Slashdot Mirror
Weird Al: The Saga Begins
BrotherPope writes "I had to make sure I got everything I wanted off of Weird Al's new site sagabegins.com, before submitting this. The site has his newest video, which is for the Star Wars based parody of American Pie, and behind the scenes info. It's the best thing I've seen and heard from Al yet, and I've always been a big fan! Share and enjoy! "
Its actually really funny. Hemos and I just sat here and laughed
our butts off.
Everybody who went to my high school a couple years ago thought he'd gone into the witness protection program and become one of the math teachers there. Mr. Addamson didn't have the long hair or the moustache, but he *did* have the glasses, and he *did* take other peoples' songs and screw with the lyrics (e.g. he turned Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire" into "We Didn't Make It Up", a song that he taught the other math teachers to think about when they're dealing with disgruntled students). He was definitely the best teacher I've ever had (even including the couple great profs/TAs I've had in my one year at UIUC so far).
This is something that I would really like to see. I surfed around, and found that this is something that is on cURL's wish-list. There is a reference implementation at real.com licensed under the GPL. The RTSP spec should be easy to find. I looked at the code; it doesn't look trivial.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
has anyone sucessfully made a mirror with the whole QT or MP files (esp the highest qual)?
i've setup a mirror of the .rm file in australia
_ starwars.rm
for *.au and *.nz users (only).
you can find the file at:
ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/starwars/weirdal
(please note the spelling correction from the original filename)
-jason
or you can use this and bypass the registration entirely
there are two kinds of people in this world - those who divide people into two groups and those who don't
Like you, I think streaming has its time and place...but the old ways are still the best ways a lot of the time. (Unix, Ethernet and "just plain hyperlinks" all fit this category.)
Fuck Slashdot
don't talk about Windows media here please.
don't talk about Windows media here please.
Why, because it's not linux?
Troll...
Did anyone catch the "Latin Variant" version at the bottom of the page? ;) EIRDWAY AL YANOKOVIC UNNINGRAY ITHWAY ISSORSCAY lol ;)
One can lead a child to knowledge but one CANNOT make him think. R.A.H.
I suspect they're all amiss.
The upper-left hand corner starts with "Das
Veird Al", and whether it's supposed to be
German or Dutch or Swedish, it's just wrong.
The lower-left hand corner looks like it ought
to be Japanese, but the bottom-rightmost
ideograph is a picture of a pair of scissors.
Wow, I feel dopey explaining this to people.
I should hope we won't have to run this test on Linux (at least not with Media Player!).
I could understand RealPlayer, and maybe QuickTime.... but not MediaPlayer!
(next thing we know, they'll be SELLING Microsoft XWindows with IE bundled in and MP part of it, which will almost definitely crash the kernel 60% of the time!)
That one seems to be gone.
/.'d then try
o k/uncook.html
Here's the originals...
http://www.free-music.com/uncook95.htm
or when that one gets
http://watson2.cs.binghamton.edu/~jtesorie/unco
Did anybody find an mp3 of this song? I've been searching for it, but can't find it.
77' jeffs@wpi.edu
I kinda doubt it would be from pretty hate machine, as the ALbum (bad pun) is 10 years old.
It'll probably be of The Perfect Drug or something
Unix is mysterious, and ancient, and strong. It's made of cast iron and the bones of heroic programmers of old -
How about someone writing a decent multimedia player for linux? xanim just doesn't cut it. So far it can only play like 10% of my media. How is that MS media player coming? If its like the windows version, thats just what linux needs.
I have always thought that Wierd Al was some sort of twisted genuis, and this just reinforces that thought. I laughed so hard watching that video that it hurt. The "may be Vader someday later" line is classic.
Joey
--
-- "Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
-- Help! Help! I'm being repressed...."
Little banners at the bottom of the Weird Al's web page are poorly translated. For exemple, "running with scissors" as been translated in french to "le courants ciseaux" but it should be "courir avec des ciseaux".
How well does MS MediaPlayer work under Wine?
It's not an ideal solution, but it would work as an interim solution.
I agree. The Cantina song was ok, but this one was great! :>
i downloaded it ok, but i get the fault when trying to play it. and was wondering if it was just realplayer on my pc that was stuffing up
anyway, thanks for putting the mirror up
:P
Making us stream these things every time is insane (damn people) Does anyone have the high quality quicktime available anywhere? Realvideo sucks, and probably always will ;)
-=Cozmo=-
im having the same problem. i downloaded the file
(8,430,301 bytes) but i've tried playing it with several different versions of realplayer, including, of course, the newest, and its not working. Im getting a "General error" upon loading the file, or in some cases a GPF.
