Fun and Games with DVD players and AVI files

So, I had a DVD player, and a Hauppage MediaMVP player, which allowed me to play MPEG files on my TV.

What it _didn't_ do was allow me to play AVI files, which was pretty sucky, as most things you download off of the internet are actually DivX or XVID based AVI files.

So I bought a Kiss DP-1500 DVD player with ethernet connection.  It not only plays DVDs with DivX files on them, it plays them streamed off of a PC as well.  Which is _perfect_.

The only thing it doesn't do is multiregion stuff.  For that you need to put on a hack, which stops you having a warranty.  I'd like to hang onto my warranty for the first year, at least, so I'm not willing to delve into the guts of the beast to play US DVDs.  Especially when I only have about 6 of them anyway.

Instead, for the watching of Don McKellar's marvellous Last Night which Padmini, Fergus, Suze and Erin are coming round for tonight, we planned to sit on Ed's bed and watch it on his monitor.  Less than perfect, I'm sure you'd agree, especially as the TV is both larger _and_ hooked up to a surround sound system.

Fortunately, I was hit by a brainwave last night, and so this morning I looked up the method of converting DVDs to XVID files, set it going and (5 and a half hours later) a perfect AVI file was spat out the other end, and plays perfectly through the DVD player on the TV.  Hallelujah!

So far I have no issues with the player at all - the only thing I haven't played with much is the MP3 streaming, which I shall get round to over the weekend.

The glorious moment of being proved wrong about something terribly sad

There's a group of quotes here of people choosing the moments in Dr Who that most affected them. 

It was written in 2003 and therefore several of them are about realising that Doctor Who was never going to be back on the air, ever again, and how terribly sad that made them.

I'd _really_ like to have seen the look on these people's faces when its return was announced.

The moment that most affected me was probably the Doctor Who movie in 1996. For many reasons, it most affected me. Upon hearing that the movie was being made, right up to the point of actually seeing it, I thought Doctor Who was back, and better than ever. I had delusional dreams of Doctor Who lunchboxes, Doctor Who nightlights, Doctor Who blankets. Everybody saying Doctor Who quotes in regular society as much as people throw around Star Trek quotes…. But after hearing about the ratings, and realizing there was no chance of any new televised Doctor Who after that, all delusions were gone, and I came to the realization that Doctor Who was indeed dead. Oh sure, we have audio adventures, and we have novels but in a televised medium, Doctor Who is gone. Doctor Who will never be mainstream (in North America….) it will only ever be that British sci-fi show with the bad special effects and that guy with the scarf… And that is what made me realize that Doctor Who will forever be treated as, and viewed as, a bad British sci-fi series to the world, and the show I care about most will just fade away. And since then Doctor Who has pretty much faded away.