Random Rants & Raves

Ok, I admit it – I was a skeptic about the choice of theme for the new Star Trek movie considering that it was to be based in the Original Series time frame and with new actors playing the iconic characters we know. How could someone else play Kirk, Spock, McCoy and all the others – each with their own distinctive personalities and styles of playing the character. I watched all the trailers and read all the reviews of how well the new Star Trek movie is doing – becoming the top grossing movie of 2009 so far, beating Wolverine, Angels & Demons and Terminator Salvation. I was still not convinced.

It was after I watched the movie that I realized I had been wrong – completely so. The movie was not just a great summer sci-fi action flick – it was Star Trek. As a full fledged Trekkie (see what I wore to the show – thanks Binesh), I loved the new movie. Here are some thoughts around it.

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If you use a large LCD HDTV for watching movies you might come across a situation where you might see black bars around your playing video. Vertical bars (pillarboxing) or horizontal bars (letterboxing) are caused by wrong encoding of videos for the aspect ratio of your widescreen television. I was having this issue with a number of older DVDs that I ripped to watch on my HDTV. There are a few different ways to correct these.

Usually the playing device (DVD player, Media Tank, etc.) should take care of this if the encoding has least anamorphic encoding on. If this is not there, you will not see the aspect ration getting corrected automatically.

You can try and re-encode the video using Super or AutoMKV to the correct aspect ratio. This will require a while in case you have a number of videos to correct but will give the best possible conversion.

The third way is probably the easiest – at least when it comes to converting Divx videos. There is a small utility called MPEG4 Modifier that you can download. This utility changes the AVI header to match the widescreen format that you wish. Take a look at the screen below:

  Simply select the Display AR to 16:9 and save

The important thing to remember is to change the DISPLAY ASPECT RATIO and not the PIXEL ASPECT RATIO for the conversion. The PAR changes the aspect ratio of the pixels comprising the video whereas the DAR only changes the header so that the video can be auto-sized in the player.

If you wish to convert a bunch of files, there is a command line version of the application as well available from the same link as above. However, there is one difference between the GUI and console version. The latter doesn’t have an option to modify the DAR, only the PAR.

Since source code is available for both, I downloaded the one for the console app and added the calculations required to use DAR from the GUI version of the app. I take NO credit for any of these calculations – all of it goes to the original author of the program. The program is now compiled in .NET 3.5SP1 for x64. You can now convert an AVI file from the command line like this:

mmcl.exe –-dar 16:9 in.avi out.avi

Simply run the console app to see the different options. You can download the binaries and source code below:

MPEG4 Modifier Console: Source x64 x32 (coming soon)

I’ve become a fan of the Matroska video container. This is basically a video file that contains (usually) HD video content in a highly compressed size. The MKV files contain a HD video (in H.264 format), audio (in AAC or AC3 format) and optionally subtitles. The latter two can have multiple instances allowing for multi-language audio or subtitles.

I’ve been converting my DVDs and TV shows (from Divx AVIs) to MKVs that last few days after purchasing the WDTV. Based on some experimentation, I’ve figured out that HD content of about 1 hour can be easily stored in a MKV file of 300MB without any visible loss of quality! Conversions do take a while on my Core2Duo machine – approximately 30-45 minutes/hour of HD content.

I used to like a free tool called SUPER for performing this task. However, I found another tool that has a couple of additional options. This tool, AutoMKV, is yet another free software that lets you convert from any format to MKV (as well as others).

The best part about this is that there is an option where you can specify what the desired size is of the converted file and the software will get it as close as possible to that size. Another option is to upscale the content as well as convert it from letterbox to widescreen. You can also queue multiple jobs and let them all process sequentially. Take a look at the screenshots for some more tips.

1. Select the AUDIO code
2. Select the desired file size
3. Select the Container and VIDEO codec
4. Add to queue or Start Encoding 

You can also convert from letterbox to widescreen format 

All in all, AutoMKV is a great tool for both watching video and for archiving them. Make sure that the player connected to your TV recognizes this format though.

Well, the long wait is over – the full official trailer of the upcoming Star Trek movie by J.J. Abrams is now available to watch online. You can also get a glimpse of walking through the Enterprise over at StarTrekMovie. The trailer is unfortunately hosted at Apple for this week but other sites will pick them soon.

If you want to simply download the HD trailer rather than just seeing on the Web page you can head here. It’s about 20MB in size. If you want the super-duper hi-res one (1080p version) you get that here. This weighs in at about 159MB.

Live long and prosper.

I recently happened to watch the new Hindi movie Bachna Ae Haseeno (loosely translated: “Watch Out Girls!”) with my famiy. I was pleasantly surprised to see massive Microsoft product placement in it! The movie stars some very well known names as both the male and female cast - Ranbir Kapoor, Deepika Padukone, Bipasha Basu and Minissha Laamba.

While watching the movie, the hero suddenly states that he’s completed his college and joined MICROSOFT! Parts of the movie (seemingly) are shot in the MS office in Mumbai! There are tons of “Vista rocks” & Xbox posters all over the place.

Not only that, the Xbox 360 and Halo 3 are shown and talked about in detail. Even when Ranbir moves to the MS office in Sydney, he continues being in the Xbox team and talking about this - for instance, "Master Chief's flamethrower is the coolest video game weapon ever!".

His romantic interest played by Deepika, also happens to be a geek girl who not only knows that “Halo 3 is the most talked about video game ever” (actual quote from the movie) but also discusses Xbox live and multiplayer gaming on the Xbox in a party.

This is the first time that I’ve seen such detailed product placement – not just as props but as part of the story and dialogue – in an Indian movie! Kudos to Microsoft for getting this right. The props are not jarringly placed and the dialogue by two of India’s current heart throbs touting the Xbox and Halo 3 is great for a movie that’s gonna be watched by young moviegoers.

After seeing a ton of Mac ads as product placement - every other Hollywood movie has somebody typing away on a Macbook or something similar – it was great to see MS stuff so nicely placed and that too in a Hindi movie!

All right, I'm not much into movie reviews and this is one that has been reviewed a thousand times over by people far better and far worse than me - however, it would simply be not fair to not comment on this brilliant movie. The Dark Knight is probably one of the best movies I've seen - and not just in recent times. But my comments on the movie come in a different context - of that of a boy who has read through many of the caped crusader's exploits. Although having been a fan of the Batman character since I was a kid, I always knew that this one series was different from the other super hero comics I used to read - Phantom, Mandrake, Superman, Tarzan, et al.

The Batman has always been a darker comic series than any of the other ones. He was one that had enough gray shades that made him more human rather than super human. For a young boy reading these comics, Batman was the ultimate in super-cool - he had the gadgets, the car, the planes and didn't waste his time romantically (too much). Most of his female counterparts were also in the same league - Catwoman, Batgirl etc. And many of the stories actually were more of detective stories than action oriented ones with dark and sinister events.

I was lucky to have watched only a few of the Batman & Robin TV series when it aired. The serial converted the duo into a set of - pardon the pun - jokers!  A caricature of the true Batman, the paunchy crime fighter with his "kapows" and "Holy <whatever>" disgusted me enough to never venture near that series for more than a few odd episodes. When the new Batman movie franchise was launched I was quite happy that finally we might have a more serious Batman version.

To a point, the first Batman (the Tim Burton one) was quite dark - at least as compared to the TV series. Jack Nicholson's Joker was eerily evil with a bunch of one-liners that made his characterization interesting. But the later parts of the franchise disappointed big time - BatGirl, Robin, the villains were all more around for their star power in Hollywood rather than the depth they could bring to their characters other than taking them back to being caricatures.

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