“Idealists don’t get much done without a few pragmatists running interferance for them.”

I’m thankful for all the pragmatists in my life (even those who don’t realize they fill the role).

I recently bought a media player. There are basically Linux based two models out there these days each with benefits and flaws. I’ll get into what I am use in a later post. Right now, I wanted to post about how I got my DVDs onto the bloody thing !

Linux may not be for the novice but there is one thing that can be said for it – It’s damn efficient … once you figure out how to do what every it is you want to do. In my case it was to move a bunch of TV shows from DVD to the media device. Originally I thouhgt I needed to convert everything the Xvid AVI files but it turns out most of these media devices can play DVD VOB files directly.

TV series DVDs are a bit different from movie DVDs. The biggest difference is that movies tend to have one big VOB of hte movie and a few small ones of out takes, director’s notes, etc. So for a movie, you want the get the biggest VOB and seldom care for the rest. TV series DVDs have 6 or 7 episodes plus the little bits of fluff. Further, the show is broken up into seasons and episodes but DVDs have “disks” and “titles”. Mapping from one to the other can be easy if there were a small number of episodes and the show was a 30 minute comedy series as opposed to a one hour drama. Fortunately, if you solve the multiple episode problem for the 30 minute comedy and the multiple DVDs per season issue for the dramas, you got all your bases covers. Continue reading ‘Watching old television on a media player’ »

Every year for the past who knows how long, I’ve had a sports ritual when it comes to the Superbowl game. I set my VCR … TiVo … DVR to record from just about 30 minutes before the game’s kick-off and get about 4 hours worth. During the game, I typically go do something or watch a movie. If I am really curious, I tune in the game after about 2 hours to see when it is going to end. At the end or shortly there after, I check the score, the winners, the losers, and then the highlights reel. My goal is all of this lat bit is to be somewhat less of a noob the next day at work.

Once the game is over, I rewind the tape or jump to the start of the TiVo / DVR and start fast forwarding at 16X to find the commercials. I watch each one and hope there is something truly funny. The Budweiser frogs were funning in the beginning … not so much any more. “Cat Herder” was a good one. Even Apple did a nice one 24 years ago.

I no longer have a TV so I had a moment of panic that this year, I’d miss out. Then I realized, my old habits were so 20th century. I’m sure, within about 15 minutes of air time, each commercial will find its way onto YouTube just like the frogs, the cats, and the apple !