Movie studio 20th Century Fox are counting on this as it’s now been announced that the next Angry Birds game, called Angry Birds RIO, will tie-in with an animated cartoon movie.

The film, which is due for release in March will be made by the same people behind the popular Ice Age.  A spokesman for 20th Century Fox said the movie would ”introduce the millions of fans of Angry Birds to the exciting world of RIO.”

In the new game the birds travel to Brazil to try and rescue two new friends, Blue and Jewel.  They are tropical birds who will be the main stars of the movie.

The Angry Birds game has had over 50 million downloads since its release last year.  It can now been found on just about every smartphone platform and is set for release on the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii.

The game, apparently ‘cos this is news to me too, is about some bad tempered birds (okay, I could have figured this bit out) who try to rescue their eggs from evil pigs.  Using a slingshot the birds are catapulted into the different structures where the pigs are hiding and can use their unique skills to defeat them.

There have also been rumours of an Angry Birds TV Series…  I can’t wait.

The film was named best picture, while David Fincher was named best director, Aaron Sorkin won best screenplay and  Jessie Eisenberg won best actor for his portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg.

The Social Network is considered to be a front-runner for Oscar success when the unveiling of this year’s shortlist takes place on the 25th of January.  It also stars Justin Timberlake in a supporting role.

The National Society of Film Critics includes newspapers from Los Angeles, New York, Boston and Chicago.  The awards given to the film will only help the hype surrounding the Oscar voting.

Scorsese original documentary was shot more than thirty years ago and influenced many film makers including Quentin Tarantino who used one of the stories of the documentary in his Pulp Fiction movie (the one with the adrenalin shot to the heart). Since the movie was never officially released Pallotta had to collect materials from other sources like Bittorrent or Youtube to get the film done. While he did get a master copy of the film from Steven Prince himself he discovered an even better copy on the Bittorrent network.

The movie can be directly downloaded from Bittorrent. The torrent is linked at Mininova. The movie has a size of about 420 Megabytes. It is already listed on IMDB with a 9.1 rating although it probably will go down when more users start voting.

Taste Kid (via Genbeta) concentrates on books, movies and music which is something that I have not seen that often yet. Normally it’s only one of the three and not all of them. The website consists of a form where the user can enter something that he likes that relates to books, music or movies. This can be an artist or a name of a product.

Taste Kid will then pull data from the database and display recommendations based on the user’s input. If you enter 24 (the TV series) for example you get recommendations for Lost and The Office among others.

One interesting aspect of the website is that you do get recommendations for books and music as well if you entered for example a movie title. This does not happen all of the time though.

A brief description (taken from Wikipedia mostly it seems) is available for many items that are mentioned on the website and the site even embeds Youtube videos when available which is great to get a first impression of that recommendation.

Another interesting aspect of Taste Kid is that the website is not commercial (yet). You do not find links to online stores where you can buy the media directly. As of now it’s just a way to receive recommendations that include previews.

A far better solution – at least for me – is to convert the DVD movies and put them on the hard disk of my notebook. Compressed movies usually have a size of 700 Megabytes to 1.4 Gigabytes which means that my laptop can store several movies without facing storage problems.

Handbrake is a software that lets you easily compress DVD movies. All you need is a Video_TS folder. This is the folder that is on every movie DVD. It is possible to select a preset output like Ipod High-Rez or Apple TV or keep the default one which is simply called normal.

You basically need a Video_TS folder, select a directory and name for the output and click on Encode Video to start the DVD conversion. Several settings can increase the quality of the output. You could for instance raise the bitrate or set a default framerate.

Another nice feature is the ability to queue conversions. You would need all of the Video_TS folders on your hard drive of course unless you want to swap disks after each DVD has been converted.

One should note that Handbrake is not able to convert copy protected DVDs. This means that you would need a different software to copy the contents of the movie DVD to your hard drive (and remove the copy protection) before you can convert the movie further if the DVD is copy protected.

One software that can do this is DVD Fab HD Decrypter. Handbrake is available for Microsoft Windows Apple Macintosh and Linux.

Read More:

Handbrake

So, the first question that I would like to ask is this one: What is your favorite movie of all times (and why). I’m always looking for interesting movies that I never heard about and it would be nice to get some recommendations from you. My favorite movie of all times is the movie Before Sunrise with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, a movie about two strangers who meet in a train and decide to spend a day and night in Vienna together. It reminds me a lot of something that I experienced, maybe that is why I love this movie so much.

The acting and setting is incredible as well. Let me ask you: What is your favorite movie of all time?

