January 2005 Archives
The best part of DVD Shrink is that it scrubs your DVDs of "prohibited user operation," or "PUOP" flags. You know, the ones that effectively add 30 seconds to the boot time of your DVD player by putting that little stop sign up in the corner when you try to fast forward through the really unamazing CG animation sequence before the main menu.
I'm fascinated that DVD manufacturers (a) choose to punish the 99.9999999% of DVD viewers who are not members of counterfeiting rings by forcing them to watch some gobbledygook about Interpol and rebroadcasting every single time they pop a movie in their player, and (b) apparently think that the other 0.0000001% of viewers -- the target audience of the PUOP warnings -- will actually realize the error of their ways and leave their bootlegging careers because the DVD they're copying told them to. (There's also an possibility (c), which is that DVD manufacturers figure we're all on the verge of becoming copyright criminals and need reeducation through Intellectual Property Boot Camp Class before being allowed to watch the movie we bought.)
Never mind the completely pointless PUOP sequences, such as the ones on The Simpsons DVDs that spend 8 seconds of dead air telling us that the opinions of commentators are their own and not those of the publisher. Who in the marketing department decided that needed to be a PUOP?
Try DVD Shrink. You'll find that it's worth spending 30 cents on a DVD blank for DVDs you watch frequently just to get rid of the warnings. And guess what -- it's 100% legal to do so! (At least, as long as legislation like this doesn't take effect.)
This article spurred me to write about something that's bugged me for a while. Why don't ad agencies host MPEGs of all the TV commercials they've produced? Or even better, why don't advertisers host their commercials online? Why wouldn't they want to distribute commercials to people who actually want to watch them?
I have seen a few archives of ads, but they don't cover everything, and they often seem to be low-quality encodings off a TV tuner.
There's a Denny's ad of a chicken dancing on a fence from the mid 1990s that I'd love to watch again. Or heck, any Old Navy ad with pre-supermodel-era Molly Sims in it (hi Mary! I'll just go ahead and make up my bed on the couch tonight).
I'm sure there's some sinister force at work I know nothing about that means it's legally, economically, and politically impossible to easily choose to watch commercials that aren't broadcast on TV. It can't be technological reasons, especially if BitTorrent makes hosting costs practically nonexistent.
For nearly seven years, Slashdot has been my primary source for geek news. Nearly everything I've read there was novel. But lately I've noticed that I rarely see anything on Slashdot that another RSS feed didn't already mention. Slashdot will continue to have some of the best commentary on geek topics, so of course I'll still read it, but currently RSS wins for timeliness.
As root:
mkdir /mnt/iso
mount -o loop -t iso9660 yourcd.iso /mnt/iso
I regret that I need to retract my earlier recommendation to use Auto Gordian Knot. The 1.84 beta installs a BHO at c:\windows\system32\dae.dll ("RESPONSETARGET") that pops up ads while you browse in MSIE.
It's the right of the AutoGK author to put whatever junk he wants to in his program (subject to licensing), so I'm not going to post instructions how to remove the adware. Instead I'll just state that if you don't want adware on your system, you should not use AutoGK. It's sad, because it was a useful frontend to a complicated toolchain, and I'm not aware of a comparable replacement at this moment.
