theMediaman.com

Wow. Busy week.

Monday after work I met with some fellows at Juice Productions downtown. By Wednesday afternoon I had resigned from Livewire.

My last day will be the day after Labour Day. I will be leaving on my eighth anniversary of starting at Livewire. To put that in perspective, I spent nine years going from Kindergarten to grade 8 in public school.  I’ve almost spent as much time with Livewire as I have at Steele St. Public School.

It’s a real shift for me.  For the last four or five years I’ve been trying to push my way into more video and DVD work. For the last nine I’ve been trying to find  a job in the downtown core. Years of job searching managed to culminate in a single, whirlwind week.

I’ll probably go into more detail in a later post (and better composed), but for now I’ll say that I’m going to help the office move towards more Blu-ray production. I’ll be able to utilize my animation/programming background, and extensive experience with DVD production (al beit for corporate video productions…  zzz…)

It looks like a young and growing company, but they already have an extraordinary number of titles under their belt. It’ll feel good to be doing work that’s seen by thousands instead of hundreds or dozens.

I wonder what it will feel like the first time I see my work on the shelf at Blockbuster or Future Shop.

The location is supurb. Adelaide and Peter, between Spadina and John St.  A block east is the Fox and Fiddle, my favourite pub - best price/quality combination of any pub downtown. Just north of that is the Paramount Scotiabank Theatre, and just south is a Tim Hortons… a REAL Tim Hortons. No more four-timbit-selections for me anymore.

A five minute walk takes me all the way up Spadina’s rich Chinese district, or to the SkyDome Rogers Centre for a Jays game.  Three blocks will put me in front of Simone’s workplace.

I’m seriously waiting for the other shoe to drop. This job is exactly what I’ve been wanting and training myself for, it’s a perfect location and it is timed perfectly as I start my new life with Simone.

Even the cat’s feeling better.  Life is good.

Following the dismissal of Peter Silverman and the final nail in the coffin of Speakers Corner, it’s been announced that Ed The Sock is also leaving the recently purchased station.

While it’s reasonable to think that Silverman can relax in a belated retirement his services have been invaluable to many “small guys” around the city, even helping out Simone’s parents at one point.

Speakers Corner has been absent for a year or two while the Queen and John corner has been undergoing renovations (although it turns out the episodes are still airing) The outright cancellation isn’t too shocking. However, they’ll soon move into the busiest pedestrian corner in this part of Canada. Why announce that they want to chop it?

Steve Kerzner (aka. Ed The Sock) is accepting it graciously, and I think in the ten years since I hosted the most popular site on the web dedicated to him (including his own, official site), I imagine he’s become tired of the role. What he could do with the character peaked years ago and has sort of lived on in spite of that.

An additional irony is the fact that Ed got his start on the Rogers community channel.

If they were replacing it with good material, then I could understand. Instead, Rogers is just positioning the cross-Canada CityTV stations with American syndicated shows that were rejected by Global and CTV. Pretty much the entire CityTV line-up is crappy Reality TV (not even “good” Reality TV).

My brother, John, hypothisized that the next thing that established CityTV as a unique broadcaster of niche content, Baby Blue movies, might be the next thing to go.

With my cable already cancelled, how could I further protest if such a horror were to come to pass?!?

As part of the effort to live without cable, using only TV-on-DVD and downloadable television, I picked up the first season of X-Files for about twenty bucks.

Wow, was that show ever Canadian!

I can’t decide whether the opening credits are very low budget (ie. Canadian) or just typical of the early 90’s. The post Se7en world has spoiled us with engrossing, AfterEffects-produced opening sequences. I remember I used to keep the TV on after one of my shows just to watch the opening for The Practice, even though I had no intention of watching the episode.

