This desktop widget is now available for Windows, Mac, and (are you ready for it?) Linux! Yes, it’s available for Linux, so all of us Penguinistas can enjoy our Hulu as it was meant to be enjoyed. And best of all, it’s easy to install. Let’s see just how easy the Hulu desktop client is to install and use.

Distributions and installations

As of now the only distributions Hulu is available for are Ubuntu 9.04 and Fedora 11. So if you’re not running either of them you’re out of luck. Hulu does hope to, over time, support other distributions. But both Ubuntu and Fedora make sense. Now, I will tell you that I did successfully install the Hulu client on Elive Compiz which is a Debian-based installation. So – if you can install a .deb package on your machine, and you meet the requirements, you might be golden.

Let’s take a look at the installation process. The Hulu client depends upon:

• GTK+ 2.12 or higher
• GLib 2.16 or higher
• LIRC 0.8.2 or higher (required for remote control functionality)
• Adobe Flash Player 9.0.124

Most likely, if you are running either Ubuntu 9.04 or Fedora 11, you already have everything you need installed (minus Flash). Installing Flash is as simple (at least in Ubuntu) as visiting a site that requires Flash, and then walk through the steps for installation when prompted. To install Hulu you will need to download the file from the Hulu Linux page. When you have downloaded that file you will need to issue one of the following commands (from within the directory the file was downloaded).

For Ubuntu:

dpkg -i huludesktop*

For Fedora:

rpm -ivh huludesktop*

Once the command finishes up, you are ready to run the client.

Using Hulu desktop

To start up the desktop client, issue the following command:

huludesktop

Figure 1

You will most likely find Hulu desktop in your Audio/Video menu. If not, you can always add it. When the client opens (see Figure 1) you can immediately begin searching and watching your favorite television episodes.

The menu and overall interface are amazingly simple and sleek. More than likely you will be surprised just how well done this Linux client is (considering it is still in beta).

Figure 2

As you can see (in Figure 2) the player runs seamlessly on the Linux desktop. What you can not see is that the client requires very little in desktop resources. In fact, it’s no more noticeable than running a browser.

Final thoughts

The Hulu Linux desktop client makes watching TV (and movies) a breeze. I am thrilled that Hulu has brought out a Linux client without making the Linux community wait as the Windows and Mac community enjoy it’s services.

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MBase 2 makes it dead easy to add and manage movies. The only input that is required is the name of the movie. MBase 2 will then perform an Internet search for the movie and display results. It is up to the user to pick the best result from the list. All information about a movie, including actors (including pictures), director, movie covers, genre, year or description are downloaded and added to the various fields in the software once a movie has been identified.

It usually takes less than 30 seconds to add a new movie to the movie database. It is still possible to change certain information although that is usually not necessary. A quick link to Wikipedia is provided as well which can be used to add information easily or retrieve additional information and links.

MBase 2 comes with a loan management module to keep track of movies that have been loaned and extensive statistics. MBase 2 is a comfortable portable movie collection software.

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We have covered means to download hd movie trailers with software programs for the Windows operating system before including the HD Trailers Downloader, Apple Trailers Downloads or Saving Movies From Apple Trailers.

We discovered an interesting alternative over at the Download Monkey: Trailer Freaks is a website that is listing hd movie trailers from both the Apple and Yahoo movie trailers website.

Listed are the cover of the movie, links to both Wikipedia and IMDB plus direct download links to the 480P, 720P and 1080P movie trailers on the Apple and Yahoo Trailers website. Each movie trailer can be downloaded directly by right-clicking the link and selecting the save as option. The size of the movie trailers varies but can easily reach 100 Megabytes and more if the 1080p versions are downloaded.

The Trailer Freaks website lists the newest movie trailers on the start page. Additional movie trailers can be accessed through the alphabetic category listing on the top. Users who regularly download movie trailers can subscribe to the RSS feed to get updates whenever new movie trailers are listed on the site.

