Topics: Music in NTSC vs PAL / UHD Ripping on Blu Ray Drives / Generation X Technology Lives / Greed Medium Article / Plex Podcasts
Hello there everybody. This is Shane arm and row. You’re in the passenger seat with me
passenger seat radio. It is June 1 2018.
It’s Friday.
You’re on my 13 mile commute home.
Technically my 13 mile commute to frys
Welcome to the show everybody
and
yes end of week it’s been a short week but it feels
like a long week I swear to god you have a three day week
so I had you know Monday off and I took Tuesday
you have a three day week somehow it seems longer Hey
will be is in what’s up brother
seems longer than a regular five day week when really suck is next week. right
because you’ve had four days off
you went back to work for a couple days. Yet another couple days off and now you have another five
days before
you have time off. Hey,
Mike ama Garcia what’s going on man
welcome,
so I’m on my way to frys as I am many many times. On my way to frys on my way home from work.
Today’s this weekend’s mission along with Dickie with my retro pi
three B plus
minus. My goal is to mess around with the concept. Hey Javier.
I just get ready to talk about you
I’m getting I’m going to pick up an old my first Ultra HD 4k
blu ray
and it’s going to be Fifth Element you always sort of remember
the first new technology
movie that you buy
my first most my first
DVDs I got up when I
first bought my DVD player back way back when
I got a
free steps a free
set of movies are cheap movies I got like a
your choice of five DVDs. When I bought my first DVD player and amongst the early five I don’t remember all five of them but amongst them was tombstone blade and Lost in Space were amongst my my freebies.
The front
end for retro pie. You’re talking the theme
I assume? Right. The way that it looks because the front end for retro pious and you Emulation Station but you can theme
that and that
is the
best send as many as send as many splash screen or should I say theme as theme
anyway, matrix was the hobbies. First one? Yeah, I’m pretty sure I don’t
remember if matrix is one of my first or not my
wife. My remember. Of course, I didn’t have a digital camera back then. Otherwise, what I pictures of the things. I don’t remember my first Blu Ray was now that I think about it. I should, I should remember what my first Blu Ray was.
But see, my problem was like I got into blu ray late because I joined the HD DVD revolution to counter Sony. And so I trickled
in to blu ray after
the fact
my first one of my
my first sets of HD DVDs. One was um,
I think Superman to as one sneakers, what else was it they were all universal titles. I remember that.
But this will be my first Ultra HD will be Fifth Element.
And now that I’m talking about it in 10 years, when I get the next eight k blu rays, super elite ultra edition and I’m buying Labyrinth for the 17th time hopefully I’ll remember that
probably not. So why I’m picking
that up is in many of you already know that I have not received the hashtag green light for getting a 4k TV despite the fact that they’re practically giving them away and boxes of cocoa pebbles these days, my wife is insistent
that there is no new TV until she gets some of her house things accomplished.
So despite the fact that I can get a decent you know, 4k TV for you know, $399
I have to expel like, you know, 15 grand on the house before I can have that.
But anyway, so Father’s Day is coming up. I’m going to take another stab at it and see if I can get her to green light me for Father’s Day. A 4k Ultra HD TV. So and I don’t even have a player. I have the Xbox One which will play the 4k videos.
But I don’t have any medium. I don’t have anything that actually will play back 4k.
So I hear about Microsoft’s layoffs for violence tears. Now I did not hear about this I’m behind my nightly walk. I catch up on all my news that I didn’t have time to read during the day. So I’m sure I will read about it on my walk tonight about seven o’clock.
But if you have something to share, definitely throw it in here. And that sounds interesting. But anyway. So the reason I’m getting an ultra HD blu ray, despite having no real player or any real way to look at him
is because apparently there are some blu ray tribes
and there’s a handful of them that are capable
of actually accessing Ultra HD blu rays.
Now once you can access them, if you got the right tool you can refer.
So I am curious. My particular blu
ray drive
in my computer is listed as one that is what’s known as
you HD friendly,
which means well, it doesn’t have all the full capabilities of an you HD blu ray ROM drive,
it does have the ability to access the content which means you’re then down to software with the software
you should be able to rip.
So I will try out my ripping software of choice which is
DVD fab.
There are some other freebie tools out there that
if you’re willing to chase the AC
SS key file, which is hashed
encryption keys
if you’re willing to chase those and keep your thing updated. And all that other nonsense. There’s apparently a free way
of taking care of that. But I’m going to try my paid way.
