My mom is about to "get on line." My son got her a computer, and is setting her up. In a few days, Mammy will be able to look at SubSITE.
Guess I better clean it up.
Coincidentally enough, The Onion recently did a story headlined "Getting Mom Onto Internet a Sisyphean Ordeal," recounting the foibles of an elderly woman's first months on the Internet. Like the best Onion articles, it prompted deep but sorrowful laughter -- partly because it brought back memories of MY first encounters with AOL and so on, round about 1994. (I had been using a Mac since 1984, but only as a word processor.)
Anyway, this means I have to go through and remove ALL the cusswords and titties from SubSITE. I could do it by simply deleting everything and starting over, or, I could manually go through and cross out each Fuck and Shit. I might get about one tenth of the way through it while my mother is still alive.
Eh, guess I'll just blow it off. She'll be on a 56k modem, what am I worried about. She'll look at the first two pages and get frustrated, like everybody else.
Thank goodness.
In other news, I BOUGHT A DVD PLAYER.
Yep, finally did it. Put it off as long as I could. The only reason I finally bought one was to see if I was making Video CDs correctly. I am the kind of person who'll buy the movie camera first, start making the movie, and only buy the projector when I HAVE to, to see if I made the movie right.
To tell the truth, I never heard any of The Hour of Slack CDs played on good speakers until last night. (It sounded GREAT!)
Anyway, I decided it was time to move into the modern world. Since I had decided to start releasing our SubG video stuff in DVD -- and VCD -- I had to be able to CHECK them. I have a DVD player on my computer, but that is NOT the same.
Wellsir, I didn't know a god damned thing about DVD players. I knew how much money I had, though. So I went over to the nearest Walmart and looked at their selection. A Sanyo was on sale for $99. A whole lot of the Shitty-Name Brands were on sale, too, for like $150.
Oddly enough, over in a corner, unadvertised, separate from all the other DVD players, was a big stack of Apex DVD players priced at $68 apiece. I had never heard of Apex and figured it was some Emerson wannabe, Emerson being the bottom of the barrel normally. But a quick look at the box indicated that it was at least TRYING to have all the features of the mighty Sony and Panasonic.
I went home and got on a series of websites -- first consumer guides, and then video pirates, with the most help coming from "nerd-out.com" and something called "www.vcdhelp.com".
There I discovered that this lowly Apex line of players was the favorite of the ultrageeks and pirates and hackers. The model I was looking at in Walmart, the Apex 1100W, had just come out but had already been "hacked" and was garnering rave reviews from the users. They were almost uniformly stating that while the chassis of this machine was a flimsy rattletrap piece of shit, it actually WORKED better than the much higher priced name brands. Half-assed CD-RWs with crappy mpegs burned onto them, mixed with MP3s in weird bitrates, and JPEGs of the family photos, the Apex played all manner of formats that the fancy shit is SUPPOSED to, but doesn't actually in many cases. (Indeed, my first VCD test, made a year ago, would not play on my neighbor's state of the art gear, back then, which made me think I was doing it wrong, but the sme disk plays on my $68 Apex FINE.)
DVD, CD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, VCD, SVCD, XVCD... MP3s, porno jpegs, your crappy home movie MPEG clips off that crappy digital camera... it all seems to work on this $68 piece of shit Walmart box, Apex 1100W.
So after all that reading-up I went and bought the thing. Hooked it up and checked to see how easy it would be to hack it so that it will play through (and be recorded by) a VHS VCR. For some reason I don't need to hack it; it already plays through and records. I only have 3 DVDs, but I tried all the other media types. I converted the SubG MTV thing from DV format to a VCD, and it played fine, not quite as well as the VHS original, but almost. Determined that I could indeed convert ARISE to VCD and it'll look fine, if I make myself a transfer of the entire video to DV format for conversion. (I tried converting things UP from the WMV and existing low res format copies of ARISE, but that looks like shit.)