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IMDB, the Internet Movie Database, is one of the most popular movie review and information websites. A search on the userscript website reveals more than 300 different scripts for the IMDB website. The following article contains a selection of the most interesting IMDB userscripts that are currently available.

• IMDB Pirated Version (link)

Probably the most popular IMDB userscript. It displays additional links to subtitles, torrent websites and file hosts.

• The Movie Dude (link)

Movie Dude puts up links to other movie review sites in the header of each individual movie on IDMB. This is great for cross-referencing movies. Supported are more than 30 different movie sites with the possibility to customize the display so that only the desired sites show up on IMDB.

• IMDB Age (link)

Adds the age of the actor next to the movies they appeared in. Useful features for visitors who often look at artist’s filmography on IMDB.

• IMDb Image Deblocker (link)

Some images on IMDB are blocked by a transparent gif which makes it impossible to save them using the usual right-click save-as dialog. This userscript removes those transparent images.

• IMDB enlarge actor pictures on hover (link)

Displays a bigger image of an actor on IMDB when hovering the mouse over the thumbnail.

• IMDB Weaver (link)

Adds two options to the movie pages on IMDB. The first is to display the actual age of the actors of the movie, the second to perform some research on those actors.

• Google Images in IMDb (link)

Adds links to Google Images which open in a new tab in the web browser.

• IMDB enlarge (link)

Will display the large image of images on IMDB when hovering over an image thumbnail.

• Remove Ads (link)

Removes some of the advertisement on IMDB.

• Netflix Links in IMDB (link)

Adds links to Netflix on IMDB movie pages.

• IMDB Ratings (link)

Adds movie ratings to search result pages on IMDB.

• IMDb Movie Collection Manager (link)

Very helpful userscript for registered users who manage their movie collection on IMDB. Offers options to quickly add movies to the movie collection, highlight those movies and multiple other interesting features.

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There are no lack of websites to do this, in fact Netflix currently has one of the best recommendation engines, but unfortunately is only available for people in the US.

A couple of other notables come up, including Movielens, Flixter and Criticker. However by far the best service I’ve discovered is Jinni, a new movie recommendation engine in public beta.

I really won’t go into too much detail about the site, I suggest you go sign up yourself, but I will say this; Jinni provides the most useful recommendation service I’ve ever used and is also unique in inclusion of the long tail into the system. Many services notoriously suffer from simply sending people to the same popular movies which in turn makes them more popular and more likely to be recommended. On Jinni you’ll get the popular, the obscure and the unlikely.

The engine is based around the Movie Genome, a similar idea to the Music Genome Project used by Pandora.

“Jinni’s social search-and-recommendation engine uses our Movie Genome, a big, ongoing project with the Jinni community to describe video more complexly. Using proprietary technology, a Jinni search takes you inside plot elements, atmosphere, and more – for search that reflects how we think and talk about movies”

Because Jinni is using a much richer set of data than the recommendation system at Netflix, it can consequently create much better results and even solve the problems Netflix has with predicting indie if people will like certain indie movies like Napoleon Dynamite.

Also, if you are a big Netflix user – Jinni integrates well with the service including the importing of Netflix data and ratings and the ability to add a movie from Jinni to your Netflix account.

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There are two problems with movies and games alike, the first is that I think both are way overpriced (although games more so), the second, what if you try it and you don’t like it? First of all, it’s difficult to decide if you don’t like a movie until you actually finish it. With games this is a bit easier, but the ending can make or break a flick completely. In this case if you don’t like the film you probably wouldn’t buy it, although you did see it through to the end, so this is a bit unfair for the publisher. However, this would spur movie makers to make better stuff, since their income relies on people liking their stuff, at least more than it does now.

So do you think this business model would work? I think that it could in the long run. The problem is that many customers would consider this to a be a free ride, and wouldn’t think about the future quality they may get from paying now. If combined with a lower price I think the demand would be very high and could be as lucrative, or even more so than the standard model, what do you say?

