WFC Singapore: Forever Fever

I had gotten the French version of the DVD. Ooops! But Amazon Video to the rescue. The picture was kinda washed out, though. Compare:

That’s from the Amazon Video version.

That’s from the DVD. The darks are really dark on the DVD, and the colours pop, while the Amazon version is pale and bland.

Why isn’t the future better than it is?

Anyway! The film!

The actors leave no scenery unchewed, but that’s quite appropriate for this disco comedy.

It’s a very likeable film, touching and consistently amusing. I didn’t laugh out loud, though.

That’s the Way I Like It. Glen Goei. 1998. Singapore.

The Raffles Hotel Original Singapore Gin Sling Cocktail

  • 1 part benedictine
  • 1 part Cointreau
  • 2 parts cherry heering
  • 6 parts gin
  • 16 parts pineapple juice
  • 2 parts lime juice
  • 1 part grenadine
  • a dash of bitters

Shake with ice and strain into an ice-filled glass.

This post is part of the World of Films and Cocktails series. Explore the map.

WFC Jamaica: Shottas

This is kinda fresh. It’s low budget but doesn’t really look it. It has a kind of charming swagger to it, both in the acting and the editing. It’s a child-like wish fulfilment fantasy. Only with guns and drugs.

Very silly.

Shottas. Cess Silvera. 2002. Jamaica.

Body Heat

  • 1 part lemon juice
  • 3 parts orange juice
  • 3 parts pineapple juice
  • 3 parts Malibu coconut rum
  • 3 parts banana liqueur
  • a dash of grenadine syrup

Run all the ingredients (except the Grenadine) through a blender with ice. Pour into a highball glass and add the grenadine.

This post is part of the World of Films and Cocktails series. Explore the map.

WFC Kazakhstan: Tulpan

Ah. Back on DVD again, so the video quality is, like, better. Than Amazon Video.

This is a very wind-blown, distracted film. Things seem to proceed sideways.

It’s funny, but it’s just so slow. Sooo slow. And I love slow films.

It has an abundance of charm. Love the actors and the steppe.

Those poor sheep. Birthin’ sheep babbies ain’t easy.

Tulpan. Sergei Dvortsevoy. 2008. Kazakhstan.

The Drink of Gods

  • 1 part cream
  • 1 part Amaretto
  • 1 part white rum
  • dash of caramel srup

Shake with ice and strain into an ice-filled glass.

This post is part of the World of Films and Cocktails series. Explore the map.

WFC Slovenia: Slovenka

Hey! It works! Very little artifacting and the audio/video sync is pretty solid.

Oh! The film!

It’s a very tense film. Very well done, extremely belivable and completely EEK.

I can’t really recommend it.

A Call Girl. Damjan Kozole. 2009. Slovenia.

The Peter XOXO

  • 2 parts vodka
  • 1 part sweet vermouth
  • 1 part dry vermouth

Shake with ice and strain into a Martini glass. Garnish with an orange zest curl.

This post is part of the World of Films and Cocktails series. Explore the map.

… when we first practice to watch some movies

As I’m sure you remember from yesterday, I got an external HDMI screenshotting box to do screenshots while watching films from Amazon Video.

That worked fine, but using an infra-red remote to trigger the screenshots is slightly awkward: The line of sight thing means that I either have to have the (not very pretty) box in line of sight (and pretty close by), or I had to use an IR repeater of some kind.

Yay. More gadgets.

But then I though… “This box can also record video! Let’s try that!”

The upside here would be that I could just play the videos on my normal Linux machine, and everything would, like, work the way I wanted, without stressing with the Ipad, using remotes, switching the source, etc.

Besides: Freedom!  DRM is obnoxious!  You’re not the boss of me!  Etc!

Let’s have a look at today’s experimental set up:

First of all, a nice and big SD card is necessary, since the recorded H.264 (AVC) video files the recorder box creates rather big files. (About 12GB for a film.) So I use my normal filming card for this, which has the added advantage that it’s an UHS-II card (Ultra High Speed: The Second!). Note all the additional contact points on the card.

The “HDMI splitter”, the Aven video recorder, and the hated HDMI switch (which I no longer need, kinda).

And instead of using my ginormous Ipad, I got a used Iphone Touch (6th gen) cheap. I didn’t know whether that would work, but look how much smaller it is! It’s much more practical than carrying the Ipad around and plugging in here and there…

Finally, my USB 3.0 UHS-II SD card reader to transfer the files to my computer. I get about 100MB/s reading speed with this setup, so transferring an entire film takes less than two minutes.

I had a peek at a recorded film (a review of which will be coming to these very pages later today, I guess?) and it looks nice. The video is a bit “soft”, but no more artifacty than the film I watched directly from my Ipad yesterday. We’ll see…

But! I then thought that it would be nice to trim down the recorded bits to the actual film length (since I had forgotten that it was running and there were two hours of blackness at the end of the file), so I loaded it up in LightWorks…

And the exported film had an audio/video mismatch of over three seconds.

Whaaa!?

And that program re-encodes everything, so I didn’t really want to use it, anyway. So I installed avidemux, which had a very strange interface, but managed to chop off the black parts at the end without re-encoding. Very fast.

And the resulting file had a six second audio/video lag.

Wat.

Just about to give up, I found Lossless-Cut, a simple editor written in JavaScript (!) that uses ffmpeg under the hood.

I loaded in the file, set the start and end points in the excellent and easy-to-use editor and clicked “save”. Amazingly fast, it saved the resulting file at 100% of theoretical disk bandwidth speed, and…

The audio/video sync was perfect!

Whoho! Go JavaScript!

But is this a sensible workflow for watching films? Eurhmn…

Freedom!