MST3K: The Region Encoding

My DVD player was getting lazy. Whenever I asked it to wake up and play a disc it would often hit the snooze alarm and sleep a bit longer. Sometimes it would hit the snooze alarm many times, not waking up for ages. It was quite frustrating. The player has a bizarrely long boot-up cycle, which can take around fifteen seconds for the whole self-check cycle to complete. When it fails the self-check it resets for a few seconds before starting the whole cycle again. Something is a little awry with the player as it can fail this self-check many times, and I have found myself waiting for half-an-hour or more on occasion before the player powers-up.

I think fifteen seconds for a consumer device to power-on is excessive, and I have worked around that by hitting the power and then getting a drink or snack, but it is still inconvenient. In its half-broken state I cannot rely on the player at all, so have to hit the power button to turn it on as soon as I think of wanting to watch a DVD and then hope that it powers-on successfully before the heat death of the universe, and I bide my time with a quick run through the Arcatraz. The whole affair is compounded by the player unfathomably running through the self check whenever a new disc is inserted, meaning that if I am changing discs from cold I have to wait for the player to start up and eject the current disc before hoping it doesn't then fail after inserting the new disc, or I have another random wait.

Yes, I should get it repaired. In these disposable times I'm not sure how many places there are that would be able to repair electronics, but I'm sure it's possible. I really ought to look in to it. However, one of my friends became Mr Awesome and offered to lend me his old player, with it not being used any more. It has the connections I use and is multi-region, being only a slightly different model from mine. A most gracious offer, and I accepted. It's brilliant! Sure, the fifteen second power-on time is still silly, but it definitely beats a random power-on time of anywhere between fifteen seconds and a year. I no longer have to plan watching a DVD well in advance of watching it.

The copy of MST3K: The Movie I ordered turned up and I was in the right mood to watch some silliness. With my new DVD player I made the audacious move of starting to cook some toast and make a coffee whilst I powered-on the player. I would have had to wait until the DVD was in the machine and running before thinking about starting toast with my old player, but this was the new player and I was once again in charge of the technology. Or so I thought.

'NO PLAY' was shown on the display when I came back from the kitchen, having flipped my toast under the grill. That's odd, I was sure the new player was multi-region. I tried a different disc, the first series of Robot Chicken, and that too would not play. My toast was browning and I wanted something to watch, what to do? For some reason I still have my first DVD player under my bed, which I know is multi-region. I made room under the TV, pushing various Nintendo game boxes out of the way, rummaged under the bed and found the Xbox-sized monster of a machine that was a marvel back in 1999, plucked a scart cable from my draw of miscellany, and hooked everything up. My toast was cooked and sitting waiting for butter by this point.

I tried the disc in my old player, which, being old-school, powered-on immediately and responded straight away when I pressed the eject button, but it too would not play the disc, complaining that I was not allowed to play a disc from that region. I consider region encoding to be rather a nonsense, hence having multi-region players and discs from several regions, but that's for a different time. Right now, I wanted to play my MST3K film. I had only one more option available. I unhooked my ancient DVD player, thrust it back under my bed, and connected my old and unreliable DVD player to the TV in its place. I wasn't about to displace the new and reliable player I had for the sake of a disc or two that it couldn't play, the random power-on time wasn't worth it. I would have to do without component video and digital audio, I didn't think MST3K would suffer from missing it, relying on RGB scart instead. I was lucky, and the old player booted relatively quickly, and again after inserting the disc. Moreover, it played the disc without complaint.

I tried the new player with an older region 1 disc I had lying around conveniently, a disc from Homicide: Life on the Street, and it played it fine. It was multi-region as I had thought. The MST3K and Robot Chicken discs are probably Regional Coding Enhancement (RCE) discs. It's something of a pain, but at least I can play the discs. I hope I retain this ability in the future, or find some way to gain access to the data.

