At least the format war is. Toshiba have announced that they are dropping out of the High Definition DVD war leaving Sony’s Blu-ray as the victor.
Toshiba has been on the back foot for a while now in their efforts to win over the studios and consumers to their HD-DVD format. With most studios backing Blue-ray, the final blows were inflicted by Warner Bros and Walmart who both pledged their exclusive support to Blu-ray. The day before Toshiba’s announcement, rumour was rife that the move was imminent and Toshiba’s share price was up 5% on the speculation showing that Toshiba’s investors had already accepted the situation and were keen to move on to other battles. The company has a lot of technology and research in the pipelines and to their credit they have bowed out with their commercial dignity intact.
At least the battle was won before the mainstream market took off. It leaves the early adopters with redundant technology but I’ve never had much sympathy for them anyway. They race to be the first to buy a new technology and then bleat when the standards or formats change or the technology drops sharply in price.
The HD DVD market just got a shot in the arm now that consumers don’t have to choose a format to put their hard-earned cash behind. I for one have been holding back for the market to mature even though I’ve had a 42″ HD TV for over a year. The market now is all about cost, finding the hardware and DVD prices that give it critical mass.
I’ve been looking at ripping my large DVD collection to a media server and streaming it to a couple of rooms in the house. Ripping the DVDs themselves has proved straightforward enough using DVD Decrypter but getting a useful encoded MPEG or AVI file via Xvid has proved a little elusive. Having tried several commercial and free programs and getting files which haven’t sized or clipped properly or have the sound missing or garbled, I came across a gem of a product.
Handbrake is a “open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows” and via a simple interface it allows you to encode a previously ripped DVD from your hard drive into a high quality AVI using several encoders, in my case Xvid/MP3. After a timely update by the author, a few bugs in the queuing system were fixed and now I can rip several DVDs to the hard drive and then queue them up to encode overnight.
It should only take a few months to get them all done 
I was watching Silent Hill last night at it occurred to me that so many films now are being made with endings that do not complete the story, but which are left open for the production of a sequel. I do appreciate that this has always happened but now it seems to be the norm rather than a rarity. It’s as though writers and film companies can’t bear the thought that there is no more money to be made from this story so they have to leave the ending open so that if the film does well, they can run off a sequel or two to milk the cash cow a little more, almost always with diminishing returns. Of course if a sequel never gets made, the original is stuck with its tainted ending which could have been far superior if the story had been concluded properly.
This is not restricted to films, but can now be found in TV series as well, nowhere greater than in Lost. The story is an excellent concept but it quickly became apparent that the writers had no clue how or when to conclude the story. The TV company is only in it for the money that the series can raise so instead of the writers saying “We have this great story and we can tell it in 24 episodes”, they literally start writing it as they go along because they want to squeeze as many seasons out of it as they can. The greed ends up killing the story because the plotline gets sacrificed, sometimes desperately, in order to extend the run. They raise hundreds of questions and then drip-feed answers to some of them, always giving a glimmer of hope that the big answers are on their way when really they have no idea what the big answers will be. For me, Lost became the most frustrating and annoying programme on television and I couldn’t bear to watch it any more.
It’s about time we allowed writers in film and TV to tell a story without greed getting in the way.
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