Quick Tip: Movies on the plane

Make Your Movies Truly Laptop Friendly

If you know you are going to be traveling, and you want to bring some entertainment with you (namely, movies), such as the best film ever made — The Dukes of Hazzard, today’s quick tip is for you.

Tip of the day: The energy required to spin the disc, and power the laser beam inside your DVD (or Blu Ray) drive is hard on your laptop’s battery, and can drain the charge rather quickly… maybe before the movie ends.

The trick is to “rip” (geekspeak for “copy”) the DVD to a file, and keep the file on your hard drive, or a thumb drive. Playing the file (watching the movie) this way is less work for your computer and your battery will last longer. Kind of a “must” for those long flights!

Today’s free download(s):
For simple, one-click “rips” of your DVD movies, bitRipper is hard to beat. It was a for-pay utility, and now is available for free.

And for those of you who want to watch your movies on an iDevice, HandBrake is a highly recommended Open Source tool to consider. It’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Copyright 2007-9 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

Share this post :

Get new life out of your old DVD’s

Many of us put off buying a Hi-Def disc player until the “format war” was settled, and many of us still haven’t shelled out the big  bucks for the winner, Blu-ray, yet. Instead, we keep on watching our collection of movies using our “standard”, old, DVD players.

This works fine until you bring a HDTV into the the scenario.. and then our old movies look sorta, well, old. (Certainly they don’t look Hi-Def!

The truth is simply this, to show you an actual HD image, your HDTV’s “input” (used to be called a “signal”) has to be HD– such as what you can get on (some) over-the-air channels, (some) satellite, and (HD) cable.. and Blu-ray discs.
What is missing from that list is all the DVD’s you’ve purchased so far— they’re “standard definition” (SD). Bummer.

So.. do you have to go out and purchase a whole new movie library, and a HD (Blu-ray) player to enjoy the “Hi-Def experience” you purchased the HDTV for? {Many of us would find this prohibitive.. Blu-ray players are around $400.} Fortunately, the answer is no.

Tip of the day: Enjoy near HD quality images from your (old) DVD’s buy purchasing a player that is capable of “scaling” SD signals up to 1080p (HD). [note: you want this ability even if your HDTV is less than 1080p] This “scaling” is sometimes called “upscaling”, “upsampling”, and sometimes “upconversion“. More info than you’d want to know about this can be read here. These types of players can be found for around $100.

I won’t bore you with the technical specs (you can click the provided links for that) but  I will say that upscaling uses a sort of intelligent “magic” to fill in the pixels required for the HD image.

Your HDTV has some scaling ability built into it, and this will help provide a fair picture from a SD source. It is possible that it does a good enough job with your DVD’s. But to get better results than you already are getting, a player with this capability is the way to go. Your SD DVD’s will appear much more “Hi-Def”, and you’ll enjoy watching them (again and again, if you’re like me) for years to come.

Today’s free link: (Yes, loyal Friends, I have posted this one before..) With the ability to scan your RAM, Registry, hard drives, and external storage devices for known data-mining, advertising, and tracking components, Ad-Aware 2008 can clean your system easily, allowing you to maintain a higher degree of privacy while you surf the Web

Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

Share this post :

Blu-ray disc “wins”, X-Box owners lose

It seems appropriate for me to take a moment to discuss the things in life that really matter. Today I’m going to talk about how gigantic corporations affect your life.. or, maybe not.. I haven’t decided yet.

All over, in all the info-tainment media (those folks who pass themselves off as “the news”) has been the headline that Blu-ray has won “the format wars”. (Yes, folks–there’s been a format war going on this whole time!) The info-tainment geniuses, future-predictors, and PR shills (aka “reporters”) also tell us that it was Target’s announcement of its decision to stock only Blu-ray that ended the war and sealed HD-DVD‘s fate.
Wrong.

The fact is, Microsoft recognized that their Halo 3 blackmail got just about as many of their mediocre Xbox 360’s sold this Christmas as they were ever going to sell, that nobody was buying the HD-DVD “add-on” box, and are (probably) pulling out of the competition.. In essence, surrendering to the PS3 and the Wii (Sony and Nintendo). It was Microsoft that was keeping the HD-DVD format in the picture, so that it could compete with Sony’s PS3 which was enormously (outrageously?) expensive because it included a (proprietary) Blu-ray drive, and MS figured they needed a Hi Def drive too.
The real winner — and the sales figures tell you why — was Nintendo and the Wii (fun, affordable, and not crud.) And, (this is a hoot) the PlayStation 2 sold more units last Christmas than the X-Box or the PS3.

So yes, folks, there was a “war” being waged, but it wasn’t a disc format war, it was a game console war.

Why should you care about any of this? Well, let’s review a little: HD-DVD and Blu-ray are both laser-written disc formats.  For the computer user, this primarily means storage (recording); and for the movie watcher, this means making sure you bring home “the ‘right’ kind”.

Let me first deal with the folks who care because it is what the movies they buy/rent come on, and get them out of the way. Have you asked yourself, why are you even dealing with discs? Can’t you get “Premium” Channels? (I realize some can’t.. or won’t.) Is pay-per-view too convenient? If you have broadband, there’s also IPTV. There’s TiVo. There’s Netflix and iTunes. Before very long, all entertainment “content” is going to be provided “on demand”.. movies, your favorite shows, the “news”, all of it. Download and view, or watch it “streamed”. The discs are already obsolete. You’re going to be storing your shows on hard drives.. if you aren’t already. When On-demand reaches us adequately.. we won’t even store it at all.

For computer users, the keyword is “storage” and (1st generation) Blu-ray can hold 50 Gigs to HD-DVD’s 30: a no-brainer. HD-DVD allowed me to “skin” my face over Harrison Ford’s so I can make it look like I’m piloting the Millennium Falcon??? Pleeeease.
But since we often need to backup more than 50 GBs, and you can get 750GB hard-drives for much less than a Blu-ray burner (which also write faster)…
The technology could have and should have come out 5-7 years ago.

All the media attention to this topic adds up to much ado about nothing (including this article). Both formats were obsolete before they even got started. And I blame the gaming console… and I think it’s worth repeating– the older PlayStation 2 out-sold both of the newer consoles!
Who knew Target had so much power?

*To any dedicated journalist out there: I wasn’t referring to you, but to those other guys.

[update: I read that last month in Japan, the Wii sold 331,627 consoles, the PS3 89,131 (¼ as many), and the Xbox… 14,079.]

Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved.

Share this post :