Utah Open Source Planet

I’ve been watching some Batman recently, and just barely ripped season two on my myth box. I made snapshots of the title screens of every one, and put them in the cartoon gallery.

I absolutely love all the artwork on all the original Batman cartoons. There’s actually a book dedicated to the artwork of the series, called Batman Animated. I’d love to get a copy someday.

I keep resizing these images to 360×270, which is 50% the original size, and of course is more than large enough for my TV, but on the website, it sure seems a bit lacking sometimes. Next time I think I’ll leave them at the original dimensions. I also think I should probably get a flickr account and put them up there, so that they just don’t sit on my obscure little website for people to randomly find.

Great stuff.

I really hate going to the video stores these days.  There’s a Hollywood Video a few blocks from my house that I go to anytime I get the urge to watch a movie *right now* that I don’t have at home.  There’s actually a long list of movies I like, but won’t buy for various reasons, which I won’t really get into.  Anyway, I always have these coupons so I go to Hollywood.  That, and I’m not a big fan of Blockbuster.  The problem is, every stinking time I go to the video store to rent something, I have about a 10% success rate.

My first problem is that I can never find what I want.  The organization there is completely outmoded.  In an online social world, thankfully things are easily tagged with multiple categories.  In the video store, there’s a few select genres you have to browse through, so you have to decide which genre most describes the movie you’re looking for.  It’s always rough when it’s a sci-fi / adventure / drama flick because it could be anywhere.

Not only that, but of course there’s only one copy of the movie.  And if you can’t find it on the shelf, you’re out of luck.  Why do they even store them on the shelves anymore?  If you go to a used CD store, what they will usually do is have a huge wall of all the discs behind the counter.  You can browse through the jewel cases and read the inline notes and stuff and when you’re ready to check out, you just take the empty case to the front and they find the disc for you.   That’s what we need at the video store.   Most of the time I know what I’m looking for, so I should just be able to ask them for it at the counter instead of digging through the miscategorized and unordered shelves of hundreds of cases crammed together.

Then of course it gets even worse, since they are sorted alphabetically somewhat, so you pretty much have to scan the entire section of the letter you’re looking for because it could literally be anywhere.

Another big beef I have is that these guys have obviously never heard of the concept of the Long Tail, because they never stack the sleepers anywhere.  I have really odd tastes, so I’m generally way off my rocker going to the video store anyway, because it’s an adventure in hopelessness finding something to watch if I don’t already have something in mind.  And since I usually can’t find the movie I was looking for in the first place, I’m stuck just aimlessly browsing.  Which brings me to the next point.

For those people looking for something to watch, you have only one option of browsing the possible titles, and that’s by visually examining the cover of every box.  Once you find one that looks like it might be interesting, then you can read the back cover and see if the movie sounds interesting.  This approach is completely missing out, because there are a lot of ways to browse movies.  You’re basically ignoring the two other ways that people can quickly perceive and gather information: audibly and literally.

One great thing I totally love about Netflix is that it’s simple to quickly browse a lot of movies by popping up a short description about what the movie is like.  I can just hover my mouse over the cover and it will display a little window with a summary in a few short paragraphs.  If it looks interesting, I’ll just add it to my queue.  And there’s another thing the stores are missing out on — let users have a freaking queue!  Or a list of movies they’d find interesting.  Setup little kiosks and let them create accounts (which they should already have if they are renting anyway) and they can add what they want.  It’d be just like the library (blimey!) you can put a movie on reserve and when they get it in, you can come pick it up.

As far as the other ways to browse movies, I have great ideas.  I love watching trailers because they give you a quick, entertaining three-minute glimpse at the synopsis of the movie.  You can quickly determine from watching a trailer if it’s something that would suit you or not.  Setup some computers in the store and have trailers from every freaking movie you can find, so that the people can find some suggestions.

As far as literally, I meant in the terms of reading what a movie is about.  Sure the store has these little booklets that they hand out for free, but they are always about the latest movie that came out.  It’s generally a step in the right direction, except for the fact that probably nobody cares about them.  Who wants to read about how some critic thought that “Snow Dogs 3″ was greater than air freshener.

When I worked box office at the movie theater, one of my co-workers would print out weekly the summaries of each movie that was playing.  When we had someone come up that wasn’t sure what to watch, we would hand them that sheet so they could quickly look over what the movies were about.  Sometimes a short title just isn’t gonna give you enough insight into what the movie is about.

Anyway, I would rawk at running my own video store, I’d revolutionize the whole process.  Maybe I should.

Okay, now this is something I wasn’t expecting. Warner Bros. is releasing season one of Justice League on Blu-ray. Wow.

I’d been planning on *eventually* getting a Blu-ray player anyway, but I’ve been pretty indifferent about the decision, or when. Actually, the real thing that’s holding me back right now is that I can’t natively rip them on Linux right now (play back, yes, but that’s an entirely different matter). There’s no way I’m firing up my Windows box just to get some 1080p goodness on my harddrive. I’m a sucker for automation.

In my neverending quest to completely pimp out my MythVideo gallery display, I’ve started taking screenshots of the title screens as the gallery view for individual shows.  For the cartoons, they are really gorgeous stuff, especially the older ones when animation really rocked.

So, I started setting up a page to display the covers.  Right now there’s not much, since I don’t have very many titles ripped on my box right now.  Also, the snapshots are really small because I’m displaying them on my TV and so I don’t really need a large size.  I’ll probably go back and resnap them for a proper web display.

Okay, I’m really tired, so here’s the link with the full description.  Enjoy.

I noticed that Woot today has refurbished HD Tivos for a nice price.  I’d recommend picking one up, if you have been waiting for a good opportunity.   I actually just bought a brand new one last week from Amazon, and I barely got it all setup just yesterday.  It’s been pretty cool, so far, though I still haven’t decided if its worth the extra cost in service fees.

The picture on the Tivo is absolutely gorgeous.  It outputs in every HD and standard format, 480i, 480p, 720p and 1080i and can display the recorded or live shows either in its native format or force them to another one.  Don’t ask me how that one works.

The interesting thing is that I had to go to Comcast’s office and pick up a CableCARD for it to pick up the encrypted digital channels.  The first time I went, they gave me a single-stream card.  The way it works is that there are two types of CableCARDs, a single-stream or a multi-stream.  The Tivo HD box has two slots for cards, so you can either use one multi or two single cards.  So, I had to go back to Comcast and pick up a multi-stream one instead, so that I could watch TV on both tuners.

The dual HD tuners is one thing that I already like above my old Series 2 Tivo.  Both of the tuners are in HD, while my Series 2 Tivo had one digital tuner and one analog tuner.  That shouldn’t matter, but some shows, when recorded on the analog tuner, the audio would drop out of one channel, so I’d get mono sound on the left channel only.  Kind of odd.  Now though, I can record two HD streams at once, and I must say, it is very nice.