Update: Four years later and I still think that Before Sunrise is one of the best movies ever made. There have been contenders though for that spot, but none actually managed to take away that number one position from that movie.

There are two major differences between Jumpcut and local video editing programs. The first is that you have to upload the raw video file before you can edit it. This can take some time depending on your upload speed. The second difference is a file size limitation of 100 megabytes which means that you either have to cut your raw video file into 100 Megabyte pieces or forget about editing it online at Jumpcut.

Jumpcut supports most of the commonly used video files including avi, flv, mpg and mov and uploading multiple files at once. It is also possible to upload pictures and audio files or import them from Flickr or Facebook. I tried the service today and somehow was not able to upload videos at all. The videos would stop at about 50-60%. I did try different videos and formats which can only mean that they have some problems at the moment.

The functionality that Jumpcug offers is pretty basic and thus easy to learn. You can slice, cut and duplicate the videos that you have uploaded, add titles and sounds to them, apply all kinds of nice effects (butterflies, invert and rain for instance) and apply actions to the video.

One thing is however really bothering me. There is no obvious way to download the created movie. You can publish it (public or private) on the Jumpcut website but I was not able to find a download link for the movie. This means that you have to use a download manager like Orbit, a plugin or extension to download the newly created movie.

Publishing the movie on the web does have some advantages. Instead of burning x movies for everyone who wants a copy you simply send everyone a link that points to the movie on the Internet.

DVD Flick is a powerful DVD authoring software which is able to automatically create a DVD from various video formats such as apple quicktime, divx, flash video and mpeg. There is no need to convert them into a DVD compliant format, just load them into DVD Flick and it will do the rest for you. All that needs to be done after DVD Flick finished generating the files is to burn them.

You should take a look at the projects settings before proceeding to generate the DVD. You may select a different target size such as CD, DVD-Ram or Mini-DVD, change the target format between PAL and NTSC and change the quality of the encoding process. A better quality or a second pass results in a longer generation time but also in a better video and audio quality.

You may select the audio format and bitrate and opt to generate a iso file instead of a video_ts folder. It is also possible to burn the new DVD right after the generation finishes.

The only thing that is really missing is the missing menu feature. There is no way to create a menu at this moment which means all files are played in a row which could get confusing if you have many small movies on a DVD.

Please note that it is illegal in some countries to duplicate copy protected DVD`s. Rip it 4 Me is able to cope with most copy protections and could be illegal in your country, use it at your own risk. Rip it 4 Me is a frontend for DVD Decrypter or DVD Shrink which adds ways to those programs to backup a DVD even though it is copy protected. You do need one of the two mentioned programs to be able to use Rip it 4 Me. You might also want to install FixVTS which allows you to adjust your DVD files into better DVD compliance.
The process of backing up a DVD is pretty simple after all the installations have been made. (If you don’t have DVD Decrypter or DVD Shrink installed use the Downloads menu in Rip it 4 Me to do so). Put a DVD into your disk drive and start Rip it 4 Me. Click on Wizard mode or 1-click mode.

You have to make some selections such as selecting a source and target hard drive and the ripping settings which give you the options to backup the full DVD, the movie only, movies and menus only or iso mode. Click on Create PSL file in the next window and rip DVD in the one after it.

If everything worked fine DVD Decrypter will start and state that it has imported the settings successfully. Click on the DVD to Hard Drive symbol in the lower left corner and the process should start. Take a look at the pictured Rip it 4 Me guide if you have further questions or encounter problems.

Take a look at the trailers below or download the HD versions at Apples trailer website. Enjoy..

I’m going to explain the method using an example. I’m really looking forward to seeing the movie 300 which will come out in march. A new trailer for that movie was released a few days ago and I want to download it to my computer to be able to watch it again without re-downloading it. The first step would be to visit the apple movie trailers website.

Click on the link to the movie 300. The main page of the movie shows up where you can select the resolution of the trailer that you want to view. Right-click and select view page source. Find either 480, 720 or 1080. Skip the first and copy the second url that you find.

480 – http://images.apple.com/movies/wb/300/300-tlr1_480p.mov
720 – http://images.apple.com/movies/wb/300/300-tlr1_720p.mov
1080 – http://images.apple.com/movies/wb/300/300-tlr1_1080p.mov

Add the letter h before the resolution, it would like this

480 – http://images.apple.com/movies/wb/300/300-tlr1_h480p.mov
720 – http://images.apple.com/movies/wb/300/300-tlr1_h720p.mov
1080 – http://images.apple.com/movies/wb/300/300-tlr1_h1080p.mov

This is the direct link to the movie. You could use a download manager to download it or save the page once the movie has been completely loaded.

