YouTube now supports 4K video

Read about it here on YouTube's official blog. In layman's terms, this is more than FOUR times the resolution of 1080P high-def video.

And for some reason, YouTube made sure to note that "IMAX movies are projected through two 2k resolution projectors".

Ummmm... why is YouTube doing this? I haven't a clue. Perhaps someone could enlighten me about this. Because I'm having a very hard time imagining why anyone would need to display video at 4096 x 2304 (do they even make monitors that big?).

Heck, I've seen 1080P projected onto a regular-sized movie screen, and it looked just as good as regular film. Not really sure what mainstream purpose 4K could be serving at the moment.

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WWII IN HD: Best high-def programming I've seen yet!

My DVR just received a massive enema. Gone is stuff that I've recorded like P2 and Krull and Clash of the Titans and Stroker Ace (though how that got scheduled is beyond me, and I'm still trying to figure out how I wound up with Yentl). So now I've got plenty of disk space to record WWII in HD from the History Channel.

HOW did I miss hearing about this until now? Well, no matter 'cuz History Channel is broadcasting them again and if you've got a high-definition television you really owe it to yourself to catch this, because you've never seen World War II as clear and brilliant as this before. See that still image? Those are British soldiers coming ashore at Normandy, and it looks so crisp and sharp you'd swear that this was footage gathered just yesterday.

If History Channel puts this out on Blu-ray... well, between that and Star Trek that's prolly gonna be more than enough to pull me into adopting a Blu-ray player at last. But 'til then, watch WWII in HD however ya can!

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The Godfather Trilogy coming to Blu-ray

It's an offer die-hard movie buffs cannot refuse: The Godfather Trilogy is coming to Blu-ray on September 23rd. As in, this September 23rd!

Francis Ford Coppola himself supervised a frame-by-frame digital restoration of the first two films, and The Godfather Part III received a full remastering treatment for the project. The set will cost $119 but will include gobs of extras.

Other than the Star Wars saga coming out in the format, this might be the only other thing that would make me finally break down and get a Blu-ray player. Will have to see what others say of it first but I would love to have the entire Godfather saga in lush, violent high definition.

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How much is that doggie in the Wii-ndow?

For Christmas I got Lisa a Nintendo Wii. Had to camp out all night during cold rain in front of a GameStop store the week before to get it (this was when they had the vouchers thing going, and I wound up getting a Wii for Lisa and a Wii voucher for my sister, who got hers a little over a week after Christmas ... am I a great husband/brother or what? :-)

Along with the Wii I bought a card worth 2000 Wii Points, to spend on extra games or whatever through Nintendo's online store for the Wii. And until now we hadn't used it at all (guess we've been having too much fun with everything else on the Wii). So yesterday I loaded up the points and "went shopping", and even though it cost 500 points I thought it would be neat to have the Internet Channel installed. This is a version of the Opera browser customized for the Wii, that lets you surf the web (kinda like WebTV).

The Internet Channel for Wii is pretty neat. The first thing I went to was this blog (of course!) and then Lisa's and a few friends' sites. Then I went to Flickr. Why? Because I wanted to see if there were any new pictures of a certain girl...

A year ago I discovered Taci, an unbelievably cute cocker spaniel whose owner Kalen loves to take pictures of her and post on Flickr. Taci looks almost exactly like Bridget, our cocker spaniel who sadly passed away way too young some years ago. Kalen is quite a talented photographer and she's captured Taci in so many sweet (and often funny) poses and expressions. The pic above is one of the latest that Kalen has taken of Taci. So I zoomed-in with the Wii Remote and took this photo of Taci's face on a 37-inch high-definition television set via the Wii! Kalen thought it was hilarious (and hopefully so did Taci :-).

By the way, that might be the last photo that I post on this blog of our high-def TV: the one that I've been referring to as "The Behemoth" ever since we got it a little over a year ago. You can't see it in this photo but there's something wrong with the screen that looks like it's been a manufacturing defect (that's not a reflection on the company that made it by any means, these things just happen every so often). We tried to get it fixed but it's not really feasible, so next week the retailer is giving us another high-def television, one that might be even better. Thank goodness we got the service plan for this thing. But still, I've grown quite fond of The Behemoth. So before it went away I wanted to post a photo of it displaying something beautiful for a change, as opposed to, say, Gears of War :-P

And if you want to see more of "Taci the Wonder Spaniel", scamper over to this link!

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Screen burn-in on an LCD HDTV? Yup

We bought a 37-inch LCD high-definition television set last November. It's specifically an LCD screen because when I was doing research before we went out to look at sets the widespread consensus was that LCD screens don't "burn-in" like plasma screens do.

Well, guess what?

I can't show what this looks like because it doesn't show up well in photos, but there are two very fine vertical lines running down the entire height of the screen: one line running equidistant from each of the left and right sides of the image. They are exactly where the borders of the "pillars" are when you watch a standard (not high-def) image without "stretching" it to fill the screen. Since most of the interesting programming around here is standard definition and I don't like distorted images, the tendency is to watch television "pillarboxed". I guess that's how the lines got in there: with the borders always being "on".

It's supposed to not be a permanent condition of LCD screens. And technically it's not "burn-in" at all, in the sense that plasma screens can get it. It's properly called "image retention"... but that doesn't keep it from being any less a nuisance. Right now I've got the TV on with the image stretched to fill the screen, so that the pixels making up those lines will get "exercised" and start working right again. I'm hoping this will work. If not, looks like that service plan is going to turn out to have been a great investment after all.

In the meantime, if anyone's ever had any experience with this kind of an issue, I'd sure appreciate some advice. I like to try to fix things "in-house" as much as possible, without having to lug something as big as an HDTV back to the store :-)

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