One aspect in particular is the online rental of streaming HD movies. Many services offer this now such as Netflix and Xbox Live, but what does that mean for the bandwidth cap?

Comcast has this to say about their cap:

250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 – 3 GB. To put 250 GB of monthly usage in perspective, a customer would have to do any one of the following:

* Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
* Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
* Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

Note that they don’t mention HD movies at all. If you were to stream an HD movie at 720p, it would take up approximately 4-6GB. That means you could watch roughly 40 movies a month (taking into account other miscellaneous items that would add to your bandwidth). That’s acceptable for most people.

If you want to go for a 1080p download or stream, it’s going to be roughly 16-20GB for each movie if it’s packaged the same way it is on a Blu-Ray disc, minus the extras. Doing the math, that’s only going to allow you to watch 10-14 movies a month! If you’re a movie nut like I am, 10-14 movies a month isn’t very many (again, adjusted for other items you may use your bandwidth for). Also, streaming movies isn’t practical if you have favorites like I do and you want to watch them again. Most streaming services only allow you to watch the movies for a certain period of time before they expire.

While I believe that in fact most people will never reach that cap, I think more people will than Comcast believes. Currently, I haven’t been able to find any tools on Comcast’s site that monitors your bandwidth, and even if there were any, how do we know how accurate they are?

The next few months will be interesting. Will we see avid movie watchers start getting “shame on you” letters from Comcast? Will there be a jump to other services like Verizon FIOS? Time will tell.

If anyone would like to see a direct comparison between DVD and HD on “Fellowship Of The Ring”, click here.

Tron was one of those revolutionary films that was really pushing what movie makers could do back in the early 1980′s. The bluescreen process that Star Wars used had been invented decades before, but was really put to the test by Lucasfilm. Even though computer graphics (CGI) had been used in vector form in the movies before (again, with Star Wars), it was never used to fully render a frame of film and move the plot of a story along on the big screen. Tron was also one of the few films I owned on 35mm back in the days before DVD.

Apart from the CGI, Tron also pushed the envelope of what a Disney film was. The Black Hole was Disney’s first PG-rated film and depite what people think of the film, I personally believe it had a wonderful atmosphere about it. Even though one line of dialog needed to be fixed (“we’re looking for habiatable life”), I think the movie really worked.

Tron also had a subtle subtext of religion. “If I don’t have a user than who wrote me?”, asks captured program RAM. It was never really expounded upon because it wasn’t necessary, but it gave the programs a much needed feeling of being human and not some robotized character running around with a monotone robotic voice saying “You..must…not…take…data”.

Last, but not least, Tron’s music was impressive as well. Written by Wendy Carlos, it wasn’t the first electronic score (I believe that goes to Forbidden Planet), but it was very unique in how it was written and performed.

It’s been 26 years since Tron was released and ComiCon showed a surprise teaser for the sequel, Tr2n. What worries me is that moviemaking has lost a lot of its humanity, especially in effect-driven films. Movies like Star Wars, Aliens, and Predator worked because although there were effects in the films, there was good story as well. I personally blame Top Gun, and moreso Armageddon for th fall of modern cinema. There are too many fast MTV-style cuts nowadays. Effects-driven stories have their actors phone in their performances. Watching Batman Begins last week really made me feel that there are people out there that still understand what makes a good film.

And that brings us back to Disney. If you look at Disney’s track record of late, the stories are good, but revolve around a central theme: some poor character is somehow lost and needs to find their way home. Toy Story, Cars, Finding Nemo, Wall-E. I pray that Tr2n doesn’t turn into some poor program getting bit-shifted outside his CPU and needs to find his way back to his home address (pun intended). I would hope that the creative team at Disney isn’t looking to make an eye-candy film, but one that pushed the envelope of movie making like the original movie did in 1982. No, I don’t mean with respect to CGI, I mean the experience of the film as a whole, just like the first film was. Push the film to challenge the audience about what lives inside a computer, don’t just run arond with lightcycles for the hell of it.

End of line

If you want to see the concept trailer, it shows up from time to time on youtube; just do a search for “tr2n”. Filmstalker has also been keeping tabs on it.

Back in the days of laserdiscs, Criterion uses to release special editions of movies like Blade Runner and Robocop which had running audio commentary by the cast and crew, documentaries on the making of the films, and other goodies not found on regular editions. These special editions weren’t marketed to the masses, they were marketed towards people like myself that were big fans of seeing “behind the curtain” about how films were made.

So now we’re getting the same treatment with videogames. I try and buy the collector’s editions of anything I’m interested in because I want to see everything I can about how the games were made; especially the art books. It’s fascinating how concepts go from pencil to screen. Funcom put out an art book for Dreamfall, Blizzard put out an art book for each of their World Of Warcraft versions. Back in college I was going to go into CGI, so I eat all this special edition material up. I read every page, I watch every documentary. I always like to see voice actors delivering their lines, and how much effort went into doing voices.