I’m also on a promotional plan for Comcast right now.  Even though I think all their prices suck, this one was the best I’d seen so  I didn’t want to pass it up.  I’ve got the basic cable for $24 a month for 6 months.  With that I get somewhere around 20 HD channels aside from the local stations.  I can’t remember all of them off the top of my head, though I know there’s stuff like two Discovery stations, TLC, USA, Universal and TNT.  Having all those channels is pretty dangerous, since I’m actually trying to watch *less* TV, not more, and the whole thing has had an interesting side effect — with the HD picture being so gorgeous, every show you watch is just so visually appealing that I want to see it, despite how crappy the actual content is.  So far, it hasn’t mattered what’s on TV, I’m just mesmerized by how nice it looks.  I don’t think that will wear off soon, either.  I was watching American Idol last night and I just kept watching the picture more than the show itself.  :)  It’s kinda hard to get used to.   And to think that I’m still only getting 720p as my best input so far.  I still have yet to see any true 1080p signals.   I wish the stupid prices on the Blu-Ray players would come down.

The Tivo itself is nice, as always.  One thing that really surprised me was that the menus were exactly the same as my Series 2.  Since the HD Tivo is a Series 3, I’d have expected it to be a little different, but the only changes were the additional menu items for HD TVs, and that’s it.  Even the remote is the same, with the only difference being that there is an Aspect button.

I do like the A/V connections on the box, though.  It has both HDMI and Component out for video, as well as SPDIF out for Dolby Digital.  Right now I’m just using the Component output, since the box came with free component cables (I thought that was a nice touch, certainly wasn’t expecting that) and also because I don’t have any free HDMI cables right now.  There is also a port for eSATA if you want some external storage.  I haven’t read up on it, but I assume any old harddrive would work with that.  Then of course there’s the standard Ethernet and phone line jacks, as well as 2 USB slots, then the normal RCA outputs for audio and video.

The only thing I hate about the Tivo is the service fees.  $12.95 a month.  Of course, I hate service fees of any kind.  One thing I’m curious about is I wonder if my Tivo would pick up my local HD channels if I didn’t have the digital package with Comcast.  My HDTV picks them up just fine since they are unencrypted, it’s just that I don’t have any way to record them.  Well, I’ve got my PCHDTV card which I have *never* gotten to work, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.  I guess I won’t be able to find out what the HD Tivo can do until I cancel the service.  I do know, though, that it didn’t pick up any HD channels at all without the CableCARD in there, which also seemed odd.  Chances are that it won’t work unless I’m paying Comcast the big bucks.

So, I still haven’t decided if I’m gonna keep this thing or not.  The picture is absolutely amazing, and it’s really nice to be able to finally (and easily) record HD channels.  TNT has Without a Trace and Cold Case in HD, and it’s a great treat to watch Discovery Theater as well.  I’m just not sure if it’s worth all the extra cost or not.  We’ll see, I guess.

This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, but never got around to it. Usually when I write comments on a film, it’s because I think I have a full post that I can write about it. There’s not much of that that comes by, but there is a lot that I wouldn’t mind dropping a sentence or two summary on what I think of the thing in passing, either in jest or admiration. Besides, there’s so much stuff that I do watch at a time, that I couldn’t possibly write a lot about all of them. So, here’s what I’ve been up to recently.

Jumper

Not at all what I thought it was going to be … I was imagining a futuristic sci-fi thriller or something, instead of this. I’d label it as typical Twenieth Century Fox film fare — lots of sensationalism, not much depth. An interesting movie, certainly an original idea, but nothing more than a popcorn movie that I’d probably never go out of my way to watch again.

I only saw it because I wanted to go out and see something in the theater and I was having a hard time deciding between this and Juno. If I was going to pay box office prices, I figured I’d wait on Juno since it should hit the dollar theaters pretty soon here. And I hadn’t watched any trailers on Jumper, and I love sci-fi action flicks, so I thought I’d have fun with this one. It wasn’t too bad. I’d give it 3 stars.

The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit

This one is also from Netflix, and it scores in the category of “Disney movies I never managed to catch on TV growing up for some reason.” Believe it or not, there’s very few that slipped through the cracks. The reason should have been obvious — I hate *any* movie where animals are anywhere near the star attraction (No, I haven’t seen Ratatouille either, and I have no plans on seeing it). I forced myself to sit through this for about 30 minutes before giving up, closure be screwed. It’s got a horse. It’s going to be about riding horses. I’m bored. Why did I rent this. Next.

Conan the Destroyer

Another one from my queue (I have 5 out at a time), I’ve been watching this on and off for about three weeks now .. partly because I keep losing the disc and partly because I can’t watch 10 minutes of it without getting a little tired of it. This is one of those movies that I swear I’ve seen before but I can’t remember when or where (which, actually, is odd). Parts of it I remember too, and parts I don’t, so I assume I must have just seen it on TV or something. So far it’s okay. I think the thief is annoying.

Tom Thumb

I really, really thought that this one was going to be good. Oh, man, was I off. All I can remember is sitting through that first dance scene with Tom Thumb and the toys thinking to myself, “How long is this going to last?”, finally fast forwarding after patiently sitting through about 5 minutes of it, only to see 15 more of it go by (I’m totally not kidding).

As far as art direction goes, it was visually really pretty and appealing. It would be a really good movie for someone who is maybe 3 years old or younger, but for anyone else, it is going to be a real chore watching this thing. The movie is good, the story is nice, but it drags on much, much too slowly. And I’m the type who enjoys old, slow, 50s movies, too. That’s saying something.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

This movie was so bad that I can’t even remember any of it now. At least I sat through the whole thing. This is one of those where you go in there knowing its gonna be sucky and having zero expectations and *still* coming out disappointed. Wow.

Martian Child

This movie deserves a post of its own, and it will get one some day. 5 stars. Awesome. Go see it!

Oliver Twist

When I saw it in the theater it blew me away. I wanted to watch more dramas after Martian Child so popped this in, and it didn’t hit me nearly as hard this time around. I still feel for the poor kid, though.

The Family Man

Looking for more human relationship drama after watching Martian Child, I went and rented this one at Hollywood. Each time I see this movie, the less attractive it becomes to me. The first time I saw it it really blew me away, but every time since it’s just been an interesting story. Nicolas Cage, though, is an amazing actor, given the right story (Matchstick Men).

Pete’s Dragon

I randomly picked this one out of my collection the other day looking for something to watch. I haven’t seen the movie in probably 20 years, and before then I imagine I’ve only seen it once. I don’t like movies with “are they gonna make it!?” climaxes at the end, and this has one of those, which adds to why I haven’t watched it since. I’m still only halfway through it, but it’s just has hard now to sit through as it was so long ago. I can’t really pinpoint the reason … I imagine it’s because it’s one of those films that tries to be many things at once to many audiences and it just doesn’t really pan out for anyone. I do love the soundtrack, though. I get a kick out of it.

That’s about all I can remember off the top of my head. I’ve been completely knocked off my feet since Thursday because of the flu, so I’ve been spending a lot of time in bed watching TV. And when it comes down to either watching reruns of Mythbusters or a movie, the answer is pretty obvious. The facial hair on those two hosts really freaks me out.

I caught a review of the last 45 minutes of TMNT 2 on Shamoozal today (a truly horrible movie, I couldn’t agree more), and it got me thinking about the whole TMNT thing way back in the day.  There were some good times.

First of all, as for Secret of the Ooze, I remember watching in the theater, and being sorely disappointed.  It hasn’t been until recently (thanks to Netflix) that 95% of the movies I’ve seen are total crap, so back then there was a really good chance that most whatever I watched I would at least watch again.  This one didn’t make the cut, which was always a mix between disappointment and confusion.

