With dual layer Blu-ray discs being the industry standard for feature-length videos why isn't the 50 GB storage space used more efficiently?
50 GB is around 12 times the storage space of standard DVD discs with 4.3 GB yet still entire seasons of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", for example, don't come on a single Blu-ray disc. What the Hell? Why?
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" isn't even on Blu-ray, but the seasons do already exist in 6 disc DVD packs. Theoretically, that means that 6 seasons should fit on 3 Blu-ray discs. Give or take a few pointless extras and maybe adding the original 1992 movie to a boxset, the maximum number of Blu-ray discs needed would be 4. How much do you want to bet that when "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" does come out on Blu-ray, there'll still be 6 Blu-ray discs to every pack and the price will be doubled?
What's the reason for this? Do you think that the original 4:3 ratioed, standard television format shows will be magically enhanced somehow to make them clearer or the stories will become any better because of it? You can't save the final season of "Buffy" from being crap anyway no matter how much you polish the turd, but I digressed. No, the truth is that Blu-ray is a scam.
No matter what the media and the nerd blogs tell you, there's no huge difference between the transfers of movies available on DVD and Blu-ray in the same way that DVD was a huge technological upgrade from VHS. The movie industry simply needed something else to get money out of people. If there is any benefit at all, it's that the plastic which covers the label where the information is really stored is a little bit harder to scratch. It's still not impossible though. Errors in duplication are just as frequent too.
I've seen Blu-ray discs which look absolutely no different to the DVD versions of the same movie. I've also seen transfers to Blu-ray which are a lot worse so it's become obvious that it's all a con. Unless you have a huge HDTV with at least a 70 inch screen, you aren't going to notice much difference either way. On my 3 year old 42 inch television, there's no difference at all.
Blu-ray players, on the other hand, aren't a scam. If they'd been used the right way in the beginning to play multi-featured discs back then they'd be a fantastic upgrade for those of us who always wanted a DVD jukebox from Sony which actually worked properly. The bonus features which allow Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and other streaming services through the same boxes are also commendable additions.
But is it worth upgrading everything to Blu-ray when you already have a huge DVD collection already? The answer is no. You aren't going to get any benefit out of it. The DVDs you own will automatically be up-scaled by the Blu-ray player to the resolution of your new HDTV, but most HDTVs should do that with a standard DVD player anyway. That's also the same process used by most of the Blu-ray manufacturers who claim to have "remastered" the movies. What did they do? They enlarged the picture and burnt it back onto Blu-ray, that's all. Give me a break! Only a movie filmed in HD specifically for the Blu-ray format is ever going to look "better" (and without letterboxing) because your old beloved '80s slashers probably don't even exist on a better format originally than VHS or Beta (if you are lucky).
So the process might be more intricate in the case of transferring 35mm prints to Blu-ray than merely up-scaling low-budget horror DVDs, but the principle remains the same. If the original source material is crap, the result of the transfer will be too. It's not some kind of magic that turns fuzzy into non-fuzzy at the press of a button. In some cases, it nearly is, but not really. But do you really believe that anyone is going to invest the time or money into rescanning movies when a few digital enhancements are all that it will take to satisfy the masses? Of course, not. 99.9% of "remastered" Blu-ray movies are the same as the DVD except up-scaled and re-burnt onto new media.
Does one movie really require the whole 50 GB of space for the resulting image to be stored on? Hell, no! You could fit 10 remastered movies on each Blu-ray disc if you wanted to, but obviously the movie studios don't want to do that. They want you to buy everything again individually apart from the movies which didn't sell well in the first place. They don't care about those at all which is why there are so many DVD multi-feature bargains to be found.
While the majority of people would rather buy multipacks of two or three movies per side of a flipper disc, the single feature scam continues to entice the cash from the wallets of those people with more money than sense.
Do yourself a favour this Christmas. Just say no to Blu-ray until the movie distributors start using the format properly.
Showing posts with label annoyances. Show all posts
Showing posts with label annoyances. Show all posts
December 9, 2012
December 2, 2012
It's coming up to Christmas not Xmas, Creepmas or Zombiemas!
