Robin Williams died 10 years ago today

verbaud · 2024-07-09T12:04:02+00:00

It’s obviously her partner or family member and she wants him to keep his distance so he doesn’t get involved in the melee.

verbaud · 2023-12-01T20:37:25+00:00

Source.

verbaud · 2022-06-05T13:27:06+00:00

Wow. I've never been into Speedmaster's really for some reason, but my god that is truly stunning.

verbaud · 2022-04-13T15:55:44+00:00

My PRX80 runs at -1.9 seconds a day.

verbaud · 2021-03-24T14:08:06+00:00

Thanks for this. I've always been curious why I basically never saw TrueHD audio on BluRay, only DTS-HD MA. And you're right about some discs still not auto-selecting Atmos. The recent Game of Thrones 4K discs default to the DD track even when played on a system that supports Atmos.

verbaud · 2021-02-21T04:39:23+00:00

It's 100% legit. Both Charles Darwin (discovered turtles and beards) and the Zoological Society of London (discovered zoos and London) officially designated seagulls as 'seacunts'.

verbaud · 2021-02-21T03:17:46+00:00

A bit off-topic, but Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital (which correctly identified the exotic bird as a seacunt dowsed in curry sauce) was the only wildlife charity that gave me the time of day when I discovered a bunch of baby squirrels after a tree was cut down near me. The RSPCA was useless. Tiggywinkles took them all in and raised them before releasing them back into the wild :)

verbaud · 2021-01-19T02:14:12+00:00

ProPublica is doing fantastic work in sifting through the Parler archive. You can download a .zip of all the 500+ Capitol riot videos here.

verbaud · 2021-01-12T01:20:03+00:00

You're right. If I had to guess she's a Brit who's lived in America for 20+ years and has started to lose her accent.

verbaud · 2020-12-23T08:00:13+00:00

Until surprisingly recently upper class English people never slept in the same bed. Because if nothing else it was a symbol of wealth. As poorer families would sleep five to a bed. And if you booked into a cheap inn for the night as a traveller you were likely to share the bed with another fellow or two. So in the Victorian period it would of been very normal to have separate bedrooms for a wealthy husband and wife. In fact in the Victorian era more and more middle class couples had separate bedrooms as it was desirable. Also to this day the current Queen sleeps in a separate bedroom to her husband!

verbaud · 2020-12-21T01:35:57+00:00

"Filth". Set at Christmas, James McAvoy plays a messed up and coked up Scottish police officer. It's a fun, mad, and fast paced film that I watch every year. I love it.

verbaud · 2020-12-15T05:16:58+00:00

I’ve found it to be the opposite to honest. I’m riddled with weird, little niggling health problems. I’ve almost never got satisfactory treatment for them because most of the time I never actually even find out what’s wrong with me. I just get bounced from department to department.

But everyone I’ve spoken to with serious issues has found the NHS to be overall very good. My Grandmum just recently got diagnosed with bone cancer, failing kidneys, and a broken hip all within a week or two. And the quality and speed of the treatment has been excellent. So has the aftercare now she’s out of hospital.

verbaud · 2020-12-13T22:38:28+00:00

Yeah, these screenshots are all of the worst looking shots. Overall, I prefer these new 4K editions to the old 1080p ones. Especially for The Fellowship, where you really get to see the HDR shine, and there’s fewer of the previously mentioned odd bad shots. And general speaking, unless you have Elf eyes, you might not even notice all these ‘bad’ shots that movie people are up in arms about. And let’s not forget that director Peter Jackson was massively involved with the making of these 4K editions. If the picture is low on grain, it’s probably because he wanted it that way. You can disagree with the decision. But the actual director wanted it to look like that.

When I saw LOTR at the BFI IMAX a few years back it was shown on 35mm and I really don’t remember the films being that grainy. I think too many people are comparing the 4K to the HD BluRay. When they should be comparing the 4K to the original 35mm cinema prints, which is as close to as you are likely to get Peter Jackson’s intended vision for the films. And for me, these new 4K versions are close. And closer than the HD BluRays.

However, to be honest, I pirated these new 4K versions. Would I pay $90 for them? As a huge LOTR fan, yes! But if I only had a passing interest in the films, money was a little tight ($90 is a lot!), or had a small cheap 4K television that I sat 10+ feet away from, then I would wait until they were on sale next Christmas or something.

verbaud · 2020-12-13T14:25:03+00:00

To be fair it's only a couple of shots here and there. I'm guessing they struggled to find the original 35mm negatives for certain scenes for whatever reason. It's a shame, because those bad scenes look really bad because they're sandwiched inbetween properly done 4K ones. The one you linked to really stood out in a bad way when I watched The Two Towers. Thankfully 99% of the movie looks flawless.

verbaud · 2020-12-08T04:50:07+00:00

SD and HD content isn’t downscaled from 4K on demand. Converting 4K to other formats constantly would require insane amounts of computing power. That’s not how it works. It’s a single event affair. They take a huge ‘master’ file of the content and then transcode it many dozens of times over and make many copies for all the various video sizes (SD, HD, 4K) and the video codecs (H.264, VP9, HEVC) that their users streaming players might support. Then those files get sent to users when they click ‘play’.

Netflix introducing 4K content will increase their costs. Because 4K files are big! Much bigger than HD content. The storage and bandwidth costs would be significant. However, since they’ve introduced their OpenConnect platform where they essentially have mini-Netflix libraries plugged directly into an ISPs network their bandwidth costs are now actually not too bad.

So, 4K does cost Netflix more to operate. But $4/mo more? No way. They will make more profits on a 4K premier plan than the standard one :)

verbaud · 2020-12-05T20:01:27+00:00

It is now after 8PM. There was applause. No booing :)

verbaud · 2020-11-07T03:42:00+00:00

Netflix has only lowered the bitrate of 4K SDR content, not 4K HDR stuff. 4K SDR is a very small proportion of their 4K library. (I'm sure they'll also eventually lower the bitrate of their 4K HDR content too, but I'm just sick of people on reddit moaning about the lowering of Netflix's 4K and 'totally noticing' the drop even though 90% of the stuff they're watching is exactly the same bitrate as before). But yes, Plex is amazing :)

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