Glacing back to this early-90’s relic is great. Newer shows with high production values can successfully disguise Vancouver as anywhere else, but the early X-files episodes managed to do so with clever framing. However, one of the first things I’ve noticed about the series is that about half of the episodes throughout the first season take place (at least to some extent) in the woods.  Western United States, mid-west, New England, anywhere that there’s trees, that’s where Fox and Scully are likely to find their next case. I never noticed it before, but when you watch a half-dozen episodes over a few nights that kind of repetition becomes apparent.

There were also a surprising number of themes introduced in the first season that were spread out through the series.  Super Soldiers, Lone Gunmen, Smoking Man and even the device implanted in Scully in a later season are all introduced. Those last two are actually featured in the pilot episode.

I was a bandwagonner. Although I didn’t jump off when David Duchovny left the series (as many did) I didn’t get into the series until after a few seasons. One of my earlier memories at University of Waterloo was how empty Fed Hall (the on-campus club) was on the night of the X-Files season premiere (”is Fox really dead?” asked the previous season’s cliffhanger). No one in the club at 9:59pm, and a long lineup by 10:30. That’s about when I started watching it. 

So, for me at least, these episodes feel somewhat new if only in the fact that I have not seen many of them. On the other hand, I also feel nostolgia in watching an episode introduce a multi-season story arc whose conclusion I already know.

John made the point that the Fox Channel wouldn’t let a show like X-Files survive now.  It didn’t show a healthy Neilson Ratings until the third or fourth seasons. Had it been cancelled, it would have drastically changed television as we know it. X-Files was one of the landmark shows of the 90’s, and the storytelling style can be seen today in shows like Lost and Heroes.

On a related note, Simone and I watched the last episode of jPod last night. Whoever thought it was a good idea to move a TV show aimed at twenty-somethings to a Friday night should be dragged out into the street and shot. There’s no way a show aimed at that age group could survive…

…well, except X-Files.

Edit May 1, 2008: I wrote the above entry very quickly over a shortened lunchhour. After reading it again, I decided to fix some grammar, put in some context, and add a friggin’ point to some paragraphs where I completely forgot to do so.

Shortly after the breakdown of talks between the Sony camp and the Toshiba camp to release a unified HD disc format, avoiding a costly format war, I registered the domain name, “HDvsBlu.com”.

I intended to make it a central hub analysing the war and how it affects the most important side, the consumers - a group rarely represented in such discussions. However, for one reason or another, I never finished development.

Tomorrow, the domain renewal is up. After a few years of spending a ten-spot renewing it, I’m going to let it expire. The war is over, and Sony is rewarding itself for the win by jacking up the price of players.

I think I’m sticking with DVDs for the time being. Unfortunately, it looks like some material I want might never be released.  A favourite mini-series of mine was the “Biography of the Millennium: 100 People - 1000 Years”. I remember being particularly proud of myself at guessing the number one and two spots as going to Johannes Gutenburg and Isaac Newton respectively.

Regularly, I would check the Internet to see if they had released it on DVD. I remember seeing it on VHS a while ago, and it can still be found on that antiquated format. However, even if the next-gen format may not make it into my home entertainment system anytime soon, I can’t imagine VHS staying much longer.

I contacted A&E to see if they were planning to redistribute it anytime soon. To be frank, I was a bit surprised at the speed of the reponse. About one hour after sending an email, this is what I got.

Unfortunately, this program is no longer available for sale. Most likely due to a rights expiration issue with certain key elements within the program.

Stupid copyright law. Basically what is being said is that, short of going to work for A&E and getting access to their library of episodes, I’m never going to get to see that mini-series again. What a waste.

Thank goodness the 2nd season of “Joey” is coming out next month. Now there’s something the world needs more of. Short-run spinoff series that history will judge as little more than the answer to a trivia question.

Well, not so much a review. I’ve only been using the player for a few days - less time than it took for the delivery. Tiger Direct updated my billing address, but not the shipping address, so I needed to phone UPS no less than three times to get the shipment redirected. To criticize Tiger Direct would be a waste of time. I’ve rarely had a purchase from them that went seamlessly, and I had prepared myself in advance for something going wrong.