Let’s see, it came out in 1991 so I was 15 at the time.  I think I liked the Turtles for a long time, more so than most of my other things — I don’t really remember now, it’s all a bit fuzzy.  I do know that I had almost all the action figures though … in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I did have all of them.  I know I made at least two home-made movies with our sleek VHS camcorder with the action figures.  I have the original VHS tape here with me, guarding it closely from ever leaking onto YouTube.

I also remember having a large poster of Donatello I think it was (although Raphael was always my favorite), along with the soundtrack to the first movie.  Turtle Power was a cool song, and I still kinda enjoy listening to it.  I’d never buy the soundtrack again.  I do know that TMNT was one of the very first DVDs ever released, that New Line (Warner) put it out, and that I had it for a long time.  You can find it for $4 at any Wal-Mart now.

As far as the movie goes, I remember it sucking hardcore.  So much that I never bothered watching TMNT III, where they go back in time.  It might be in my Netflix queue now … maybe.  The whole thing with Vanilla Ice was just terribly embarassing.  The way that Shredder never did anything was annoying (of course, even in the cartoons, the only time anyone would ever fight was against the robots), and how he died at the end was just really pathetic.

The first movie kicked butt, though.  I haven’t seen that one in a long time.  I’d buy it again, but I’m usually really picky about re-purchasing titles that I’ve had in my collection before and either sold or ditched (I’m on my third take of collecting DVDs again, and this time the “rules” for buying something are a lot more strict as to what I’ll allow).  I’ll have to watch it again just for old times sake.

I really liked the latest one though, the animated TMNT.  I thought that one kicked butt, and if the price ever comes down, I’ll pick up a copy.

Along with my other TV shows on DVD, I already have a lot of the season shows of the original cartoon on DVD.  I know there’s another production of it that’s airing on TV right now, but I haven’t seen it and don’t really plan on checking it out.  Generally speaking, it takes me a very long time to get into something that everyone’s known about for years (for example, I just barely started watching Smallville, now that six seasons have gone by).  Mostly, though, I just get a lot pickier as time goes by.  There are very few new cartoons at all that I like.

The more I think about it, TMNT was one of those that really stood out from the rest of ones that I really got into.  Looking back now, I’m not sure why at all.  I’d probably have a hard time sitting through watching the cartoons, and I don’t like the approach of the formulaic personality stereotypes in the story, and I really sucked at the arcade game, but I guess it was fun.  Kinda weird.

I find it kind of interesting that Netflix chose Blu-Ray as its high-definition DVD format to back. I guess the “format wars” are almost over. I, personally, always figured that the two would learn to live side by side, since, unlike some previous format differences, the actual media was the same physical size so it would have been just a matter of firmware to play discs from both camps.

However, one thing I completely forgot about is that its the retailers who the ones that are really paying the price while this thing wages itself out, and for one important reason — retail space. It hurts the stores the most because they have to stock the same movie three times over — in standard definition, and both HD formats. And of course the best way to get retailers to take action is to hit them where it costs money.

So choosing a format was never really up to the consumers at all, and I was silly to imagine that in the first place. My only minor annoyance was that Blu-Ray is a stupid name compared to the simplicity of HD DVD, but oh well. Things have worked out well anyway, since I’ve got a Sony Bravia HDTV, and Sony makes some nice Blu-Ray DVD players, and all my DVD players have been Sony. Plus, that whole Bravia Theater Sync thing is really nice (I hit play on my DVD player, and my TV automatically turns to the right input. Plus when I turn off my TV, it turns off my DVD player too. Hey, it’s the small things).

I’m not going to be shelling out $400 for a player anytime soon, though. I’m still regretting paying that much for a DVD player back in 1998. The last one I got, on the other hand, does 1080p upconversion, and it was only $84. Not bad.

I’d love to check out some HD titles some day though, since every time I go to the store and see a demo, my eyeballs take a bath in amazement. I would consider getting a PS3, but I’ve read that you can only control it with a Bluetooth-enabled remote, meaning a universal remote is out of the picture. Bummer.

So, I finally bought a used Tivo just to see what it was like.  I don’t know why I never got one before, honestly… I think the whole idea of the subscription service put me off.  Since I’m already paying $13 a month for a Comcast HDTV DVR though, I figured I’d be interested in seeing what a real DVR looks like.  Short answer: I’m impressed.

I’m really not big into DVRs per se, so I still don’t know what I’m going to do with this thing … recording tv shows is actually a bit of a phase with me.  I’ll be interested in it for a while, then go months without, then want to do it again.  Pretty much the same thing with computer games.  I always love watching movies though. :)  So the fact that I have to consistently pay a monthly service fee whether I’m using it or not kinda bothers me.  Of course, I’m interested in doing it right now, but that’s because it’s still a novelty, and quite honestly, it’s worth it… Tivo is nice.

I am really anal when it comes to my user interfaces, especially menu navigation.  Tivo gets it right in every place.  In fact, the only even minor gripe I have with it isn’t related to main menu navigation at all (it’s the fast forwarding, which kind of flips out on me sometimes … but it could just be that my remote is so sensitive, who knows … still researching).  One thing I really like is it always remembers what position you were last on whenever you enter a menu, be it the Now Playing list, or the Settings menu.  It’s a small touch, but nice.

Overall the presentation is really professional too.  The menus, backgrounds and animations are well designed and easy on the eyes, and the remote is extremely well done.  I’m having a really hard time switching over to using my universal remote to control the Tivo because their remote is so comfy.

Another reason I got one is because I wanted to see if it could decode the Hallmark Channel for me.  I’m convinced now that Comcast is encrypting it or something, since Tivo won’t pick it up, even with its digital tuner.  Of course, my HDTV had a digital tuner and didn’t pick it up either, but I figured maybe throwing a DVR into the mix might do it.  It didn’t.  My Comcast box is the only one that is able to pick it up.  Very strange.

I’m still going to hold onto my new Tivo though, and I’ve already decided that I’m going to use it to navigate through my channel surfing instead of my TV.  In that regards, it has one feature that I really like, which, while it should be standard in my opinion, it’s still a nice surprise to see it in action.  In the channel setup for the Tivo I can select which channels I receive, which I really narrowed down to the ones that I’d ever actually bother to watch, so that any possible listings or recording options only show what I’d be interested in.  On top of that, I can also mark a channel as my favorite.  Then, when I’m watching TV and use the program guide to display the channel lineup, I tell it to only display my favorite channels.  It remembers the setting, and when channel surfing only flips through those.  Here’s the cool thing though — when I want to go browse possible shows to record, it shows me all the listings from all the channels I receive.  Very cool.  So what happens is I don’t have TNT on my favorites list so I don’t see it when I’m channel surfing, but it still records all my Cold Case and Without a Trace episodes for me.

Another thing I really like is being able to mark shows I like or don’t like with the thumbs up or down option.  I’ve always been really specific about my own personal ratings systems, and I scrutinize my ratings, so that’s fun that I can do that on TV shows too.  In fact, it had another unintended bonus — when I’m channel surfing, the info bar displays the thumbs up or down icon in the top left, and before I process what’s actually showing, I’ll see that icon and just know whether to keep flipping or not.  Kinda cool.

