If you ever came across a situation when you had lost your DVD from your car shelf, or lost it from your DVD rack, you had probably pondered about how to retrieve the lost songs. May be your cravings were about the lost music, but not so much about the DVD. You may get DVD’s [...]
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Here’s a candidate for the Canadian parent of the year award. Police in Richmond B.C. are looking for a couple that used their kids to load up on over $3000 worth of Blu-ray and DVD discs from Future Shop. The estimate is that the couple took between 80 to 100 movies. The parents took the children into the store, and then allowed them to walk around picking the movies that the wanted to watch, and then loaded them into the stroller. The couple then left the store without paying for the merchandise. Of course in the US, they would have been harassed and then let go, only to find that all the cases were filled with rocks. Police are currently looking for help in identifying the couple and the children.
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I love how this is controversial. Sony Pictures (creators of Spider-Man ) chairman Michael Lynton has suggested that movie theaters offer healthy snacks in addition to their usual parade of garbage, and people have reacted with blind rage . How dare you tell me how to live my life, you pinko liberal communist! It’s like, really? What is so terrible about not covering your popcorn with metric tons of liquid “butter”? You would think movie theater owners would go out of their way to make their theaters as welcoming as possible, right? Yes, last year was a record year for Hollywood, but take away Avatar , an outlier if there ever was one, and do the numbers look as hot? Not bloody likely. If I were a theater owner, I’d make it so that I’d have, yes, plenty of garbage (buttered popcorn, soda, etc.) on hand, but I’d also have fruits and vegetables to cater to the Whole Foods crowd. Can you imagine a small movie theater opening up in Park Slope that has arugula as a snack? I’d be a millionaire! A selection of the comments that made me laugh… Hmmmm, watching Terminator 12 eating blueberries. That should pack them in to the theater. I think I’ll wait for the DVD and have my popcorn at home. I hate liberals always telling me how to live my life. *** is he WANTING to kill of cinema?! *** He can have my popcorn when he pries it from my cold dead fingers. *** The sony idiot would make a perfect democrat congressman, one who loves to tell you how to live your life. When will the public quit voting for these morons? *** You might have already guessed it, but Drudge linked this story, too. I’m trying to remember the last time I went to a movie theater, and I’m pretty sure it was to see Casino Royale . I picked a Sunday 11am showing, figuring most of the troublemakers would still be hungover. But no! Who should sit next to me but a rather large woman with two bags of popcorn and a soda! What she eats is her business, obviously, but my God in Heaven she was rattling the bag like she was auditioning for Stomp . 3D cinema may be a draw right now, but the minute I break down and say, “Eh, let’s go see Alice in Wonderland ” and find that the theater is populated by loud, obnoxious people is the moment I walk right out the door. And where is it written that you have to eat at all during a movie? Can’t people sit still for two hours without ingesting 18 bags of Milk Duds? Flickr
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Everyone’s favorite Dances With Wolves remake, Avatar, is coming soon to Blu-ray and DVD. Just don’t expect many extras. Or 3-D. As reported by the great TheDigitalBits.com , 20th Century Fox will shortly announce a 4/22 release date for Avatar on Blu-ray and DVD. But be aware that if you want some bonus features, or 3D , you might have to double or even triple dip. According to the article: “Don’t expect any extras, however, because you won’t get any – just a menu…that’s being done to maximize the video and audio quality by devoting all the available disc space to it. Here’s the thing though: The studio obviously already knows its going to be double-dipping on the title later this year with a more elaborate multi-disc special edition…which shouldn’t come as any surprise to you. But neither this round, nor the November version, will be 3D. That’ll likely come in a third dip a year or two from now. You see, in order to sell more than a few dozen copies in 3D, Fox needs the market for 3D on Blu-ray (meaning capable players and displays) to… well, frankly EXIST… first. So for now, it’s movie-only versions on Earth Day, more elaborate versions in November and no 3D this year.” Personally, I’m hoping for a Kevin Costner audio commentary. He’s not too busy these days, and I think he’d probably do it for a hot sandwich at this point. Image from here, but I don’t know what it is.
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I could have sworn “piracy” was killing the movie industry. Apparently not, when you actually look at the data ! The year 2009 was the single best year in Hollywood history as far as “money” is concerned—if you can find a single decent movie produced by Hollywood last year I’d love to see it—where it made $29.9 billion in ticket sales alone. (Never mind how much Blu-ray and DVD sales will bring in.) So again: if piracy is killing the industry, how do you explain these numbers? Well, we’ll try to explain them. Last year was the year of Avatar — Avatar is 3D, to be exact. A ticket to a 3D showing cost quite a premium, something like $14-$15 (or more!) depending on your location instead of the usual $10ish. That’s pretty much the only explanation. Avatar was to Hollywood what the Wii was to Nintendo for a while there—simply a money-printing machine. Perhaps it speaks to an earlier thesis: you cannot “pirate” the 3D “experience,” so Hollywood should be flying high for a little while.