It took the author 20 days to encrypt the protection using his Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive and lots of free time. He started looking at solutions because he was unable to play a purchased HD-DVD movie using a HD-DVD drive and a HD monitor. I never fully understood why they created such restrictive formats in the first place. They only make their customers angry with restrictions like this, hackers will always find a way.

The author published a youtube movie, here it is:

The faq that comes with the program gives valuable information. I decided to publish it fully as well.

Unplug steps in providing the technology to discover media links for mms and real media videos as well. It is also working for flv files that youtube and google video use but not that comfortable as the video downloader add-on. Once the extension is installed you can use the add-on by selecting Tools / UnPlug to scan the website automatically for media links.

A better option would be to add the unplug icon to one of your toolbars for faster access. To do that right-click a toolbar and select customize from the menu. Scroll down until you see the unplug fish and drag it to the toolbar of your choice.

Most of the time you receive a choice of possibilities that could contain the actual movie. It looks more complicated. Unplug tries to help the user by suggesting one or two of the links that it thinks are the most possible correct links to the movie.  I would use this plugin for the sites that the video downloader is not able to process.

Zamzar offers four different format categories which are: document, image, movie and music. Each category has a large list of formats that can be converted into each other. The following can be converted on the website:

• text formats: csv, doc, odp, ods, odt, pdf, ppt and xls.
• image formats: bmp, gif, jpg, tiff, ps
• music fomats: ac3, au, flac, m4a, mp3, wav, wma
• movie formats: avi, flv, gvi, mov, mp4, mpg

As you can see there are plenty of possiblities to convert formats into each other. The maximum file limit is 100 megabytes which should be sufficient for most purposes.

A drawback is that you install many codecs that you do not need and that could interfere with codecs already installed on your system. A more elegant approach would be to scan the media file to find out which codes have been used to encode the file. One freeware that is able to do this is Media Info.

Media Info loads the media file and scans it for codes that are needed to playback the file. It displays extensive information about audio and video streams, the bitrate used to encode the movie and the names of the codec(s). A great feature is a link to the website of the codec used where it is possible to download it and a link to a video player website that is able to play the file without downloading the codec seperately.

Democracy Player has a nice video player, that supports different video formats, like MPEG and AVI for example. Democracy Player supports different ways to get videos.

You can add RSS feeds, podcasts and video blogs which are deliverd in the form of channels. You can also search trough a number of different video sites and download the media like you do of a channel. All the media that you download will go to the new videos/collections tab in which you can view them.

Democracy Player is very simple to use, while still delivering a great service. Some people made claims saying this is the Firefox for videos, i can’t say if Democracy Player will be as popular as Firefox, but it does have allot of potential.

Some days later he managed to do the same with a Blue-Ray movie which means that everything is set to get the warez scene going. I think it is kinda strange that it was always easy to copy games for the Playstation systems and many people think that the success of the Playstation systems could be connected to this.

This got me thinking. Why did not Sony try and dump their discs if they knew everyone would be able to install and use Linux on the Playstation 3 ? Did they all miss it or was it probably something they did not care about or even wanted ? What do you think about this ?

The following method makes it possible to join multiple video files into one big file making it that much easier in the end to play and enjoy the downloaded movie. The method is different depending on the type of movie that you are playing. If the movie consists of multiple mpg movies you can use the windows command line to merge them.

Start the command line by pressing the windows key and R. Enter cmd in the prompt which will start the command line window. Enter the following line into the command line, make sure you enter the right filepath to the movie. I suggest you move the files to the top of a hard drive to ease the amount of typing that needs to be done.

copy /B “C:\movie1.mpg” + “C:\movie2.mpg” + “C:\movie3.mpg” “C:\completemovie.mpg”

This joins movie1.mpg, movie2.mpg and movie3.mpg into completemovie.mpg. You can add more movies to join more parts without problems.

You need an additional programs if the parts are avi files instead of mpg. Download the freeware VirtualDubMod and unpack it to your hard drive. Run the tool and select File, Open Video File and browse to the first part of the movie. Select no If a popup named VBR audio stream detected appears.

Click on File, append Segment and browse to the second part of the movie. Once this is done click on File, Save As and save the newly merged movie file to your hard drive.

If you can´t get enough tech support stories you might be interested in the techtales website which has a rather large archive (almost 10 years) of tech support related stories.

I´am not sure about the technique used to show this impressive ascii movies, if you know let me know please. But know, take a look for yourself and enjoy this fine piece of technology. Everything is available at romanm.ch.