One thing I was really interested to see how it works, and this is something that I’d heard about from the beginning since Tivo came out, is that it will monitor what you are watching and recording, and record suggestions for you.  I’ve only had this thing for two days, so I might be getting lucky, but four out of the five recommendations that it recorded for me, I’d be interested in watching.  So that’s pretty cool.  I love anything that takes my preferences and helps me find stuff … I get a big kick out of Netflix and Amazon finding stuff for me, since I’m always looking for something new and interesting I might have missed out on otherwise.

Last but not least, this thing is freaking quiet.  That’s one area where the Comcast box drives me insane and I want to chuck it out into the street.  Mine is so noisy that it drives me nuts.  I work with computers all the time, so naturally I’m used to some background noise, but I think my box might be broken since it is constantly whining.  The Tivo does make some noise when it’s recording stuff, but when its just sitting there, it’s quiet as can be.  It’s really nice.

The only problem I’m going to have in giving up my Comcast box completely (which is odd, since I’ve only had it … what, two weeks?) is the On Demand service.  I really like the free shows it offers, which is always a random collection of old movies and TV shows that nobody would really want to watch to start with.  I have no idea why, I just like it.  Tivo has the Amazon Unbox, which I looked at once and mostly shrugged off.  If I want the latest movies, I’ll just rent them on Netflix, and if there’s a TV series I want to watch I just buy the DVDs.  I don’t follow the whole buying a digital copy thing, since they always get lost.

I do believe though that Tivo has everything built into it (including market share and brand recognition) to do video downloads directly, so maybe things will change in the future.  I’m sure they can only get better.

Anyway, I like my little Tivo.  It’s been a lot of fun playing with it.  I think I’ll hang onto it for a while.

Continuing in my slow re-examination of playing with Comcast’s DVR offerings, something else is coming back to me — I really like their On Demand selection. In fact, it’s actually the best I’ve seen to date. Although, in all fairness, I’ve only looked at three: Comcast, Real and Netflix.

I was flipping through the free movies section of Comcast’s on demand menu, and it occurred to me that there was a lot of movies that seemed interesting to watch. So many, in fact, that I went back and counted to get an idea. There were 12 total that I thought looked decent enough to at least try and start watching them, and I’m pretty sure a few of them were in my Netflix queue (which is maxed out at 500 movies). On top of that, there were four movies that I’d already seen, but I wouldn’t mind watching again. In fact, I did watch a movie tonight (Field of Dreams) for free, and that was cool.

That’s not to say the user experience still couldn’t be improved. First of all, the things I like, aside from the selection, is that the shows start instantly, and I never have a problem with caching or anything like that. As usual, all the issues I have deal with the user interface again. You can only fast forward at one speed, which is not very fast at all. So if you want to jump ahead at all, whatsoever, you are really screwed. The second minor issue is that the box is really slow to respond, which many people complain about. It’s interesting because the menu will respond quickly but anything related to playback takes a good second or two to apply. So if you hit fast forward, the OSD will immediately display on button press, but it won’t start fast forwarding right then. That wouldn’t be nearly so bad a problem except if you want to resume playback, by the time it does work, you’re already a good five seconds ahead of where you wanted to be. I haven’t watched any TV shows using the DVR (I was just skipping through the boring parts in the movie), but I imagine that would be a real pain if you’re trying to skip commercials and you constantly go too far ahead. I can’t help but wonder if that’s intentional, since in all my experience with TV tuners, recording and playback, seeking and pausing has never been an issue. Who knows. It wouldn’t be hard to attribute it to crappy coding either, since the entire thing is a mess.

One other problem I just remembered is that pausing a movie isn’t very friendly either. If you leave it paused for more than something like three minutes, it will stop the playback completely, and dump you back to the original on demand menu. That’s a bit of a pain since you have to re-navigate the menu to get back to your movie. I can understand doing that after a long wait, but every time it happened to me I had either just gone to the bathroom or to the kitchen for a minute and it had already exited out. It is a really short delay. And I’d be surprised if it does that when you’re watching live tv and you paused it. Another odd UI decision.

The only other on demand instant movie services I’ve tried is RealPlayer’s offerings (although that was a little less than a year ago, I doubt much has changed) and Netflix. Netflix just barely announced that for any of the unlimited plans, customers can also watch unlimited movies as well. That news might be exciting, except that their selection is incredibly crappy right now. If you don’t believe me, just look at the Top 50. Number 40 is Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie.

Admittedly, I really don’t think it’s their fault, though. I’m sure it’s the movie studios being really, really reluctant to open up their libraries to the internets to let everyone have them on their home computer. I think things are changing, but I also believe it’s going to be a few years before things really take off. Maybe with Apple TV entering the ring the landscape will start to change a bit faster. We can only hope.

The other thing I like about Comcast is I can actually watch the movies on my TV. I’ve never been one for watching things on the computer, which is why I ditched my RealPlayer account and never really bother with Netflix. I mean, I could easily hook up my Windows machine to a TV, but I’d still have no remote, and I have to deal with downloading and buffering the thing. It’s not worth the hassle.

Finally, I should disclaim that anyone should consider any of these services based on my recommendation, since my taste in movies is really unique. I’d say that a good portion of my movie collection you can’t even find in the DVD rental stores, and every time I go there it literally takes me up to an hour to find something I feel like watching. But that’s okay, I wouldn’t recommend Comcast’s DVR option right now anyway. I just wish there were more on demand options, with more movies, with the possibility of natively watching it on my TV.

A bug in MythVideo inspired me to work on fixing mplayer-resume tonight, so that it can properly handle movies with filenames.  I don’t know why I didn’t think about this before, but it’s simple if the file is properly escaped or quoted.  And so, mplayer-resume v1.5 is released, with support for spaces in filenames, finally, and also one other cool little thing: it works with playlists now, to a degree.

The playlists thing is kind of hard to explain, and it’d be easier to point you to the documentation that I’ve already written.  Instead, I’ll just describe what it is I’m going to use it for.

One thing I’ve been wanting to add to my MythVideo setup is some playlists so that I can randomly play something.  I have a lot of cartoons and videos and movies, and sometimes I don’t feel like picking something myself — one of the nice things about TV in general is you are genuinely surprised when you’re channel surfing and something cool just happens to crop up.  That’s kinda what I like, and what I wanted to do.  But, I wanted to take it a step further.  If I started playing $random_episode, then if I quit, I want to be able to resume playback of that same show.  Up until now, mplayer-resume wouldn’t work that way, since if you’re randomly picking something from a playlist file, there’s no real way to seek back to the same one.

That’s fixed now.  The script will read the filename of the movie you are playing when you exit (once you setup .lircrc correctly), and checks to see if that’s the same file you started playing.  So if I play random.pls and it plays Tarzan.mkv, and I exit, then when I go back to watch Tarzan, it will resume in the same place.  Basically, it saves the file position for Tarzan instead of the playlist file.  Pretty cool.

So, there you go.  I’ll put it in portage shortly as well.  Enjoy.

Comcast came out on Friday morning and installed my upgraded cable connection. Strictly speaking, I have no idea which tier I’m actually on right now. I know it’s at least expanded digital cable, and I think I get some HDTV channels. To be honest, I haven’t played with the settop box for more than 5 minutes. The real reason I wanted to get cable was so that I could have the Hallmark Channel again. Unfortunately, it looks like that’s not going to happen. I’ve tried everything, and the only way I can get the channel is by using the settop box. In the meantime, I only added 4 channels that I was interested in watching (Food Network, TLC, HGTV and Animal Planet), and am living with that.

