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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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.

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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