Sorry. You're sentenced to 4 to 6 years of being a Revenant. You will walk the earth as the living dead until your debt to society has been repaid. You may rejoin the living early as a reward for good behavior (ie, shambling at respectable speeds, not eating brains, not infecting entire nation-states with zombitis...)

Hey. Unfair. You're too informed and unbiased to make the argument any fun :)

Omni - :D

Alex - Sir, having checked various sources, I find you are indeed right, PAL-M inherits the colour encoding only, not the higher number of scan lines. Of course the new digital formats are making all this rather irrelevant. I might be the only person in the world who thinks VHS is better quality than DVD - too often the compression creates noticable background artifacts (especially on smoke and such like) that put me off in a way analouge never would.

I think I'm probably disqualified from life as well now...

Zip

Quote:Originally posted by Interference22

You know, you could replace the word "Revenant" in this post with the words "telephone call-centre employee" and it would still make sense.
But I think you have to live in India to be a call centre employee nowadays... I'd rather be a Revenant. Don't like hot weather.

Quote:Originally posted by Zip

VHS is better quality than DVD
That's what I thought when I first saw those dodgy artefacts and stuff (though it wasn't a very good quality recording). But even with those, there's still so much more detail in the DVD picture. I'll be very surprised if I ever buy another VHS tape.

Did anyone see the first game of Euro 2004? I'm positive I saw artefacts around the players at times... first time I've ever seen that on TV. What's going on there? Better not happen again or I shall write an angry letter to Terry Wogan.

DVD drives wear out fast? I've had mine for years and it's still Ok... which is more than can be said for my DVD player software, PowerDVD, which crashes if you're not 800x600 when you click on "play". Ridiculous. DVD software forcing you change screenmode to play a DVD is like an oven forcing you spit on your food before it'll cook it... Er, at least to my mind.

I don't like being ruled by inanimate things.

Black Books is good.

Rips are great for the following reasons:

1) Quality is pretty damned close to the original. Good enough anyway. Obviously there are certain movies you want to own on DVD, but for things like TV shows, rips are almost as good as the real thing.
2) They're better than the real thing because they're small enough you can archive, so you can play them on demand, and when I say on demand, I mean it. You double click and there it is, you can seek around it instantly, without having to get up and get the right DVD, muck around with the drive spinning up, being noisy, having crappy ass seek times, etc. And skipping around is much easier in media player than with dvd fast forward/etc controls.

I have 440gigs of storage, and about 120 free presently. Not to incriminate myself, but one might suspect that I could probably easily have all of Farscape, Stargate SG-1, Brisco County Jr, Sopranos, Futurama, Babylon 5, Cowboy Bebop, Andromeda, Crusade, and two dozen assorted movies in that amount of space. Not counting mp3s, software and games.

And thats one of the reasons piracy is rampant. Because the pirated version is not only free, its better - more convenient, less encumbered - than the real thing. Same goes with mp3s, but at least there are venues to legally buy mp3s now.

220 volts is only good for improved electrocution! Which is a plus, I admit, but it's not something I'm especially concerned with in my own house.

Quote:Originally posted by vecna

Rips are great for the following reasons:

1) Quality is pretty damned close to the original. Good enough anyway. Obviously there are certain movies you want to own on DVD, but for things like TV shows, rips are almost as good as the real thing.
2) They're better than the real thing because they're small enough you can archive, so you can play them on demand, and when I say on demand, I mean it. You double click and there it is, you can seek around it instantly, without having to get up and get the right DVD, muck around with the drive spinning up, being noisy, having crappy ass seek times, etc. And skipping around is much easier in media player than with dvd fast forward/etc controls.

I have 440gigs of storage, and about 120 free presently. Not to incriminate myself, but one might suspect that I could probably easily have all of Farscape, Stargate SG-1, Brisco County Jr, Sopranos, Futurama, Babylon 5, Cowboy Bebop, Andromeda, Crusade, and two dozen assorted movies in that amount of space. Not counting mp3s, software and games.

And thats one of the reasons piracy is rampant. Because the pirated version is not only free, its better - more convenient, less encumbered - than the real thing. Same goes with mp3s, but at least there are venues to legally buy mp3s now.

I'm not sure if this topic is dead, but i was perusing and thought i'd add something in there...

i've got more cds and dvds than i can relly keep track of and or find when i feel like playing a particular game, or listening to a cd... converting music to mp3s and cds to iso is really the only way i can keep track of that stuff. I have a tendancy to just give the original cd away after i've copied it. (not sure if that's legal or not) especially when music is concerned, because my girlfriend and i often 'taste test' new music and then distribute the original cds to our friends when we find something that they like.

now, in a wierd twist of fate, it seems the current in my house in unstable and has caused several electrical issues. (sparks, breakers flipping, toast that won't toast, high terrorism alerts, and poltergeist) I suppose that i should have known something was up when the wall outlets only had two prongs. (no slot for the ground) but, i kinda just ignored it. until the breaker in my room flipped and crashed my hard drive (on a seperate rant... hitachi sucks ass!) costing me a great deal of time to try and restore or replace all the files i lost. so... 110,120,220... or in my case all of the above, can be bad for your hard drive... what makes this all the more retarded is that i actually work on servers, and have access to an ups if i wanted it, but never really thought about it... so... damn the power grid, but... any sacrifice to be near the ocean, right?