There’s a lot more channels that I like to watch, but I’m taking it slow. Another channel I’m mostly interested in is TNT, since they play Without a Trace and Cold Case regularly. I think. Anyway, I’m actually trying to cut *back* on the number of channels I watch (one of my TVs only has all the PBS channels on it, which is a nice change of pace), but the fact is that some channels on cable have a much better and interesting lineup than the local ones.

Onto the cool stuff though. The settop box is a disaster and a half, or at least the menu is. I’m going to have to take screenshots because it really is unfathomable how much of a UI nightmare this is. Here’s my biggest beef with the whole thing: you can’t setup a custom channel list, or even add / delete channels from your lineup. If you want to go channel surfing, you have to go through *every* *single* *channel*. The only option around that is to add a ‘Favorites’ list, for which the remote has a button that will flip through those, but only going up. It’s incredibly annoying because adding / deleting channels has been a standard option for TVs for decades. Comcast’s settop box does let you setup a list of your favorite channels, but to browse it, you have to go through about 3 or 4 actions on the remote to get there, and even then it only displays the list in a guide. If you go back to hitting channel up or down, it just cycles again through every channel you get. And there are a lot of channels. And of coures it doesn’t ignore the ones that you aren’t signed up for, so you get to muddle through about three dozen that you aren’t authorized for.

I *think* that that the DirecTV and Dish Network boxes let you create lists, and then keep you in those channel lists for when you want to channel surf. I’m not sure, since I’ve never given one a good hard look. I’d switch to one of those just for that, though. In fact, I probably will.

In the meantime, I’m going to screw around with this settop box for a bit more before taking it back to Comcast. From what I’ve been reading, MythTV can add the box as an input device, using a firewire connection to control the channel tuner, and of course record TV. Mine is the HDTV DVR (Motorola DCT3416), and I haven’t yet seen much info about connecting one. The anecdotal evidence so far seems to be along the lines of “plug in the cable, and it works great.” We’ll see. I don’t even have a firewire cable.

So that’s where I’m at right now. I’m not gonna use the settop box unless I can get Myth to play around with it. Even then, I don’t need it, since I can tune into all the channels I wanted anyway with my normal TV tuner cards. I still need to see exactly which channels I get. I actually ripped it out from my HDTV since the picture was so horrible to begin with. Even on component output it looked incredibly crappy, not to mention worse than my original coaxial input connection. I plugged it in briefly using HDMI, but that was just as unimpressive.

I’m toying with the idea of getting a Tivo just to see what my options are (yet another area I don’t know anything about, so who knows), but I’m not too optimistic anything good would come out of it. I’ll probably buy one used somewhere just so I can see if its worth it.

The real good thing is that, despite all these interesting issues, is that I’m perfectly happy with my original cable lineup, so if I rip everything out, I won’t miss it one bit. I’m just curious to see what I can accomplish though. It’s fun.

My best Christmas gift this year (aside from my Frosted Flakes pajamas) was that my older sister took me to go see George Winston in concert while I was visiting her in Minneapolis last week. I absolutely love his music, and I never dreamed of being able to see him perform live. It was an excellent show, too. George Winston’s albums are the first piano albums I’ve ever listened to, and I’ve been listening to them for probably over ten years now, and I’m nowhere near tired of them.

I was expecting that, since it was the holidays, most of his selection would be from the December album. I was wrong about that, he played stuff from all his albums, maybe doing three or four selections from December. The one that I remember the best was Tamarack Pines from Forest. It’s an incredibly interesting piece, and it was real treat to see him do it live. I never really thought about how much he’d be moving his hands. Sometimes he would grip the strings inside the piano for extra effect which was weird, but it worked.

Something I didn’t know is that he also plays the guitar. He did about three songs on his guitar. He played the harmonica once, too. Overall, the guy was a really interesting character. He was very modest about his work. When he first came out, he just went straight to the piano and said what he was going to play first. Before each piece he’d say who or what had inspired his work, and after each piece he’d say nothing more than “thank you very much,” and quickly moved on. At the end of the concert he barely even bowed before briskly striding off the stage. You’d certainly never pick him out from a crowd, that’s for sure.

Great music, though. He played about eight of my favorites, which I wrote down, but I left the paper and program back east. I do remember he did Carol of the Bells, though. That one was amazing, too. I love his stuff.

On my little Christmas vacation to Minneapolis, I got to visit the Mall of America, and go to a theater to see National Treasure: Book of Secrets. The movie wasn’t really worth writing about. It wasn’t as good as the first one in regards to humor … it was more serious and focused instead of relationships. The adventure was good, though. I find adventure movies hard to sit through, personally. I don’t like the whole “oh my gosh, are they going to make it?” excitement. It just bugs me. It also makes it so I can’t watch movies a second time. I much more prefer “punch me in the face 857 times with a textbook” style of action movie, like the Bourne trilogy or 007 movies. Action all around versus a mix of drama and then a climatic ending.

Anyway, nothing compared to the actual cartoon that preceded the movie … Disney put a Goofy cartoon before the movie! Old school, baby! Man, I am old enough to remember watching Looney Tunes before movies way back in the day, and Donald Duck and other Disney ones. Wow, I don’t know why they ever did away with that.

The one we saw was “How to Set Up A Home Theater,” and it was absolutely awesome. I was laughing quite a bit during it, and it was a great nod to the old “How To” series of Goofy cartoons that are classic. I would have a hard time watching this newer one and an older one and have even the slightest idea that they were about fifty years apart, it followed the pattern so well. I’d buy the movie on DVD just to see that cartoon again (I never bought the first National Treasure, may or may not someday).

There were trailers on there which looked really good, too. I saw a Wall-E trailer for the first time, and it looks absolutely hilarious … hopefully it’ll be the first Pixar movie that’s worth watching since The Incredibles. In fact, my friend Jason and I were discussing this the other day, and there’s only three of the six that are out that I think are worth watching: Monsters, Inc., A Bug’s Life and The Incredibles. I don’t like Toy Story (for the adventure / climax reason I stated above), never saw Toy Story 2 (no thanks), Finding Nemo was a bore and a half, walked out of Cars, and as far as Ratatouille … I haven’t seen it. I’ve never liked any movie where an animal has the starring role, animated or not.

The other trailer was for Narnia 2, Prince Caspian. Now *that* trailer looked really, really, really cool. I didn’t like the first one at all (the battle was too short, boring, and nothing really happened … it was very well detailed in the book. Plus that goat-man thing looked freaky). The second one looks like it’s gonna rawk. I’m pretty excited for that one.

Seems like there was another trailer … oh yes, Hancock looks hilarious. Watch the trailer if you can find it.

That’s about it. As far as the movie itself, it was a good popcorn movie. Definately rated PG as I don’t remember anything remotely offensive at all, which is a nice change of pace. I’d recommend going to see it.

Well, that was a fun little review. I never write ones for movies that I’m sorta half-interested in because it never seems like I’ll have anything to say. Maybe I should just write about them anyway.

Well, it’s been two years now since I’ve been hooked on Netflix.  I can’t say I’m disappointed yet.  In recent months, though, I’ve switched from trying my luck with movies to trying with TV shows a little bit, and the success ratio has been much higher …. around 75% compared to something like 7% with movies.  I’m just guessing.  I should quantify that.

