Category: Movies

  • Who do I need to slap upside the head?

    Every once in a while, while reading Wikipedia to try and figure out why some show from my childhood isn’t available on DVD, I read that music rights are holding back the DVD.  I understand that these shows were created back before DVDs and, therefore, some kind of weird legal loophole is keeping the tv…

  • WALL*E is, hands down, the best Pixar Movie Ever!

    I don’t recall if I’ve ever mentioned it on this blog, but I hate going to the movies. I’ve nearly given it up. The only exceptions are Pixar movies and the very few movies that I can’t wait until they come out on DVD to watch. So today I went to see WALL*E with my…

  • Big Buck Bunny has been Released to the net!

    Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo. Here’s the Blender Institute’s latest movie.  It’s much, much better than Elephants Dream.  Check it out!

  • Upgrading to Mythdora 5.0

    Written Friday, 2 May 2008 Today I decided to upgrade my Mythdora to the latest verison, 5.0. I downloaded the CD media and booted into the install. I had to do a text install to be able to watch it on my TV. Then I just needed to yum install the kmod-nvidia drivers. (Although, first…

  • Another Look at Thoggen (Part 3)

    So, to wrap up a review I started a long time ago. So I took a good look at the files and I had an xvid at 704×400 (I cropped a little) and an ogg theora with 720×480 resolution. Generally speaking, the ogg theora had much better audio/video sync. Throughout the entire film, the audio…

  • Is it really stealing?

    Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as “piracy.” In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them. If you don’t believe that illegal copying is just like kidnapping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word “piracy”…

  • If you liked 300….

    Then you may find the following a bit entertaining.

  • Fair Use

    Stanford University, a leader in trying to get Congress and the public to understand the importance of the Public Domain have done what I’ve been dreaming of doing for a few months now. They decided to test the doctrine of Fair Use in copyrights by creating the following video. Any Disney fan should be sure…

  • Why the TV and Movie Companies have it so wrong

    Let’s pretend I’m Joe College-Grad Consumer and I’m trying to evaluate how I should obtain my video content. I’m interested in watching shows as they come out – not later when they’re on box sets. Let’s see, I could buy my content on iTunes, Amazon Unbox, or some other such service. If I buy my…

  • That was fast!

    Ars Technica is reporting that Netflix is promising that they will be working very hard to get Macintoshes supported. Looks like they read my letter and now they have my brother covered. Now they need to work on Linux support. And drop the DRM because I guess they ignored my paragraph on how it’s BS…

  • An Open Letter to Netflix

    I am not an unreasonable man and I full understand your need to focus on making your “watch now” feature debut available exclusively to Windows users. After all, they do make up about 90% of computer users. However, I do have some problems with this as a long time plan. First of all, it does…

  • Dilbert Movie

    Looks like, mentioned a couple of times in this post that there will be a Dilbert movie. This one seems to hint that it will be a live movie rather than a cartoon. I think that would be a horrible idea. Cartoon/newspaper comics make lousy movies – see The Flintstones movies and The Dennis the…

  • SCO vs IBM as a part in The Princess Bride

    I found this online and had to include it because this is my favorite scene in The Princess Bride. It concerns the current lawsuit between IBM and SCO. (Click that link to find out more about it). It appears on slashdot and is written by Titanium Fox: SCO: So, it is down to you, and…

  • Another Look at Thoggen (Part 2)

    So, according to Thoggen’s count, it took 4.45 hours to encode into Theora. At least with this DVD it seems that the coding team has fixed their error where the software seems to keep going past the end of the DVD. As far as I recall from one year ago, it didn’t add more infomation…

  • Another Look at Thoggen (Part 1)

    Thoggen is a tool for backing up DVDs to the ogg container with the theora video codec and vorbis audio codec. Theora is the darling video codec in Linux because it is unencumbered by patents. There are other free formats, such as Xvid – a format compatible with Divx, but it is based on MPEG-3,…