A Small Step into the HD World

An early Christmas gift from my father arrived yesterday in the form of a Samsung Blu-ray drive for my PC. Since it came with PowerDVD 9, I was able to try out some HD movies on the system for the first time. TRON: Legacy is an exceptional visual experience, so I fired it up in the drive.

What a fantastic looking film it is in HD! While my monitor only goes up to 1680 x 1050 and is exactly between 720p and 1080p, it looked great. Just one problem. No way to do screen captures from PowerDVD and DRM prevents my usual utilities from working correctly. All I get is a black rectangle where the picture is.

Well, being the industrious and stubborn sort I looked for a way around this. While I eventually found one that didn’t cost money (for the moment), it is not the best solution because it involves backing the movie up as an MKV file. Some detail is lost on TRON: Legacy to my eye, but it seemed to do fine with Gammera: Attack of the Legion.

Click on the following for HD sized (1280 pixels wide):

The Disney logo looks sharp here.

Not as satisfied here, but scaling issues may be at work. Oh for a a 1080p monitor!

The film looks grainy, but is miles better than I expected. HD is fun for examining the model buildings that are always destroyed in these films.

It is very silly that screen captures are not allowed. Do the studios really think we will sit and takes stills of every frame to recreate the movies?

I probably will upgrade the PowerDVD software but I am still looking for a better way to do screen captures. AnyDVD is what a lot of people use, but the price of 80 Euros is exorbitant! MakeMKV did an odd job with TRON and there are waves of block distortions going through every scene. Perhaps the DRM is the culprit.

So my first step into the HD world has been taken and I am liking it, despite the screen capturing issues.

Odds and Ends 11-28-2011

It is sale time across the USA and things are wrapping up with today being Cyber Monday. Sadly the one deal I was most looking forward to today was not as good as expected, so now joy for me. Especially since the back up deal I was eyeballing sold out by today. Instead I got a set of Ginsu knives at Newegg.

Wish I had the money to pony up for this refurbished Samsung 27” monitor. It is the single best deal I have found on Cyber Monday. Maybe somebody else will see it here and get themselves a nice deal.

I did score several Blu-ray deals from Amazon before Black Friday officially began, so I am not empty handed. 2001, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the 1990’s Gammera trilogy will be making their way here. It should be fun installing the Blu-ray drive when it arrives. While my monitor is only 1680 x 1050, it can handle the HDCP copy protection protocols and does better than 720p.

A friend of mine also gave me Fallout: New Vegas as a gift from a Steam sale, so that has been fun. Mad Max meets 50’s radioactive monster movies is how I would describe it. Taking out giant mutant ants is like being dropped into the movie Them, an old favorite of mine. You can even set them on fire like in the movie.

Watching the presidential primary for the GOP has been painful. Cain’s implosion isn’t as much from the false accusations but from the disastrous handling of nearly everything by his staff. He is badly damaged by this and it shows they are not remotely ready for taking on the well oiled Obama machine.

Meanwhile, delusional conservatives have convinced themselves that Newt Gingrich is a true conservative and electable. Both are false propositions and they need to deal with reality. I say that as a very conservative man. How they can rally around someone with the immense personal and political baggage that Newt has is beyond me.

“Anybody but Romney” is not sufficient to explain this madness. With Mitt you may not know what you are getting as far as worrying he’ll betray conservatives, but with Newt you are guaranteed that he will stab you in the back, front, sides, and then bite you on the ankles. Just because someone is good in debates does not mean you ignore his track record. We already have a raging narcissist in the White House and replacing him with another is not going to go well.

Yesterday was a lost day again. Being very ill I ended up sleeping through most of it. Having watched a bad movie for Turkey Day, I decided to start rewatching Stargate: Atlantis over from the beginning. Oddly enough it evoked a feeling of better times and that is somewhat discomfiting.

UPDATE on Herman Cain:

Put a fork in him, he is completely done. At this point it doesn’t matter whether or not he is guilty, there is only so much damage that can be taken. It is also a cautionary tale in regards to Gingrich. Once the media takes him seriously his multiple infidelities will get a lot of attention.

Gratitude

Being more grateful for things is something I am always working on and I find myself needing to more this Thanksgiving.  For some reason, ready reasons to be thankful are fleeing me at the moment.

One thing I need to do is stop comparing my life to that of others around me. It will come up short 99% of the time as far as achievements go, so letting go of that benchmark would help a great deal. But that is easier said than done, so it may be a few more years before that happens.

Perhaps I should write some things out and hope to actually feel them a little more tomorrow.

Some things to be grateful for, in random order:

• Food
• Shelter
• Heat
• Electricity
• Indoor plumbing
• The Atonement made by Jesus Christ
• Friends
• Family
• Music
• Art
• Sunlight
• Books
• The Internet
• Cats (depending on patience levels)
• B Movies (Perfect for sick days)
• Gunpowder
• Kind words (even if they embarrass)

Well, I got farther than I thought I would, given the headache I’ve had most of the day. It is a start, at least.

I hope everyone has a good Thanksgiving and remembers what the holiday commemorates. From articles in the papers, a lot of people are not feeling the spirit due to economic problems. The pilgrims would look at what most of us have and think us wealthy beyond belief. So please, find some things to give thanks for!

To the Future… AND BEYOND!!!

I have no idea why I typed that title, but there it is. Working on posts for the future is the topic, it beats me what the “beyond” is all about.

Zulu is up for my next movie review and is currently in the first draft stage. Being a beautiful film, I took far too many screen captures and culling them too too long. There will be two companion reviews of the soundtrack, one right away and another to come later. Any excuse to play John Barry composed music is a good excuse.

