May 24, 2007

The Good Death on Cold Case

I just loved this episode 23 of Cold Case. Called "The Good Death" it was to me really touching and as I've always loved the last sequences on Cold Case, the song Good Day was just terrific. Paul Westerberg sings it from track 11 of Eventually. For those of you who don't know Paul was the lead for The Replacements, one of the best alternative bands of the 80s. Eventually by the way was his second solo album from 1996.


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October 20, 2006

Cold Case Season 3 Episode 20

I'm probably a softie, but I finally had a chance to see this episode of Cold Case. It is about someone on death row with three days to go and what really happened. I loved the music and the ending was just incredibly intense. They don't rebroadcast often, but catch it if you can.

I thought the music on that episode was particularly good with cuts like:

Shine - Collective Soul
This Ain't Living - G. Love & Special Sauce
Come Undone - Duran Duran
I Know - Dionne Farris
Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm - Crash Test Dummies
Satellite - Dave Matthews Band
Hallelujah - John Cale

They should make it easier to buy tracks IMHO.

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August 6, 2006

Elizabethtown surprisingly great

Elizabethtown is a movie that critics hated and I just happened to see as a title on a United flight. Glad we rented it, although the premise is a little strange and amazing, I thought that people and the story were great. Kirsten Dunst who I have to admit I really didn't like much in Spider-Ma although I'm sure that made her as a star, I though was just great. Was super romantic too. Fits in the list of "best movie ever made" of which I have a lot as anyone who knows me can tell you.

The soundtrack by the way is just awesome, Nancy Wilson is great and of course they have my just favorite song in the world, Long Ride Home by Patty Griffin. See the official site for a sampling.

Others in this genre include Say Anything, Green Card, The Princess Bride, Field of Dreams, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pretty Woman, Crazy/Beautiful, Jerry McGuire, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind amongst others. And yes, I don't know the genre is exactly.

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April 19, 2006

Digital Videos from your library

King County Library System - eCollection - Home. How amazingly cool. King County now has a deal where you can download IMAX and other films onto your PC. Check them out and watch them. They also do classical music and books-on-tape as well.

These do use Windows encryption so they won't work on your iPod :-( but will work on your PC or if you really need to you can buy a Creative M:Vision or other iPod clone that uses Windows Media formats.

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December 26, 2005

Oggcodecs decodes Flac

illiminable Ogg Directshow Filters for Speex, Vorbis, Theora and FLAC. I use FLAC for lossless compression to archive music. Until now I've used winamp to playback FLAC files or dbPowerAmp to convert them back to WAV or MP3.

A strange thing is that Ogg has a set of DirectShow filters that will let any DirectShow capable player like Windows Media Player or BSPlayer playback not just Ogg formats like Vorbis, but also Flac. So, loading this gets rid of a reason to have winamp on my machine. Now I just need Musicmatch to do MP3 tagging and BSPlayer for Dvix and Xvid movie playback plus itunes for my ipods.

Interesting to note that FFDShow also claims to decode Flac as well in addition to a zillion other formats but I've not gotten that to work in either the 8-2004 buiild nor the latest 12-21-2005 build.

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December 25, 2005

Graphedit to debug audio and video problems

REALtime FM MP3 Recordeing. When you load as many codecs as I do, it is often mysterious what is really going on, so there is a tool called graphedit from DirectX toolkit lets you find it.

You load the File Open and you can see what DirectX would actually load. You can load it from digital-digest.com and learn more about it. A super useful tool.that Chris has a good tutorial on.

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December 21, 2005

AC3, H.264 and every other decoding

OK, if you need to decode AC3 and other contnet, you can either download specific codec from xVid or for Free-Codecs.com :: Download AC3 Filter 1.02a test8 : AC3 Filter is a DirectShow filter for AC3 decoding.

However, most folks will be happier with FFDshow, this is a multiformat decoder includes video formats including Xvid, Dvix, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 as well as H.264
Also, for audio, it decodes AC3, DTS, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. So, its a good choice for general decoding and it means that any DirectShow capable player can do this. In a real sense FFDShow is the universal deocder.

It is open source and actually uses less CPU power than Xvid and Dvix codecs as well.

Posted by rich at 11:20 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 23, 2005

SD-6

SD-6.com / Alias Info / Episodes, Cast, Crew, Music, 47, Ratings & More. There is an entire site dedicated to alias. wow.

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November 24, 2004

RSS and BitTorrent

a little ludwig goes a long way: I need a meta-guide for TV. A great tutorial on how to stick bittorrent and RSS together to find things.

