Television

For rambling about idiot box entertainment outside of the Star Trek universe.

Whoops…something slipped.

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And…we’re back. The server my site resides on went down about 3pm yesterday, and didn’t come back until sometime this morning. Sorry ’bout that — these things do happen from time to time, though.

In the meantime…

Yesterday, a customer came wandering into the store. “Hi there,” I greeted him. “Anything we can help you with today?”

“Yeah, I wanted to look at a couple cameras.” Then he paused and took a closer look at me. “Um…are you Michael? Of Eclecticism?”

I laughed. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“I’m Joe — Pop Astronaut.”

And another connection was made between the online world and real life. We chatted for a bit, then got him set up with the camera he’d been considering. Small world!

Small bits related to my recent re-acquaintance with television:

  • Desperate HousewivesLast night, Prairie and I finished our Desperate Housewives Season One marathon, which we’d been working on for the past couple weeks. We’ve both been enjoying watching Season Two on Sunday nights, and have been borrowing Season One so that I could get caught up on all the back story.

  • Battlestar Galactica has started up again also, and I’ve been doing my best to avoid any articles about the first episode of the second half of Season Two until I get a chance to watch it myself. The episode is sitting on my ‘puter…I just need to get a chance to watch it! Maybe tonight…

  • LostFinally, Lost finally starts up again this Wednesday — and because I’m working until 10pm that night, I’m not going to be able to see it until I get a chance to download it! Grrrrr…stupid work. ;)

And I think that pretty much brings us up to date. Plans for tonight are light: work ’til 6pm, do my reading for school tomorrow, have dinner, and watch tonight’s Desperate Housewives. Non-stop excitement, I tell you!

Best TV of 2005

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Of Time’s list of the best TV shows of 2005, I’ve only seen one — but I’m not going to argue at all with their assessment. Number one on the list…

Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi)

Most of you probably think this entry has got to be a joke. The rest of you have actually watched the show. Adapted from a cheesy ’70s Star Wars clone of the same name, Galactica (returning in January) is a ripping sci-fi allegory of the war on terror, complete with religious fundamentalists (here, genocidal robots called Cylons), sleeper cells, civil-liberties crackdowns and even a prisoner-torture scandal. The basic-cable budget sometimes shows in the production, but the writing and performances are first-class, especially Edward James Olmos as the noble but authoritarian commander in charge of saving the last remnants of humanity. Laugh if you want, but this story of enemies within is dead serious, and seriously good.

(via /.)

iTunes “Panzermensch” by And One from the album Virgin Superstar (2000, 5:04).

Time to put my money where my mouth is?

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Ten months ago, when I was trying to figure out BitTorrent so I could keep up with Battlestar Galactica, I wrote this in a comment:

As it is, I’d gladly pay a few dollars per episode to download high-quality versions of this show (and, theoretically, other shows that I might be interested in in the future), much like I currently do with music from the iTMS (with the caveat that I’d expect any DRM to be no more restrictive than what the iTMS uses).

And wouldn’t you know it — Battlestar Galactica is now available through the iTunes Music Store at $1.99 per episode! Very nice.

Of course, over the past ten months I’ve become accustomed to the quality afforded through captures of HD broadcasts: the episodes I download through BitTorrent are ~350Mb each and widescreen at 624×352 pixels; the episodes Apple offers are ~200Mb and shown at the ‘standard’ (pan-and-scan? cropped?) 4:3 ratio at a much smaller 320×240 pixels. Of course, there is the risk of getting a bad quality rip from BitTorrent that wouldn’t hold up to the norm, while it’s probably safe to assume that the officially sanctioned videos from Apple will be consistently good quality.

As an experiment, I purchased the most recent episode of BSG (‘Pegasus’) and compared Apple’s version to the version I downloaded via BitTorrent.

Battlestar Galactica’s ‘Pegasus’
iTMS BitTorrent1
Filetype: .m4v .avi
Length: 45:27.04 44:19.03
Filesize: 207.26 MB 345.80 MB
Time to download: I didn’t immediately think to time this, roughly 20-30 minutes on my connection. Varies depending upon the number of active BT clients: at best speed should match the iTMS time; at worst speed could take anywhere from hours to days.
Dimensions: 320 x 240 624 x 352
FPS: 24.00 23.98
Video encoding2: -NA- Generic MPEG-4
Audio encoding3: AVC0 Media MPEG Layer 3
Data rate: 636.72 kbits/sec 1106.58 kbits/sec
DRM: Apple FairPlay v2 None
Comparitive: At native sizes, the iTMS video is sharper but noticeably darker. The BitTorrent copy isn’t as crisp, but being a few notches brighter makes it easier to see (a situation exacerbated by my using an old 17″ monitor that already has its brightness and contrast at maximum and really needs to be replaced when I can afford to do so). Even so, the iTMS video is gorgeous: darker and smaller (2/3 the height and 1/2 the width), but better quality — at native size.

At full screen, the smaller size, greater compression and lesser data rate of the iTMS track is very obvious. Compression artifacts not noticeable at 320 x 240 are very visible when blown up to my monitor’s standard setting of 1152 x 870. The BitTorrent video, while softer, doesn’t show nearly as much artifacting (but then, given the larger native size and widescreen ratio of the video, it’s also only being enlarged 247% as opposed to the iTMS version’s 360%).

All in all, while the iTMS video is better quality at native size, the BitTorrent copy is far more watchable when blown up to full-screen.
Notes: 1: Due to the distributed and decentralized nature of BitTorrent, the reported statistics, while representative of the quality of most BT downloads I’ve received, are only definite for this particular copy of this episode.
2: As reported by QuickTime Player’s ‘Window > Show Movie Properties” window under ‘Sound Track’.
3: As reported by QuickTime Player’s ‘Window > Show Movie Properties” window under ‘Video Track’.

So, now what? I did say in the original quote that I’d happily pay for “high quality” copies. At the moment, with Apple’s focus on optimizing the video for the iPod, I’m not sure that the video offerings are quite enough to tempt me away from BitTorrent on a regular basis. It’s close…but not quite there.

Unless someone gives me an iPod video for Christmas, of course. Then I may need to re-evaluate. ;)

Frack!

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Hehe — Prairie and I just finished watching Season One of Battlestar Galactica. I’d seen it before (on my ‘puter via BitTorrent), ’twas the first time for her.

She’s hooked.

We may end up taking some time to watch what there is so far of Season Two (which is sitting on my ‘puter, again thanks to BitTorrent) so she can catch up to where we are before they start broadcasting new episodes in January.