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Rar File Source is a Direct Show Filter that adds system wide support for playing movies in rar archives. The only restriction is that it can only play movies in uncompressed rar archives. This is usually the case as it does not make sense to compress movies due to limited space gain and time constraints.

The Direct Show Filter will display a small menu if a rar archive contains more than one video file so that the user can select the one that he would like to play. The different parts of the rar archive (of the rar archive is divided) have to reside in the same directory so that the tool can access them.

The only other requirement for Rar File Source is the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package which has to be installed on the computer system. The download link is available on the program’s homepage.

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DEG’s figures aren’t just for outright sales of DVDs, but also include DVD rentals and Blu-Ray disc sales. Rental revenue stayed nearly constant from previous year’s figures but sales pretty much took a nosedive. While it’s easy to blame dismal sales on the old monster of piracy, I personally think there are a lot of factors for this loss. Here are some of them.

Economics: There’s no denying that DVD sales have in part been affected by the recession. With money starting to get tight, fun spending is the first to be cut and DVDs are definitely not ‘essential’.

Content: For me, barring 2-3 flicks, I can’t think of many movies that I found memorable this year. So I don’t see the point of owning them on DVD because I certainly don’t want to watch them over and over.

Digital Downloads: Nowadays, plenty of TV shows and movies can be legally purchased in a digital format of your choice. In the case of TV shows, consumers have the option of purchasing only the episodes they want. This is a definite advantage over buying an entire season on DVD for a few episodes.

Transition to High Definition: Falling prices of HDTVs, Blu-Ray players, and discs means that a lot of people no longer prefer to invest in standard-definition media like DVDs. It’s similar to tapes dying out once CDs became more affordable.

I’m not much of a DVD person myself. If a movie catches my fancy, I’ll watch it in a theatre. If not, I can just wait a few months and catch it when it’s broadcast on cable. What about you? Have you bought less DVDs this year? Why do you think sales are down? Let me know.

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Options range from high quality H264, NTSC or PAL DVD format over XVID, PS3, Xbox 360 to mobile phone formats. Videos can be dragged and dropped into the application. The user picks the output directory and clicks on the Start Conversion button in the last two steps. This is an effective method of converting media files on the computer system.

The expert mode provides access to additional features and settings which make it possible to optimize the output further. The video format, codec, aspect ration, bitrate and dozens of additional parameters have to be set by the user manually before the conversion can be started.

One of the main advantages of Quick Media Converter is the support of many different video formats without the need to install additional codecs to the computer system. The software program is very responsive and provides the right interface for both beginners and experienced users.

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There have not been many releases on Blu-Ray disks though except for movies. Blu-Ray disks can have a region protection which means that it can be that a movie won’t play on a Blu-Ray player if the disk and the player have been purchased in different regions.

The world is divided into three regions: Region A spans across most of Asia, region B includes Europe, Africa and Australia while region C includes North- and South-America and Japan.

Not all Blu-Ray movies are region encoded though. The decision is made by the motion picture studio releasing the movie.

The Blu-Ray Region Code Remover removes the region code of Blu-Ray disk rips on a computer’s hard drive so that these rips can be played regardless of the user’s region. It furthermore supports removing of region code from Blu-ray titles and Java-enabled titles. It can also remove Prohibited User Operations for a better user experience.

The software program requires Windows XP or Windows Vista and the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0.

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It was actually very easy to predict. One simply had to look at all the other companies who decided to turn off their DRM servers leaving their customers standing in the rain. All of them caved in after announcing that they would turn off their DRM servers.

Why don’t the decision makers look around first to get a feeling for what will happen if they announce the shutdown of DRM servers? It happened numerous times already in the last years and it always went off the same way. Company A announces the shutdown of their DRM servers. They usually do that by mailing their customers or posting an announcement in the online store.