There’s always a discount on DVD fab. There’s always a way to get their products cheaper than what’s on the website. And they have some sort of a trial program, I’m sure. So I’ll be able to check out to see how the ultra rips work with my
blu ray ROM drive in my computer.
So I’m on my way to frys I’m going to pick that up, I’m going to go home, slap it in there and see if I can actually get lucky and access it. So according to Mike Garcia, Microsoft laid off its x box support staff in favor
of volunteers.
So we’re talking sort of about crowdfunded that support. Hmm,
interesting, I told you guys about my plan, right? What I wanted to see happen with with mass crowd supporting
just second, I’m gonna eat this Sonic myth because my blood sugar’s low, and I don’t want to pass out of the way. Oh,
you know, I’m kind of doing that, you know, 1100 calorie thing. And every now and then I have something to eat real quick, something. Eat this. Sonic mint.
Yes,
I’ve been wanting to sell. Remember, they have a diet green tea. That’s my new diet coke with lime. Hopefully it’s better for me.
So at these myths, excuse me, all over the place.
There we go. Makes my mouth happy. Like, Twizzlers?
Anyway,
so my idea
was to
to crowdsource
The, the cleaning and restoration of film,
right? So if they would digitize like the highest quality copy of some movie, right, let’s say sanity, right? So they take Santa do and they, they capture it in 4k, right off the Masters right there. That’s pretty much an automated process.
Now, what really takes all the time is to clean up the print,
you know, that sort of thing. Because the print, you know, it’s, it’s the prints old, it’s got specs, and all this, you know, hairs or whatever. So that’s what really takes all the time is Frame By Frame cleaning up the film. But what if they could scan it, put it online. And as a user, I could say, reach out and grab one minute of that video in some sort of proprietary editor.
But I could then go in and clean up the frames, and then submit them for review. And then somebody official make sure I didn’t put pictures in there, whatever. And,
you know,
frame by frame, minute, four minute, hour by hour, these merge into this master archives. And then at some point, as part of my reward, I will have access to a digital copy of the fully restored sanity. I think that sort of thing could work sort of like SETI but for restoring films that finding aliens,
so yeah, that is, that is kind of too bad. I wait a minute. They only had 20 Xbox support people total. That doesn’t seem right. Interesting. I can’t wait to read the article. I’m sure I’ll see it tonight. When I’m looking around. Let me bring up my keep list here. I did have some items to cover for a change.
So as I was setting up my pie over the last couple days, I had to I know poor Alex. He doesn’t want to hear about pi setup anymore, but so I was listening to the music that Chris Henschel it put into his his image that I started with and, you know, music to me in video gaming is very important, and it’s very personal.
I’m into classic video game music be at arcade music or Commodore 64, Amiga, to me, you know, like listening to the music and forbidden Forrester caverns of Kafka or, you know, adventure construction said any of those things.
Those are, those are important things to sound effects in music. So it occurred to me that even though I don’t typically sit and listen to music on my you know, my pies interface, if I was going to have music on there, I would want to have Commodore 64 music like commando or Rambo,
international karate, plus, I mean, there’s a billion adventure constructs that legacy the ancients
there, she just goes on and on, crush crumbled chop. Had a great soundtrack. Opening soundtrack. there’s a there’s a million songs I would love to have as my random background music that is it some arbitrary, you know chiptune from some NAS game. I could give a rat’s I didn’t grow up with the ideas. I grew up with the Commodore 64 and make it
an arcade games, right? Super Batman has this sort of a remix of the old you know, the old
you know, country, you know, Old West song Red River Valley, they have sort of a upscale remake of that in, you know, a remix of that inside and super bag. Man. That would be a perfect example of a song that I would want to have on my retro pie, you know, playing while I’m navigating menus.
But you know, I was. So I started I started digging around online looking for mp3 made of Commodore 64 music. And it’s sort of an interesting things happen. And I wanted to share with you because it’s sort of a time capsule thing. And a lot of you have come from retro gaming radio, when the podcast I used to do
so
as any of the oxygen.
So I like talking about some of these classic things. So something that unless you are part of the eight bit revolution,
you don’t think if something known as the international television standard. And when I say that I’m talking about NTSC versus pal.
And these standards something national TV scan something right, these they stand for something, but NTSC is the video standard used by
North America and Japan. Everybody else on the planet uses pow,
which apparently has more resolution. But lower frequency. Something like that right, because Palace 50 hertz and
NTSC is 60 years. Right, so in the old days palaver No. Today pal versus NTSC means nothing, right. So if you’ve got an Xbox, and you had a pal game or an NTSC game, you would know you would know the difference. There’s nothing, it’s all it’s all arbitrary. Now, doesn’t matter. But in the old days, Commodore 64 and Amiga, and I’m sure other eight bits of the time that plugged into televisions,
powerful.
