DVD

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It’s the end of an era as VHS finally heads into the West along with Frodo, Ronald Reagan and Roy Rogers. The final shipment of the once ever-present tapes has left the warehouse of the format’s last major supplier. The business’s owner claims that the same will happen to DVD within a few years and that it’ll yield completely to Blu-ray… but I kinda doubt it. The same was said of VHS more than twenty years ago when laserdisc enjoyed a brief rise in popularity as premium home entertainment. But Blu-ray’s attraction is only going to really take off once the capability of recording discs becomes more common, and that ain’t happening yet. And there’s always gonna be a need for cheap data storage, and just about every Blu-ray player is backward compatible with DVD anyway.

But for the VHS, it is indeed “Farewell, my lovely”. It cannot be ...

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It’s a funny thing: I’ve been so wound-up about the release of Transformers: The Score last week, after months of crusading for the thing, that when the actual movie came out on DVD a few days ago it was something that I had almost overlooked! I’m still ransacking the music shelves at all the local stores for the score CD, by the way: it’s still not turning up anywhere. I may have to break down and get it off of Amazon, which I’d rather not do only because I like picking stuff off of shelves and ringing it up at the register. But Amazon really is a terrific place to find stuff especially if you can’t locate it on your own, so that might have to be the route to go. In the meantime, the copy that Steve Jablonsky sent is still not being played, out of solidarity with everyone ...

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Seibertron.com is reporting that this summer’s smash hit movie Transformers – which has come up for discussion a few times on this blog for one reason or another – will be out on DVD and HD-DVD here in the U.S. on October 16th!

Am wondering though if this will include the “extra” footage that is going to be in the IMAX release coming out later this month. Some are already speculating that there might be a “special edition” release of the movie too with that and other things (I haven’t found anywhere that there are going to be deleted scenes on this DVD release).

Still, that’s going to be pretty nifty: the CD of Steve Jablonsky’s Transformers score out on October 9th, and then the movie itself on DVD a week later 🙂...

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TVShowsOnDVD.com has the scoop on what to expect with next month’s long-awaited (well I sure have been wanting this anyway 🙂 release on DVD of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles – Volume 1.

In case you never saw this, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles was a show on ABC that started in March of 1992 and ran for a year or so on-and-off. The brainchild of George Lucas, Young Indiana Jones Chronicles followed, well, young Indiana Jones on adventures from the time he was 9 on up into his early twenties. We got to see Indy meet T.H. Lawrence (of Arabia) and Howard Carter (discoverer of Tut’s tomb) in the burning sands of Egypt, all the way to fighting in the trenches of World War I and then as a college student in Chicago where he was roomies with Elliot Ness. It was an amazing show that happened to ...

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Well, almost a complete set. But it is the part that counts most!

As I’ve said here before, I’m not much of a television watcher. A show has to be very good before I invest my valuable time in sitting down to enjoy it on a regular basis. And it takes nothing less than storytelling of the highest caliber to keep me captivated and coming. That’s why I love Lost so much. And ten years before that, there was Babylon 5.

This was the standout science-fiction show of the Nineties. And easily one of the best shows of that era, period. Babylon 5 broke bold new ground and in my sincere opinion set the pace for all the good shows that have followed. I don’t know if there had been this kind of thing attempted before with American television that Babylon 5 pulled off: a broad, sweeping epic boasting ...

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300 easily ties along with Transformers as my favorite movie so far of 2007. I’ve seen it twice now (click here for my thoughts when I first caught it) and it’s sort of taking hold with me just as The Matrix did some years ago. So I’ve been looking forward to the release of 300 on DVD this week. It also came out on both HD-DVD and Blu-ray but since I’m still waiting to see which way the market tilts before investing in a player for either of those formats, I’m still using standard DVD. Besides, we’ve got a nifty lil’ “upscaling” DVD player that does a great job outputting regular DVD to our high-def set, and we’re probably going to be more than happy with that for awhile to come. As I’ve said before, when it comes to new technology I’m very much like the Amish: I ...

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Hexadecimal 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

This is the decryption key for most of the HD-DVD titles that have been released. Apparently the bigwigs in the entertainment industry are going after websites and blogs that host it. This is similar to what happened a few years ago when DeCSS was discovered. Some people were arrested for spreading the code for that one around (in quite a few creative ways). Just for the heck of it, here’s one of DeCSS’s smaller C implementations:


/*     efdtt.c     Author:  Charles M. Hannum              */
/*                                                                         */
/*     Thanks to Phil Carmody  for additional tweaks.    */
/*                                                                         */
/*     Length:  434 bytes (excluding unnecessary newlines)                 */
/*                                                                         */
/*     Usage is:  cat title-key scrambled.vob | efdtt clear.vob           */

#define m(i)(x[i]^s[i+84])<<
unsigned char x[5],y,s[2048];main(n){for(read(0,x,5);read(0,s,n=2048);write(1,s
,n))if(s[y=s[13]%8+20]/16%4==1){int i=m(1)17^256+m(0)8,k=m(2)0,j=m(4)17^m(3)9^k
*2-k%8^8,a=0,c=26;for(s[y]-=16;--c;j*=2)a=a*2^i&1,i=i/2^j&1<<24;for(j=127;++j;c=cy)c+=y=i^i/8^i4^i12,i=i8^y<<17,a^=a>14,y=a^a*8^a<<6,a=a>8^y<<9,k=s
[j],k="7Wo~'G_216"[k&7]+2^"cr3sfw6v;*k+
...

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