TV

Two Of The Best TV Show’s, Ever, And You Probably Didn’t Know It

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I have mentioned that I got Homicide life on the streets on DVD. Or at least the first and second seasons. It sits in my waiting to be seen pile. I also just got another show on DVD that is also arguably one of the best shows every. It is Babylon 5. I do not deny the fact that I like decent Sci-Fi, and Babylon 5 is a fantastic show. I cannot think of any series that is better. The story was unbeatable and the effects rocked. I recently got Season 3 on DVD. By far the best season of the 5 years of the show. I am nearing the end of the DVD set, and just probably watched 3 or 4 of my favorite episodes. I like special effects like anyone else, but some of these stories were crazy, or so deep it makes you stop and think. A fantastic show that not that many people ended up watching. Too bad, but at least they are making it on DVD. Why is it that some of the best made stuff is not even close to popular? Both shows I mentioned in this blog entry were never popular, and always had to fight to get renewed. Then you have shows like ER, that used to be good but are way past there prime. That show needs to be put out of everyones misery. I used to like it, but now it is painful to watch.

While on the subject of my TV habits I would like to mention another new show that I have started to watch. MI-5 on A&E. It is a rebroadcast of a BBC show. It is actually really good. I also like the British filming style, not a hollywood version of a british agency. I have my Tivo set to grab it.

DVD’s

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I don’t hide the fact that I am a fan of Science Fiction. I like it. In this day and age it is ok to be geeky!!!! Now I draw a fine line between liking sci-fi and dressing up in a costume and going to some convention. That is just weird to me, but to each their own. Just don’t classify me in the weird category. I have enough trouble with languages that are actually spoken in this country, so I am not planning on learning made up sci-fi ones! With that being said I can discuss DVD’s.

I just finished watching season 2 of Babylon 5. That was a great show period. Well done, great stories, and good effects. In my opinion one of the best shows I have ever seen. Now that I am done I need to wait for season 3 to come out. That was probably the best season they had. Until then I am trying to catch up on other DVD’s I have gotten. I am getting season 3 of Star Trek Deep Space 9 while I am away. Now for some reason I keep buying these Star Trek DVD’s but I still can’t stand the dam series. The action is so fake. Who would stop and want to talk through a problem when the enemy is actually shooting at you. Come on, blow the bastards up already. But I still buy them. At least in the deep space 9 series they do get down to some fighting. I refuse to buy any other Star Trek series. This is the last.

I heard that the simpson’s season 3 is coming out after the summer. Now that I will get. The simpsons is also one of the best series ever made in my opinion. That show is funny on so many levels. By season 3 it started getting great. I was not a huge fan of the first 2 seasons.

The last of the “best series I have ever seen” front would probably be Homicide life on the streets. They haven’t made that into DVD yet, but I would get that in a heartbeat if it came out. It was always underrated but it was a great show.

Ton’s more I want to get on dvd. Including the family guy, band of brothers. Both are out already but I am trying to budget my DVD spending.

More on my useless DVD opinions later. The train is in the tunnel to Penn station. That is my signal to wind down my writing…

Still Tivo hacking, not so thirsty anymore.

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I was able to extract 1 show onto a DVD. I can get them into MPEG2 format which is what a DVD is made up of, but I am still having issues with the part where I actually get it onto a dvd that is viewable in my DVD player. I did this one, and it seems to work. Even better the video and audio at the end seems to be in sync. That is a problem with alot of these conversions. The down side is I left the burner on all night and I don’t know when it finished. it took a while. Also unless the numbers are wrong a 1 hour tv show took up 3 gig’s of space. The MPEG2 file on my hard drive only took up 1 gig, so I am not sure if that is correct. This whole thing is a work in progress.

I am going to show Gus my work today. I was on IM with him last night. he was excited about the possibilities for him. I think he is out of room on his Tivo but does not want to delete anything.

All this tivo hacking makes me thirsty!

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If you don’t watch the Simpson’s you don’t get the title of this blog. No big deal. I still thought it was funny. I actually did it. I was able to extract video from my tivo. I am working on the assumption that it is legal to do what I am doing since I am truly archiving my video for my own use. Like I had 50 video tapes with old TV shows on them. I have no plan on distributing anything. That being said, I was able to export video to my PC, and then encode it to a mpeg2 file. I have not yet been able to get it to a DVD and watch it in my DVD player, but I was able to view them on my mac. I used a program called tystudio. It is a Windows or Linux based client and a program running on your tivo called tyserver. Once configured you can even encode right off the tivo without copying files off of it. I have not let the indexing complete yet to do that, so I am extracting what they call the ty stream file and then converting to mpeg2 on my PC. it takes a while for an hour long show but it is worth it.

To get this extraction to work you do need to have done previous hacks to your tivo. Such as install and configure a network card, FTP, and Telnet. I had my hard drives upgraded and the network card installed for me by PTVUpgrade last year. It is cool. I can program the tivo over the network, or telnet into it. But this is the best feature so far.

So I am sitting here extracting video’s while doing my laundry and the dishes. This sunday is shaping into clean my apartment day. I am cleaning up the mess from a week of neglect, and cleaning crap off my tivo. Even with 120 hours or so you can fill these things up. I have been waiting for a solution like this for a while so I can get stuff off the tivo. I am a sci-fi fan. Yes, I like computers and science fiction, what a shock! I don’t like all sci-fi though. I am rather picky. So I liked this show that was out this september called firefly. I have most of them on Tivo, and I have not deleted them since the show was canceled. I figured keeping the tivo files was the only way I was going to see this show. Well I am extracting them now to save like 8 hours of space on the tivo. I also have like the past 10 24’s that I have not watched yet. Can you tell I am excited about the new found ability?

What I cannot seem to do is get simple html to show up in these entries. Not sure why. I am looking into what to do.

I just turned on the pinging options, so maybe someone will read these things now. I have not advertised this blog’s existence until now.