wonkablog

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.