I have to copy all of Dobbsfilm Shorties to another drive to make that transfer, though.
One thing I determined in the course of doing all this was that the best way to do ARISE, REALLY, is not this half assed VCD thing -- VCDs really are not that great -- but a for-real full res DVD. And to do it from the 1" original master, which I actually have in my possession.
So, tomorrow, between SubSITE fix-ups, I am going to start pricing DVD duplication (from 1" video master), preferably here in Cleveland, since I'd rather be able to DRIVE the master to the facility and supervise the first transfer rather than mail it to some fucks in Taiwan or wherever. Depends on what kinds of deals I can get.
I might only need to make a few copies; maybe I can buy a DVD burner later and be able to copy those myself.
But really, ARISE needs to be on something more permanent than these two 1" masters, anyway.
I also suddenly realized that, THOUGH we need to do a bunch of work on the end section of ARISE to replace the PO Box and add the URL, etc., I CAN NOW DO THAT MYSELF!!! I was so used to having to think of video titling in terms of paying some post production facility -- it took me a day to remember that I had spent several weeks learning how to do just that on my big G4 computer. I would still have to pay to lay the DV clip over to the 1" master but that's probably $100 or so...?
I have been downloading movies from news groups in DivX format. DVD players will not play DivX. To play them on a DVD player you have to convert them to the LOWER-resed VCD format (MPEG 1 at 320x460 picture size). One thing I did learn about burning your pirated DivX movies to VCD (as opposed to just watching the DivX on your computer screen) -- IT TAKES A FUCKING LONG TIME. It takes ALL NIGHT for a FAST computer to convert HALF of a feature movie from DivX to VCD. (VCD only holds about one hour of video.)
Then , watching the VCD just makes you want to go out and buy the DVD. VCD is roughly akin to a home-made VHS tape. Fine if that's all there is to watch, but, I can see how people get completely spoiled by DVDs.
The DivX format, a variation of MPEG 4, which only plays on computers, is WAY better than VCD or VHS (and takes up HALF the file space of VCD!). However, it's developed OUTSIDE THE CONSPIRACY LOOP. It works better than any of Their codecs, but of course it's not used in any of Their appliances.
AS I UNDERSTAND IT. I am new to this game.
I'm making another tech jump. Over my career I went from flip-it-books on paper to 8mm silent animations to Super-8 with loosely synced soundtracks on tape, to 16mm double system sound, to 3/4" video, to low res Internet videos, to broadcast quality digital video. With long breaks in between where I wasn't doing film or video of any kind. I have had to do a LOT of reading to make each jump up. I have been able to find everything I needed to know on line or in the library. I have been able to work on borrowed gear, unless the prices went down to the point that I could buy my own. (I never did own any 16mm film or pro video editing equipment, but you CAN edit video and multitrack sound on a used $400 computer now.)
I love this shit! I love reading the instructions! I love it when I finally find the ONE SIMPLE STATEMENT that explains, say, the difference between VCD and SVCD. And then I start making all these lists in my head of which SubGenius things to convert first.
And then I find out how long the conversions take! AIEEE! Heh. It's always something. And I still don't know a GOT-damed thang about Flash and Director and all.
A few years ago, my son said, "Dad, you're BEHIND. You're OLD. You need to start adding a zero to EVERYTHING." He was right. I did, and now I am young again, even though it makes me almost 500 years old, doing things his way.
And have you seen these new thingies they have, called "electric razors?" It's a MACHINE that cuts your beard. Some of them run on batteries and you don't even have to plug them in. One would think a mechanical contrivance for cutting facial hair would be crude and painful to apply, but these new gizmos just throb comfortingly and hardly ever nick or scrape! This modern world, I tell you. What'll they come up with next. "Photo-Copy-ers"?
Original file name: MammyOnline & New DVD - converted on Monday, 21 July 2003, 13:44
This page was created using TextToHTML. TextToHTML is a free software for Macintosh and is (c) 1995,1996 by Kris Coppieters