Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I’m excited; the entire Star Wars collection is coming out on Bluray this fall. Amazon (see the link below) is selling it for $89.99 (36% off) and I’ve put in my preorder already, with the added benefit of free shipping and release-day delivery from Amazon Prime. See, my wife has never seen Star Wars, and I want to get through at least “A New Hope” and “The Empire Strikes Back” with her in order to further her cultural scifi education.

Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Episodes I-VI) [Blu-ray]

Meanwhile as a massive nerd, I will be checking out the never-before-scene additional footage. The press-release highlights some of the features that you will be able to see:

Bring home the adventure and share Star Wars™ with your whole family – when STAR WARS: THE COMPLETE SAGA comes to Blu-ray Disc from Lucasfilm Ltd. and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment! To be released beginning on September 12 internationally and on September 16 in North America, the nine-disc collection brings the wonder of the entire Saga direct to your living room, where you can revisit all of your favorite Star Wars moments – in gorgeous high definition and with pristine, 6.1 DTS Surround Sound. Dive deeper into the universe with an unprecedented 40+ hours of special features, highlighted by never-before-seen content sourced from the Lucasfilm archives.

There’s even a Bluray disc (number 9) containing Star Wars documentaries, like “Star Warriors” (2007), “A Conversation with the Masters: The Empire Strikes Back 30 Years Later” (2010), and “Star Wars Spoofs” (2011). There are some downsides:

1. This is not the “original version” of the classic trilogy. You will have to deal with Greedo shooting first, etc.
2. This is not a new transfer of Star Wars; it’s basically going to be a slightly better version of the 2004 edition. There’s no new HD 4k transfer.
3. These discs are 4:3 wide, not 19:9 widescreen

This post is a followup to the quite dated tutorial I wrote in 2005, called How to rip a DVD: A Tutorial. At that time, DVD decrypter and AutoGK were the tools of choice, but they’ve been supplanted as technology has improved by more user-friendly, automatic programs.

As of 2011, I would recommend using Handbrake, an open-source multithreaded and cross-platform ripper which works on Windows and Apple Mac OS both!

Step 1: Download & Install

Please download and install Handbrake to get started. At about 6MB, it shouldn’t take more than a minute.

Step 2: Launch the DVD Ripper

Put in your DVD and launch Handbrake. You should be greeted with an informative screen similar to the following:

By default, nothing is selected yet. There are a few options you can set, such as your preferred subtitle capture language and dubbing language preferences. I prefer the movies in original audio with English subs.

Step 3: Select the Source

I just popped in a Coen Brothers DVD, so when I click on the “Source” dropdown, it shows up there right away. Unfortunately, you can’t directly rip a commercial DVD this way. You need to dump it to disk with DVD Decrypter, after which you can select a DVD rip saved to a folder on your harddrive:

After some time (“Processing Title: 1 of 15…”) you will see the main screen populated with information. If you get stuck on the “processing title” bit, remember you need to open a folder you saved from DVD Decrypter (the decryption will take 20-30 minutes for a feature film).

Step 4: Choose a Title

Titles are like the chapters of a DVD. Usually there will be a single long title that contains the movie, like the 1 hr, 56 minute “Title 1″ I am selecting:

Step 5: Choose Output Settings

You have a lot to choose from. You can pick one of the Handbrake presets for iPod/iTouch/iPad, or customize one of your own. I’m going to use the “High Profile” setting to watch on my PC, but override the target file size to 2 CDs, or 1400 MB:

Step 6: Encode the video

Just click the “Start” button to kick things off, or “preview” to make sure you’re OK with the quality:

It’s going to take me about 52 minutes to encode this; on my i7 with 4 cores x2 hyperthreading, CPU usage is at 100%.

Finally…

If anything goes wrong, there’s an entire Handbrake community who can help you out. Why don’t you start by looking at their How To Request Support for HandBrake thread?

I went to the Staten Island Film Festival today to watch Block Three: Love Is Hard To Find (1 hr 28 min). I saw the following films:

Love Bombing (7 minutes)
Director: Philip Lepherd

Four friends discuss the cult recruitment technique of ‘Love Bombing’. Three of them seem to know an awful lot about it. Is it possible they’ve tried the technique before?

I thought this film was absolutely a blast, from the brilliantly sharp production quality and cinemetography, to the lovely accents and crisp dialog. It’s a great short film on the concept of Love Bombing, a process cults use to attract new blood. Check out the trailer on IMDB, too, it’ll give you some sense of it.

Number Nine (26 minutes)
Director: Brendan Ferrer

Set in an underwear factory called Material World Garments, Number Nine tells the story of Inspector #9, a meek briefs inspector who is color-blind. This could be the worst day of #9’s life, until he meets Miss #9, his equivalent in the brassier department.

An excellent short film, Brendan’s choice to shoot in black-and-white perfectly matches the total colour-blindness of the protagonist. The 35mm gives the film and old-style Three-Stooges feel (although Brendan said he was shooting for Chaplain). At 26 minutes, it’s probably 6 minutes too long, but it rarely drags.

Avatars (30 minutes)
Director: Michael Ofenheim

When Lisa catches her husband, Tyler, cheating on her in cyberspace, HotWetLinda turns the tables on TyMeUp. And, when their avatars meet on a blind date, Lisa discovers that in real-life, two online wrongs CAN make a right.

Although you can buy this movie on Amazon, I don’t recommend watching it. From the start it drags–the cheating husband is so terrible an actor that you feel neither annoyed at him for being a bastard nor sorry for him for losing his love, but total apathy. The mercilessly repeated punchline “So, do you have any Pot?” is Avatars only attempt at humour. The plot itself is tripe, trying to weave together notions of solipsism and internet dating, with a touch of the implausible Nigerian 419 email scam. I don’t know if the director’s brains were addled with pot himself when he did this–but it’s no good at all.

2095 (25 minutes)
Director: Troy Romeo

A young man who falls in love with a woman he thinks is his female co-worker, discovers that his own computer may offer him more than any human ever could.

There’s an interview here. As for the film, it was OK. I felt that too much time and effort ($40,000 and 4 years, according to the director) were spent on the production, leaving the screenplay a bit spaghetti. Its major flaw is that it spends most of the time focusing on the things that don’t matter, and then blitzes by the important developments in seconds.