Most movies can fit on a standard DVD-R if you remove the bonus features and extra language tracks. The other option is recompression which will affect quality depending on how much more you need to compress the file. If you are just doing the base movie the quality impact is pretty minor.
The rip is a work print encoded to MPEG 2 (the format used on DVDs). So you could burn it to a DVD-R and toss it in your DVD player to watch it on your TV if you like. Not to mention if you have a media pc (i.e. XP Media Center, MythTV, modded Xbox with XBMC etc.) you could play directly to the TV off the hard drive. Downloaded of the net onto a computer does not mean you have to watch it on a computer.
"In the old days movies had intermissions. Live shows still do. What happened to those?"
Intermissions = more time per single showing of the film = less shows per day = less theater profit. It's not like you can just have a 5 minute intermission considering everyone in the theater will be waiting to take a whiz at the same time. Especially with a long movie like LOTR where there are less showings simply due to the three hour run time.
Lucas himself has been pushing for the switch to digital projection. The systems exist and are supposedly much better then standard film projection. I believe the main stumbling block is the high cost of switching the theaters over to digital projection.
New games, new expansions vs. long overdue battlegrounds in WoW. I play World of Warcraft and I like it well enough, but it isn't the end all and be all of MMOs. I started playing in March thinking that maybe all the nasty bugs would be sorted out by that point. Well, they sure aren't. I've had lots of nice experiences such as boats disappearing and killing me and crashes that left my character stuck logged in for 24 hours. I like the game but it seems like there are a lot of bored level 60s going around. Seems like the long term potential may be problematic. So yes there are people that might be interested in something other than Blizzard's offering. The way I see it Auto Assault and City of Villains will be launching in the second half of the year, so my time with WoW will probably be 6 months on the outside.
I would argue that Star Wars doesn't really have any other way to "end" (well um in this case the end being a middle) since we already know Anakin turns into Darth Vader and have since 1980. I defintately agree with you on the in terms of games. Despite good reviews, I just didn't want to touch the latest Prince of Persia because of the stupid visual style. What the hell is wrong with the Arabian nights look? Maybe selling an Arabian themed game is difficult in these times of turmoil in the middle east? I won't even bring up the Shadow the hedgehog game Sega is working on (oops I just did). Tabula Rasa looks like some Unreal/Starship Troopers sort of thing now. I guess they really didn't like the way the game was going, because it looks like they completely changed it.
Agreed! And people think playing female in an MMO is a sign of repressed homosexual tendancies. Come on it's an obvious sign of lecherous heterosexual deviance.
$3,200. Yeah not exactly cheap. I definately would be better off selling one of the kids in order to afford it though. The daycare costs alone would cover it.
Doom 3 on the Xbox is considered a near-perfect port. Aren't you overestimating PC hardware superiority of the current consoles by just a tad?
It's a very good port. I was quite impressed that they managed to get it looking that good. But they did change some stuff around. Even just playing through the beginning I could tell areas where they stripped out interaction and decreased some of the environments (where did that martian surface run through go?). Also at low res it doesn't look any where near as good as playing at 1600x1200. It also isn't pushing textures nearly as big. That being said, a console with equivalent specs to a PC is going to be faster as it doesn't have the OS overhead. It is a more streamlined game playing machine. I'm interested in seeing if Half Life 2 gets a successful port. I would imagine the physics are likely to suffer on the Xbox.
Owning both a PS/2 and a Gamecube, I would say that at least in terms of graphics and load times, the Gamecube seems better. See this a completely subjective experience, but that is ultimately the only really important one. So this has 50MHz more than that. Who cares? For all I know the PS/2 is superior and the GC programmers are just better at optimizing the games.
Microsoft has however been developing APIs for a long time. One of the pushes of DirectX was to create a hardware abstraction layer and an API for everything from sound to input to video and 3D. To think that this type of development can't expand past the nature of a single CPU type is not true. Microsoft is obviously aware of the developer challenges and of the interest in preserving the ease of development across at least the x86 PC world and the Xbox 360. That is what XNA is all about. Will it work? Will they succeed? Will Sony have better development tools? We will see. The next gen console wars aren't over, they are just beginning. To call a decisive victory to Sony before anything actually hits the shelves is a bit silly.
Either that or you're a fan of a very limited scope of games (perhaps sports games?)
