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Our new plasma showed up early! The Stereo Shop said it would take a week, but the guy left me an email on Wednesday afternoon so of course we had to go get it. We settled on the Panasonic TH-50PZ850U…decided against the Pioneers since they’re selling off their plasma business to Panasonic, and decided that the tv having ethernet is pretty cool (for firmware updates and such), even if we don’t use the youtube and picasa features. We were a little bit torn about the Pioneers since they support DLNA, but oh well, maybe it’ll be more established next time we upgrade. Since we are switching up to blu-ray and needed everything to be 1080p, that meant a new receiver as well (so that we can switch HDMI)…this time we went up a level to the Denon 4308ci (our last was a 3803). We were going to wait for Black Friday on the blu-ray, but the Stereo Shop offered us their black friday price on the Sony BDP-S350, which we were going to get anyway, for $199 (I think we could’ve gotten it for $179 from Sears or K-Mart on Friday, but figured why not). He tried to sell us Monster HDMI cables too but we came to our senses, there. The TV had to be unboxed to fit in the Subaru and it was like Tetris trying to fit the receiver and blu ray boxes in there too.

OK, I ALMOST came to my senses about HDMI. We had ordered HDMI cables online for like $5 each but they are being shipped ground from California. This was fine when we thought the TV wouldn’t be here until next week. But the sight of a blu-ray player sitting there on the shelf was bugging the hell out of me. In the interests of marital harmony, Paul suggested we go buy 2 cables from Wal-Mart…the minimum we’d need to hook it into the receiver and hook the receiver to the TV. $60 for impatient geekdom. But man, Wall*E and Nightmare Before Christmas looked and sounded great…when we finally figured out how to get the blu ray player to pass through the audio as bitstream (had something to do with the bd live or additional content audio setting; we had it on ‘Mix’ and we needed ‘Direct’).

The other thing was, the TV came with a stand but not bolts for other mounts (we have a low A/V shelf with pole mount)…had to go to Lowe’s to get them.

So now we’re just waiting for HDMI cables so I can eliminate component/optical for the cable box and one DVD jukebox, which frees up enough component connectors on the Denon that I can finally eliminate the manual switchboxes…yay. Next up, new motherboard and/or video card for Mooby so we can hook that up HDMI as well.

This is the first time we bought A/V equipment where everything had an ethernet jack. First thing we did with all three was get firmware updates. Can’t wait to see how the Sony blu-ray jukebox will turn out–will we finally get a complete disc title listing without having to type them all in?

 Watching Batman Beyond Season 2 ====> schwaaay

See this article about the recent DRM problems they’ve been having. If you’ve got one of the 20 or so defective titles (of which I haven’t seen a list but it includes at least Stranger than Fiction, Casino Royale, The Holiday, and The Pursuit of Happyness), you can call 800.860.2878 and they will take your name, phone number, address, and UPC off the box and will send you a replacement disc.

Glad we didn’t send the player back. I feel certain we would’ve gotten stuck with the shipping fee and gotten absolutely nothing useful done to the player.

Sony, you and your ARccOS suck. Sure, you’re replacing discs. Maybe if you weren’t so anal retentive you wouldn’t be having this problem to begin with. It doesn’t prevent illegitimate use, just pisses off the people who actually bought the damn movie for their own use.

Bravo to EMI for releasing DRM-free music. Now if Apple would sell it in a lossless format, I’d probably even start using iTunes!

We’ve had 2 interesting failures with our new dvd player, and recent dvd releases.

Sony DVP-CX995V + “Stranger Than Fiction” == “Reading -> power off”

Sony DVP-CX895V + “Stranger Than Fiction” == “Plays”

(for 2 different disks, one from amazon, one from netflix, a Sony pictures release…)

Sony DVP -CX995V + “The Holiday” == “Reading ->power off”

Sony DVP-CX895V + “The Holiday” == “Plays”

(Also a sony pictures release…)

The DVP-CX995V also has this annoying quirk, whereby if you turn it on, it turns it self off every other time ;). It didn’t bother me at first, but now… it’s irritating.

That little guy in the front, Pidge, is still looking for a home. Check out the Rochester IGs Drupal for more info.

We have had a great couple of nights for movies. We rented Aeon Flux and Superman Returns from Netflix. The first was not bad, worth a rental at least. Loved the second. We’ll probably pick up the big box set. If you pick one up, be careful–there were some things missing from the first batch of sets released. Check here for more info. We also made a trip to Walmart and picked up Clerks II (watched and loved it yesterday), Da Vinci Code (watched earlier today while decorating the tree!) and Young Frankenstein (old favorite).

Watched “The world’s fastest indian” tonight via netflix. It was awesome.

Not gonna ruin it =), but we’ll probably buy it.

Since I’m on the netflix topic. My current movie is the early batman serial 2 disk DVD set. We’ve watched the first one and it was pretty neat. Some of the dialog was a bit of a shock, blunt anti Japanese wartime propoganda and slang, for some reason I just didn’t expect it. Can’t wait for disk 2 =). We’re still trying to figure out if the evil guy in the movie is supposed to be japanese…

The lengths I’ll go to to save $30-$50 (depending on seller) for Texas Ranch House on DVD:

• Recorded in HD on TWC DVR because I wanted to watch it in HD at least once (yeah, I know my final product is SD DVD but at least it’s a nice clean source).
• ‘Save to VCR’ from there to standalone ReplayTV box, wait 2 hours per night’s recording (no, no easy means of extracting data directly, and it’s not mine so I’m not likely to break into it)
• DVArchive to download it to my laptop
• gopdit to determine edit points (remove few commercials, chapter points to skip ‘next time’, credits, etc
• rtvedit to apply edit file from previous step
• rtvconvert to get it from Replay format into something more palatable to DVD (splitting into m2v and mp2 as future steps like that better)
• mplex the audio and video back together (don’t ask why. At least it’s all in sync.)
• take screen shots, edit out music clips, etc; gimp it into menu screens and a bunch more steps to stick it all together
• dvdauthor it
• mkisofs it
• copy the iso back to our media machine
• burn to DVD

See ReplayToDvd wiki for some details.

Just think, this is still fair use. Maybe not for long. If only I didn’t have to go through that additional digital to analog conversion….

I don’t get DRM for music. They’re already selling whole albums in non-protected, unencrypted formats (ie the CD), which you can rip and do whatever you want the songs. But if I only want one or two songs off an album, generally I’m stuck with whatever lame DRM’ed, compressed format they feel like selling. And don’t tell me I can go buy a subscription on one of the non-DRM MP3 sites…I only want a few songs at a time, and very rarely what they’re selling (although I did recently buy a copy of Jonathan Coulton’s ‘Code Monkey’).

So what’s the purpose of DRM? To force me to buy entire albums when I only want a couple of songs? To prepare me for some kind of sucky future in which most music is DRM’ed and there are no CD’s? C’mon. Is it so much to ask? I *want* to pay for a copy of these songs. I just want them in the same format I’d get them in if I happened to buy the entire crappy album. You don’t seem to mind selling me a CD that I can rip to whatever format I like. Maybe it would encourage artists to produce albums that are more than just a few good songs, with the rest being filler?

Speaking of DRM, kudos to Sony for making their first-gen blu-ray stuff export full-res over all connections. It almost makes you happy to be an early adopter (well, early/middle anyway, 3 years) of an HD monitor. Still, even though we had a DVD player within about a month of their original release, I doubt I’ll be getting off the fence with regards to HD or blu-ray DVD. It’s not so much the player as the thought of replacing the media in one format or the other.