It has been said “It is better to be a pirate than join the navy.”
Notably, it was said during the movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley”, which Gina, John and I watched yesterday in the living room. Normally, this wouldn’t be remotely blog worthy.
This however was not a normal viewing. We watched it on YouTube.com, on the living room TV, via the S-Video cable on my laptop. The reason we had to watch it on YouTube, is because I apparently left the DVD disc in my old HP laptop, which is back at the office. (We had watched it a few weeks ago, late on a Friday afternoon at the office.)
But thanks to the miracles of modern technology, I was able to pipe the YouTube version out to the TV. The sound aspect was a slightly different story, I had to steal the sound system from my office computer. There were a few downsides to this setup.
The first downside, was that the 95 minute film was broken into about 10 parts, each being just a little bit less than 10 minutes each. This meant that after each part ended, soemone would have to click on the next segment, which was usually me.
The second downside, is that for some reason part #7 was missing, not sure why it was missing, the “video had been removed”. All the others were perfectly good.
The last downside was more of a minor, minor annoyance. Not sure that John or Gina noticed (or cared), but the dubbing looked to be a bit off. I am not sure if this was a combination of the s-video output or the videoes themselves. But the audio appeared to be about a half second ahead of the video.
The, next marvel of technology was that we all wanted to watch Hackers, a cheesy, yet classic techie movie. I love it because of the cameo appearances of Jolt Cola. Now, I still swear that we own the DVD of Hackers, but it could have been a VHS tape. Either way, we searched our DVD collection and could not for the life of us find it.
So we turned to the U-Verse’s video on-demand service. Low and behold, there it was for a mere $2.00, we could rent it. The movie started up almost instantly (not suffering from any of your usual “buffering lag” that you get when watching movies over the Internet.
I mean, the idea of a video on-demand isn’t anything new, cable companies have had the technology for quite some time. But overall the number of movies available have usually been limited and therefore only your current titles. The U-Verse video library has a wide variety of movies available, Hackers was made in 1995.
While, I am talking about this type of tech, I have to mention the recent addition of a marvelous feature to the XBOX-Live experience, Netflix Video On-Demand. Meaning that I can watch streaming Netflix videos through my XBOX-360. I have used the service to watch some silly TV shows (”Battlestar Galactica 1980″) and some funny movies (”War Inc”, and “Cash Back”). The quality was quite good, DVD level and I experienced no lag.
Earlier today we went and saw a fabulously funny film, “Four Christmases”. We went to see it with Jeremy and Nichole. I had been a little apprehensive about it recently, as I was afraid that having seen numerous trailers for the movie that I had already seen all of the funny parts. Nope, not in the least. If you haven’t seen the movie and think that from any trailers you have seen that you might be interested in seeing it, please definitely go and see it
Tonight we watch “Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day” via the U-Verse video on-demand. It was one that Gina and I had wanted to see in the theatres but had missed out catching down at the Great Hills Regal (which tends to show more of the art-house style flicks).
We closed out the evening with “Sweet Home Alabama”, which we have on DVD. It is one of Gina’s favorites and I have to admit I like it too.
Well, it is definitely time for bed.
Laterz
bdbenner Technology, XBox360, movies dvds, movies, Technology, U-Verse, youtube