Okay, it's just a small annoyance that I've noticed creeping into the titles of various blog posts from other people recently, but something needs to be said about this and a few other things as well.
Christmas is the time to celebrate the birth of the Saviour of the human race who died for our sins. Obviously, Jesus' birth didn't actually occur during Yule or the Saturnalia which the Roman Catholic church covered with its own celebrations, but that's neither here nor there. The clue is in the name. Christmas has nothing to do with zombies, neither does Hallowe'en for that matter, yet the dumber-than-dumb continue to pervert the true meaning of the holidays.
Now I know a lot of you think it's witty, funny, or clever to make some crappy pun out of a religious festival for the sake of your lame blog posts which nobody wants to read anyway, but it's annoying. Just scanning the titles on my blogroll makes me want to unsubscribe. So let me just educate you about a few things before you continue your lack of originality and piss your readers off completely.
Yule, Saturnalia, or the great mid-winter festival by any other name has always been associated with the spirits of the dead. Not the undead or the living dead, but the ghosts of ancestors who hang around enviously watching the living. The crackers pulled across the dinner table, the protective spirit in the Yule log or the fir tree brought inside, and the loud celebrations with clinking glasses were all part of the superstitious rituals designed to keep the dead away from the feasting. To allow the dead to eat, also known as a "dumb supper", was a whole other ball game which could only bring bad luck. Early Christians associated it with a mockery of the Last Supper and their Holy Communion, but they weren't the only ones who showed caution. The Bacchants and Jews would have have turned away from such necromantic practices too so you can't blame the Catholics for everything.
Ghost stories were always part of the festivities. They predate everything as mankind feared what was lurking in the dark of the long winter nights and sought to terrify each other both as entertainment and a warning. It was "edutainment", if you will. While demons and monsters delighted the Eastern tales, in the West they were rarer. Man feared man or the gods more than any mythical beasts. Cautionary tales abounded in legends, folklore and nursery rhymes. You don't need me to tell you that they were the precursors of all our modern horror stories.
Jumping ahead quite a few centuries, the Christmas ghost story reached its peak during the dour Victorian era when Charles Dickens wrote "A Christmas Carol" and "The Mistletoe Bough" became one of the most popular songs. The great British writer M.R. James made another Christmas tradition out of reading his own fictional ghost stories to students at the end of term. This practice spread, but try as hard as you like and you won't find any tales of Christmas zombies. Zombies are not traditional Christmas fare. They never will be either.
To be perfectly frank, the slashers (Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees. and even Michael Myers) sneaking into the Hallowe'en festivities piss me off just as much. Hallowe'en is yet another time when the dead are allowed to cross over which has nothing to do with horror movie icons. Yes, the Catholics stole another pagan festival for their own use, but the original dumb suppers of Samhain/Hallowe'en were based on the superstitious acknowledgement that the seasons were changing, the Earth was dying, and nobody wanted the curse of upset ancestors to stop Spring from coming back again. It was the time of year to honour the dead although not without scaring a few of the meaner spirits away with hideous gourds. There were still no zombies, vampires or werewolves involved. If you want the latter, you have to fast forward to Spring for the fertility rites which underpin Easter.
I've oversimplified a lot of things here, but my point remains the same. Stop dragging zombies and other trendy American horror crap into European festivals!
America can't even make bread, beer, or chocolate properly because of its own bloodymindedness and arrogance which ignores centuries of tried and tested formulas that work. Just look at the state of your movie industry, legal system, or economy before you think you can start trying to be innovative. You've failed in every possible way, so it's time for you to get back to basics, learn the rules, and conform. I'm seriously going to unsubscribe from any more of you assholes who don't start toeing the line.
Oh yeah, and stop using the word "super" instead of "very" too. This crap started in Japan with their "Engrish" marketing hyperbole which the Californians and gamers who never leave the house have all picked up on. You aren't all from California so stop spreading this grammatical cancer along with saying "like" every other word in public. Think about the "Oh my God" phrase too since most of the people who use it are bloody pointless, hypocritical athiests in the first place.
