a luchablog archive google drive is now a thing which exists

this drive has been up for a week. I was waiting for a good time when nothing bad was going on to announce it. I’ve given up on that.

Where is it?

This link works. It’s in my Twitter bio too, for when this post vanishes off the front page.

What’s the idea?

If you wanted to see many of the biggest CMLL matches from the last decade, they’re in here. This intends to replace the stuff lost when the YouTube channel went down, though it won’t do it completely. I’ve put up all the ELITE and Todo x el Todo I have, plus the bigger IWRG matches.

Going forward, this is also a place where I can upload the CMLL Sunday shows and anything else which doesn’t make it on to official YouTube channels. This may not happen until there is actual lucha libre again.

Why these matches? Why not all the CMLL and IWRG matches?

Since May, I’ve been organizing my CMLL archive from a few different drives and determined it was close to 2 terabytes. Putting all of it up would take a lot of time, wouldn’t leave space for much else, and there’s no compelling reason to have a public archive of a lot of years old meaningless trios matches. I narrowed down it to the key matches:

• any hair/mask match
• any title match
• any singles 3 falls match
• occasional other matches of note

The CMLL collection swells a lot in the early part of 00s (when CMLL got more TV shows and people were kindly helping me record them) and then narrows later in the 00s (when the fewer TV shows that existed tended to show stuff that was already on YouTube.) The IWRG archive is mostly 13-18, when the promotion was airing at typically random times on AYM Sports.

This collection is only a first pass. I need to go through my lists of matches I liked and see which ones didn’t fit into that category. If there’s something missing you think I might have, let me know and I’ll put it on the list to add.

WHERE IS THE AAA?

It’s tricky. I’m confident CMLL isn’t going to care about this, they don’t really care about their old content. I’m less so AAA is – they’re running old content on Pluto and were doing it on Twitch. I’m not planning on putting on any paid content on here for any promotion and would prefer people to go to the official sources when possible since that’s how we get more content. (There’s some CMLL stuff that’s aired on TV and is still on YouTube that I’ve left included, but mostly because I just haven’t had a chance to weed through everything.)

The same situation with AAA exists with Lucha Underground. It is still available, at least in the US, and there’s a chance it could show up in other forms. I’m not going to put Lucha Underground up while it still exists in the world. The general principle is I don’t want to lose everything else over one promotion.

Some of this video is not good quality! Why can’t I have a better version? Can you put up a better version?

This is just the state of lucha libre TV. Some stuff aired on cable, on stations that didn’t always take care of their video. Other videos come from internet feeds, sometimes long forgotten and barely working feeds. Some stuff is so old that I recorded it on a VHS, then used a capture card to get into a computer, then compressed in a weird video format, then compressed it into a different format years later. That’s not a great process for video quality. Most stations which carried lucha libre were late into getting HD feeds (or still never have) and we weren’t spending money on a HD capture card for a free project anyway. I’ve put up the best versions I have, but little of this is 2020 video quality.

There are also weird things going on with the aspect ratios at times, a product of networks framing HD content on SD stations. I tried to fix those issues where I could. I made it worse in some cases, I’m sure.

(There are multiple versions of CMLL matches in some cases. The rule of thumb is the US TV version is HD but may have been edited more than the Mexico TV SD version.)

What’s the best use? Downloading or streaming?

My impression is you’d use up a little less bandwidth streaming them, but it’s not a big deal either way to me.

The drive may hit a bandwidth limit somedays, probably more often when it first goes up. Try to be a good neighbor and not grab everything right away, and just come back tomorrow if it’s not working today.

Do I have to download the videos to watch them? How do I stream?

I’m able to stream the videos by clicking on them, clicking on the three dots in the upper right-hand corner to “open in a new window”, and then clicking play in the YouTube controls you get there.

Is this going to be up forever?

Forever is a long time. It’ll probably be DMCA’d out of existence before I stop paying the bill, but I can’t predict when that’d be. (It seems like these are lasting 6-7 years so maybe 2026.) I would suggest saving anything you desperately want to keep forever on a hard drive somewhere; don’t bet on me doing it this bit a fourth time.

Why do this?

I wanted to replace the YouTube. Also, recent world events made me ponder the idea that I could be dead at any more and all of this would sit on a hard drive that no one would ever look at. That seemed like a waste.

You can use these videos however you’d like. I don’t own the promotions, I didn’t produce the shows, they’re not mine. I can’t and won’t stop you from putting them on a video site elsewhere. I’d prefer you don’t put a dumb watermark on them, and that you’d sell them for a fair price outside of Arena Mexico, but I can’t really do anything about it. You take all risk for using the videos, I can’t help you if a promotion or media partner gets upset about it.