Wow. State that the PS2 is the least favorite console at my house and get branded a Madden fan. I enjoy a wide variety of games and have ever since the Atari 2600 I had in 1979. I am a PC gamer primarily (preferring strategy, FPS, MMOs and RPGs). On the console side the Gamecube gets a lot of use partially because it has more kid friendly games. The rash of generic looking 3rd person action games on the current generation of consoles really bores me. You argument about missing out on the PS2 games is also valid for the Xbox or Gamecube. On Xbox you get ports of a lot of great PC games. Xbox will be the only system to see Half Life 2 for example. Other great games include Knights of the Old Republic and Phantom Dust. On Gamecube you have the range of Nintendo exclusives, and for something not so kid friendly Resident Evil 4 is pretty sweet. I'm not knocking the PS2 - I just can't see some kid sitting there being bummed because he got the wrong console. There are great games available for each of these systems. As for the Dreamcast a lot of people I know own and use one because of the last generation 2D shooters that were released on it.
Then why do they currently actively ban modded Xboxs from accessing Live? Why have they changed the way they detect modded Xboxs on Live to get around newer mod chips that allow locking the hard drive? The obvious statement about banning comes from the fact that modded Xboxs can run hacks which can lead to cheating. However the PC suffers from this problem anyway and the PC game companies provide things such as Punkbuster to block out cheaters. I'd love to believe what you are saying and I'd love to see homebrew development on Xbox 360 - but it doesn't seem to jive with the current Xbox mod situation.
I'm American and I know Minter's work very well. Attack of the Mutant Camels and the rest. Of course I imagine that those playing bootlegged games back when they were using Ataris and Commodore 64s had more exposure to UK releases. The biggest thing I could never understand was why the UK loved the Speccy so much. I guess it was cheap and came out before the C-64. All those ports of Spectrum games to the C-64 had completely crap graphics.
Well, the Virtual Boy sure is a bad choice - the others at least have some merit. Saturn was pretty interesting for its time, the Dreamcast still has a loyal fan base and a large amount of decent, cheap (or bootlegged for that matter) games, the Xbox has plenty of games to play. Just because something is the number one seller doesn't mean that the competition has nothing to offer. I have a GameCube, PS2 and Xbox in my house. The GameCube and Xbox get the most play (although in the Xbox case it's more to play old NES and SNES games). On the PS2 the only thing recently that shook the dust off the case was Katamari Damacy.
I have a modded Xbox and it is very sweet. The only thing that bugs me is that XBMC doesn't support DVD menus. This doesn't matter too much with a movie, but it's kind of annoying to have to play the individual VOBs with a DVD that has multiple episodes of a show on it. Especially as the episodes are may begin or end in the middle of a VOB.
Um yeah right. FPS rehashes like the Sims and Rollercoaster Tycoon. In addition top of the crowd RTS games have sold very well (some such as Age of Empires, Starcraft and Warcraft 3 continue to sell years after their release). I would also point out the MMORPG market which (outside of Final Fantasy) has no parallel on consoles (expect this to change with the next generation of consoles). World of Warcraft, SW: Galaxies, City of Heroes, Everquest 1 and 2 etc.
Right. Which is why they should stop using the term "filesharing". Because now we have ads telling us not to "share files" because it takes food of the tables of the poor underpaid gaffers and key grips. It is a misuse of the term, and it is misused by the RIAA and MPAA and every part of the media when reporting on these things. Peer to peer file duplication, not sharing.
Was not an error by the parent poster. He was simply "keeping it real" and showing his "street cred". "Yo, yo shout it out to my homies back in the trailer park, rocking with Kid Rock." That sorta stuff.
Yeah I am waiting for the MPAA/RIAA to push through legislation to change our educational system to teach kindergarten kids not to share, because sharing is evil.
Bobby: "I want to play with the blocks, can I have some blocks?"
Suzie: "No! Fuck off Bobby, sharing is Evil! Teacher! Bobby's trying to make me share!"
Teacher: "Now Bobby you go and take a time out - you KNOW sharing is bad!"
Slashdot Mirror
Most movies can fit on a standard DVD-R if you remove the bonus features and extra language tracks.
The other option is recompression which will affect quality depending on how much more you need to compress the file. If you are just doing the base movie the quality impact is pretty minor.
