What a surprise! I’ve finally done it! Yes, I’ve finally taken a video stream off our Dish 501 PVR (Personal Video Recorder) and transcoded it on the pc… with no audio sync issues!

Odn stands with his legs apart proudly making a V sign with his right hand toward the camera shouting VICTORY!

I don’t know how long or how many sleepless nights I’ve devoted to video conversion, editing and the holy grail of saving perfect digital copies from our PVR but I’ve finally done it and it feels great! It’s kinda like an RPG I kept dying right before gaining a level with various problems but now I’m level 2 in video conversion! Woohoo.

I didn’t even plan on doing this today it just kinda happened.

So how do you do it? Well I think I’ll write a tutorial one of these days (nothing too technical) to help others. Lets just say for now that TMPGEnc rocks!

After that fun and unexpected discovery I decided to look for a good DVD player since Parr’s mom has been wanting one. We’ll I want one too but it’s easier to justify when it’s for someone else. I started out my search looking for players that could handle the DIVX format. I figured I could save/reuse all my existing video on the computer without having to transcode anything.

We’ll a few hours later I had come to the horrible conclusion that yes, there are DVD players that can handle DIVX, OGG and even had hard drives and ethernet in them. The bad news? All of them currently act like a windows machine. Crashing, lock ups, finicky about media and worse. Bleah!

You know, I love computers. I really do. More that most people realize I think. I do not however want a big complex overkill of a machine for every task.

I do not want to troubleshoot my toasters micro operating system because it doesn’t like bagels. I don’t want my cars steering system freezing up on me and I certainly don’t want my automatic star trek doors to not open because I lost too much weight.

Some things are best done specialized. Like when you call a plumber, he may not be a good music teacher but he sure can stop that leak.

Specialization is a good thing.

Think I’ll go buy a regular DVD player tomorrow. Maybe with that nice Gift Certificate Dj Clawz gave me for the wedding.

I haven’t truly enjoyed a Bond film since the old Roger Moore series of the 70′s and 80′s. Classics like Moonraker had the a wonderful combination of comedy, action, gadgets and yes, a mandatory plethora of beautiful women. The latest Bond film titled Die Another Day stars Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry and is actually good!

I have to say I’ve never been truly happy with Pierce as James Bond but this film is different, the movie starts out in with our hero surfing into the coast of North Korea. After looking cool, using a few gadgets and issuing a couple of suave hand signals, James meets up with a helicopter during an unscheduled stop and switches places with a bad guy inside. James gets in the helicopter which takes off and he goes on to conveniently place a package of C4 into a briefcase filled with diamonds. He adds some finishing touches to the explosives with a flashing LED peg stuck through it, making mandatory “beeping explosion in a later scene” noises of course.

After the Heli lands, James meets up with some unsavory North Korean military personnel. The deal is simple, trade a whole bunch of diamonds for a whole bunch of weapons. Should be a easy trade except Mr. Bond is discovered thanks to a henchman’s digital camera and probably someone doing a google image search in a back room. The situation gets worse when the main bad guy demonstrates a new weapon on the heli that originally dropped James Bond off. Ka-Booom! (Depleted Uranium shells are really effective BTW). The situation quickly turns into chaos as the bad guys father, the true general of the North Korean army, radios in wanting to know why there is fire and smoke eminating from his base. He informs his son that he was already enroute and that he will be there in five min to inspect the area.

Our main bad guy then orders the super cool hovercrafts to leave the area. (Quick everyone mom is coming, hide the comic books and pixie sticks). James of course, facing certain death, sets off his previous C4 laden briefcase, gets on a escaping hovercraft, knocks out the driver and proceeds to cause some major havoc.

In the escape and chase sequence that follows, hovercrafts are skirting over mines, vehicles are blowing up, chain guns are trimming down trees and flamethrowers are making everything extra crispy. The chase is technically well done and ends with James Bond slugging it out with the main bad guy. They eventurally crash through a temple gate with the entire hovercraft going over the side of a waterfall to certain doom. Our hero james of course survives by hanging onto a bell hammer (horizontal asian style) as the bell rings over and over with his momentum.

All this commotion attracts the real General of course. James, surrounded and blamed for the death of the generals son is sent to prison, the special “torture you kind” that are becoming so hard to find in our western civilization nowadays.

All this and we haven’t even got to the main credits yet!

Well, I don’t want to ruin the movie for you but lets just say if you have ever liked any of the Bond films in the past, do yourself a favor and go to the theatre right away. This latest film is an action packed, visually diverse, bad pun filled, love fest extravaganza! Plus, any movie with John Cleese as an excellent M should probably be a mandatory film to see anyway.