Anyway, to compare directly to last years stats, I’ll post the same results first:

Current plan: 5 a month (unlimited)

# of times I changed my plan: 7

# DVDs at home: 0

# of movies in my queue: 483

# of movies I’ve rated: 1,948

# recommendations: 7

# of movies I’ve rented: 78

# of 5-star ratings (from rentals): 1

# of 4-star ratings (from rentals): 4

# of movies I’ve bought on DVD (because of rentals): 2

I figured the numbers were poorer this year, but they’re pretty close to last year’s, except for the new movies I bought because I liked the rental so much (84 Charing Cross Road and The Court Jester).

It might be worth explaining my movie rating system.  I give something 3 stars if I think it’s clean enough and worth watching … that is, I’d rent it, maybe buy it, and definately watch it again.  I don’t include that in the stats since I think its too general a number.  But in this case, the number that I rated 3 stars that I haven’t seen before was 7.  Still a pretty low number, and it just goes to show that most of the stuff out there isn’t worth watching (in my opinion).  I’m pretty picky, though.

Here’s some categories I’d put stuff into, which occurred to me as I was looking over the list:

Movies I expected to be good that disappointed me: Do Not Disturb, The Princess and the Pirate, How to Make an American Quilt, Move Over Darling, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, The Thrill of It All, The Ice Pirates

Thought it would be slightly entertaining, but was horrible:  Dungeons and Dragons, Merlin, A Cinderella Story

Unexepected surprises (good movies): The Cure, 84 Charing Cross Road, Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut, The Court Jester, Time After Time, Hacking Democracy, The Dead Zone, Smallville, Spider-man (the 67 collection), Ivanhoe

Seen it before, liked it, watched it again, still like it: Coach Carter, The Fog of War, Lady in White, Carpool, Mom and Dad Save the World, Without a Trace, The ‘Burbs, Home Alone, Home Alone 2, Freaky Friday

My opinion lowered: Greedy, 50 First Dates, The Wizard

Meh: Popeye, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Core

Didn’t finish it: Captain Blood, Capricorn One, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Three Musketeers, Notorious, Dragonheart: The New Beginning, Gone in Sixty Seconds, Sliding Doors, Starcrash, How to Make an American Quilt, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, This Island Earth, 20 Million Miles to Earth, The Notebook

What in the world did I just sit through: Silent Running, Logan’s Run, Popeye, Dreamscape, Starcrash

That last category really takes the cake.  Silent Running was about the weirdest thing I have ever seen.  It’s basically a hippy 70’s sci-fi dream movie …. let’s fly off into space, murder our evil corporate overlords … all to save the trees!  That’s not too far off the mark of what happens.

Logan’s Run was just absolutely weird.  I’d heard of the movie ever since I was a kid but had no idea what to expect.  It was mostly interesting until it got to the halfway point where they spend half their time dilly-dallying around outside.  Boring.

Popeye, I already wrote about.  Wasn’t bad … just … another trip.

Nothing can beat out Starcrash for extreme oddity though.  Apparently this movie never had an editor, as you’ll lose count of the inconsistencies and plot holes since there are about a dozen every 5 minutes.  I’m not exaggerating, either.  Star Wars rip-off is the simplest way of describing this movie …. I wouldn’t miss it, if only for the experience, and the fact that you’ll never be able to forget.

Two other movies that I think need honorable mention … The Ice Pirates.  I remember watching the TV spot for this movie a LONG time ago when I was a kid, and I always thought I would have loved that movie.  Watching it now, all I could think to myself was, if I had seen this as a twelve year old, I would have loved it.  Unfortunately, it just bothered me a bit now, so I couldn’t sit through the whole thing.

Last but not least, was Superman II: Donner’s cut, which I wrote about as well. A lot of mixed feelings in that one, since they cut out more than they should have, I think.  I’d still like to mix my own.

Anyway, I always figured this year kind of sucked for rentals, but looking back I see it wasn’t half bad at all.  Most of the good ones I found right near the beginning of the year, and most everything else has just been a complete miss for me.  Oh well, there’s still a ton of movies more to watch … I’m sure there’s something good out there, somewhere.

Now that I’ve got my mythbox all setup properly (I screwed up LVM2 and lost all my data, twice, trying to remove harddrives … meh), I’m back to ripping my DVDs again.  This time I’m using dvd2mkv, my custom little script I wrote, to do all the heavy lifting for my movies.  But, there’s one thing I didn’t really put in there the first time around, and that’s support for alternate audio tracks.

Originally I wrote it simply to check automatically for the highest number of tracks and best audio format.  As a general rule, that chooses the first channel that’s in English with 6 channels, which is always (in every case I’ve seen so far), Dolby Digital.  If there is a DTS track, it’s always the second or third track behind it, but never gets selected automatically since it’s not the first one on the list.  I can, however, select it if I run the program interactively.  Not really ideal, of course, but it’ll have to work for now.

My real question though is, why aren’t there more movies with DTS audio tracks to them?  Back in the day when I was working at a movie theater, one of my managers would swear up and down that DTS was better quality than Dolby.  He would even make the projectionist screen the movies for him in the DTS  theaters if the movie was equipped for it.  He was quite the audio and videophile so I took his word for it.  Now, though, you hardly see it anywhere.  The only DVDs I’ve seen them on are some Paramount and Fox titles, and even then it’s only the newer ones that have it.

What’s also really interesting, and I kind of assumed this, is that SDDS, Sony’s 8 channel format, is completely missing from a home theater setup.  Good ol Sony, going off and making their own standard yet again.

Anyway, when I listen to DVDs with both tracks, I really can’t tell a difference myself.  My receiver supports both DTS and Dolby, so I figure … why not, I’ll rip em anyway and see if it really is any nicer.

Well, it’s Christmas, and what makes a better gift than a TV that’s bigger than your wall? I was talking to my boss last night who just recently bought an HDTV, and we were chatting about it, so I got the idea to post my tips on what to look for in an HDTV if you’re considering a purchase.

HDTVs is actually one area where I have done a TON of research. When you’re buying something that costs over $1k and you plan on having it for 10 years, you should too.

First, get a good brand. There are only three brands worth buying: Sony, Samsung and Sharp. The rest are crap. In fact, most manufacturers will buy their stuff from Samsung. Personally, I prefer Sony, but whatever floats your boat.

Second, rear projection TVs are the way to go — the picture is better and the TVs are much, much, much cheaper than LCD flatpanels. Also, don’t even think about buying plasma (they are getting phased out anyway) as they’ll burn your screen out.

If you can stand having an extra 5 inches sticking out from the back of your TV, rear projection sets are the way to go. Check this out … Circuit City is selling a Sony 1080p 55″ rear projection TV for $1800. A Samsung 46″ LCD HDTV is also on sale for $1950. Whee! (I couldn’t find a good comparision online, but go in the store and you’ll quickly see what I’m saying is true).

Third, protect your investment with a decent power supply — get something with stage 1 or up filtering. You’re gonna pay a lot for the TV, don’t get a $12 power supply from Wal-Mart to keep it running. Expect to spend at least $150 for something decent.