The online community notices what company A is trying to do and is writing about it in protest. No one likes the decision of company A at that time. Bad press and customer complaints result in company A changing their mind and either providing their customers with a better deal or canceling the decision to turn off the servers.

Why can’t there be an instructions manual for overpaid managers who think that laying all the burden of turning off a service on the customer is a good idea that would save the company money?

Here is the original email send out by Walmart (via Engadget):

NOTE: This is a follow-up to our email titled “Important Information About Your Digital Music Purchases” from 9/26/08.

Based on feedback from our customers, we have decided to maintain our digital rights management (DRM) servers for the present time. What this means to you is that our existing service continues and there is no action required on your part. Our customer service team will continue to assist with DRM issues for protected windows media audio (WMA) files purchased from Walmart.com.

While our customer support team is available to assist you with any issues, we continue to recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you insure access to them from any personal computer at any time in the future.

We appreciate your support and patience as we work to provide the best service possible to you. As we move forward with our 100% MP3 store, we’ll continue to update you with key decisions regarding our service and your account via email.

Thank you for using Walmart MP3 Music Downloads.

The Walmart Digital Music Team

Who wants to bet on the next company that is making the same mistake?

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EMDb is closely tied to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) which can be used to search for and fill out most of the information about a movie. It takes only 15 seconds from entering a movie title to searching IDMb to adding the movie to the user’s collection.

It can take more depending on the information that the user wants to add or change before the movie gets added to the database. A hit on IMDb usually fills out many information about a movie like actors, plot, director, year, genre(s) and duration while other information that are source specific have to be filled out by the user himself.

Source specific meaning the medium the disk is on, for example DVD, CD, VHS or a computer video format.

All movies that are added are listed in one central database which can be sorted in various ways. A search function is available to search huge movie collections by using various parameters like genres, titles or actors. One interesting feature of the search is that all information that have been added are available in menus which means that a user could either enter the director manually or click on the name in the list.

The movie database comes with an export and print function and can also keep track of loaned movies easily. Eric’s Movie Database is fast and responsive. It might appeal to users who want to quickly organize their movie collection without the added noise that other applications in the category produce.

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Everyone should however notice that most of the full movies and tv episodes are only available to US viewers. Pretty much everyone else will see a grayed out inactive Watch It button on the movie pages which could be confusing for some users who might believe that they could watch the movie but are missing something, for example a user account at IMDb.

The main reason for this move is that most content comes from other streaming media services like Hulu which are also only available to US viewers or those who know how to use a VPN to view the contents.

There seems to have been some recent changes as well which are great for all users. Trailers and clips of movies are now prominently displayed on the right side and everyone can watch them without restrictions. That’s an interesting feature for many users who used to visit the Apple Trailers website to see the latest movie trailers.

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The main argument for using DeVeDe is the ease if use of this application. It just takes a minute to add the videos to the application and start the creation of the DVD which does not require user input at all. The program keeps the advanced parameters like audio and video bitrates in configuration dialogs that a normal user does not need to bother to look into.

One nice feature of the video to DVD software is the ability to automatically adjust the size and the quality of the videos that are added to the application so that all movies fit on the selected medium. The medium that is created can have a size between 185 Megabytes and 8.5 Gigabytes which can be selected from templates.

The user can specify the output format of each video file that he adds, select an audio track if multiple are available and add subtitles from the computer. Advanced users can take a look at detailed information and settings and change settings like the aspect ratio, the scaling mode or several quality settings.

The title menu of the DVD can be configured extensively. A user who just wants to play the videos one after the other can keep the default settings. Users who want to define font size, background image and sounds can do that as well.

If the computer uses more than one cpu core then users should enable the optimization for multi-core cpus in the advanced options of the main menu. The video to DVD software saves the new DVD in iso format on the hard drive which can then be burned to a blank DVD. Other options include the creation of a video_ts folder.

DeVeDe is an excellent video to DVD program for Windows and Linux.

