Century

Or rather: Leftovers.

I was tidying the DVD stacks (rooting out doubles and the like), and it occurred to me that I should probably watch all this stuff at some point or other.

While going through the discs, I noted that the oldest unseen movie I have is from 1918… And this year is 2018… That’s like at least a century!

I could watch, like, one per year in sequential order!

I mean, I don’t have one per year, so it’s probably just going to be 50 films or something. I haven’t done the maths because I can’t find my slide rule.

And! This reminded me of all the boozes and liqueurs I have left from the World of Films and Cocktails series, which I should probably try to make a dent in so that I can free up some cupboards.

So here’s the concept: At most one film per year, and a new cocktail per movie based on just the booze I’ve already got.

This should be easy.

Bustin’ Out

So I was watching the newish Ghostbusters (the one from 2016) on 4K Bluray (it’s a pretty funny film; a couple of the scenes had me in stitches, but it’s got pacing problems, and too many of the jokes didn’t land), and it looks like this:

I mean, it’s just a normal very-wide-screen film (2.4:1, apparently), so it’s on the TV letterboxed with these kinda wide black margins at the top and bottom, as you can see…

Nothing abnormal here… And then!

THE GHOST SPEWS THAT GREEN STUFF OUTSIDE THE FRAME!

I was shocked, I tells ya. Shocked!

It’s a fun effect, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before? So the entire Bluray was mastered in, er, 16:10 with wide black areas at the top and bottom instead of having a narrower video stream, which I think is the norm? Just to be able to do those effects?

It’s cool.

Dear Interweb

I was listening to an old mix tape the other day, and I happened upon this song:

I can’t for the life of me figure out who this song might be by.  Shazam doesn’t recognise it and I can’t find any of the text snippets on Google (“dreams of what could be if you love me”, “dreams of love and sunshine”, “I can show you happiness”, etc).

I thought that perhaps it might be Mimi Goese because it’s weird drum’n’bass-inflicted craziness which she was doing around this time.  The tape is from November 1995 to April 1996, and the surrounding tracks are, among others,  from albums like Protection by Massive Attack, … I Care Because You Do by Aphex Twin and Born Slippy by Underworld.

Could it be some weird atypical thing from somebody in 4AD?  A random track from a compilation?

Anybody know what this could be?  It’s rather nice.

Hm…  Perhaps I could upload it to Youtube and see whether the automatic Content-ID system tags it and blocks it.  🙂

mpv Is Nice

I’ve been watching movies and TV using an Emacs interface since 2004, according to the movie.el file.  Under the hood, though, I’ve hacked away at mplayer to make it do what I want, which includes a convenient way to switch audio outputs and output progress info so that I can store that to restart the video in the same place I left off.

And various bits and bobs.

But with the advent of 4K Bluray, it seems like mplayer just doesn’t hack it anymore.  So I started watching 4K material with mpv and the rest with mplayer.

And then I got a new TV machine (because the old one wasn’t fast enough to play Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 4K) and, as usual, mplayer didn’t really want to compile on the new Debian version, so I thought it was time to switch completely to mpv.

I thought I was going to have to do the same hacking on mpv as mplayer, but it turns out that mpv is really nice: It has almost all the features I need, and in a very pleasant-to-work-with interface: Just talk to mpv by sending JSON via a Unix-domain socket.

The only thing it didn’t have was a way to set the screensaving prefix on-the-fly (which I need for making GIFs), so I hacked that in.  The mpv people have really cleaned up the mplayer source code, I have to say.  Everything is nice and logical and clean, apparently, and I adding the feature took like 15 minutes.  Kudos.  I’ll try upstreaming the patch… if I can figure out how the mpv people like receiving patches.

Just one note on building mplayer and FFmpeg: Some things in Debian break if you have the new FFmpeg libraries in /usr/local, so put it somewhere else.  In case somebody needs to build mpv from git in Debian, this is what works for me, and is non-breakey:

/usr/src/ffmpeg $ ./configure ‐‐prefix=/usr/plocal ‐‐enable-gnutls 
/usr/src/ffmpeg $ make
/usr/src/ffmpeg $ sudo make install
/usr/src/ffmpeg $ cd /usr/src/libplacebo
/usr/src/libplacebo $ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/plocal/lib/pkgconfig meson setup build
/usr/src/libplacebo $ meson compile -C build
/usr/src/libplacebo $ sudo meson install -C build
/usr/src/libplacebo $ cd /usr/src/mpv
/usr/src/mpv $ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/plocal/lib/pkgconfig meson setup build
/usr/src/mpv $ meson compile -C build

And then the mpv executable is in /usr/src/mpv/build/mpv, and can just live there without being installed.