Look at the older horror movies or even the amateur indie crap from 4 years ago which reflects society and you won't find all this "super fun" or "I was super scared" bullshit in the dialogue. You will find it all over YouTube because, let's face it, all YouTubers are narcissistic and thick as two short planks anyway. Those attention whores dumb themselves down intentionally or gimmick themselves to get pageviews and AdSense revenue. If you are blogging, you should have no such agenda.
Be Bloggers! Write properly! Stop with all the Christmas zombies!
While you're at it, stop promoting amateur handycam dreck too. All that malarkey was dead and buried 3 years ago when the rental stores closed down. Stupid people couldn't be fooled by garish DVD coverart which made them choose the wrong movie anymore. Only the lame cliques who like to get ripped off at conventions still buy into that bullshit now. The real horror fans have turned their backs on it. We want good professional horror movies not more Hollywood-inspired clones of something we could make ourselves after a trip to Wal-mart's camera section. Kickstarter/e-begging projects which nobody in their right mind is going to donate to and all that other fluff which makes people not want to read anything you say will kill your blogs!
Want to lose more readers? Just keep on doing what you're doing.
Christmas is the time to celebrate the birth of the Saviour of the human race who died for our sins. Obviously, Jesus' birth didn't actually occur during Yule or the Saturnalia which the Roman Catholic church covered with its own celebrations, but that's neither here nor there. The clue is in the name. Christmas has nothing to do with zombies, neither does Hallowe'en for that matter, yet the dumber-than-dumb continue to pervert the true meaning of the holidays.
Now I know a lot of you think it's witty, funny, or clever to make some crappy pun out of a religious festival for the sake of your lame blog posts which nobody wants to read anyway, but it's annoying. Just scanning the titles on my blogroll makes me want to unsubscribe. So let me just educate you about a few things before you continue your lack of originality and piss your readers off completely.
Yule, Saturnalia, or the great mid-winter festival by any other name has always been associated with the spirits of the dead. Not the undead or the living dead, but the ghosts of ancestors who hang around enviously watching the living. The crackers pulled across the dinner table, the protective spirit in the Yule log or the fir tree brought inside, and the loud celebrations with clinking glasses were all part of the superstitious rituals designed to keep the dead away from the feasting. To allow the dead to eat, also known as a "dumb supper", was a whole other ball game which could only bring bad luck. Early Christians associated it with a mockery of the Last Supper and their Holy Communion, but they weren't the only ones who showed caution. The Bacchants and Jews would have have turned away from such necromantic practices too so you can't blame the Catholics for everything.
Ghost stories were always part of the festivities. They predate everything as mankind feared what was lurking in the dark of the long winter nights and sought to terrify each other both as entertainment and a warning. It was "edutainment", if you will. While demons and monsters delighted the Eastern tales, in the West they were rarer. Man feared man or the gods more than any mythical beasts. Cautionary tales abounded in legends, folklore and nursery rhymes. You don't need me to tell you that they were the precursors of all our modern horror stories.
Jumping ahead quite a few centuries, the Christmas ghost story reached its peak during the dour Victorian era when Charles Dickens wrote "A Christmas Carol" and "The Mistletoe Bough" became one of the most popular songs. The great British writer M.R. James made another Christmas tradition out of reading his own fictional ghost stories to students at the end of term. This practice spread, but try as hard as you like and you won't find any tales of Christmas zombies. Zombies are not traditional Christmas fare. They never will be either.
To be perfectly frank, the slashers (Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees. and even Michael Myers) sneaking into the Hallowe'en festivities piss me off just as much. Hallowe'en is yet another time when the dead are allowed to cross over which has nothing to do with horror movie icons. Yes, the Catholics stole another pagan festival for their own use, but the original dumb suppers of Samhain/Hallowe'en were based on the superstitious acknowledgement that the seasons were changing, the Earth was dying, and nobody wanted the curse of upset ancestors to stop Spring from coming back again. It was the time of year to honour the dead although not without scaring a few of the meaner spirits away with hideous gourds. There were still no zombies, vampires or werewolves involved. If you want the latter, you have to fast forward to Spring for the fertility rites which underpin Easter.