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This article is going to list the top 10 box office movies of 2007, the top movies 2007 at IMDB and the movies 2007 that got an academy award or another awards.

Why would that diversity be important? Movies that make money are not necessarily good movies. Maybe they had fantastic advertisement or hype surrounding them. Just look at I AM Legend. Was that a good movie ? It still did very well money wise.

Awards and ratings on the other hand might give better indications if a movie is good or not.

Top grossing movies 2007:

• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• Spider-Man 3
• Shrek the Third
• Transformers
• Ratatouille
• I Am Legend
• The Simpsons Movie
• National Treasure: Book of Secrets Disney
• 300

Top rated movies 2007:

• No Country for Old Men 8.4
• There Will Be Blood 8.3
• Into the Wild 8.2
• The Bourne Ultimatum 8.2
• Ratatouille 8.2
• Scaphandre et le papillon, Le 8.1
• Tropa de Elite 8.0

Movies 2007 with awards:

• Atonement
• Away From Her
• I’m Not There
• Juno
• La Vie en Rose
• Michael Clayton
• No Country for Old Men
• Sweeney Todd
• The Counterfeiters
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
• The Lives of Others
• There Will Be Blood
• This Is England

I have seen three of the top grossing movies 2007 in cinemas and although they provided a nice viewing experiencing they did not provide that special feeling, when you see a movie and know that this one is special. That happened when viewing the Star Wars movies, the original ones in cinema. That opening melody is all it takes. In case you are asking. I viewed Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers and 300 in cinema.

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Those three are probably the most common uses other than playing movie DVDs on the computer which can be done with virtually any program.

The tools listed below have been tested extensively and completely free, most are Open Source. If you know of a tool that is not in the list but should be let me know and I add it after evaluating it.

Play movie DVDs on the computer:

I rarely play movie DVDs on the computer, heck I dislike watching movies on the computer and prefer to watch them on the big TV screen. My video player of choice, SMPlayer, can play movie DVDs.

It does not offer a menu driven interface but different chapters, subtitles and titles can be selected from the menu. No need for additional specialized software in most cases.

Rip movie DVDs in DVD format to the computer:

Tools in this section:

DVD Smith Movie Backup
DVD Fab HD Decrypter
DVD Shrink

Here we have to distinguish between applications that rip the movie but retain DVD quality and those that rip the movie into a compressed format like avi or a portable format so that it can be played on a mobile phone or iPod.

DVD Smith Movie Backup can backup a DVD to the computer with little user interaction. It can deal with copy protections so that all movies can be copied with ease.

An alternative to that is DVD Fab HD Decrypter which offers all the features of DVD Smith Movie Backup plus the option to make the movie region code free.

Both store the movie in a Video_TS folder on the hard drive which has approximately the same size as the DVD.

The third tool is DVD Shrink which can reduce the size of the ripped movie which comes in handy if you have a DVD-9 movie and want to burn the backup on a DVD-5. DVD Shrink handles all copy protection as well.

Rip movie DVDs in compressed format to the computer:

Tools in this section:

Auto Gordian Knot
Bitripper
Handbrake

Converting movie DVDs into a compressed format has many advantages. One is the ability to store multiple movies in the place that one full DVD rip would take on the hard drive. A general size of around 700 Megabytes for a compressed movie would mean that about six movies fit into the place of one full DVD backup.

Another example where it does make sense is mobile computing. If you want to store movies on your iPhone, mobile phone, netbook or UMPC you have to take size into consideration because they usually come with hard drive or flash drive sizes of 20 Gigabytes or less.

Auto Gordian Knot can convert movie DVDs into avis. Minimal user interaction is required for the process. The only limitation of the program is that it cannot handle copy protected movies. To overcome this users could first backup the movie to hard disk with one of the applications mentioned above and rip it from there.

Handbrake is another tool which can handle basic CSS protection and convert the movie into additional formats like mkv, mp4 and ogm.