Does anyone know how to -download- the clips? I can't get the stream through my firewall. :(
Great video... but Wierd Al looks so *wierd* without his "trademark" glasses and frazzled hair...
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Slashdotted... and only one post up. Must be a new record.
Last month this silly story about Weird Al and Larry Wall was posted.
They may be limiting the number of simultaneous connections allowed (wise! very wise!), so be patient if you want to get through.
It is pretty good.
I'd swear I could watch the slashdot effect kick in... the farther the movie got, the worse the video got... though that could be an effect of me selected "Really, Really Fast"... sorry, everybody else!
nope. no qt4. no wmp. no G2 player for linux, either.
Could someone do a conversion? Maybe write up a nice stable algorithm this afternoon for qt4?
d
...
We've had sites that were slashdotted before there were any comments. It's happened quite a few times this year
Can Xanim play any of these file formats?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Anyone have an MP3 of this? if so, post and be ready to be /.'d. ;-)
-- DuckWing
Ender
Indecision is the key to flexibility...
Nothing to see here
Heck with mirrors (although it'd be really nice).. i just want a copy for myself! If someone finds a way to get it, post it (please)!
Insert mind here.
Linux RealPlayer G2 Alpha
Daniel Butler
They're all streams, nothing that can be downloaded. Maybe try pointing realplayer at rtsp://troy-1.real.com/showcase/g2audio/jive/wierd _al/wierdal_starwars.rm , that will avoid the web page slowdown.
Ahh, the ending is just ... priceless. Al really is a SW nerd! Maybe the song for Episode 2 will be to the tune of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."
It's a spoiler (so if you haven't seen the movie...why are you on /.) but a funny one. Wierd Als been a SW fan since way back, everyone remember "Yoda"? (sung to Lola)
Has Al reached American Icon status yet? He's been around for a good long while now....
+&x
I just watched Al's video...we should revere Al like the French revere Jerry Lewis. His humor belies his subtle genuis.
But better still was the MPEG4 video using Windows Media Player. Wow! This is the best video quality I have ever seen.
I am watching the Media player version and I am stunned. With my cable modem I am getting 30fps @ 320x240. The picture is identical to my TV and the sound is crystal clear.
Anyone know other sites where I can watch high bandwidth MPEG4 video clips?
Alight kids, you download the thing from Netscape and it saves the file to the disk as a bunch of text, right? Right..
Hmm.. that sure sounds like a famaliar problem. Oh yeah! Some MP3s do the same thing when downloaded by a browser. Some smart, smart person out there developed a piece of software called "uncook" (uncook.exe) that fixes it.
And ya know what? It works for this Real Video file, too! Kick ass, eh? Where do you get this uncook.exe? Right here:
http://www.inlink.com/~neuracnu/tem p/uncook.exePS: usage of it is: uncook.exe badal.rm goodal.rm
--
It really lives at http://nitro.fsck.org/~maw/al_wall/. There it will stay. For now.
You're a suburbanite.
Does anyone else see a disturbing trend here? "They" seem to be trying to turn the web into television. Bad enough that so much of the web economy is based on advertising (which is at least not as bad as spam), but now these various media systems force you to stream the video. It doesn't seem to be incompetence -- they definitely seem to by doing everything they can to make it so that you can only view it as a stream, without being able to save it to disk. Aside from the control issues (which make this offensive enough), this reduces the quality of the experience in so many ways:
- You can only view the video at the quailty dictated by your internet connection; they (try to) deny you the option of waiting through a long download in order to view it at higher quality.
- Even the fastest internet connection will skip occasionally, so it's impossible to get really perfect playback.
- Playback through browser plug-ins always sucks -- even with a local file, it skips more than with a separate player.
- You can't resize the window or, better yet, put it in full-screen. Someone else said he was impressed that the stream (on a cable modem, of course) was broadcast-TV-quality, but even so, if it's in a little window, you don't get the full TV experience.
- What I assume was |Cozmo|'s point: bandwidth -- even if they had the right to control how the content is used once it's on my system, why would they ever want to make it so that every single viewing has to be streamed from their server? Aside from annoying the hell out of us, all that does is cost them bandwidth.
Now, I think streaming is pretty cool stuff, and I've always been a fan of QuickTime (certainly vs. the other two lame formats on the page), but it should be an option, dammit! A good site would always provide an ordinary link to the actual file as well as the stream, but even more, a good media system would make it so that they wouldn't have to: it would be user-centric, so that by setting a browser option, or at most making a trivially obvious change to the URL, you could get at the file directly.David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Just a confirmation that Slashdot really is a News for Nerds site. You just can't get much more nerdy than Weird Al.