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Amazon is selling Futurama: The Complete Collection on DVD for $85, today only. The box set features 18 discs and over 33 hours of content. All your favorite characters are there: Bender, Fry, one-eyed Peg Bundy, you name it. Aside from all the episodes, you’ll get some other goodies as well. According to the product description: “Comic Con Exclusive includes all four volumes of Futurama, as well as 4 feature-length adventures: Bender’s Big Score, The Beast With A Billion Backs, Bender’s Game, Into the Wild Green Yonder all contained in a limited edition collectible Bender Head with a numbered letter from Matt Groening and David X. Cohen.” The collection normally sells on Amazon for $120 and, again, the deal’s good today only. Futurama: The Complete Collection [Amazon.com]
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Credit to Ring of Honor, the professional wrestling promotion, for embracing the Internet era. The promotion has launched a new download store that makes its extensive video library only a $10 download away. A legal download, mind you. It’s all a fan could ever ask for. The process is pretty easy. You visit the Web site, add the video of your choice—I selected Joe vs. Punk II , from October, 2004 (which received a 5-star rating from The Wrestling Observer newsletter)—then buy via PayPal. A link then appears in the Account area of the Web site. In there is a link to a plain ol’ ISO that you then download at your leisure. The servers don’t seem to be too beefy since the download is running only at around 300 KB/s right now (6:30pm). Still, it’s quite a bit faster than waiting for a plastic disc to arrive in the mail. It should also be noted that Ring of Honor regularly hosts Internet pay-per-view events, including one on April 3 . So, “figures out the Internet” may be a bit harsh. Companies like Ring of Honor have been fighting piracy for quite some time. There’s a couple fairly high profile BitTorrent sites that specialize in professional wrestling, and their DVDs are often ripped and posted and as soon as they’re released. It’s one thing to download a WWE DVD rip, where the company makes millions of dollars every year, but smaller guys like Ring of Honor truly do get hurt every time you fire up uTorrent. (Not to justify downloading WWE DVDs, of course.) But giving people an easy-to-use, inexpensive, and legal method to access their video library is to be commend, and it probably should have happened sooner. I’d much rather be given the option of paying $10 for an ISO than having to sift my way through this or that torrent site, worrying about whether or not there’s a seeder in the swarm.
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Right around the time the world’s financial markets started to collapse, back in 2008, RealNetworks, the folks behind RealPlayer, released RealDVD . It was a short-lived piece of software that made making DVD movie backups fairly painless— too painless for Hollywood, which immediately took RealNetworks to court, claiming all sorts of copyright infringement hokum. That’s all in the past now, for RealNetworks has settled with the six “major” Hollywood studios to the sum of $4.5 million. Ouch. The deal sees RealNetworks, yes, cough up $4.5 million for “costs and fees in connection with the litigation.” Some deal: you bring someone else to court, then make them pay all your bills. RealNetworks will also stop supporting RealDVD, and is in the process of refunding the purchase price to the 2,700 people who bought the thing. The company’s statement is sad: We are pleased to put this litigation behind us. This is another step toward fulfilling our commitment to simplify our company and focus on our core businesses. Until this dispute, Real had always enjoyed a productive working relationship with Hollywood. With this litigation resolved, I hope that in the future we can find mutually beneficial ways to use Real technology to bring Hollywood’s great work to consumers. “Core business”? Hasn’t Flash (and hopefully HTML5 ) made RealVideo irrelevant? I liked RealDVD, if only because it demonstrated quite clearly that Hollywood has no intention of letting you use the items you buy for your own ends. DVDs copied using RealDVD could only be played on that computer where it was ripped. It’s not like I could have borrowed Doug’s copy of Movie , then shared the resulting file with the other guys or anything. The point is, RealDVD is now dead as disco, but RealNetworks may have earned itself a little bit of geek cred in trying to stand up to big, bad Hollywood.
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A charming young buck by the name of John Herlihy of Google Europe believes, like most people in the Western World that desktop PCs will be dead in the next few years. However, he believes they’ll become irrelevant by the year 2013, which may put a damper on some PC makers’ sales forecasts. Smiling John, shown here, said: “In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs,” Herlihy told a baffled audience, echoing comments by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the recent GSM Association Mobile World Congress 2010 that everything the company will do going forward will be via a mobile lens, centring on the cloud, computing and connectivity. Now I’m of two minds here. Yes, I agree the desktop is going the way of the dodo. Laptops are strong enough to stand in for desktops these days and a nice docking system can go a long way to let the average Joe become desktop independent. However, I have a constellation of devices connected to my always-on PC that I wouldn’t have connected to my iPad. Even simple backup hardware is hard to connect over the cloud. Granted, he did say “research” and not “fragging zombies and rendering DVD menus for your own rip of What About Bob ,” so there’s a good chance he meant that the general populace will use mobile devices for most Google-related activity and desktops for the things at which desktops excel. Desktops still have a place, but its shrinking. I could see a thin client sitting on an office desk sooner than later, with email, storage, and office apps in a cloud. But for uber-nerds heavy iron is what we crave and what we’ll buy. You can’t stick two water cooled graphics cards into a laptop and still call it a laptop. What think you? Will PCs die out? via SiliconRepublic
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Looking for a decent web-browsing machine? Sellout.Woot! is selling the 18.4-inch Averatec all-in-one with Atom CPU and Windows XP for $300 today. I reviewed the model with the big-boy Athlon X2 processor and Windows Vista back in July, should you need more info . Specs: Intel Atom N270 CPU at 1.6GHz Windows XP Home Built-in Wi-Fi (b/g) Built-in DVD burner 18.4-inch screen at 1680
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