"The Cat!"

The running game I have going is for you to try and guess the obscure pop-culture reference of the above title, which I will reveal in the next entry. The title of the last entry ("Milk Duds") is yet another line from one of my favorite shows ever Whose Line Is It Anway?. I think they were coming up with unlikely names for products or something and...well it had something to do with braws is all I remember. That was the name of the braw, milk duds. Ok maybe you had to be there.

I'm fairly certain it did have to do with what I wrote about though. I mean the shows I mentioned could be described as duds since they're hardly watched although very, very good. And they're like milk also. Because you know. Milk is good, and the shows are good. Do I have to explain eveything? What am I, "connections guy"?

Tonight although it's already kinda late I thought I would talk about my Video CD collection. Video CD, for those who don't know, was briefly a standard right before DVD started to get wide acceptance. It was a popular format in Asia also I believe. And now adays, the time before DVD burners and recorders become wide and affordable people like who are really into that sort of thing use it to record shows and put on a format some home TV-type DVD players will actually understand.

More specifically I have been using the follow-up superior format called Super Video CD (SVCD). The difference is Super Video CD has superior video and sound quality but obviously that takes up more space so it will be fewer minutes of video and not all DVD players will play SVCD.

To get even more specific I actually use a sort-of rogue, unofficial much higher resolution version that's a staggering 480x720 (that's good).

So here's what I did. I recorded Cowboy bebop every night using my cheap little TV input card on my computer. I then imported this file into my video editing software I bought for $50 called Video Deluxe 2.0. Which by the way, isn't really all that good but if you can get to do what you want it to without it crashing it actually does what it is supposed to rather well. Using Video Deluxe I edit out all the commercials and tell it to convert formats or "encode" into the appropriate SVCD format and resolution and then burn onto a CD for me. Which usually takes around two hours on my punny little 650Mhz computer. Only I ran into a hickup. It was a while before I realized this high resolution feature built into Video Deluxe and that my DVD player actually supported it. So after I had recorded the entire 26 episodes on CD in regular VCD format I then re-recorded all 26 episodes and put them on CD in the SVCD format. It took forever to finally get all those episodes on SVCD. But I did it.

  ¶ 12:11 AM