Last night I was consumed with hooking up my PC to the receiver. The last few weeks, I have been downloading a lot of anime fansubs off BitTorrent and just downloaded Kumo no Mukou, Yakusoku no Basho (The Place Promised In Our Early Days), the new anime from Makoto Shinkai. For those who don't know, Shinkai is the guy who made the anime independent gem Voices of a Distant Star by himself on his personal computer.I never got around to watching the movie, Rhonda fell asleep early, so I spent time tinkering with a better interface to watch files from the computer on the TV. I dusted off the ATI Remote Wonder that came with my Radeon video card, and hit the Net. Stumbled upon this Meedio software and it's pretty cool, like a TiVo interface for your computer. The most irritating problem is that even on my 32" TV, the fonts are super-tiny due to standard TV's terrible resolution. I'm still evaluating the software...not sure if I'm going to buy it, since it's a stop-gap solution until I am able to build a MythTV box out of my spare PC. Or until TiVo allows you to stream video to your TiVo box and not just the other way around.
Still, I was thinking about springing for a Philips DVP642, so this probably saved my $70 in the short-term. And now I can watch some of the cool stuff I downloaded from the couch instead of huddled in front of my monitor.
And before I get bludgeoned by the morality police for downloading stuff and taking money out of the hands of artists, this movie's not even licensed for U.S. distribution (yet). And most of the stuff I watch I end up buying anyway (Bebop movie, Paranoia Agent, RahXephon are all examples), I'm just too impatient to wait for a domestic release, if it ever comes. The anime industry tends to look the other way on fansubs because they believe (wisely) that exposure to their product is a good thing.
<soapbox>As for piracy in general, the MPAA viciously went after the Sony Betamax because they thought the VCR would destroy the film industry, and we all know how that one turned out. I don't advocate downloading movies to keep them (DVDs are what, $20? For superior picture and audio quality?) but the popularity of movie file-sharing should tell the MPAA something (movie prices are friggin' ridiculous, the quality of most studio films is too iffy to risk wasting ten bucks on, good but obscure movies don't play in cineplexes in small cities and downloading is the only way some people can see them, people are sick of getting burned by buying a DVD and seeing a "special edition" hit the market within six months so they want a watching copy - take your pick). Instead of sending out a team of lawyers to stifle technology, perhaps they should look at how to use it to their advantage.</soapbox>
Wouldn't you pay to get a studio-quality, high-definition stream of a new movie with Dolby Digital sound at a reasonable price, bypassing long theater lines, people answering cell phones during the movie, stupid pre-movie commercials, and price-gouging at the snack bar?
The studios are like Sean Penn at the Oscars Sunday - they just don't get it. And don't get me started on the RIAA.
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