NTSC was a big thing. In fact, many people who had these classic
gaming computers, like the commenter
line actually installed switches, physical switches on the unit Amiga, especially that would let you boot the computer up in PAL
or NTSC mode.
I know this, this doesn’t seem like I’m going anywhere with this, but bear with
on the Commodore 64, it was the same thing.
Now, if you had a TV
that you have plugged into your Commodore 64, and you booted up a power game, your TV
would lose its mind, right? It would stay, we start flicking flickering and rolling and, and go black and white, it almost looked like some sort of Macrovision copy
protection. It was so up.
If you had like a 1702 monitor, you had other monitors
that you could kind of mess with the, you know, you could mess with some settings in the back. And,
yeah, higher resolution, lower FPS on power, right, right. Right, I thought was something like that. So,
a few extra hundred 64 plugged into a TV, you’re if you wanted to play a pal game. But if you were on
a 1702 or whatever, it wouldn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.
But here’s the thing, 60 hertz,
if you are if your Commodore 64 was running at 60 hertz versus 50 hertz, right? A lot of times while the game itself wasn’t affected, because of the way the graphics are drawn, right, the game still played right. Sometimes you have some flickering, right, if you try to play a power game on an NTSC Commodore
64, or vice versa, you would see maybe some, you know, some flickering of the sprites or something. But for the most part, the game played the same speed
for the most part, maybe just a fraction faster or slower.
But one thing that was definitely affected definitely affected was audio
playback.
So this is circling back around to Commodore 64 tunes that I’m used to command to all this stuff.
The songs that I remember from the Commodore 64 were often
and incorrectly played too fast on my Commodore 64 because they were how versions of the game
so if you were to boot up blue Max, right, great game, blue max isometric flight simulator, very, very cool. arcade ish flight simulator,
you were to put it on an NTSC Commodore 64. The music would be Data, Data, Data, Data, Data data data
center, right my tone deaf interpretation. Now if you load the game into an emulator that understands pal versus NTSC, or you actually load the proper NTSC version of the game The music is a whole lot different
than
data totally slower commando the same thing did it did it did I dead Dead, dead
dead. But if you listen to it in its actual
format, it’s dead. Dead. Dead. Dead dead. It almost sounds like
the music is wrong when it’s the right music and the By the way, extends to tons of games that I played growing up where the music
was the game that had Moonlight Sonata It was one of those weird specie conversions
I’m sure someone in the channel will remember Hey Michael Caine’s on the great famous
British actor
Jet Set willing right it had the greatest
audio version
of moonlight so nice low back and not
play because up we’re game
razor
blades chasing when all that other nonsense but it had the greatest rendition of of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata as the intro music so I would load that game and just let a play of course the version I remember is a pal game running on NTSC. So Moonlight Sonata played a lot faster. Hey Daniel Jellicoe, is that like Jellicoe. Cats. Nuts. That’s a bad joke. Hey, man. Nice to see. I know we get some some UK listeners. Especially if I am do the show earlier in the day when it’s not midnight. There. You guys. You know all about it. So tell me something. Are you Am Did you have Commodore 64 Amiga. And you were on the other side of the pond. So you had power and you probably had some NTSC games. So you probably had games they ran to to slow. How does that work out?
. I don’t know. Go from the other point of view.
But anyway, so I was pulling down some mp3 of music that I grew up on on the Commodore 64. And it sounds so slow. I almost have to artificially speed them up by what
was that 10%, 11%
just to make sure that the music was right or not. Right. But what I remember, you know what I’m saying? So yeah, so in your case. So what would
happen? Daniel if you had an NTSC game and you played it on your pal? Commodore 64 the mute with the music playing too fast, or would it play extra slow? I’m not sure how that would work. Maybe he’ll answer I noticed, like a 15 second delay on the show here. So. But anyway, so I thought that was an interesting experience. You know, it’s one of those things that
I was talking to my friend Justin who’s too bad. He’s at home sick with like this massive stomach flu poor son of a, or he’d be listening. He and I were talking the other day about
there will never be a generation of people like Generation X like Gen Xers like myself, that the people of our age group and I’ll tell you why
we have. So we have lived through the most diverse technological
growth
period. Frankly, I think that will ever be seen in human civilization. If you think about what 10 year old Shane’s life was like. Versus Shane’s nearly 15 year old life is like
when I was 10, there was no cable TV.
