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.

Comments

Re: G2 Player for Linux

[Yupnik]

Sure there is! It's alpha quality, but it works on this stream and a lot of other sites.

Linux RealPlayer G2 Alpha

Daniel Butler

Disturbing Trend?

[David Gould]

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

"The Cantina Song" is better

[Brian Kendig]

"Yoda" and the newest Weird Al song are both funny, but the absolute funniest Star Wars parody I've ever found has got to be "The Cantina Song":

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/".

Mirror Available

[xenotrope]

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.

MediaPlayer/QuickTime/RealPlayer Comparison

[bradbury]

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 (:-))

Additional Weird Al bits.

[Masem]

(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 !!!).

Re:Additional Weird Al bits.

[Masem]

Well, Al generally parodies sufficiently entrenched music. (His latest off this album
is probably One Week, months old.). If
the NIN rumor is true, I'd expect it to be from
Pretty Hate Machine (the most easily recognizable
of the NIN albums).