Its much better than using a search engine like isohunt.com. Pealco.net explains how you never have to miss another show with RSS feeds.

Basically, you use Azureus and there is an RSS Import plugin that you connect to TVTorrents.

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November 23, 2004

WMA fiiles

Re: WMA to MP3 Transcoding Software? - MP3. Ages ago, I ripped a few CDs in WMA format, but MP3 is the standard. Here's a quick way to transcode so that in my core libraries I have complete portability.

Note, I also have songs in FLAC for archiving (it is lossless) and in HE AAC for portable music players (it is 8x smaller than MP3).

Posted by rich at 6:49 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 4, 2004

Videos on the Road

Well it used to be incredibly complicated to backup DVDs to your hard drive for those long trips with the kids. Things have gotten much easier though with:

  • AutoGK. Gordian Knot is certainly the most powerful of the utilties out there, but super hard to use. AutoGK is the simplified version. The stable release 1.25 has bugs, but the latest beta 1.53 which you install on top is way better.
  • SourceForge.net: Project Info - AC3Filter. The AutoGL generates files in Xvid format and in either MP3 or AC3 depending on how much space you give it. To listen to AC3, you need a decoder that Windows doesn't come with. AC3Filter is an open source project that lets you hear AC3 content from Windows Media, Winamp, etc.

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May 7, 2004

Tears of the Sun: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing

Netflix: Tears of the Sun. I must be getting sentimental in my old age. This was a hard movie to watch. The acting certain isn't anything to write home about, but the story is incredibly compelling (at least to me).

Its a dramatization of what happens in Africa, with ethnic cleansing in the most graphic way. By Bruce Willis's production company and the director of Training Day. Scary that this kind of stuff can happen in the real world. Stuff we don't want to see in that it is so real.

Shot right after 9/11, they brought real refugees from Africa who had lived through atrocities like this.

Reminds me that there is moral ambiguity everywhere, but there are some things that are just right. Like you shouldn't kill or torture people for instance.

Great quote at the end:

‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’

Posted by rich at 6:38 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

April 7, 2004

Watching DVDs on Airplanes

So, we are off to Hawaii pretty soon and Connie asked me, how do we get a movie for the squirmy kids. Here are the options:

  • Inflight Movies. This is one of those .com businesses like Netflix that don't seem to make sense, but we've actually used quite a bit. You rent a DVD player at the airport, use it and then return it at a kiosk. Makes sense when the price of portable DVDs was high. Cost is $12/day and they now deliver to you.
  • Digiplayer. This is a dedicated device that uses DivX format internally, so movies are preloaded on a hard drive. You can get on Alaska Airlines now only, so that is not a total solution. These are now free if you fly first class on Alaska!

What if you use your own hardware, well you have two choices:

  • Your laptop. So, you ask, why doesn't Rich just use his existing notebook computer. Well, main reason is that I have a 3 year old one and the battery has given up the ghost. Main issue with laptops, is that they have very short battery life while spinning a DVD. The Toshiba Porteges that we use at Ignition for instance won't last a whole movie on a charge. If you go to a hard disk version of a movie using DiVX or the OGM file format it works much better, but it is a pain to convert.
  • Samsung DVD-L100 Portable DVD Player Review - PCStats.com. This is the high end of a whole class of players. Got good reviews. A 10 inch screen and incredibly long battery life with a huge 4400 mAh Lithium battery is supposed to be multiple hours. BTW, for the geeks, this thing is actually an embedded Sparc processor running VxWorks. It draws just 16W, so that is why the battery lasts so long. Main issue is that it has a street price of $900, so is as much as a low-end notebook.
  • Panasonic DVD-LV70. This is a retailer and they tested a 7 inch screen model

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February 10, 2004

DVD Backup

"DVD Copy Basics":http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/114For those of you with kids who love peanut butter or have seen a DVD blown by a 4-year old sliding it across the table, here's a pretty good intro into how to have a backup until they learn to treat DVDs like Chihuly glassworks. They recommend DVDXcopy Express for beginners. For power users, they liked InstantCopy.. And of course for freeware geeks, there is DVD Shrink to putz with. DVD Shrink is actually pretty easy, but if you just want to copy the main movie, so kids can watch it, its even simpler. Then there are no menus to confuse people either. Just go to reauthor and drag the main movie and select only English AC5.1 and AC2.0 and voila. "Doom9.org":http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/mpg/dvdshrink31-main.htm. This is a great overview of how to get things done. Check out the DVD-9 to 1 DVD+/-R

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February 6, 2004

Alias Reruns

"Know Buddy":http://knowbuddy.dyndns.org:81/torrent/index.cgi. ok, i admit it since I've been flat on my back, I've been watching this mindless show. Connie can't understand why I like it. Maybe because its the same show over and over. Anyway, here's a spot that has Season 3 on it. I've l already gone through Seasons 1 and 2 via Netflix, but season 3 is in progress. Shape of things to come. You need to have bit torrent to view

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December 9, 2003

Yet another ripping guide

Copy your DVD to XviD with AC3 surround sound. This one tells you more closely what is really going on.