The reason I chose to buy from them was that they had the best DVD/DivX player for the best price. Brand name, card reader, decent online reviews, and reads DivX movies from DVD-R. That last point is good because you can fit an entire season of a TV series on one disc. It also supports HDMI and I’ve read that it is excellent at upscaling footage to HDTV formats. Two features I won’t be using until my 6/49 investments pan out.

Lately, Simone and I have taken to watching HBO and Showtime TV shows. Since they can take many months to show up on TMN in Canada, we’ve been forced chosen to download them. I realize this is taking ad dollars away from the people who deserve it, but I refuse to play the game while the RIAA, MPAA and the Canadian counterparts are squabbling over distribution rights. Season 2 of Stargate: Atlantis was finished in Canada before half the episodes showed south of the border. It then played all the way through season 3 in the US before even starting broadcast here. It’s petty, but I just can’t forgive them for that.

Since Simone’s laptop isn’t equipped with a video-out (only VGA out) I figured it was worth picking up a proper DivX player in order to watch it on my big screen 27″ CRT with stereo surround sound. I’ve done a test of the player’s compatibility with different file formats, but I’ll be leaving a more comprehensive test for a later time.

One of my favourite features doesn’t even have anything to do with the packaged product. My television is RCA and so is my VCR (yes, I still have it hooked up) and they both use the exact same remote. It’s supposed to be a Universal Remote, but except for one model of digital cable box I’ve never had it work properly with any other devices. The new DVD remote is pretty ugly and the buttons are small - the complete antithesis of all prior RCA remotes.

Luckily, nearly all DVD functions are available and work by default from my old television universal remote. It’s missing the Title Menu function and the skip-chapter button, but everything else is on there. If I do need those other functions then I’ll just grab the fugly remote that was packaged with the player.

I loaded four episodes of Entourage that Simone and I hadn’t seen yet. Two worked, two didn’t. Of the two that didn’t work, one was at a resolution higher than 720×480 and simply wouldn’t display.  The other problematic file I suspect was partially corrupted, but I haven’t tested it much.

The player handles .AVI, .DIVX, .MP4 and even .OGM containers for video. It supports multiple languages and subtitles as external text files. The MP4 support seems the most limited, which is unfortunate. I haven’t tested any formal podcasts yet, but I found that the 480×272 PSP-formatted MP4s did not work. It’s not too much of a problem since most shows I watch on my PSP are just transcoded from some other video format.

When you put in a disc with video files instead of a DVD movie (or switch over to the card reader) then a file browser pops up. It looks very pretty, and displays JPEGs as thumbnails when you select them, but there’s not much else nice to say about it. It only supports about 13 characters, so when you burn discs, name your files with this in mind. The original file of “Entourage_S04E05….avi” would only display “ENTOURAGE_S04″. If you have multiple episodes, they would all show as “ENTOURAGE_S04″.

Removing the thumbnail pane would give the interface more space for more letters, but I don’t think that’s relevant. My guess is that this is just a limitation of the player’s firmware. Probably the most disappointing thing about the player.

What I assumed I would be most disappointed with was the load time, or the limited file support. I was happily surprised when I saw that the player loads the disc quickly, and that it even supports OGM, subtitles and multiple audio tracks (something I don’t think is even documented).

I’m calling the player “Murdoch 2.0″. Even though I didn’t build it, the player is a final replacement for my custom-built case I made from an old Pentium 200 with a Sigma Designs Xcard to play back DivX movies on my television. The final product was more complete than the above link shows, but that page was more to test out what CSS can do than show off Murdoch. That project met with limited success, but was mostly a hobby to keep trying new things to turn old, useless computer parts into a machine that could rival the newest Windows Media Centre PCs.

I’ll post more technical mumbo-jumbo later after I document the results of the DivXTest CD.