With the excitement over and my toast cold but still crunchy, I make my coffee and sit down to enjoy the MST3K film in all its high production value glory, and it is good entertainment. I had a bit of additional entertainment too. I mentioned that the DVD player my friend kindly lent me is almost the same model as my player, and this means that the two have almost identical remote controllers. Asking one machine to do something also meant the other machine did the same thing, despite them being separated somewhat. This wasn't a problem, just amusing when trying to find an angle that allowed me to communicate only with the one I was using, which I failed to achieve. I've since left my old player unplugged to prevent it from trying to respond when I am using the new player, as the old player is only needed on rare occasions.

Posted in Technical, Video | 2 Comments »
Tags: dvd, homicide, mst3k, region encoding, robot chicken, toast

Embarrassing collision

Walking back from King's Cross to Euston after last night's gig I saw some flashing blue lights ahead of me on the road. It turned out to be nothing too serious from what I could tell, a police van stopped on the side of the road with a couple of officers talking to a cyclist on his bike. This isn't particularly noteworthy, but as I was passing I heard a crunch and looked up to see a couple of cars had collided in the junction about fifteen feet away from the police.

It can't be much fun to have an accident, however minor it was with just some panel damage, but to crash with police as witnesses can only make it more embarrassing, if nothing else.

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on Embarrassing collision
Tags: accident, crash, police

Blitzen Trapper at the Water Rats

'We've lost Mike, our bass player', announces the frontman for experimental folk band Blitzen Trapper. 'Maybe you can help us find him?' he asks, immediately comfortable on stage and ready to perform. On a count of three most of the limited audience call out for 'Miiiiiiiiike!' but it takes another minute before he shambles between everyone with a beer in hand wondering what the fuss is about when people cheer his arrival. He picks up his bass after the drummer had released it from being slung around his neck and banging the instrument's headstock against the stage floor. With the whole band on stage Blitzen Trapper fire in to their first song of the evening, all six of them committing themselves fully to the musical experience.

Most of the songs are from their current album, Wild Mountain Nation, with some new songs included during the set. We are told that there is a new album coming out in September, but that we should acquaint ourselves with their back catalogue in the meantime. To persuade us to buy more of their records, the drummer lets us know that 'Christmas is here sooner than we think', no doubt a reference to their song Christmas is Coming Soon. With perpetually a couple of songs left in their set, until they actually run out of time, we are treated to lightly plucked guitars and lilting voices interspersed with loud, distorted and occasionally arhythmic songs. Everything played is delivered with vigour and passion, enough for the drummer to break a stick. He asks if anyone has any to spare, as it is the last date on Blitzen Trapper's tour and they have run out of drumsticks. It takes a minute or so and a few sticks are brought to him on stage, and it's a good thing he was given more than one because he snaps another stick during the next song, much to everyone's amusement.

Even with the venue's small size it isn't sold out, but it's difficult to see why. Blitzen Trapper are wonderfully entertaining, with energetic and beautifully melodic songs as well as a charming presence on stage. I am looking forward to the new album and hope to see the band play live again.

Posted in Audio | 1 Comment »
Tags: blitzen trapper, gig, water rats

Hits of the 80s

I happened to be in Woolworths at the weekend browsing for something in particular, when the person I was with pointed out a compilation CD of 80s hits. It was Woolworths' own brand and decidedly cheap in both cost and design, but it's the content that matters. Having grown up in the 80s I like lots of 80s songs if only because they were popular in my formative years, and this three-CD compilation looked to contain quite a few songs that I recognised and would listen to at least occasionally. Costing only £3 made it a bargain. But what caught my eye and made my decision for me was that a good portion of the songs on the CDs, at least a third, were listed as being live versions.

I really like listening to live music. Whilst I appreciate what can be performed in a studio and enhanced through production there is a special pleasure to be gained when listening to a band play live, which can come across from on a live recording. So even though I had a few of the songs on the compilation CD in my collection already being offered a live version adds rather than reduces value for me. It made me wonder where the live recordings had come from, for a department store to be offering an exclusive collection of tracks.

