Media Collection Increases, Reviews, Niece’s wedding
by mandrake on Aug.09, 2009, under General Rambling
As my collection now grows to 450+ movies, and 1700+ TV Episodes, I feel compelled to remark on a few of the things I’ve watched recently:
Arrested Development: Somehow I missed this show when it was originally on TV. That’s a shame, because this show was great. Loved it. Highly recommend it to everyone. I’m looking forward to the feature film coming out next year.
Hancock: This movie was doing so well for itself til it took a strange left-turn halfway through. Would have been amusing like the rest of the movie if it didn’t take itself so seriously at that point. Also, the ad thing at the end? WTF.
Miss March: How could I not want to watch a feature film by the people who brought us The Grapist. Unfortunately they left a couple of their cohorts behind and the movie seemed to suffer a little from it. Still pretty amusing, but I can see why this movie didn’t get very good reviews 
War, Inc: The sequel-in-essence of Gross Pointe Blank. Very amusing, I enjoyed this quite a bit. It reminded me quite a bit of the book ‘The Futurist’ crossed with GBP.
Equilibrium: Was recommended this by a friend… Had a good start, and an amusing end, but I was relatively checked out during the movie.
I’ve watched a bunch more, but those were ones that were sticking out in my head…
Also, grats to my niece who just got married last weekend, it was a fantastic service and everyone seemed to have a great time 
I know I did!
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Howdy. Welcome to mandrake.net!
Feel free to drop me a line if you see any problems, though I'm still in the middle of setting up my new site. I update this blog on an irregular basis, sometimes several times a day, sometimes once a week. Feel free to drop by again or grab the rss feed
April 16th, 2010 on 2:20 pm
Hi Mandrake,
I’ll follow the crowd by first off saying, awesome setup you have going in your home office.
I finally got an TV (yay!) and after searching numerous forums & hours of reading all the bickering going on about how to use handbrake etc etc. The recesses of my mind kept nagging at me saying: “Remember that dude with the magnificent setup? He was converting all his Blu-ray & HD movies to digital content waaayyy before you ever thought about Hi-Def” So here we are.
You’ve been a great help as far as mentioning MetaX and so forth.
My questions are: 1. As far as I can tell Macs have no native way of Blu-Ray playback – This is a moot point though if all you want to do is get a simple Blu-Ray reader (FastMac APP-6907 – roughly $150 on their website) and encode your library for digital consumption on a mac or TV?
2. You said you were doing 5500 kbps @ 720P, From what I understand the TV can’t play beyond the 720 anyway or has the software changes they made over the last months for HD content changed that? Do you still use these settings or have you decided on a lower bitrate since starting this that gives minimal quality loss for gain in filesize?
3.I have never done Blu-Ray decoding, and I’m sure the forums have enough to go on as far as how-to’s. Why don’t you use Mac The Ripper 3 or 4 to remove protection instead of Any DVD HD?(Just came across Pavtube, would like your thoughts on this)
4. How do your rips compare to the HD quality through the iTunes store? Better/worse equivalent? I know that a regular dvd isn’t even close to the HD quality of the iTunes store from personal experience, but wondered if your rips look better or not (don’t care about filesize if you’re getting a higher quality)
Well I hope I haven’t asked too many stupid questions but anyways hope you get some time to reply.
Thanks for all the good info already given!
May 27th, 2010 on 8:03 pm
1) I actually do my ripping in XP (vmware) on my mac pro – I put a bluray drive in it and vmware sees it just fine.
2) 720p is still the best the appletv does, and 5500 is the best filesize / quality ratio I found, honestly.
3) I have no idea why I don’t use mac the ripper 3 or 4, anydvdhd just happened to be the only tool I could find at the time
4) my rips are higher quality than the ones from the apple stor. far better.
hope that helped, I totalyl ignored my blog for a while so I’m late responding