I have trouble watching non-English speaking movies. I can barely stand Greek in movies (even when I used to live in Greece). And yet, “Pan’s Labyrinth“, entirely in Spanish, came out so natural for me. The movie was so captivating that even if it was shot in Klingonese it would be enjoyable. One of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. A fairy tale definitely NOT for kids. Watched it last night via Netflix’s online player.

NYTimes: “Lawyers for the Alaska Native coastal village of Kivalina, which is being forced to relocate because of flooding caused by the changing Arctic climate, filed suit in federal court here Tuesday arguing that 5 oil companies, 14 electric utilities and the country’s largest coal company were responsible for the village’s woes.”

Maybe this is what it will take to get countries to do something radical about it.

We were discussing over dinner with JBQ about James Morrison, the actor who plays Lt. Col. McQueen on S:AAB, and Bill Buchanan on “24″.

Eugenia: I love his characters, but the actor himself is not my type at all… he writes poems, is a yoga instructor and a vegan. I can’t identify myself with any of that.
JBQ: Actor and a vegan?
Eugenia: Yes, why?
JBQ: Film is made out of [animal] gelatin.
(loud laughs)

Finished watching both “Earth 2” (IMDb rating: 7.0/10) and “Space: Above and Beyond” (IMDb rating: 8.1/10). I was watching the latter on the Greek TV in the ’90s, but the first one never broadcasted in Greece as far as I know. So I Netflix’ed both and [re-]watched them as I am such a sci-fi sucker (if you want to torture me, you can always force me to watch a medical/drama). So, as you can see that S:AAB has a higher rating compared to “Earth 2″. Usually, I trust IMDb’s ratings. But I won’t agree this time. In my opinion, “Earth 2″ is superior to S:AAB.

“Earth 2″ has elements that show that its writers had a pretty objective view of the future: a totalitarian government, chips implanted to people without their knowledge, an almost uninhabitable original planet Earth, non-humanoid aliens that are different enough from humans to be interesting, genetically engineered people pre-destined to follow certain professions, long interstellar travels that required cold sleep, the fact that in order to survive a colonization of a planet the humans must be genetically modified, while other humans were modified to become cyborgs. It’s all there. It’s true sci-fi, but with enough future reality dosage in it. So from the writing point of view, “Earth 2″ was great (and it would be greater if they dropped the parapsychology-driven episodes). Where it lacked was in the actual realization of the writer’s vision. It seems that the rest of the crew did not get it, and gave us some constipated-looking aliens, cheap directing in addition to bad broadcasting times that drove ratings down.

S:AAB suffers from the exact opposite problem. Better directing, more expensive sets, “Starship Troopers”-like battles, a “Wing Commander”-like universe (the show was obviously inspired by the video game), computer generated sequences that were a first for TV at the time. And at the same time, writing sucked big time. Stupid dialogs (don’t you hate it when characters start explaining shit like we are 5 year olds?), idiotic characters, aliens that seem to share similar values with us and yet don’t sit their ass down to discuss a treaty. While the Sillicate AI story is somewhat believable (although the show is set awfully too close in 2063), the InVitro story is not: it’s cheaper to employ soldiers than to gestate them and pay for their growth and education. The fact that only 6-7 characters were recurring, shows how shallow the show was. If it wasn’t for the super-hot James Morrison as the Lt. Col. “T.C.” McQueen, I would have been sleeping in the couch in no time.

Truth is, there were things that really bothered me in S:AAB. No matter how sexy McQueen was, when he was talking how much “hope” the Hiroshima bomb gave to people and he wanted to do the same, I just wanted to blow his brains out. Or how greatly he talked about the Vietnam war: the guy is a maniac, and yet his character was meant as a father figure. The show felt like a US Army propaganda at times. Or when Lt Wang said something about the ancient Greek God called “Cer”, a God that does not exist (what did the writers were smoking?). Or that episode where the marines were stranded in space and they *heard* the alien fighters closing in (WHAT)? What really bothered me was that episode called “Who Monitors the Birds?”. For the S:AAB fans, this is one of their favorite episodes ever. To me, it was freaking incomprehensible. Alien soldiers exchanging tokens? And that vision (or was it an alien?) “The Whore of Death”, a concept taken (unfortunately, literally) from the William Manchester’s “Goodbye, Darkness” book. I mean, if you had never read that book, you can’t help thinking that the writers went mad. What a waste. No wonder it got canceled.

So there was this question on that video forum, right? About how to transcode an h.264/AAC MOV file into an h.264.AAC MP4 one without re-encoding so it plays back on the XboX360 and PS3 devices. Owners of such devices that use Vimeo to download videographer’s videos will probably have stumbled into the problem already.

So here are my tested solutions using popular software:

1. Quicktime Pro. Costs $20. You load the MOV file, you make sure that it’s indeed h.264/AAC using the “Show Movie Inspector” window. Then, you export, select “Movie to MPEG-4″ and then click “Options”. There, you select the MP4 option, and you select both for video and audio the “passthrough” options from the format drop-down menu. That’s it, in 30 seconds you will be having a PS3/XBoX-compliant video file without re-encoding.