It was even more intriguing after I read the small print on the packaging once I got the CD home. According to the packaging all songs listed as being a single performer were performed by that person, but songs from any bands listed were performed by as many original members as possible. 'As possible' is rather ambiguous, but that's okay, even if it means I am not listening to the original recording. But because I am not listening to the original recording it means that someone, or some company, has arranged to get as many of the artists 'as possible' together to record new versions of their songs, all of which have actually been recorded and made it in to the charts before. Why would they do this?

I can only imagine there are licencing or copyright complications that preclude using the original tracks, but it still seems like an awful lot of work to get a whole load of old songs recorded, particularly as they would have to sound as they did originally. I am sure there are greater machinations afoot that I am not privvy to, and my bafflement at a compilation of newly recorded old songs being sold so cheaply could be easily explained by someone.

Posted in Audio | Comments Off on Hits of the 80s
Tags: 80s, cd, compilation, live

Client, server, other?

One of the problems with running software under emulation is that when you encounter an error you can never be quite sure whether it is the software itself or the emulation layer that is the cause. In my case, the software is City of Heroes and the emulation layer, although I suppose it's more of a translation layer, is Crossover Games. I think Crossover Games is great, even in its early stages where it officially supports only a few games. City of Heroes is not one of these supported games, yet with a tweak here and there it runs smoothly and properly.

I have had problems with the stability of City of Heroes and judging from the continued popularity of the game and lack of similar reports from my PC-owning friends this is because of its unsupported nature on my platform. Even though I have managed to get City of Heroes running for extended periods by reducing various graphics options I am still getting the occasional random crash. These crashes are as frustrating as a normal crash, as they interrupt game play and can occur mid-battle, but they are simple to recover from by reloading the game and this extra time is short enough relative to time spent in the game that I have forgotten about it a couple of minutes later.

I experienced another one of these crashes over the weekend, but with a difference. When I got back to the server selection screen the game would hang whenever I tried to connect to the server my characters are on. I would forcably quit the game and try again, and the game would load and let me log in but then hang as soon as I clicked on the server name. This seemed to be a rather awkward error to try to recover from, for I couldn't even get to the settings menu if I couldn't get in to the game, and surely it wouldn't be an issue with that anyway. I had to wonder what was causing the problem, suspecting it was Crossover Games having some indirect effect.

As much as I am loathe to do so, I decided to log off from my user account and log back in to my machine again, wondering if some resources or processes were being unduly held by the application and causing the problem. I couldn't see anything untoward in the process manager but I don't expect to recognise every process running anyway. Logging out didn't help, though. I tried to find some way to check the Crossover 'bottle', the environment in to which Crossover installs all the relevant files on an application-to-application basis, in case some files had become corrupted but there was nothing obviously wrong.

I took a more drastic measure and decided to reinstall the game in to a new bottle, which should restore the game files back to their original state if nothing else. Whilst this could be potentially awkward for a game with preference files stored everywhere it's not as bad for an MMORPG that stores most important information on the game servers. One thing it meant was that I would have to leave the game to download the half-a-GB of patches for a while, which I did. Once installed, I made a tweak or two that would help City of Heroes to run properly under Crossover Games and then got the game running, only to run in to the same problem as before. I couldn't select a server without the game hanging.

Actually, I couldn't select the server I play on. I tried the German-language server and could connect and start to create a character. This was new information, and I opened my browser to find out the status of the game servers. It could be that the server was down, which would be a good reason why I couldn't connect. I haven't played much in the way of server-client games but I am used to getting an error message when unable to connect, although I may have simply not waited long enough to get the error and instead assumed it to be a crash that I have become more accustomed to.

I quickly found a server status page, but for the US City of Heroes servers. I flicked over to the EU/UK site and was presented with nothing that looked like it would offer the status of the servers. I poked around many pages but couldn't find anything useful and ended up deciding to try another time. Instead I loaded World of Warcraft and was happy to find my US friends had also recently logged on, so we had a merry jaunt around the Western Plaguelands stabbing ghouls and zombies and being silly on our ponies. After we had defeated enough undead, and a couple of group members had gained a level, we headed out to the real world again. I took the opportunity to check quickly whether the City of Heroes problem had resolved itself.