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December 3, 2003

Lord of the Rings Trilogy at the Cinerama

Seattle Cinerama. There is a god. The Cinerama will have the Lord of the Rings extended editions showing December 5-10 for the first one, then the second December 12-15. Then, it is too bad that it is sold out, they will do all three versions of the Lord of the Rings on the 16th when the last one is open. That's nine hours of it. I'm so depressed I didn't get tickets!

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Ice Age Backup Issues

DVDRHelp.com Forum Archive - Ice Age Collectors edition - problem - disk 1. I've had trouble backing up Ice Age. Here are some recommendations on what to do if DVDDecryptor fails. There is "AnyDVD":http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvd.html, which is a driver that makes the DVD appear to be unencrypted. Pretty smart really. Then you can use other programs like it was just a file system. "DVDRBase":http://www.dvdrbase.com/archive/index.php/t-21410 says that some are just hard to rip and recommends a host of different backup programs. CladDVD is the big one.

Posted by rich at 9:12 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

DVD Shrink: Backup DVDs to DVD±R

"DVD Help - DVD Shrink":http://www.dvdrhelp.com/tools?tool=155#comments and DVD±R Digest - Articles - DVD Shrink Guide and "Afonic DVD Shrink Guide":http://www.polarhome.com/~afonic/shrink.htm.DVD Shrink is the a free software that allows you to "shrink" existing DVD movies (by removing content or reducing their quality) so that they will all fit onto a single 4.7 GB DVD recordable. DVD Shrink is the first software of this kind that is actually free, and has DVD decryption functions built right into the software. DVD Shrink allows you to reduce the size of the DVD in two ways. One is to remove content from the DVD (eg. remove extra features), and the other is to keep all the original content, but reduce their quality and hence, file size. This guide currently deals with the second case (reducing quality). Pretty cool application for doing backups.

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November 27, 2003

DVD to DVD Conversion

Doom9.net - The Definitive DVD Backup Resource. OK, a new guide that tells you how to backup a DVD to a DVD recordable. Good stuff. complicated as usual, but great for geeks.

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November 22, 2003

Xvid Settings

Nic's XviD Binaries & Paraphernalia ;). Because DivX now doesn't let you remove GAIN for the free ad version (how sad), I've switched over to using XviD. This is an open source MPEG4 codec. Since it is open source, the settings are very strange and hard to understand. Check out the source page here that explains how to set the various parameters. Complicated.

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August 9, 2003

Review site for IMAX films

BIG MOVIE ZONE. Use this quite a lot for figuring out what IMAX films to take the kids to. Their reviews seem to track pretty well with what we've thought. Here's a quick review of recent IMAX movies we've watched. Both at the theaters on DVDs via Netflix: * Mount Everest. Awesome. This is an A+ movie. Has the drama of an actual ascent up Everest and you have to see the view from Everest in IMAX to believe it. Also the human drama of observing people dying up there as documented in _Into Thin Air_ (an incredible book). * Space Station 3-D. For us technology lovers, what could be better than actual footage shot from the International Space Station in 3-D no less. Another A+ * Pulse by Stomp. The music was incredible in this music documentary of sounds around the world. The African scenes were great. It was too bad the Japanese drummers were so short. Stomp itself is an incredible group. Grade A. * The Human Body. Kind of cool to see your insides at six stories high. The pimple scene was incredibly gross, but it was interesting. Grade B+. * Thrilling Rides. This was a fantastic view of riding roller coasters, but then becomes a review of CGI motion rides which were frankly not very inspiring. Didn't feel real at that size of film. Grade B. * Jane Goodall. Was kind of interesting, but really didn't take advantage of the format. Grade C.

