While I was writing my last post, the download to the embedded Windows Media Player of The Angry Red Planet completed. At some point Netflix’s system must have improved my speed rating, because now the video is approaching DVD quality. Hmm. What movie should I try next …. ?
Category: Tech
More Netflix Instant Watching
Netflix is rating my connection speed as being merely “Basic.” HA! I don’t think so. I have FiOS, the fastest residential connection there is. If there’s a throughput problem, it’s not with the last mile!
After repeated re-testing, I managed to get a “Good” rating and confirmed that the image is much better. The jaggies are less flagrant, but there’s still a lot of color banding.
In my viewing test I still haven’t moved on beyond Mars, that angry red planet. The script offers seemingly endless lessons on life and, yes, love. How do I compare thee? I compare thee to my dog …
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/FEB07/AngryRedPlanet2.mp3]The distinctive male voice belonged to Gerald Mohr. A radio actor for many years, he switched to TV in the 50’s. Mohr was the voice of Reed Richards in the 1967 Fantastic Four cartoon series.
Netflix Instant Watching
I wasn’t among the very first to be able to watch online movies from Netflix, but I’ve been checking almost every day, and this morning the feature is enabled. The selection of movies is very limited, and playback requires Internet Explorer 6 or 7 with the Silverlight plugin. Firefox isn’t supported, and movies can’t be downloaded.
So what did I pick as my first choice? The Angry Red Planet, from 1960. Why? Because it was directed by Ib Melchior, who wrote the story that became Robinson Crusoe on Mars. The movie is full of profound human insight. For example, the relative merits of girls over radiation risks.
The video transfer of this movie appears to be, at best, 400×300 pixels blown up to 640×480. In other words, it’s lousy. There’s a full screen option, but the resolution doesn’t justify doing that. Because of the way the video is done I can’t get a screen capture without great difficulty, so I took a picture of it with the camera.
How red can an angry planet be, anyway?? For Robinson Crusoe on Mars, instead of Melchior’s simple red filter, Byron Haskin cleverly used the blue of the desert sky as if it were a blue screen, to easily and cheaply insert a red sky.
Netflix is off to a rather tentative start with their “Watch Now” feature. But I’m not going to knock it because it isn’t costing me extra, and it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
Jan Stats
Excluding myself, for the month of January there were 2788 unique viewing visitors (non-viewers are search engines, etc.) representing about 37,000 hits. Compared to last month this is a huge increase in addresses accessing this blog, but about the same number of hits.
Audio Files
While transferring a song from an LP, I watched the graphical decibel meter. While finding the maximum recording level I couldn’t help but notice how dynamic the recording is.
I’ve seen this before with certain records. The overall sound level can seem low, because the loud parts would cause distortion if the quieter parts were made louder. But there are ways to deal with this, typically called “normalize levels” or something similar.
But the funny thing is, songs on CD often don’t have this problem, because it seems their levels have already been normalized. That means their dynamic range has been reduced.
One of the advantages first touted for CD was its greater dynamic range compared to LP. But my impression of CD sound is that everything is made to sound loud. So much for dynamic range. This is certainly true of more recent releases, where the expectation is the music will be heard on an iPod or MP3 player.
The audio player below has the song that got me marveling yet again at how good some records still sound. This is “Ain’t Superstitious,” from Jeff Beck’s Truth, with Rod Stewart on vocals. I did nothing to eliminate pops or clicks. No equalization or loudness adjustment. The bass and drums take this to the volume input limit, yet the overall output seems low compared to most CD rips.
I bought this record for $1.50 at a pawn shop in Westfield during my DJ days, many years ago. The track is at the end of the side, where the phenomenon known as “groove compression” occurs, reducing the maximum level of loudness and the bass potential. So this recording has a lot going against it, and yet it sounds like this ……..
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/JAN07/AintSuperstitious.mp3]….. and while we’re tripping out here, let’s listen to the first track of side 1. The first half of a side is where vinyl tends to sound its best. Beck and Stewart redid the Yardbirds’ song, “Shape of Things.” I’m hearing some things in here that seem to have perhaps been influential on Black Sabbath, but the overall effect helps to explain why the Beck-Stewart team didn’t hit it big the way Jimmy Page and Robert Plant did.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/JAN07/ShapeofThings.mp3]Wii Wiinner!
A year ago, Nintendo was the long-shot underdog of game consoles, but my son Eric insisted that the Nintendo Revolution (as it was known then) would be a winner. And he was right. The more I see of this product, the more impressed I am by it.
Wii Web access is done via WiFi. There are various channels dedicated to a single feature, including weather and, starting yesterday, news. But there’s also a customized version of the Opera browser.
I’ll try to get an A/V capture of the Wii while it’s browsing my blog. Everything except the video player seems to work. YouTube videos play pretty well, so I’ll assume my Flash player is incompatible with Opera. Eric has just used the Wii to enter a comment. Click here to see.