By now I was able to log in to the server and get myself back in to Paragon City, suggesting there was a problem with connecting to the server and not with my installation. I was happy to see Sue Purr back in action and left her to keep a vigilant yet passive eye over criminal activity as I had other things to do, the first of which was to delete the new installation and bottle I had created earlier. Running a game as it was not designed to be run has its complications, but with complications comes experience.

Posted in Gaming | 1 Comment »
Tags: city of heroes, crossover games, sue purr, world of warcraft

The automobicycle

I really ought to bear in mind that when I say 'bike' many people will hear 'bicycle' and not 'motorbike' as I intend.

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on The automobicycle
Tags: motorbike

Buying cheaply

Dungeons and Dragons fourth edition rulebooks are to be released soon, and my RPG group is in the process of ordering or thinking about ordering copies. There are a few deals floating around to order the books at a discount before they are released, with the books becoming full price the week of release. Some of the group have ordered the books through Amazon, although I am considering getting them from Orcs Nest. The books are a little cheaper from Amazon and the postage is free, whereas I'll have to pay about five pounds more to get them from Orcs Nest, yet I am more likely to get them there. Having recently bought Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and A Scanner Darkly on DVD for three pounds each it left me wondering why I seek bargains for some goods and not for others.

In the case of the D&D books it isn't a matter of convenience, as ordering from either on-line shop would be just as easy and the books would probably be delivered just as timely from either too. I would like to hand-wave the extra cost away as being 'only a fiver', but even though it certainly isn't a cost that would make me lose sleep five pounds could easily get me a cheap, and good, DVD. So why am I prepared to spend a little extra? I would say it is because of a couple of factors.

First, I know the brick-and-mortar shop that is Orcs Nest, on Earlham St. in London, and visit it on occasion. I still like to be able to buy a physical product from people sometimes, and have a tangible representation of the transaction instead of an e-mail and tingling sensation that some money has just been charged to my credit card. Although it is becoming rarer by the year because of closures, I really appreciate any relationships that I've built up over the years with small, independent retailers and it makes shopping more of a pleasure. It's not just a matter of having my purchases validated by someone, it can reach a point where the assistant or owner of the shop will actually make recommendations or offer advice, or even bend the rules slightly, because of the established relationship. It makes the world a more pleasant place by connecting with people.

Second, because RPGs are often large books full of details and illustrations there is a certain satisfaction in being able to pick up the book and browse through it leisurely. To feel the quality of the pages and get a sense of how the material is presented can help in making a decision on whether to try a system or look for something different. It's possible that on-line shops will be able to get closer to this experience soon, with PDF versions of books available and becoming more popular, and sample chapters offered for browsing, but as we are still some way from electronic books becoming relied on solely the hardback will still be the default reference version. At least, it will for me. Because I value flicking through books and seeing more of them than an on-line shop offers I also value the physical shops that stock them, and I want to support those shops that I value.

With DVDs I don't feel the same way. The physical case of the DVD doesn't offer me any more information than an on-line shop can display, in particular anything that could sway my decision to buy the DVD or not. The title, actors, director, special features, and other information is all made available and is not enhanced from reading it on a physical box. The quality of the item is rarely in dispute either, with decent packaging being a nicety but far from necessary to enjoy the recorded content. On top of that, the only places I see DVDs being sold are major shopping chains, and there never seems to be a niche market that isn't covered and needs to be sought separately, unlike on occasions with CDs where I still value buying from independent music shops when I can. Computer games are much the same as DVDs, with identical quality across different regions and no niche markets to cover, so buying cheaply again becomes important. Well, I suppose Mac games is a niche market, but one that is actually better covered on-line than in meatspace.

When I can get the same range of items with the same quality of transaction on-line at a cheaper cost than in meatspace it makes more sense to buy on-line. It's when I value more than the item itself that encourages me to see that value in the extra cost involved in the purchase. I may well end up spending an extra five pounds on the fourth edition D&D books but when I next head in to Orcs Nest I will appreciate being able to browse through the selection of books on offer, particularly after having seen a few shops that were favourites of mine go out of business in recent years.

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on Buying cheaply
Tags: 4e, a scanner darkly, amazon, dungeons and dragons, kiss kiss bang bang, money, orcs nest, shopping

White Hinterland

There was a positive review a month or two back in the NME for an album by White Hinterland. As I try to find some good new music regularly and the review sounded like I would like the album, not just basing it on the score out of ten, I picked up Phylactery Factory. What I didn't expect was to hear such a beautiful, soothing voice coming out of my speakers when I played the CD. The review probably mentioned the wonderful vocals, and there is little that can enthrall me as thoroughly as an elegant woman's singing voice, but it is rare to find music that immediately demands I stop everything and just listen to it, basking in the encompassing atmosphere filling my room.

The music and songs on Phylactery Factory both work with and accentuate the glorious vocals, and the whole album is a joy to listen to from start to finish. Finding White Hinterland is the best reminder of why I try to buy new music, because there are true gems waiting to be discovered that are unlikely to be thrown in to the spotlight directly.

Having a look through the band's website I poked my nose in to the White Hinterland discography page, wondering if there was perhaps a previous album I could also enjoy. It seems that there is a previous album, released under vocalist Casey Dienel's name, called Wind-up Canary. Sadly, the album does not appear to be available this side of the pond, but with the internet at my fingertips it is relatively easy to find a US merchant willing to sell me almost anything. As it turns out, and unsurpisingly so, my US-based merchant of choice for CDs and the occasional DVD, Newbury Comics, has Wind-up Canary in stock.

Now I just needed to convince myself to place an order, and I often procrastinate about spending money. However much I adore the White Hinterland album and want to hear more I can still somehow manage to talk myself out of buying another CD, so have managed to put off the purchase. This doesn't always happen, but it does sometimes and I can't really work out why it happens when it does.

Stacia mentioned recently that the MST3K film had been rereleased on DVD. Being a fan of the show and having seen the film at some point and finding it to be as polished as a film version can be expected to be, as well as owning some of the collected box sets, I decided to get myself a copy of the film on DVD whilst it remained available. I headed over to Newbury Comics and ordered a copy. It was only a few days later that I realised I could have ordered the Casey Dienel album at the same time and not paid any more for postage, which seemed like a good opportunity missed.

This missed opportunity luckily stayed with me. Yesterday Modey Lemon announced the release of Season of Sweets, their fourth studio album. I have been a fan of Modey Lemon for years, owning all the albums and having seen them many times at gigs, and am interested to hear what the new album is like. Again, I headed to Newbury Comics and ordered the Season of Sweets CD. This time I remembered also to add a copy of Wind-up Canary to my basket before checking out. This promises to be quite a treat, getting both the Modey Lemon album and more of Casey Dienel in the same package! I'm quite looking forward to it.

Edit: as a poetic postscript, I had forgotten that the Mary Timony Band had released a new album as well. Well, it's now a year old, but I hadn't got around to picking it up yet. Needless to say, I hadn't added that CD to my order with the other two CDs, where the shipping policy of Newbury Comics allows three items for a single international shipment at a single rate. After I remembered I wrote to Newbury Comics asking if it were possible to add the Mary Timony CD to my order and within the hour I got a reply informing me that my order had been updated as requested. That's good service. Of course, I may get hit with customs charges now where I would have been better off paying for a separate package, but that's okay.

Posted in Audio, Video | 2 Comments »
Tags: casey dienel, mary timony, modey lemon, mst3k, newbury comics, nme, phylactery factory, season of sweets, white hinterland, wind-up canary

A flight to remember

I'm not that smart, you know. Months ago, I was playing my warrior, Tiger, in World of Warcraft and was running around in Shadowmoon Valley for reasons that escape me now, and I saw a fel iron ore vein that I could mine. It was sitting on a rock in a small lake of lava, but getting to it was a simple matter of jumping down on to the rock. Mine, mine, mine, I got me some ore. Then I was stuck. I had jumped down on to the rock but had not realised that the bank would then be too high up for me to jump back. I was surrounded by lava and saw no way out, and wondered for at least a minute how I was going to get out of this predicament. It was only then that I remembered that I had a flying mount. I summoned my gryphon, made the short hop to the bank, and continued on my adventures. You can probably imagine the heroic adventures I have if I manage to get stuck on a rock with a gryphon as a companion.

Last night, Sue Purr was running around Paragon City. I was heading to a warehouse, or sewer, somewhere villainy was afoot at least, and still not knowing the layout of the city too well I was heading to my destination as the crow walks. This inevitably led to having to make diversions on occasion, like when a building rudely blocks my path. On one of the occasions when my path was blocked I actually recognised my surroundings and realised that I would not be able to jump over the high wall in front of me and that a more circuitous route was required. Just as I started to turn, I had a minor revelation. Instead of running I activated my super power of levitation, and flew over the wall instead. Sometimes I just don't know what I'm capable of.

Posted in Gaming | Comments Off on A flight to remember
Tags: city of heroes, sue purr, tiger, world of warcraft

A more stable City of Heroes Mac

The tweaks I made to the video settings in City of Heroes have led to a massive improvement in stability when running the game using Crossover Games. Instead of spending half my time waiting for the game to reload I am blasting villains in Paragon City. I still get the occasional crash, but so far I've been able to play for at least half-an-hour at a time, and even up to an hour, and I exited the game last night normally. A crash here and there isn't too much of a problem, particularly considering the contiguous game time I get in-between crashes. It's a little frustrating when the game crashes just after I kill the boss-man in an instanced mission and reloading finds him and some minions to be still alive, but that just means more XP. I made another tweak to the settings too. As I was getting crashes when managing enhancements it didn't seem likely to be a purely graphics-based problem, so I decided to change the audio setting from 'performance' to 'compatibility' to see if that helps.

As cool as Pam O'Frost is, I've been playing Sue Purr since I improved the stability of the installation. Pam's abilities to chill and slow targets to reduce their attack speed and accuracy are neat, and being a villain is kind of fun, but Sue Purr's knockback powers make for more synergistic combat. Targets are not just slowed but actively prevented from attacking when knocked-back, and all the powers Sue has work together really well. The recharge times on the two frostbolts work well together, the frost wave that can affect multiple targets is great to take out minions, and when someone gets too close I have my energy punch to damage the mob as well as knock him away from me.

I also found out that the long-range sniper shot attack has an advantage over just being long-range and high-damage. Because it has a much longer range than my other attacks, if I use it from the full distance away to attack a mob any other mobs in the same pack don't aggro. Only the mob I hit with the sniper attack starts coming for me, and I am able to shoot him with normal ranged attacks when he gets closer. Combined with the large damage from the sniper shot the mob rarely gets to attack me before he is defeated. I can then repeat for each mob in the pack. I think this relies on the sniper shot hitting the target though, with a miss pulling the group, and I only really tried this in an instance.

Sue Purr is now 9.5 and gaining XP quickly. I would like to write that I am getting the hang of everything, but as it generally takes me about fifty levels before I know what I am doing I'll just note instead that I'm having a blast. I have a vague idea of what's going on, I think I have the hang of enhancements, and inspirations are less mysterious. I have a full inventory of salvage and my last mission snagged me a recipe. I think I need to be tenth level before I can make use of it though. I really didn't pay enough attention to the tutorial, thinking I could just wing it, and it's lucky I created a villain and decided to read the tutorial text the second time through. I may even brave joining a team soon.

Posted in Gaming | 4 Comments »
Tags: city of heroes, crossover games, pam o'frost, sue purr