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May 25, 2003

dvd to divx backup

Well it's been six months since I figured out the best way to backup DVDs. Here's an update on what's on the web now: * "Doom9.net Guide":http://www.doom9.org/. This was the source I used before and learned about Gordian Knot. The site has only gotten better. It actually explains what you are doing while the other guides are more of the press key 1, 2, 3 variety. Not the first hit in Google, but seems the most comprehensive. Main change is the use of the XviD encoder which is open source and royalty-free apparently with great quality. I'll have to give that a try. * DVD To DivX conversion guide. I did a DVD to DivX backup tools study about six months ago. It's interesting to see how the tools have evolved since then. Here's a how-to-guide that uses the various piece parts that Gordian Knot integrates. * "Ecuador's DVD to DivX Guide":http://ecuador.ebodyform.com/pcdvd/dvdrip.htm. A slightly different take on the conversion process. This does a conversion of the audio to MP3 as well, so you lose the AC3 I think. He also has a rip "pack":http://users.otenet.gr/%7Ethalia1/ecurip23.htm of all the software needed. * "Ecuador's PC Software Player Ratings":http://ecuador.ebodyform.com/pcdvd/dvdplay.htm. He also has a good guide to software DVD players. He likes Cyberlink PowerDVD the best. * "OCAddition DVD to DivX Guide":http://www.ocaddiction.com/articles/howto/dvdbackup/. Yet another guide. This one uses Gordian Knot. I used this program before. I sure hope it has gotten easier.

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May 2, 2003

It's Coming! The Matrix Reloaded

Seattle Cinerama. The matrix is nearly here. Tickets from "MovieTickets.com":http://www.movietickets.com/house_detail.asp?house_id=5881. The 12:45PM show looks good. There is also 7AM on May 15-17 if you can believe that! I'm go for the week after the Thursday it opens. That makes it May 23 I think. Thanks to the amazing "Digital Remastering":http://www.killermovies.com/m/thematrixreloaded/articles/2995.html technology that IMAX has. Then there is the IMAX version...at the "Pacific Science Center":http://pacsci.org that opens June 6. Sign me up! While we are at it, there will be many movies remade. For instance, "Apollo 13":http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/Apollo13TheIMAXExperience-10001918/reviews.php is comginout this way as well. "Too bad":http://www.imax.com/apollo13/ you have to go to Boston or Florida to see it.

Posted by rich at 11:19 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 1, 2003

Star Wars: Is there hope

Zagula spells trouble: Coming from Genndy Tartakovsky and More. There is hope for Star Wars. For me at least Star Wars II was unwatchable. What a fall from grace. Anyway, John says some real geniuses are doing the final version. For me anyway, part of the problem is that there is zero suspense. It is like watching the first 10 minutes of the Poseiden adventure over three movies. We know Anakin is a bad guy. We know who the emperor is. The only question is when we get to the next reel and the bad stuff happens.

Posted by rich at 12:07 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

April 25, 2003

Summer 2003 Movies: The Matrix and The Terminator

I am in fat city. With all the depressing economic and political news. It is nice to be able to escape. This has just been an incredible year for my kind of movies. First of course has been Lord of the Rings. I could watch it 100 times in Paul Allen's Cinerama. But, look what's coming: * "The Matrix Reloaded":http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/. Wow, what a web site and what a set of previews. It is starting May 15 and the IMAX (if you can believe it IMAX) version is coming out June 6 (D-Day). I can't wait. According to "Greg":http://www.upcomingmovies.com/matrix2.html. At the end of the trailer for the final Matrix episode. There is a God! You should see the 60MB trailer in Quicktime 6. Amazing. Unlike T3, this one looks like it pushed the story farther. There is Agent Smith 2.0, the Twins, wow! * "Terminator 3":http://www.terminator3.com/. Probably my favorite movie of all time. This next sequel include Claire Danes. A favorite actress of mine. Only problem is that (unlike the Matrix), the trailer makes this look like almost an exact remake of T2 rather than moving the story forward. I think what makes these things work is when the story actually moves forward like Lord of the Rings or The Matrix (hopefully). Any way according to "The Unofficial T3 Site";http://www.terminator-3.co.uk/index2.asp, this opens July 2.

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December 24, 2002

DVD Reviews

Here are some movie related sites that I use:

  • dvd authority v4.0 -=> . Just had a chance to see Lord of the Rings: Two Towers again. Better the second time, I'd say. Also been looking at getting the collectors edition of volume 1. This site seems to have the coolest reviews. Now that widescreenreview.com charges, I've been looking for other places to find information on DVDs.
  • Movies.com. A good list of upcoming movies that I like to look at. Notables are Terminator 3 and Matrix 2. There is a god!

Posted by rich at 11:55 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)