Bitripper finally handles DVD copy protection with ease and requires minimal user input to rip the DVD to the computer. The main benefit of Bitripper is its ease of use, no technical knowledge is required to rip the DVDs.

Convert Videos to DVD Format:

Tools in this section:

AVStoDVD
DVD Flick

DVD Flick supports a wide variety of formats which is its greatest strength, a total of 60 video and 45 audio codecs are supported by the application. It supports subtitles, PAL and NTSC DVDs and can burn the created DVD right after the creation has finished.

The biggest advantage of AVStoDVD is the ease of use. Just add videos to the program interface and it will automatically calculate the correct size to fit all the videos on a DVD-5 or DVD-9 depending on the users selection. Everything is created automatically and it can also burn the DVD after the DVD creation process.

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The best case is to enter (part of) a movie title and click on the button to search one of the databases. Hits are then displayed in a menu and the user can pick the movie that he owns from the list. All relevant information are then filled automatically. And this can be quite a lot of information including all technical details, cast, plot and rating.

This would take lots of work to fill out manually. Each movie that gets added by the user is shown in the main list which can be sorted and filtered by a lot of parameters.

One interesting feature of Griffith is the poster fetcher. It is possible to pull movie posters from Internet websites and save them as well. Besides that links to trailers and movie websites are added automatically if those information are available. There is unfortunately no way to download the movie trailers as well to the local computer.

Griffith offers a “loan-system” as well which helps keeping track of movies that have been loaned. Another interesting feature is the export function. The movie list can be exported in various formats like pdf and html.

As mentioned earlier Griffith is a multi-plattform software currently running on Linux and Windows. If you are looking for a movie manager you might want to check it out, it runs fast and solid.

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The software only works with Quicktime compatible formats. Basic use essentially means picking a movie and clicking on the Go button. There are some advanced parameters the user can play around with like thumbnail size, number of columns or snapshot interval.

Matthew Merkovich created a gallery of images that he created with Thumber including Black Hawk Down, Bulletproof Monk and Equilibrium.

Falls into the modern art category, don’t you think ?

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The DVDs are apparently coated with a chemical substance that begins to react as soon as it comes in contact with oxygen (the developer is stating that the 48 hour period starts with the first playback). The process takes 48 hours to complete and the DVD will be unreadable afterwards. It could be copied though because there does not seem to be any kind of copy protection or DRM on the disks.

While this product might have it’s good side, for instance that you do not have to return it, it has at least one huge bad side that would keep me away from it and that issue is an environmental one. If the self-destructing DVDs are successful, and according the the developer they are in France and Scandinavia, then they will add waste, lots of waste.

I’m not an expert on this topic but my uneducated guess is that it takes more energy to create and distribute and dispose of those self-destructing DVDs than it is to provide downloads on the Internet or use local movie rentals.

What do you think ? Is that a good idea, something the world really needs ?

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ThisOneNext or TON if you please is an extension of the already popular What Should I Read Next site. Both sites are the brainchild of a group of people called Thoughtplay Ltd. The working of the site is simple. You type in the name of a book, music artist, or movie. The site asks you to confirm your selection and then proceeds to give you a small list of recommendations you can try out next.

How does this work? Well, the site produces its lists purely on the basis of something called collective taste. This means that when people input the book or movie you are searching for into their own favorites list, you get to see their choices. This means the more your movie is in someone’s list, the more recommendations you are provided with.

I typed in names of a few movies and books and was fairly impressed with the recommendations of the site. Another nice part of the site is that the recommended titles have links to Amazon, where you can purchase the movie you want to see. A small percentage of your purchase goes back to the site to help its running.

You can contribute to the site as well. Simply register with them and you can enter in your own favorites and help out other visitors to the site. Registration is free and only needs an email address.

Overall, the site is interesting and quite helpful when you are stuck with making a choice. I’d love to see how the site grows in future as I think the concept has great potential. Do you know of any similar sites? Do you agree with the recommendations? Let me know.

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