There was no compact disc, there was no digital music. There was no internet, there was no cell phones, there was nothing and yet here we are. Fast forward in my lifetime. We’ve got self driving cars, we’ve got artificial
intelligence, we have the ability to put you know, Sofia, the guards face on some star, you know what I’m saying? I mean, the amount of that we have seen as Gen Xers, the diversity and differential of technology and basically social order when I was when I was 10 years old, calling a black person the N word. Well, not necessarily. The greatest thing ever was no big deal. Now it basically get you kicked off of your TV program on NBC. You know what I’m saying? We have seen, you would be scared, shiftless to come out of the closet as a gay man in 1979, the kiss of death.
And yet today My son is 11 years old to come out of the closet this game and be like a cool, whatever, right? So it is truly stunning to me that
the age that that we can exercise leaf through and listen, yes, technology is going to move forward in the future. But will it move at the speed and the diversity within one person’s lifetime that we have experienced as Gen Xers?
Let’s see here. So Daniel writes back, honestly, I can’t remember. But it didn’t play. It originally played all the joys of reading from a video storage and then finding they’ve
given you an NTSC copy. So whatever your video playback was, probably didn’t handle NTSC any better than our NTSC machines. handled power,
but I always
thought that that pal people
could play NTSC gains,
but they would be cut off at the bottom and run too fast is that was that one I remember? I don’t remember. That’s like 40 years ago.
Hey, Jeffrey Dallas here. What’s up, man? So I wanted to share with you that Commodore 64 music
unbelievable nonsense story
Hey, right now one of my favorite game series older PC game series call of whereas is on sale right now at it wasn’t fanatical calm, right. Used to be what it used to be. I don’t remember what it used to be now. But anyway, so it’s on sale for a buck as far worse things you can spend $1 on them to pick that up.
So I wanted to let everybody knew that that was available.
Hey, so I just I released an article
on medium. You guys know I like to write on medium from time to time I wrote. I wrote an article
a couple weeks back about being an adult game
player and some of the
trials and tribulations about that. That seems to be like the most popular article I’ve written on medium. So whether or not it’s just because more people have been following me or whatever. So I decided to follow it up with an article about video game greed, about greed being sort of the last super power of video games. And I talked about robot Tron and zookeeper and jackal as being these games were chasing the high score, wasn’t it? It’s the greed elements of games
that make them so addictive,
that with you psychologically. So check that out. It’s on again, it’s on medium. It’s a pay article, which means it’s for members only. But everybody, whether you’re a member or not, gets three free articles a month. So you get to read the article, please clap for me. If you like the article, it’s just like, a beggar’s cup
right? The more class you have the more people who are willing to clap for you. So check that out I think you’ll like it it’s an eight minute read according to medium so it won’t take you forever to check that out
regular listener of the show
the younger up the boomers and the Gen X failed them yeah I don’t know I guess so.
And I have a theory on that and I’m sure I’ve talked about essentially how Gen Xers didn’t want their kids to want for anything you know when I was growing up I didn’t get what I wanted so I’m gonna make sure my kids don’t you know get get told no or whatever yeah so we kind of that part up but anyway we could we could go all day on now let’s see Do I have any interest in true crime podcasts notice that they have exploded recently yeah you know it’s funny you mentioned that
when I was looking at Plexus podcast support
because I was that’s actually on my list of things to talk about oddly enough is Plexus recently added podcast real podcasting support to their product and so when I when I brought up their sort of recommendation list or whatever I noticed there were tons and tons and tons of true crime real crime type
podcast so I might pick it pick up a couple of those and check them out I’d be interested in that
yeah whereas repeat thank you for reminding me on repeat is is is on an extended hiatus frankly repeat was taking me you know 10 between 10 and 20 hours to produce a single episode
and without a sort of listener
base and you know something that could actually make it
monetary valuable it’s not something that I can devote that much time to unfortunately so either I’ve got to reformat the thing so it doesn’t take me 20 hours across two weeks to actually put one of these things together
you know or and I don’t know what’s going to happen or maybe when my time free time gets more to a
positive more free time maybe I can get back to it alright I’m actually at frys now so I guess I’m going to check that off. I have had some important stuff to talk about but nothing that’s time critical I can get back to that on another show. Maybe on Monday. Yeah, I know the show is a little short traffic was good. What can I tell you
anyway, I hope you enjoyed the show,
keep the comments coming, etc. etc. I guess I’m going to get out of here. This is Shane arm and row pastor c radio. We’ll see you next time. Take care of a button.