The rip is a work print encoded to MPEG 2 (the format used on DVDs). So you could burn it to a DVD-R and toss it in your DVD player to watch it on your TV if you like.
Not to mention if you have a media pc (i.e. XP Media Center, MythTV, modded Xbox with XBMC etc.) you could play directly to the TV off the hard drive.
Downloaded of the net onto a computer does not mean you have to watch it on a computer.
"In the old days movies had intermissions. Live shows still do. What happened to those?"
Intermissions = more time per single showing of the film = less shows per day = less theater profit. It's not like you can just have a 5 minute intermission considering everyone in the theater will be waiting to take a whiz at the same time.
Especially with a long movie like LOTR where there are less showings simply due to the three hour run time.
Lucas himself has been pushing for the switch to digital projection. The systems exist and are supposedly much better then standard film projection.
I believe the main stumbling block is the high cost of switching the theaters over to digital projection.
New games, new expansions vs. long overdue battlegrounds in WoW.
I play World of Warcraft and I like it well enough, but it isn't the end all and be all of MMOs.
I started playing in March thinking that maybe all the nasty bugs would be sorted out by that point. Well, they sure aren't. I've had lots of nice experiences such as boats disappearing and killing me and crashes that left my character stuck logged in for 24 hours.
I like the game but it seems like there are a lot of bored level 60s going around. Seems like the long term potential may be problematic.
So yes there are people that might be interested in something other than Blizzard's offering. The way I see it Auto Assault and City of Villains will be launching in the second half of the year, so my time with WoW will probably be 6 months on the outside.
I would argue that Star Wars doesn't really have any other way to "end" (well um in this case the end being a middle) since we already know Anakin turns into Darth Vader and have since 1980.
I defintately agree with you on the in terms of games. Despite good reviews, I just didn't want to touch the latest Prince of Persia because of the stupid visual style. What the hell is wrong with the Arabian nights look? Maybe selling an Arabian themed game is difficult in these times of turmoil in the middle east?
I won't even bring up the Shadow the hedgehog game Sega is working on (oops I just did).
Tabula Rasa looks like some Unreal/Starship Troopers sort of thing now. I guess they really didn't like the way the game was going, because it looks like they completely changed it.
This joke predates Scott Kurtz by YEARS. It's been bandied about the MMO world for a long time.
Agreed! And people think playing female in an MMO is a sign of repressed homosexual tendancies. Come on it's an obvious sign of lecherous heterosexual deviance.
$3,200. Yeah not exactly cheap. I definately would be better off selling one of the kids in order to afford it though. The daycare costs alone would cover it.
Doom 3 on the Xbox is considered a near-perfect port. Aren't you overestimating PC hardware superiority of the current consoles by just a tad?
It's a very good port. I was quite impressed that they managed to get it looking that good. But they did change some stuff around. Even just playing through the beginning I could tell areas where they stripped out interaction and decreased some of the environments (where did that martian surface run through go?).
Also at low res it doesn't look any where near as good as playing at 1600x1200. It also isn't pushing textures nearly as big.
That being said, a console with equivalent specs to a PC is going to be faster as it doesn't have the OS overhead. It is a more streamlined game playing machine.
I'm interested in seeing if Half Life 2 gets a successful port. I would imagine the physics are likely to suffer on the Xbox.
Owning both a PS/2 and a Gamecube, I would say that at least in terms of graphics and load times, the Gamecube seems better. See this a completely subjective experience, but that is ultimately the only really important one. So this has 50MHz more than that. Who cares?
For all I know the PS/2 is superior and the GC programmers are just better at optimizing the games.
Microsoft has however been developing APIs for a long time. One of the pushes of DirectX was to create a hardware abstraction layer and an API for everything from sound to input to video and 3D. To think that this type of development can't expand past the nature of a single CPU type is not true.
Microsoft is obviously aware of the developer challenges and of the interest in preserving the ease of development across at least the x86 PC world and the Xbox 360. That is what XNA is all about.
Will it work? Will they succeed? Will Sony have better development tools? We will see.
The next gen console wars aren't over, they are just beginning. To call a decisive victory to Sony before anything actually hits the shelves is a bit silly.
Hell, sometimes nothing can play World of Warcraft. Like when the server takes a big poop. All the PowerPC cores in the world won't help you then.
Either that or you're a fan of a very limited scope of games (perhaps sports games?)