I've oversimplified a lot of things here, but my point remains the same. Stop dragging zombies and other trendy American horror crap into European festivals!
America can't even make bread, beer, or chocolate properly because of its own bloodymindedness and arrogance which ignores centuries of tried and tested formulas that work. Just look at the state of your movie industry, legal system, or economy before you think you can start trying to be innovative. You've failed in every possible way, so it's time for you to get back to basics, learn the rules, and conform. I'm seriously going to unsubscribe from any more of you assholes who don't start toeing the line.
Oh yeah, and stop using the word "super" instead of "very" too. This crap started in Japan with their "Engrish" marketing hyperbole which the Californians and gamers who never leave the house have all picked up on. You aren't all from California so stop spreading this grammatical cancer along with saying "like" every other word in public. Think about the "Oh my God" phrase too since most of the people who use it are bloody pointless, hypocritical athiests in the first place.
Look at the older horror movies or even the amateur indie crap from 4 years ago which reflects society and you won't find all this "super fun" or "I was super scared" bullshit in the dialogue. You will find it all over YouTube because, let's face it, all YouTubers are narcissistic and thick as two short planks anyway. Those attention whores dumb themselves down intentionally or gimmick themselves to get pageviews and AdSense revenue. If you are blogging, you should have no such agenda.
Be Bloggers! Write properly! Stop with all the Christmas zombies!
While you're at it, stop promoting amateur handycam dreck too. All that malarkey was dead and buried 3 years ago when the rental stores closed down. Stupid people couldn't be fooled by garish DVD coverart which made them choose the wrong movie anymore. Only the lame cliques who like to get ripped off at conventions still buy into that bullshit now. The real horror fans have turned their backs on it. We want good professional horror movies not more Hollywood-inspired clones of something we could make ourselves after a trip to Wal-mart's camera section. Kickstarter/e-begging projects which nobody in their right mind is going to donate to and all that other fluff which makes people not want to read anything you say will kill your blogs!
Want to lose more readers? Just keep on doing what you're doing.
September 20, 2012
Too many upgrades
Well, they finally did it to me. After nine months of getting away with still using the old interface even though they kept saying that it would be upgraded, Blogger updated the Dashboard against my will. I'm not happy.
I like to compose my posts with the HTML editor, and now it doesn't insert the line breaks automatically. Unless I want everything to come out as one huge paragraph, I have to use the "Compose" feature which I hate. As for the rest of it, I suppose it loads faster, but I can't find anything now. As much as I may want to, I'm not going to jump ship to Wordpress because I can't understand a damned thing on that site anyway.
Just to add insult to injury, Photobucket also joined in this madness by updating their site design (which is also still optional for a while) with a dumbed down but, paradoxically, less easy to navigate mess. Now my images all upload with an underscore and a load of random numbers and letters after them such as "underworld_zps2b76599e.jpg". That really annoys me! I tried to change the filenames, but then the images disappeared from my blog posts. Maybe it's time to look for a new image host or just not use any more pictures.
Finally, Twitter has a new official widget which is now the only one available on its site, but it doesn't work yet! I deleted the old version to put this cool-looking but useless thing in the sidebar, and was stupid enough to not keep a backup of the code. Thus, I've been forced to put the amateur-looking but still functional one from the gadgets directory at the bottom of my sidebar instead.
Why can't the developers ever leave good enough alone? This reminds me of how I used to love MySpace until they ruined it with all the streams and a load of widgets which slowed it down to a crawl. YouTube has also become even more irritating to find anything on since that all changed and they removed the labels feature. As for Facebook, why did anyone think that the timeline would be a good idea? It's made me not want to use Facebook at all anymore. What's next?