It looks like I will be getting an early Christmas present of a Blu-ray player for the PC, which means redoing the screen caps for TRON: Legacy and the making of lots of wallpaper for my desktop. With Zulu out in an affordable and apparently brilliant Blu-ray, I will have to get my hands on that sooner or later.

Captain America: The First Avenger will be reviewed in the near future in DVD and Blu-ray. That will be easier than usual, since I have the in-theater review to work off of.

I will be starting reviews of one my three favorite animes of all time, Area 88. Besides Studio Ghibli’s movies, this TV series helped convince me that the format can produce legitimately good material. It has a film noir feel about it without being visually noir, strangely enough. It certainly is grim material, being a story about mercenary pilots fighting and dying in the skies over a fictional Middle East country in the 1980’s.

Sorting all my DVD’s into alphabetical order has shaken up what I planned to review yet again. The desire to tread down less seen paths is strong and that means my more obscure titles will get some attention. But do I dare review The Lord of the Rings movies as well? If nothing else, they would be good exercise in shortening reviews which is something I need to work on.

I am still working up the courage to review the worst movie ever made. Being one of the few in the world to actually watch the entire thing, I dread seeing it again.

Health 11-21-2011

Well, all in all that was a lost week. This year has been hard enough that I found myself surprised to be taken down by intensification of my CFS symptoms rather than a complication on top. Ironically, that may be a sign of improvement.

On to the new week.

Health 11-17-2011

Yesterday I was sure today was going to be a good day, one where I would get things done and be productive. Reality, however, disagreed with me once today arrived. The crossword puzzle was a warning, taking sixteen minutes despite being painfully easy. But Audiosurf went well so it looked good. Ah well.

No major health issues to report, other than the fatigue was bad from the beginning and even typing this out is difficult due to spacing out.  Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Numerical Uncertainty

Or how you never know what is really going on around the Web.

For my personal amusement, I have had Google Analytics running on this blog site for some time now with only a brief lapse of a couple of days when I changed over to the newer template. Thanks to things like NoScript and other blockers of content, I can never be sure how accurate the visitor stats are, but it does give me a rough idea of who, what, and where.

Being a tiny fish in a vast blogosphere, From the Sidelines’ stats are nothing to brag about. Still, it is interesting to me what gets looked at since I do not flog the blog in dreams of gaining wealth and fame. This blog has been up for over five years now, something that surprised me when I went back through my posts a little while back.

One thing that fascinates me is how Google Analytics and Blogger’s stats do not quite line up. Let us take a look at the top posts past month, October 16 to November 15, for comparison. Blogger is first, then Google Analytics:

Bleach Season 1: The Substitute, Episodes 1-2
Jul 26, 2011   
149 106 Pageviews

CITIZEN KANE (1941)
Jun 22, 2011   
132 102 Pageviews

Howl’s Moving Castle
Nov 25, 2009
106 80 Pageviews

Gojira (Godzilla 1954)
Nov 25, 2009
80 26 Pageviews

Godzilla: Tokyo SOS (2003)
Dec 18, 2009, 2 comments
61 30 Pageviews

Battle of Britain (1969)
Jul 22, 2011
56 85 Pageviews

Bleach Season 1: The Substitute, Ep. 2-3
Jul 28, 2011
43 44 Pageviews

Smallville: Absolute Justice Review Part 1
Sep 13, 2010
40 39 Pageviews

Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidora (2001)
Dec 9, 2009
39 36 Pageviews

Only Yesterday (1991)
Dec 3, 2009, 2 comments
34 29 Pageviews

So there are some very large discrepancies between the statistics gathered. One pattern I think I am detecting is the blocking of Google scripts by people concerned about their privacy. All of this makes me wonder how in the world the advertising rates can be calculated for websites.

Note: Blogger doesn’t list the home page for some reason. Google Analytics does and says it was visited 87 times for third place by its stats. It also has a whopping average time of 5:18 spent on it. Yes, that is five minutes and eighteen seconds. In 2009, the average time spent on a web page was 56 seconds. Something is very screwy with that number, methinks!

Now for some fun if probably inaccurate stats for the past year (12 months) from Google Analytics:

2,304 Visits

1,816 Absolute Unique Visitors

3,927 Pageviews

1.70 Pages/Visit

67.45% Bounce Rate

00:01:05 Avg. Time on Site

77.82% % New Visits

Browsers used to visit:

1. Firefox 1,120 48.61%

2. Chrome 511 22.18%

3. Internet Explorer 389 16.88%

4. Safari 205 8.90%

5. Opera 41 1.78%

6. Android Browser 11 0.48%

7. Mozilla Compatible Agent 11 0.48%

8. Playstation 3 5 0.22%

9. IE with Chrome Frame 3 0.13%

10. Opera Mini 3 0.13%

Firefox is still on top after all these years, but Chrome is gaining. Internet Explorer is fading fast.

Visitors came from 78 countries and territories:

I looked at that and I suspect that is a fair representation of Internet penetration across the globe.

What does it all mean? Well, not a lot but one thing that I have confirmed is that pop culture dominates the Net. Also, most of my hits come from people doing image searches, something I rarely do these days. That intrigues me.

I am pleased to report that the Citizen Kane review is one of the most hit pages on the blog. Battle of Britain is slowly climbing up and thanks to the Philippine aviation buffs at timawa.net Thirteen Days got a lot of attention. Bleach becoming hit so often is quite a surprise, since I would have thought reviews of it are done to death and images from it are abundant on the Net.

The biggest surprise is how popular the Smallville: Absolute Justice review has been. There are a lot more Justice Society of America fans out there than I ever suspected. It is nice to see those 1940’s comic book characters still getting some love seventy years after being created.