fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Writing library : x264 core 142 r2453 ea0ca51
Encoding settings : cabac=1 / ref=6 / deblock=1:0:0 / analyse=0x3:0x113 / me=umh / subme=9 / psy=1 / psy_rd=1.00:0.00 / mixed_ref=1 / me_range=24 / chroma_me=1 / trellis=1 / 8x8dct=1 / cqm=0 / deadzone=21,11 / fast_pskip=0 / chroma_qp_offset=-2 / threads=3 / lookahead_threads=1 / sliced_threads=0 / nr=0 / decimate=1 / interlaced=0 / bluray_compat=0 / constrained_intra=0 / bframes=3 / b_pyramid=2 / b_adapt=1 / b_bias=0 / direct=1 / weightb=1 / open_gop=0 / weightp=2 / keyint=250 / keyint_min=25 / scenecut=40 / intra_refresh=0 / rc_lookahead=40 / rc=crf / mbtree=1 / crf=20.0 / qcomp=0.60 / qpmin=0 / qpmax=69 / qpstep=4 / ip_ratio=1.40 / aq=1:1.00
Language : English
Default : Yes
Forced : No
_STATISTICS_WRITING_APP : mkvmerge v7.1.0 ('Good Love') 32bit built on Jul 27 2014 12:59:18
_STATISTICS_WRITING_DATE_UTC : 2014-08-15 08:40:50
_STATISTICS_TAGS : BPS DURATION NUMBER_OF_FRAMES NUMBER_OF_BYTES
DURATION : 00:59:02.520000000
NUMBER_OF_FRAMES : 88563
NUMBER_OF_BYTES : 1477750471

Audio
ID : 2
Format : AAC
Format/Info : Advanced Audio Codec
Format profile : LC
Codec ID : A_AAC
Duration : 59mn 2s
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Channel positions : Front: L R
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Compression mode : Lossy
Delay relative to video : 9ms
Language : English
Default : Yes
Forced : No

Text
ID : 3
Format : UTF-8
Codec ID : S_TEXT/UTF8
Codec ID/Info : UTF-8 Plain Text
Language : English
Default : No
Forced : No

Screenshots: