Saturday 10 February 2007

Pic of the day: Would anyone want to miss out on something like this in order to watch grainy movies that collapse halfway through? Yes, if your brain runs on TEH DUMB! LOLZ!!!11 Oh, the sacrifices we make for science curiosity.

Adventures with online movies

If you want excitement, renting an online movie may be the way. I don't mean just renting a movie online, which has been available for a long time. Even Amazon has had these for a while in its largest countries, and even here in Norway you can order a rental online and get it in your mailbox. Nice for people who don't live too centrally. But the wave of the future is of course to not see a box at all, but just connect to an online server and watch the movie over broadband. I sacrificed my time and money for science, or at least curiosity, and tried one of the services available from broadpark.no, which is the marketplace of my ISP. (Obviously we are using the word "broad" as an adjective here, not as a noun. I guess you have to be pretty old to even be able to read it otherwise.)

The actual service, one of several at the marketplace, was called film2home. It seems to be a Scandinavian company, at least it presents itself that way to us Scandinavians. It also uses large fonts and fairly simple sentences. Unfortunately its menu system requires some trawling, but as far as until you have paid it is pretty straightforward. At first, I decided to rent a movie. After all, I rarely ever see a movie twice. My brain goes into "burn mode" when watching movies, a weird experience where my head grows very warm while the rest of my body shivers for a while like in fever. Which it may well be, but if so only a slight one. Anyway, after I have watched a movie this way, I remember it in fairly great detail for ... well, several decades so far. Possibly till the end of my life, or until Alzheimer's takes me, whichever comes first.

Paying was a snap, disturbingly so. Because film2home is associated with Broadpark, and Broadpark with NextGenTel, and NextGenTel with LOS which is my utility company, I just had to sign in and the cost will come on my bill from LOS. This is disturbing because I know how foggy the world of economics is to many humans. They could easily go on a movie watching spree since it seems at the moment to be free. Well, they easily could if not for what happened further.

I chose an action movie (since there was no good anime). There aren't many of those I am interested in watching; I am a quiet person and don't like loud noises and flashing lights, generally. But I have had an interest in the movie Bulletproof Monk since I saw it mentioned somewhere a few years ago, when it was new. So I decided to watch it. Not a bad choice for an action movie, full of humor and gently mocking the decadent American civilization. So far, so good. What was not so good was that the movie would freeze the pictures from time to time, while the sound played on, then the picture jumped to catch up. Normally this would be a bandwidth issue, but I had several times the required bandwidth, and occasionally test it to make sure it is still there. I was not running any download at the time, either. Or should we say, not yet.

Around halfway through I rewound a little to watch a scene again, and the movie crashed. There was no menu choice to restart it. Nor was there any to start it over from scratch. The menu got me so far that I could see that it was still rented for 23 hours, but this was not very useful when I could not start it, no matter how much I clicked everywhere. Thank goodness for Pirate Bay, where you can get the stuff you've paid for in a timely manner and with minimal hassle. You know, why don't the movie companies just set up a box office online, and once you have paid, just link to the relevant movie on Pirate Bay? It would be an improvement.

***

Not one to do things by half – at least fun, harmless things – I next decided to purchase a movie online and download it. The supplier here is called MPS Broadband, still a Scandinavian company. The first part of the name is easy to remember, since I have so many good memories from games made by MPS labs (no relation). Oh, and back when I was new on the Usenet, MPS was a common shorthand for Mad Passionate Sex. Not that I ever had that, of course, or even watched the corresponding movies.

This went better, although the download was slower than BitTorrent. I had to install a separate program, an MPS Broadband download manager. It now starts automatically when I log in to my Windows user account, but I suspect I'll remove it after a month or two without use. Anyway, it took its sweet time, but there were no actual problems. I saw it would take some hours, so I went to bed and woke up again and the download was finished. It can only be played on this particular computer, and only in Windows Media Player (and a very recent version of MP at that). But it does not explode, and the quality is acceptable, and you can watch it until your computer crashes or you have committed the movie to memory. Once, in my case, but then again this was all an experiment, not an attempt to save money. It is still faster than getting it in the mail, though hardly faster than driving to town and buying a movie there.

Oh, and the movie I actually bought was Superman Returns. As expected from someone who plays a superhero several times a week in City of Heroes... And to be honest, I think that is more likely to be my source of super entertainment for the future as well. But at least buying movies is now more convenient if you live far out in the countryside and can't buy them while you are in town. The price is not so very different, and worse when compared to the quality (much worse when you consider that the movie will die with your PC, no question asked... thank the Light for Pirate Bay, defenders of justice). Of course, for the unfortunates who watch their movies on TV, quality is not really a consideration. I trust I shall never have to do that. These days, I could watch TV on a hi-res computer monitor instead. But I think I prefer City of Heroes.