Fourth, HDMI is the way to go for DVDs. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players are insanely expensive, and not worth the price (yet). Go get a nice upconverting DVD player if you don’t already have one. You can easily snag one for under $100. The HDMI cables are more expensive, but again they are worth the picture quality. Personally I think they look better than Component. I’d recommend buying your cables online instead of spending $60 for a Monster cable that is 3 feet long in the store.

Fifth, you don’t need to get a huge cable deal to get some HDTV channels. Comcast, even with their most basic cable plan ($12/month) will give you the local channels in HDTV (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX). The picture will blow your eyeballs out of the water. Sure, go ahead and spend $$$ if you want on Dish Network and get a lot more HD channels (in fact, from what I’ve gathered … they are the best deal. Its about the same price for lots of HD channels as it is for Comcast’s basic cable), but you don’t need it.

Sixth, look for online coupon codes. It’s worth waiting a month if you can snag a 10% off coupon somewhere. Or, just watch the weekly circulars and see how low the price on your TV will go. If you missed the opportunity, just wait, and it will eventually go back to that same price. If you can’t get some coupons, then be sure to buy from a store that will match the price for up to 30 days *after* the sale. That way, if they do sell it cheaper later, you can get the price difference back in your pocket.

Seventh, and as much as I hate to recommend this, if you are responsible enough to manage your money, open a store credit card and take advantage of their no interest for x amount of months deal. Put the cash that is going to go towards the purchase and put it in the bank, and float it so you can earn interest on it. Then, be sure to pay off the balance in full before you hit the due date, otherwise you’ll get hit with nasty back fees and insanely high interest rates. I really don’t recommend this route unless you *know* you can do it safely.

Eighth, don’t worry if its not “full” HDTV or not. Make sure that it is at least 720p though. Some smaller TVs will tout themselves as HDTV compatible or some crap like that, but they look poopy. The 720p pictures still look amazingly gorgeous. There’s nothing wrong with future-proofing though, and going with the best possible picture, and if it’s a difference of only a few hundred dollars, go for it. In three years you won’t remember if you saved $200 or not going for the cheaper price, but you’ll remember that you stuck yourself with the lower quality.

That’s about all I can think of … just be sure to do a lot of research. Check the connectors on the back. Play with the remote. Look at the features the TV has. Ask lots of questions. And for heaven’s sake, don’t buy on impulse. TVs are heavy and hard to lug back to the store. Especially in the snow. And then the cashiers sneer at you when you want to return stuff.

Have fun, though. HDTVs certainly live up to the hype.

I’ve picked up my quest again to find a DVD player that is region-free.  This is about the fourth or fifth time I’ve looked around, this being my most serious attempt.  I’ve been doing my research quite a bit on this one instead of just randomly buying whatever looks like it might work the second I see it.

The first question is whether you want to get a player that is region-free “out of the box” or hack one to reset the region settings.  I’d rather go with the first one, for fear of getting stuck with a player that for one reason or another isn’t hackable.

I actually found a lot of search results on Amazon, which surprised me.  Almost all of them are either Philips  or some cheap-o brands I’ve never heard of.  A Philips DVD player is most certainly out of the question.  I bought one once and it had the most horrible remote I’ve ever seen.  Today, that’s no real excuse since you can use a universal remote, but one feature it also lacked was that you couldn’t eject a disc from the remote.  Lame.

Aside from my experiences, everywhere I read about their players, people regret the purchase, and have lots of complaints about them.  So, definately going to steer clear.

The only thing I’ve really found so far that looks like it’d work is this one, the Samsung DVD-P171.  The only problem is that I can’t find any reviews for it, anywhere at all.  Either no one bought this thing or it was quickly replaced by another model.  Neither scenario exactly inspires confidence.  Even then, I couldn’t find the specifications for it on any website.  I finally downloaded the product manual from Samsung’s website, and it has component and rca video out, along with coaxial audio out.  No HDMI or S-Video which stinks for maximum options, but it’s not a big deal.  Samsung seems to be generally a good brand overall, so I think I might get it and check it out.

The one feature I really want in my DVD player is what my Sony already has — remembering the last playback location.  It’s great.  The Sony players will remember the last position for six discs.  So you can take them out and put them in later and pick back up exactly where you left off.  I couldn’t really tell by reading the manual for the Samsung if it had that or not.  Not a huge deal though, the reason I’m looking in the first place is to have it play any regions.

The reason I want a region-free DVD player in the first place should be pretty obvious — I want to be able to play DVDs from other regions.  It’s the most annoying feature of DVD’s DRM that I hate.  Ironically enough, HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs, known for their DRM, actually don’t employ this tactic … all discs are region-free.  Sheesh.

Even dumber is that the studios will release some movies only in certain countries, or release them as widescreen only other places, but not in the USA or for Region 1.  That means if I want to get Looking for Richard on DVD, I’d have to buy it from the UK.  Or if I want George of the Jungle with widescreen I have to get it from Germany.  I already bought Disney’s Shipwrecked from Australia, and changed the region code on my DVD ROM in my computer so I could rip it.  I’m limited by the number of times I can change it though, so I’d rather have a player that I can just throw anything at.

For the record, here’s a list of Disney’s pan & scan only DVD releases, and which regions have the widescreen ones available.

I just watched the coolest documentary, Hacking Democracy, which tells the story nicely of Black Box Voting. It’s a great movie, and I highly recommend watching it. I thought that I was watching the news closely on the insanity of the computerized election voting drama, but I had no idea that the citizens group had done so much and found so much damning evidence.

It’s amazing all the stuff they find out, a lot of it through dumpster diving, and a large part through a very small few election officials where are actually willing to look into the situation. What’s really interesting is how much nobody wants to really look into the flaws. They are stonewalled at every turn in their investigations, and when they do find tampering, the county or state doesn’t pursue the matter diligently … or they do, with equally flimsy policy that can’t be scrutinized.

One thing I didn’t like much about the film is they didn’t dive into the technical aspects of it very much. From an experienced programmer’s point of view, my opinion is that the system is flawed from the start because of at least one very basic fact — Diebold’s software uses Microsoft Access to store the results. Anyone who has used any type of databases know that Access is designed for nothing more than hobby use, and should never be used in any kind of production environment where data integrity or security is in any amount necessary. That alone just blows me away.

There was a very cool test that they ran near the end of the film, and they covered the explanation quite well on how it worked. They found a hacker to modify the software on one of the electronic cards used to store the votes, to throw off the vote that was going to be tallied using that card. Then, the investigators and some election officials actually did a mock vote right there to test the system, and sure enough, by just hacking the card itself, the vote was completely skewed in a different direction.

The film asks a lot of great questions. Why is it that the vendors are deciding how the voting process should work? How are these things verified for accuracy? Why isn’t the entire process made more public, since it is a matter of public interest? And my favorite one addressed very early was, why is the software secret, so that not even election officials can know what is in there? At the beginning they showed the state of California’s technical advisor, who said that even he hadn’t been able to see the software.

As far as documentaries go, I thought this one was really well done.  It was clean, concise, and had a lot of evidence backing up what they were doing.  They didn’t have any wild crazy-eyed conspiracy theories, instead just providing facts and asking rhetorical questions.

There’s just a lot of great stuff in this movie, you have to see it for yourself. It’s unbelievable how screwed up the system is. There’s a lot more screenshots I’d like to throw up as well, but just watch it for yourself. Good stuff.

