November 06, 2007 by sharky
This is just a personal list of tips for movie aficionados.
Hardware
Get yourself a decent DVD player, one that supports DivX (most do nowadays) - Try to avoid that $29 one from Wal-Mart. Note that these players will play XviD flawlessly as well. It looks like Blu-Ray is going to win the race for next DVD format, but they’re a little to pricey at the moment. And blank Blue-Ray disks aren’t light on the wallet either, nevermind the PC DVD Blu-Ray burner. Ride it out until the end of 2008…also Blu-Ray downloads are slim pickings for the moment.
Get a decent HDTV (preferably LCD) if you can afford it. And don’t go smaller than 32″, since most movies are released in their ‘native’ video aspects now. This means bigger and bigger black bars at the bottom and top of the screen. And avoid Plasma TVs - they are susceptible to “burn-in” where an image icon remains permanently burned on the screen (especially with long hours of video game playing etc.).
Subtitles
If you enjoy foreign films like I do (subbed, not dubbed) then playing them with the external subtitles can be a hassle, especially in a home DVD player. Basically there are two main formats of subtitles that can accompany a movie: 1. *.SRT files and 2. *.IDX/*.SUB files. My Toshiba will automatically load the .SRT type subtitles, as long as it is located in the same ROOTDIR as the movie, and is identical in name to the movie (with the only difference being the extension name - ie. ABC.AVI and ABC.SRT). But it won’t load the .IDX/.SUB type subtitles, no matter what. So for this I use VirtualDubMod to hard-code the subs onto the video file. (We may add an entire section onto this site devoted just to video converting, editing etc.). If this seems too daunting, try to download the FULL DVD (DVDr - 4.35GB) version (if available), which will usually include English subtitles in the DVD menu (but not always).
Searching for pirated movies
When searching for movies, I use BitTorrent exclusively. Sure, I could use mIRC to get them a little earlier, but I don’t want to be bothered with the queues. It all trickles down to Bit anyways. Also, I view the most recent torrents daily to see what’s new, plus I do a weekly search of the main release groups in case there’s stuff I’ve missed. And I cross-reference everything on IMBd.com - this comes in handy when deciding to junk the subtitle files or not.
I don’t avoid “everything” that doesn’t fall into the 700 - 720MB size range. But I definitely stay away from anything smaller. If DivX is done the right way in a larger container size, the quality can be quite comparable to XviD. And I burn everything onto DVD+RW first, and try to play it in my Toshiba - if it plays on a RW disk, it’s gonna play on a DVD+R. This way I don’t end up with permanent DVD disks containing some movies that won’t play, and some that will.
I typically steer clear of VCDs, SVCDs, KVCDs (TUS releases), and RMVBs because of the lacking video quality. These types of movie formats are grossly inferior to movies that are encoded with XviD. My home hardware consists of a 32″ HDTV WS Sony Wega, and an Toshiba 720p/1080i HDMI DivX DVD Player. OK, these aren’t top of the line products nowadays, but I sure notice a difference that proper encoding (and resolutions) can make. And XviD movies are the only ones that I can’t tell the difference from a retail DVD. All else pales. For this reason, I also avoid *.mpg, *.mpeg and most *.mp4 movie formats, plus most DivX releases (unless I can’t find it any other way - sorry aXXo, but I’d rather have it on XviD, not DivX 5.x).
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