American History X

Good acting and an ok script, where at first the film does a good job of portraying a how people are lured into radical racisim it eventually devolves into sterotypes. Not a bad story but it's not hard to make Skinheads look bad. Reasonably interesting though, maybe a B

Crimes and Misdemenors

Ok, probably spelled that wrong. This is another "typical" Woody Allen movie where he pretty much just catalogs the lives of people he's known. The topic here is morality and if you don't get caught who cares what you did. I think it's a pretty bleak point of view but insteresting to watch. Not a bad film, interestingish story and interesting ideas. A-

Media Center Setup!

So I finally set up a Home Theatre PC. Probably will re-build it from scratch now that I know what I'm doing, but I don't have the redo the time consuming part (ripping movies from DVD and transcoding them to H.264 (MPEG4).

So...if you want the fun and joy I've had you'll want:

• A TV Tuner Card (Hauppauge is a common one)
• Vista Premium Home or Ultimate
• Lots of free time to insert DVDs
• A DVD ripper (I use DVDFab, lots of people prefer AnyDVD, DVDDecrypter is free but does not support new formats)
• Assorted cables etc to plug everything in - most video cards have an adapter that will let you do S-Video out. My Geforce 7800 GT does
• TV Pack 2008 (Note this might not be legal, I doubt MS cares but it's OEM only
• Latest CCCP Codec pack (yes, I know you're too cool for Codec Packs, so am I. Get it, alternatively the latests FFDshow tryouts will work)
• Handbrake or Ripbot (Ripbot is probably better since you can update your H.264 encoder with out waiting for a new version of Ripbot, but it takes frigging forever to open your VOB files
• Understanding of what things are (i.e. VOBs are simply mpeg2 encoded video and an AAC audio stream, you'll have to demux them (break them into video and audio seperately) then put them back together (the two utilities listed above do  this for you)
• A MCE compadible remote
• http://www.mediabrowser.tv/ (a godly plugin for VMC)
  
• Lots of hard drive space (even in h.264 format a single movie takes about 2 gig of space).

Some tweaks:

LIVE TV Quality Trouble:
1)
Change BitRate:
First of all check the key:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Video\Tuners\DVR] and find the KEY DefAvgBitRate
Change it to somewhere between: 20000000 and 90000000
Select DECIMAL VALUE when changing.

DISABLE YOUR DIGITAL AUDIO IF THAT"S NOT WHAT YOU ARE USING - it will cause stuttering.

Download this registry patch and apply it:

http://homepage.eircom.net/~rock2002/Blog/v7-WMP11-MKV-MKA.reg

Tada, you're done!

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

I am still smiling. If you like stupid stuff, fart jokes and a bunch of stoners talking about shit this is a film for you. Essentially it's a paen to the friendship of the guys who play the people in real life. If you've seen any of the Evening with Kevin Smith features then you'll know what I am talking about. Essentially they're married to each other and there you have it.

Anyways, I thought it was funny, there are about 100,000,000 cameos in the film and while not provoking any deep thoughts it does show how a pair of friends can make an excellent team.

A-