Even my current operating system, Ubuntu 12.04, is only still acceptable by using the Gnome "fallback" mode. I can't get on with Unity, Gnome 3 or KDE, and I certainly don't want any of those rough-looking lighter desktops. With a new Ubuntu only a month away, I might have to go back to using Windows. Well, unless that means Windows 8. If I have to use that crap, I might as well give up completely.
Are all these changes just to give people something to do or to satisfy the latest smartphone users? It doesn't do me any good. I loathe smartphones and only have an old Tracfone. I don't even use it all that often to make any calls and haven't got any credit on it at the moment. I couldn't imagine typing in my blog posts by pressing the same keys a hundred times over with my thumbs. Christ! What a world we live in.
For years everybody was quite happy with Firefox and all its plug-ins but, noooo, now all the kewl kids have to use Chrome (which you can't add anything to) because it's easier and they either can't think or don't have to think about it. Look at the Google search engine and how it wants to fill in everything for you (unless, like me, you've turned that infuriating "instant" nonsense off and removed the "safe" filtering). No wonder nobody ever leaves the social networking sites to look at anything else. It's like being trapped by AOL's custom interface all over again. How is any of this supposed to make using the internet more enjoyable?
Technology is conspiring against us. I never thought I'd see the day when all the changes right across the board would actually make things less usable than before, but it's happening.
I like to compose my posts with the HTML editor, and now it doesn't insert the line breaks automatically. Unless I want everything to come out as one huge paragraph, I have to use the "Compose" feature which I hate. As for the rest of it, I suppose it loads faster, but I can't find anything now. As much as I may want to, I'm not going to jump ship to Wordpress because I can't understand a damned thing on that site anyway.
Just to add insult to injury, Photobucket also joined in this madness by updating their site design (which is also still optional for a while) with a dumbed down but, paradoxically, less easy to navigate mess. Now my images all upload with an underscore and a load of random numbers and letters after them such as "underworld_zps2b76599e.jpg". That really annoys me! I tried to change the filenames, but then the images disappeared from my blog posts. Maybe it's time to look for a new image host or just not use any more pictures.
Finally, Twitter has a new official widget which is now the only one available on its site, but it doesn't work yet! I deleted the old version to put this cool-looking but useless thing in the sidebar, and was stupid enough to not keep a backup of the code. Thus, I've been forced to put the amateur-looking but still functional one from the gadgets directory at the bottom of my sidebar instead.
Why can't the developers ever leave good enough alone? This reminds me of how I used to love MySpace until they ruined it with all the streams and a load of widgets which slowed it down to a crawl. YouTube has also become even more irritating to find anything on since that all changed and they removed the labels feature. As for Facebook, why did anyone think that the timeline would be a good idea? It's made me not want to use Facebook at all anymore. What's next?
Even my current operating system, Ubuntu 12.04, is only still acceptable by using the Gnome "fallback" mode. I can't get on with Unity, Gnome 3 or KDE, and I certainly don't want any of those rough-looking lighter desktops. With a new Ubuntu only a month away, I might have to go back to using Windows. Well, unless that means Windows 8. If I have to use that crap, I might as well give up completely.
Are all these changes just to give people something to do or to satisfy the latest smartphone users? It doesn't do me any good. I loathe smartphones and only have an old Tracfone. I don't even use it all that often to make any calls and haven't got any credit on it at the moment. I couldn't imagine typing in my blog posts by pressing the same keys a hundred times over with my thumbs. Christ! What a world we live in.
For years everybody was quite happy with Firefox and all its plug-ins but, noooo, now all the kewl kids have to use Chrome (which you can't add anything to) because it's easier and they either can't think or don't have to think about it. Look at the Google search engine and how it wants to fill in everything for you (unless, like me, you've turned that infuriating "instant" nonsense off and removed the "safe" filtering). No wonder nobody ever leaves the social networking sites to look at anything else. It's like being trapped by AOL's custom interface all over again. How is any of this supposed to make using the internet more enjoyable?
Technology is conspiring against us. I never thought I'd see the day when all the changes right across the board would actually make things less usable than before, but it's happening.
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