So the next time someone tells you that collectors editions are “crap”, ask them why. Collector’s editions aren’t for everyone, but the ones that do buy them are probably the people that are interested in how games and movies are made.

It follows the lives of seven gamers, and how MMORPGs have affected their lives.

I have no idea how much of the cut we made, or if we’re in it at all, but I think that if the film is as good as I think it will be, all gamers should watch it.

Get the trailer here.


"Rent and download your favorite movies with iTunes on your computer or directly to your living room on Apple TV. Enjoy rented movies in sizes up to 720p HD with surround sound on your Apple TV and sizes up to DVD-quality on your computer. Transfer your rented movies from iTunes to your iPod or iPhone and enjoy them on the go.


So what they don’t tell you up front is that you can’t watch the HD rentals with iTunes. What I’d like to know is: why the hell not? I have a Mac Pro capable of running HD content, especially the lower quality 720p which is what these HD rentals are formatted in, and I have a Macbook Pro which I can hook up to my home theater system using DVI and optical audio. So can someone tell me why Apple chose not to allow iTunes users to watch HD rentals? I’m not buying an Apple TV when I have a Macbook Pro that’s already perfect for the job.

If you’re reading this, you don’t need a description of what Everquest is. I always thought the game had enough lore and backstory to make a damn good movie. Chances are, it’ll take place in Old World Norrath during the time of Everquest 1, rather than Everquest 2 which has decent lore, but nothing worth making a motion picture out of.

I’m crossing my fingers and toes that Sony/Columbia does this right.

Yesterday afternoon, I got an email from Amazon which was an offer to download certain NBC shows for free from their Unboxing service. I did hear that you could grab The Bionic Woman from iTunes, but as much of a tech geek I am, I’m still tied to watching TV and movies on a TV/projector. I still don’t like watching shows and movies on a desktop computer monitor. Intrigued, I clicked the link and of course, it was Windows only. That didn’t sit well with me and I was about to close the page when I noticed the little TiVo logo. It turns out that if you have a TiVo Series 3, you can link your TiVo to your Amazon account, and then tell the TiVo to download the show. Now that’s wicked, so I did it.

After the kids went to bed, my wife and I decided to watch the show. I don’t know what brainchild at NBC was thinking this up, but the show was 4×3 letterboxed and mono, which means that on a 16×9 HTDV, not only did you get black bars on the top and bottom, but on the sides, making the show hard to watch without fiddling with the video controls (which I don’t like to do). The mono track was a terrible mistake, it wasn’t even in stereo.

The show was just awful. Somewhere along the line Jamie Sommers was demoted from tennis pro to bartender. You would think that you’d want someone with a little athleticism in them to be a soldier for the company that put her together. Her boyfriend is a neurosurgeon. If you think that these two don’t belong together, you’re right. The writers even put a scene in there where they ask each other why they’re together. This is top-notch Emmy stuff, folks.

The biggest oversight is when Jamie and her boyfriend are out to dinner and she takes a sip of wine just before she says “I’m pregnant”. Sweetie, put the wine down and have a water with lemon.

I’m not going to give any spoilers away, but there are plot holes you can throw a Sasquach through. So much of the show just didn’t make sense. I swear, don’t these people have focus groups anymore? Nobody noticed the problems with the plot? It doesn’t take a lot of work to rewrite a line here and there to make the show consistent.

Another thing wrong with the show is that it needs time to unfold the story more. There’s so much jammed into 44 minutes that it makes you wonder why they didn’t turn this into a two-hour or two-part premiere.

So between the Amazon Unboxing not up to speed and the show itself being a dud, I’ll be staying away from both.

Sure, the usual thing is to go to Vegas or Atlantic City or something, but then you have to bring people and most people don’t want to travel to Vegas just to have a birthday party.

I found out that Blade Runner: The Final Cut opens on October 5th at the Ziegfeld in New York City. It’s not as elaborate as going to Vegas, but it is one of my favorite films and so I decided that I’d at least spend the afternoon seeing it.

Tickets bought.

.m4v (H.264) format

By the way, I still have all my action figures

Click the image to see the movie.

What a disappointment.

At first, I was completely neutral about this stupid format war. When Blu-Ray started picking up speed this year, I admittedly started leaning a bit towards the Blu camp. I had this feeling that with all the movies coming out on Blu-Ray, there was no way that HD-DVD could win.

Then comes this morning’s announcement about Paramount/Dreamworks. All this does is prolong this goddamn war. People just want high-def movies on a disc. That’s it. Why all the politics? Just give some money to everyone involved and roll in the dough.

Something that bugs me is that there are reports that Paramount was paid $50 million and Dreamworks was paid $100 million to do this (click to read). $150 million, if true, is a lot to spend on keeping a format alive.

Here’s something of interest, though. At the end of the press release is this line:

“Today’s announcement does not include films directed by Steven Spielberg as his films are not exclusive to either format.”

Does that mean that with the announcement of Close Encounters of the Third Kind coming on Blu-Ray exclusively, we can see other titles on Blu-Ray also? This whole thing makes my head spin.