2. Download AvideMux2. It’s free. First, Avidemux2 will ask you if you want to use an alternative algorithm to load this kind of file. If you say “no”, you will get a crash after a while. If you say “yes”, you will get a known audio/video sync issue. So choose your poison. Then select “copy” for both video and audio, MP4 for exporting format and then you save your .mp4 file. The created file is compatible with the PS3 (dunno about XboX360), but Quicktime itself can’t play it back. It seems that Avidemux2 has an MP4 container bug.

3. Download FFmpeg. It’s free. You run the file like this: ffmpeg -i movie.mov -f mp4 -vcodec copy -acodec copy output.mp4
It creates a compatible MP4 file but B-Frames are all fucked up and so the file stutters on playback.

4. Download Mencoder. It’s free. You run the file like this: mencoder movie.mov -oac copy -ovc copy -o output.mp4
It says that it’s broken and that it can’t copy AAC audio and that you will need to override this by using the -fafmttag 0×706D option. You add that and you get an MP4 file. Only that this file is broken and it doesn’t work.

So, commercial proprietary solution 1, open source 0. You get what you pay for, obviously. This doesn’t mean that Quicktime is perfect, I still hate its “tick” problem with h.264 MP4 videos and the fact that the MPEG-4 exporting has no de-interlacing option. So in general, you have to use a gazillion utilities that each one does one part of what you need in order to accomplish a seemingly simple task.

In all fairness, the “Transcode” OSS utility might be able to do what we need to do here, but it only runs under Linux, and this takes out 99% of the Vimeo users.

Wow, a very sexy Hugh Jackman, I don’t even want to think the countless painful hours spent on the gym building that body. Thankfully, the producers let him grow his chest hair back, as he is currently filming the “Wolverine” movie. This is why I like the Wolverine super hero: ’cause he’s a hairy badass. He doesn’t look like a wuss. I don’t like the real-life actors btw (I can’t stand their insecurities — I have enough of my own), I often like the fictitious characters they portray though. Jackman’s wife seems to like Wolverine too, as it is said that sometimes Jackman wears the X-Men costume in their bedroom…

I guess I can ask my (also hairy) JBQ to come to bed with his work costume, covered in printed sheets of C/C++ and Java Android code.

And so the popular with teenagers Stage6 is going to close. Reason being that it’s “too expensive to run”. Now, leaving aside conspiracy theories that RIAA/MPAA might be lingering to sue them as Stage6 is a pirate’s heaven, truth is, this site IS expensive to run.

The reason why it is expensive to run is because they are not clever about it. Here you have people uploading GBs of video, and Stage6 shows them as is, without a sensible re-encoding. This obviously does not fly well with bandwidth consumption, which is the No1 wallet killer. If they had the brains to do HD the same way Vimeo does it (re-encode the HD stream in a lower bitrate HD in the page, allow an SD version to be embedded only, and allow for download of the original stream), plus re-encode files only if necessary (a formula could be used to decide to either re-encode or not based on the video time vs bitrate and filesize), that would have probably save them millions of dollars in bandwidth by now.

But, they didn’t seem to have the brains, so they are out of the picture, leaving Vimeo being pretty much the only big-enough video sharing site to support HD.

My JBQ just ordered the 50″ Pioneer Kuro PDP-5010FD! At last, a real 1080p HDTV (our current 55″ Sharp only does 1080i/540p, not even 720p). I just hope it arrives in one piece, as it’s an almost $4000 purchase.

We spent the day yesterday trying to find cheaper alternatives to the Kuro. We saw the Sony LCD alternatives which we didn’t like the over-sharpen saturated images, we tried the new Sharp LCDs that have uniformity backlight problems, we saw the new Panasonic TH-50PZ85U series (pre-order only at this point) and we were actually close to getting this TH-50PZ85U 50″ plasma TV as it has a 30000:1 contrast ratio. Only to find out that Panasonic changed their press release and site to change the 2:2 24p pulldown to 2:3 pulldown (which means no real 24p support), plus it has no pixel-to-pixel mode (useful if you are using the panel as a PC monitor, or playing games), plus a few other small issues. Besides, even if it had the 24p support, 2:2 pulldown means that the panel would run at 48Hz instead of 60Hz or 72Hz (as the Kuro can do), and 48Hz means flickering. We could buy that Panasonic for less than $2000, and still, we decided to pay the full price and get the best there is for the money: the Kuro.

In fact, yesterday JBQ asked a very interesting question that was important to our decision to go with the Kurro: “don’t tell me what it does well, tell me what it does wrong“. And we couldn’t find a SINGLE thing missing from that TV, feature-wise.

And don’t give me that crap that “plasmas die easily”, that’s a myth. Modern plasmas don’t have such issues anymore. And their natural image is just amazing, and worth the risk. Your eyes will thank you.

If you don’t have the money for a Kuro but you still want the best there is, I highly recommend that Panasonic btw. It’s the second best on the market in my opinion (for the price that is).