The cool thing about Weird Al is that he never ages.
http://www.theforce.net/humor/ music/mp3s/cantina.mp3
Also, "Yoda's Sunscreen" is pretty funny:
http://www.theforce.net /humor/music/mp3s/yoda_sunscreen.mp3
You can find these and more at" http://www.theforce.net/humor/music/".
Kinda. I managed to get the RealPlayer version of it. It's 8.0 megs, so don't everyone crash the server all at once: http://monk.student.cwru.edu/~betts/weirdal_starwa rs/wierdal_starwars.rm If anyone knows a way to save RTSP media to disk, please let me know.
---
Remember when "Truth, Justice, & the American Way" wasn't contradictory?
Weird Al has done it again. Just wish he'd come down into Texas on this tour. I missed his last one cause the closest he came was Kearne, Nebraska.
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
...this is going to be great. Now I'll have a bookend to Yoda. Or if he makes a few more songs with Star Wars themes in them, he can put out, "The Star Wars Album". Then he'll hate it as much as he does the Food and T.V. albums...
(No, I didn't have anything to say, but hey... it's "Weird Al"! Had to say something!
Use Open URL in QuickTime Player with these. The http server is /.ed, but the QTSS one is coping fine.
_ 28.mov _ 56.mov _ 100.mov _ 180.mov
rtsp://qts.liveonline.net/weirdal/thesagabegins
rtsp://qts.liveonline.net/weirdal/thesagabegins
rtsp://qts.liveonline.net/weirdal/thesagabegins
rtsp://qts.liveonline.net/weirdal/thesagabegins
http:/ /rochester.real.com/showcase/g2audio/jive/wierd_al /wierdal_starwars.rm
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I took the time to try and see what format of "The Saga Begins" was better. These were tested on a dual processor 200 MHz Pentium Pro, 64MB ram, running Windows 2000 Beta 3, connected to the net via a 256K ADSL modem. The sound card was an old ISA C. L. SoundBlaster output to a Bose Acoustimass Multimedia speakers.
I rated the players in 4 catagories:
Video: The subjective video quality;
Synch: The ability of the video & voice to stay synchronized.
CPU: The CPU time consumed by each player
Mem: The memory required by each player
The results are:
Video: RP > QT > MP; mainly because the QT & MP videos appear very dark.
Synch: QT > MP >> RP; Quicktime seemed to keep things in sync well, while MediaPlayer seemed to lose sync periodically and RealPlayer consistantly stopped at various points in the video (even when loading from a network file on an unloaded 10Mbps net!)
CPU: MP > QT >> RP; ~50% vs. 33% vs 12% of the dual CPU (100%) system)
Mem: RP > QT > MP; ~ 11.2 vs. 8.5 vs. 5.5 MB
I ran all three players simultaneously to get the CPU & Memory figures. Since the line is rated at 256K and I was using the 128K ISDN for MP/QT data sources and the RP video was on the local net this should not be network bandwidth constrained. Running in 3 part harmony appears to be difficult to do because you can't seem to balance the sound source volumes.
I'm rather stunned that W2K Beta 3 actually didn't crash during this test!
It seems to me that MP might be the best choice on a faster system. QT wins in terms of maintaining presentation quality. RP doesn't offer much but a good looking video that fails to stay in sync. The MP & QT sound quality was richer than that of RP, but the QT sound seemed to have occasional clicks in it. I don't know if that is a network problem or a software/hardware glitch. I don't believe any packets were lost during these tests.
When you can run this test on Linux let me know (:-))
If you're talking about the Cantina song that's a parody of the Copa-Cobana, his name is Mark Davis. He also did a song called "The Phantom Medley" which I guess is getting airplay on Dr. Demento.
My take on the Weird Al song-- Pretty lame. At least "Yoda" had some jokes and some energy behind it.
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Nope, sorry, the link doesn't work...real networks redirects you to a different page.
<tim><
the Yoda Sunscreen song had me ROFLing...
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
(Not that I'm bitter that I've been submitting this to /. for the last week & a half >:-).
The new album, "Running with Scissors" will be
out this Tuesday. No track list, but the
parodies that have been mentioned include
"Pretty Fly for a Rabbi", "It's All About the
Pentiums", and parodies of "One Week" by BNL
and "Zoot Suit Riot". Also, rumor of a NIN
parody (!!! They haven't done anything for
years !!!).
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I have downloaded the entire file off the mirror but i still get an general? error... anyone else find that it doesn't work for them?