I have an opinion on the whole matter of the direction that the business models of the companies that make up the RIAA and MPAA, as well as the television networks — while they may present one opinion, it’s not necessarily shared among all its members.  The proof is in the fact that some are embracing technologies and new methods, while others are holding back.   Things aren’t as bleak as they seem.

Take DVDs for example.  Looking back at the history of the format, each studio approached the new business model differently.  Warner Brothers and MGM burst onto the scene immediately, pushing the format hard, and releasing all kinds of movies to encourage people to buy them.  Warner and it’s affiliates were the first to release special editions as well.  Go back and look at some of the first DVDs under the New Line Platinum Series, in fact, and you’ll see that even by today’s standards, the list of features is still impressive.  And these were released something like ten years ago.  Universal Studios was another one of the first to release their movies, but their production was pretty crappy.  All the other major studios pretty much held out for years, and you have to wonder why.  Doesn’t anyone remember wondering if Disney would ever release any of their animated titles on DVD?  Disney was, in fact, the worst holdout of them all, and their first DVDs were even worse — often the only list of features was that the movie was in widescreen.  They still have a lot of DVDs out there that are only released in pan & scan.  Fox was another hold out as well.  So while one studio (Warner) saw where things were going, they embraced it, profited from it, and pushed the envelope quite a bit, while those that dragged their feet would only dip their toes in the water a few times before committing full time, and even then giving us scraps of morsels.  In the end it only made things cost more for them, as they would have to re-release a lot of their films so they would get the treatment they deserved.

You can watch a similar approach going on right now with the television networks and HDTV.  Some are doing a great job, and some are resisting it pretty bad.  NBC, in my opinion, is doing the best job right now.  Pretty much every broadcast I watch on that channel is in HDTV.  Heck, even the local news is in HD, and widescreen format as well.  It’s pretty nice.  Fox, on the other end of the spectrum, is doing the worst job ever.  They are only broadcasting at 720p, and I hardly ever see anything in widescreen.  When it is still full frame, my local station is displaying the picture with ugly gray bars on the sides, instead of leaving them black which would be much easier to ignore.  They obviously are either incapable or uncaring of providing a good picture.  ABC is also the only other local network still coming through in only 720p, and the main features are still in fullscreen format.  ABC is owned by Disney, which explains that whole scenario perfectly.  PBS and CBS come through both in 1080i, and look gorgeous.  After watching a show on there, you’re too spoiled to sit through anything else.

Now the question to ask is, why are some people not doing better?  It’s pretty obvious that just like DVDs, the HDTV format is the future, and it’s going to stay.  I think that things will resolve themselves, eventually.  Time is definetely on our side.  Older executives who have been in the business for decades and are still short-sighted and stuck in the old way of doing things will eventually retire, move on or die.  As a younger generation that has grown up with computers, portable music and video devices will see things completely differently, and surely be less resistant to change and new ideas.  Also, they will be frustrated with the old models, and introduce new ones.  Don’t look at the RIAA and MPAA for the opinions and predictions of where things are going, instead look at the ones who are actually making the money and putting the products on the shelves.  Based on the quality and options that they are coming out with, individually as companies, is what we can expect more of.  I think things will only get better.

I finally got around to hooking up my 5.1 surround sound stereo this weekend (I didn’t have my rear speakers setup), since I also finally bought season two of Star Trek: Voyager, and I wanted to watch it in full audio goodness.  The difference is glorious.  It’s great fun.  Every time they are in a ship somewhere, you can hear the hum of the engines in the background all around you.  It’s the coolest thing ever.

Ironically, Voyager is the only Star Trek that I don’t have the complete set of.  It’s weird, because it is *almost* more my favorite than TNG.  It’s just the best series ever in a lot of respects.  It’s the story arc and the tight situations that continually focus on character that make it so good to me.  Actually, the real reason I don’t have them all is obvious — they are still way too expensive.  I’ve got the entire series of TNG and DS9, but that’s because Paramount finally got a clue and dropped the MSRP from $110 to $60.  That’s much more reasonable.  Unfortunately, Voyager is still running about $100 a season, and it’s been that way for a while.  I don’t know if they are ever going to drop the price.  I’ve had season one on DVD for the longest time, but never got anything else.  I got so itchy to watch a Voyager episode again though that I just had to buy another season set, even if it did cost an arm and a leg.  I’d say it was worth it.

One thing I like about Netflix, is that since I can have a huge queue of movies, I get to add all these ones I’d like to see someday. Well, today Popeye was next in line. I haven’t seen this movie in more than 20 years, and watching it again was interesting.

I remember when I was a little kid, when we first got a VCR. I must have been around 8 or 9 or so. Popeye was the first movie we ever recorded (it was on ABC, I think), and we must have watched this movie dozens of times. Man those were the days. I remember our VCR didn’t do time-based indexing. Instead, it had this arbitrary counter that we could never figure out how to translate into actual time segments. Good times.

Anyway, I have fond memories of this thing since I’ve seen it so much. I was unsure of what to expect seeing it again, for the first time. I don’t think I could accurately describe the experience. It was just weird. Artistic, but weird.

The movie opens up with a song, which I *completely* forgot that there were any songs in this thing at all. They were weird. In fact, the whole movie is just odd. It wasn’t until about halfway through that I realized how hard a project this would have been to tackle, and all things considered, you have to give it some credit for at least being original.

As far as the story goes, this was the first time I actually could follow the thing. That was weird as well. The whole thing moved a little slow for me, but I imagine that it’s supposed to be a kid’s movie more than anything else (although that’s never really stopped me before). The acting was really good though. Robin Williams did a great job as Popeye. You can never recognize its him the entire time. Everything about the movie really pulls you in. It’s just a weird, hard movie to sit through. I had to fast forward through the DVD three or four times because it was moving too slow for me, but strangely enough I managed to sit through it and experience the whole thing.

I’m trying to think of something more to say about it that would lend itself towards actual content, but I can’t really think of anything. It’s hard to describe something that you understood completely differently in another life, and then you look at it again years later and try to make sense of it all. I honestly can’t even think of how to summarize the story. I do remember it being fascinating to me as a kid for all the funny, whacky weird stuff in it, and I can still see how it would spark the imaginations of some kids today. Still, it’s a hard sell when it’s an artistic film all the way through, especially more so to kids. Everything about it was really well done, and it’s very seamless and put together nicely … but it’s more of a circus event than anything else. You experience it, and move on.

As you can tell, I have a hard time revisiting some things from my past (movies have always been a big part of my life), and it’s even harder when you’re not sure what to expect. For the most part, everything I revisit again has always been a great, positive experience for me — since the first time around I got the general idea to know it was good and entertaining and fun, and the second time around I discover the story, character drama and depth. Or, it’ll just be something like Scooby-Doo and I enjoy the simplicity compared to all the strange crap that’s on now.

I’d sum this one up as an odd, interesting artistic, original exploitation. It did a good job of tackling a tough subject (cartoon strip characters), but it manged to do so with some real depth and character. For me the best part about it was just reliving those childhood memories and getting to see it again. There’s a lot of slapstick and silly antics, which is what I remembered the most. I don’t think I could ever sit through watching it again, but I feel strangely compelled to buy it anyway just in case I do. Very weird.