I bought a new TV yesterday. It was kind of inevitable that I’d trade in the old CRT for an HDTV of some sort at some point, but I guess the PS3 was the tipping point. It just didn’t make sense to have both a Blu-Ray and HD-DVD player in the apartment, and not have a decent HDTV. I got a 32″ LG from Best Buy. It’s this model. It works great with the PS3, but that’s the only device I have hooked up via HDMI at this point. I only had one HDMI cable in the apartment, and I didn’t want to pay Best Buy’s price for HDMI cables. Instead, I ordered some from MonoPrice. When they arrive, I’ll be able to hook up the HD-DVD also.
Alas, there’s not much I can do with the cable box / Tivo combination. That’s composite at best. I can get a new HD cable box from Cablevision, but that’s probably not going to do me much good unless I trade up to an HD DVR, which I’m really not ready to do yet.
The Wii can’t do HDMI, but I can trade up from composite to component, which my friend tells me is worthwhile. I should have ordered a Wii component cable set from Monoprice when I ordered the HDMI cables from them, but I didn’t think of it until after I’d placed the order. Looking around, it does seem that Wii component cables are nearly as overpriced as HDMI cables — $6 from Monoprice, $30 elsewhere.
I’m also thinking about getting an antenna, so I can pick up over-the-air HDTV. Antennas are cheap enough, though I’m not sure how well they’ll work here in Somerville. We’re basically too far from both New York and Philly to pick up regular TV or radio stations from either market without some grief, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to pick up a few stations with a good antenna.
Category: video
Venture Bros!
Warner Bros. Plans to Sell Movies Only on Blu-ray
Of course, this happens right after I pick up an HD-DVD player! One of the quotes in this article is pretty dire: “We expect HD DVD to ‘die’ a quick death.” I don’t know if that’s going to happen. I think a lot of people picked up HD-DVD players for Christmas, and I don’t think they’ll be looking to throw them out just yet. At least, I’m not looking to throw mine out! There are still a fair number of titles out on HD-DVD, so I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to get a bit of use out of my player over the next couple of years. I guess it may go the way of my laser disc player by, say, 2010, though, huh?
Airplane!
This is pretty much how I feel this week.
Lecture of a Lifetime
…and you can see the whole talk here, if you’re curious. Really good stuff.
new Peerflix system
Peerflix has pretty much completely relaunched their service, effective today. I haven’t really used Peerflix in the last month or two. I’ve had no DVDs to send out, and I was at zero Peerbux, so nothing was coming in. The new system assigns a dollar value to each DVD instead of using the old Peerbux system. I’m not sure that I like the new site. I think they need to fix some stuff before it’ll be as useful as the old site. I’m also not sure if I like the new dollar-value system. I guess I’ll leave a few oddball DVDs listed in Peerflix and, if they get requested, I’ll send them out. We’ll see how it works.
RiffTrax
I just discovered RiffTrax this weekend. This is basically a project where Mike Nelson, of MST3K fame, riffs on a movie (in MST3K style) and then releases the audio track as an MP3, which you can then play as you watch the movie on DVD. (He includes a few devices to help you keep the two in sync.) While this is obviously a bit of a kludge, it gets around the issues that MST3K had with licensing movies, and allows him to do movies that he’d never be able to get the rights to do, like The Matrix, X-Men, and Star Wars: Phantom Menace, all of which I downloaded and watched/listened to this weekend. (I’ll readily admit that I already own the DVDs for those three movies.) There was some pretty funny stuff on all three of them. Lots of Jar-Jar jokes for Star Wars, of course, and the usual assortment of oddball pop culture references and general silliness that you’d find in an episode of MST3K.
After discovering Rifftrax, I did a little searching, and found that there are quite a few other sites out there offering alternate commentaries for movies, some funny and some serious. There’s Commentary Central, offering an index of popular commentaries, and DVD PodBlast, offering a number of freely-downloadable commentaries on generally bad movies. And there’s the strange Wizard People, Dear Reader, which is an oddball alternate audio track for the first Harry Potter movie.
To help make the whole process of listening to these things a little easier, there’s a program called Sharecrow, that basically just plays a DVD movie (from your computer’s DVD drive) and an MP3 file at the same time, keeping them in sync, and letting you pause them simultaneously. Of course, this doesn’t work if you want to watch the movie on your TV. The method I used with Rifftrax was to play the DVD on my normal DVD player, while playing the MP3 on my laptop, which I just plopped down on the couch so I could easily hear it and control it.
I’m not sure if I’ll bother downloading any more of these right now, but I’ll definitely keep an eye on the Rifftrax site and see if they do any other movies that I’m really interested in.
Jigsaw
Jigsaw: fun little puppet cartoons.
Dr Who DVDs
It looks like the current Doctor who series will be available on DVD in February 2006. Kind of pricey though — $100 retail for the set.
Comic Book Guy
Comic Book Guy’s real name was revealed during last night’s post-football Simpson’s episode: Jeff Albertson. Not terribly exciting, but it sounds about right. Also, there was a brief shot of CBG’s web site, www.dorks-gone-wild.com, which is, of course, now a real web site, presumably created by the Simpson’s folks.