Two weeks with the ElGato Turbo.264

It's been close to two weeks since I purchased my Turbo.264 and have managed to push about over 100 hours of video through it, equally split between TS_Video and transcodes from DivX. Almost every night for two weeks it has run nonstop doing TS_Video folders, and at least 2 hours every morning doing transcoding.

The good: it really works. Even at its busiest, it will run on real time (24fps or so for most video) while CPU utilization is very reasonable. The fastest I have seen it encode was 50fps for a WMV transcode for the iPhone (all my other encoding is for the AppleTV). Funny thing is that during the WMV transcode it could not recognize that I have a registered version of Flip4mac.

The bad: it is at the mercy of the software that you use. The application that ships with it slaughters DVDs. I have seen many instances of audio tracks our of sync. It botches the aspect ratio. It can't deal with most TV season DVDs. And no AC-3 passthrough.

Roxio Popcorn 3 is a little better. I haven't seen it screw up the aspect ratio, and again: no AC-3 passthrough. I don't understand why this is a problem since all it has to do is take the sound as is, it won't need to transcode it. It can handle DVD chapters and TV season DVDs a lot better. The in-progress status is not as good as the one with the application supplied with the Turbo.264.

After the first week or so I realized that I could still use the dongle for transcoding and leave the TS_Video jobs to run overnight with Handbrake. Handbrake on this laptop when it is idle can easily run over 30fps, which is not exactly terrible.

I still think it is a great buy, and if you don't care about the AC-3 passthrough then it is even better (for example, if you are watching AppleTV and you are using only the component cables). Just make sure you try Popcorn 3 before settling on the default application.

Goodbye Jericho

In one of the worst blunders of recent television history, Jericho was cancelled again. The last episode aired last night, with an ending that made it painfully obvious that the show was nowhere close to a logical closing.

It was a great show, with a decent cast, a timely main theme, and plenty of thrills. It missed one thing: the support of its television network.

By the rabid reaction from its fans after the first cancellation, it is obvious that either the viewership statistics were wrong or that whoever is calling the shots at CBS didn't have a clue as of what to do with the show. This is the kind of bullshit one would expect from FOX, not from CBS.

IGN: Jericho Cancelled Again

March 21, 2008 - Last year Jericho got a lot of attention when CBS cancelled the series, only for the fans to rally behind it. The ensuing "nuts" campaign was a very impressive one, and resulted in the series achieving the incredibly rare feat of being un-cancelled, as CBS renewed it for a seven episode second season.

Unfortunately for Jericho fans however, the publicity surrounding the show's resurrection didn't result in increased ratings for Season 2, leaving its fate very much in doubt once again. And indeed, CBS has now announced that this coming Tuesday's Season 2 finale will serve as a series finale.

[From IGN: Jericho Cancelled Again]

Maybe this explains why the series seemed to be headed toward complete nuclear doomsday. This is too bad, the show was starting to get really interesting, especially since Rosseau was shot ...

uhm... nevermind, I mixed up Jericho with last night's Lost. At least now with the cancelled Jericho the network can replace that time slot with more suck.

Aftermath: Population Zero (National Geographic Channel)

I just watched the premiere of Aftermath: Population Zero, a documentary that tries to predict what would happen to the world if every human simply disappeared at the same time.

Yes, it's the rapture!

Hell of a show. The documentary starts with the very few minutes after the humans are gone, then a few hours later, days, months until it has gone forward over a hundred thousand years.

The money shot: the collapse of both the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty. And no, the damn dirty apes had nothing to do with either.

iTunes 7.6.1 out: bug fixes, plus a weekly 99 cent rental special

iTunes 7.6.1 is out, I haven't been able to find the actual release notes, but so far it is reported as limited to fixes for AppleTV Take Two. On a side note, Apple is now offering a 99 cent movie rental every Thursday. You still have a month to start watching the movie and once started you have 24 hours to finish watching it.

Photo by heyjoewhereyougoingwiththatguninyourhand, used under a Creative Commons License.

Cross your fingers, the end may be near

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Hollywood writers on Saturday gave resounding support to a tentative agreement with studios that could end a strike that has crippled the entertainment industry. However, it appeared the approval process might briefly delay their return to work.

About 3,500 writers packed the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles to hear from union leaders about the proposed deal that was finalized just hours before meetings were held on both coasts by the Writers Guild of America.

[From Writers strike may be nearing 'The End' - CNN.com]

About god damn time, too many good shows got cut short because of this mess. Others (*cough* Lost *cough*) should have been cancelled under general principles. What we have seen in the past two weeks is some of the worst writing in any kind of TV show of the past decade. It was just lousy.

Lost Season Premiere tomorrow

For those three of you that still hold hope that Lost will shed off the suck, the show is back for a new season starting tomorrow (1/31) at 8/7c. In the not-so-remote possibility that your mind is playing tricks on you and you have stared forgetting about the suck, you can refresh your memory, legally and for free, at ABC's HD streaming site. It even works on OS X.