Wow. State that the PS2 is the least favorite console at my house and get branded a Madden fan.
I enjoy a wide variety of games and have ever since the Atari 2600 I had in 1979. I am a PC gamer primarily (preferring strategy, FPS, MMOs and RPGs). On the console side the Gamecube gets a lot of use partially because it has more kid friendly games.
The rash of generic looking 3rd person action games on the current generation of consoles really bores me.
You argument about missing out on the PS2 games is also valid for the Xbox or Gamecube. On Xbox you get ports of a lot of great PC games. Xbox will be the only system to see Half Life 2 for example. Other great games include Knights of the Old Republic and Phantom Dust. On Gamecube you have the range of Nintendo exclusives, and for something not so kid friendly Resident Evil 4 is pretty sweet.
I'm not knocking the PS2 - I just can't see some kid sitting there being bummed because he got the wrong console. There are great games available for each of these systems.
As for the Dreamcast a lot of people I know own and use one because of the last generation 2D shooters that were released on it.
That I just don't possess the "Branes" to understand this superstring theory.
Then why do they currently actively ban modded Xboxs from accessing Live? Why have they changed the way they detect modded Xboxs on Live to get around newer mod chips that allow locking the hard drive?
The obvious statement about banning comes from the fact that modded Xboxs can run hacks which can lead to cheating. However the PC suffers from this problem anyway and the PC game companies provide things such as Punkbuster to block out cheaters.
I'd love to believe what you are saying and I'd love to see homebrew development on Xbox 360 - but it doesn't seem to jive with the current Xbox mod situation.
I'm American and I know Minter's work very well. Attack of the Mutant Camels and the rest.
Of course I imagine that those playing bootlegged games back when they were using Ataris and Commodore 64s had more exposure to UK releases.
The biggest thing I could never understand was why the UK loved the Speccy so much. I guess it was cheap and came out before the C-64. All those ports of Spectrum games to the C-64 had completely crap graphics.
Well, the Virtual Boy sure is a bad choice - the others at least have some merit. Saturn was pretty interesting for its time, the Dreamcast still has a loyal fan base and a large amount of decent, cheap (or bootlegged for that matter) games, the Xbox has plenty of games to play. Just because something is the number one seller doesn't mean that the competition has nothing to offer.
I have a GameCube, PS2 and Xbox in my house. The GameCube and Xbox get the most play (although in the Xbox case it's more to play old NES and SNES games). On the PS2 the only thing recently that shook the dust off the case was Katamari Damacy.
Don't you also need a tv tuner as well?
I have a modded Xbox and it is very sweet. The only thing that bugs me is that XBMC doesn't support DVD menus. This doesn't matter too much with a movie, but it's kind of annoying to have to play the individual VOBs with a DVD that has multiple episodes of a show on it. Especially as the episodes are may begin or end in the middle of a VOB.
A good reason to start dropping acid again!
"The only titles that sell are FPS rehashes."
Um yeah right. FPS rehashes like the Sims and Rollercoaster Tycoon. In addition top of the crowd RTS games have sold very well (some such as Age of Empires, Starcraft and Warcraft 3 continue to sell years after their release).
I would also point out the MMORPG market which (outside of Final Fantasy) has no parallel on consoles (expect this to change with the next generation of consoles). World of Warcraft, SW: Galaxies, City of Heroes, Everquest 1 and 2 etc.
Right. Which is why they should stop using the term "filesharing". Because now we have ads telling us not to "share files" because it takes food of the tables of the poor underpaid gaffers and key grips.
It is a misuse of the term, and it is misused by the RIAA and MPAA and every part of the media when reporting on these things.
Peer to peer file duplication, not sharing.
"so yo should be ashamed of yourselves"
Was not an error by the parent poster. He was simply "keeping it real" and showing his "street cred".
"Yo, yo shout it out to my homies back in the trailer park, rocking with Kid Rock."
That sorta stuff.
Yeah I am waiting for the MPAA/RIAA to push through legislation to change our educational system to teach kindergarten kids not to share, because sharing is evil.
Bobby: "I want to play with the blocks, can I have some blocks?"
Suzie: "No! Fuck off Bobby, sharing is Evil! Teacher! Bobby's trying to make me share!"
Teacher: "Now Bobby you go and take a time out - you KNOW sharing is bad!"