I thought the theme of forgiveness was well played. Forgiveness is a subject that modern sensibilites are a little afraid to touch. Sure we get preached at about taking “revenge”. But simply not being vengeful is different than true forgiveness. Forgiving someone for a wrong committed is one of the most un-natural and hard things a human being can do. But, that is what Christians are supposed to practice:

I would agree with that reviewer totally. The acting, score and cinematography were excellent. The story however was worse than bad. It was so “out there” that anyone who is currently not tripping on acid is going to be totally lost within 15 minutes. Even if you take the confusing parts as metaphor, you still can’t make the metaphors mesh. I haven’t been so confused by a movie since 12 Monkeys. I also agree with the reviewer that the advertising was very misleading. It was billed as a sci-fi/fantasy lovestory about a quest for the fountain of youth. Yes, it had some space, swordfighting and kissing. But if it’s a sci-fi/fantasy lovestory, so is Santa Clause 2.

And before you liberal whiney-babies start e-mailing me with the typical “just change the channel if you don’t like it” garbage, it’s impossible to realize, react, put down the dishes, dry off your hands, cross the room, grab the remote and change the channel in time to keep them from seeing it. And don’t tell me “it’s your responsibility to police your kid’s TV watching” either. We DO police our children’s television time. More than most I assure you. But I shouldn’t have to velcro a remote control to my arm just in case CBS decides to show some nasty show’s trailer during the 2:30 college football game broadcast. To me that is just irresponsible programming, and it’s tiresome. I shouldn’t have to be concerned that my kid will get nightmares from me watching a football game.

I’m a big time TV nut. I love a good TV series as much or more than a good movie, and I love watching football just as much. But there is no V-chip for commercials. At least movie previews get ratings. Why not television previews. Sometimes I just turn the TV off altogether because it gets to be too much of a hassle to police it during shows and times where no policing should be necessary. And I’m sure that’s not what networks want to happen.

I guess I really don’t have any opinion on the whole issue one way or another. While it’s obviously a ridiculous double-standard for NBC to filter out any mention of God, which a good 70% of their viewership believes in, it’s also their prerogative to do so if they decide to. In the end, it’s probably a good thing that NBC is airing it no matter what. If kids like it, their parents will buy the DVD’s, and those are not filtered. It’s a great show, and evidently it’s ratings have gone up steadily each week since it debuted. Keep it up guys.

On the flip-side of that, it looks like they will be renewing Stargate Atlantis for another season. That is a show that I definitely have watched and I have to say it is probably the best sci-fi show going right now. I know a lot of people like Battlestar Galactica but it’s a little too “out there” for me. I like my sci-fi really simple. A good sci-fi show will walk the line between the fantastic and the cheesy. It will get perilously close to cheese sometimes but without crossing that line. I think that only comes from having a good cast with good chemistry. The last time I saw such good chemistry on a cast was when TNG was on the air. If you haven’t seen it then give it a try. New episodes air on Sci-Fi channel on Friday nights.

The officially supported audio formats are PCM and AC3. PCM is a raw audio stream. It sounds very good but it’s incredibly huge. That makes it impractical for all but the shortest of videos. AC3 is a great sounding, small codec and is perfect for most situations. The only time it’s not practical is when your source audio is really lousy. In that case it can actually make it a lot worse. But as long as you have a good sounding source, you can encode to AC3 pretty painlessly.

I use FFMPEG for almost all my transcoding needs these days. It can do pretty much anything you want, including making perfectly DVD compliant ac3 audio streams from an mp2 source. I wrote the following batch file(called transcode.bat) to make it happen:

@echo off

@set videos=C:\videos
@set tools=C:\tools

:: Prerun commands
C:
cd \transcode\

:: Convert audio to ac3
::
IF EXIST %1.ac3 GOTO CLEANUP
echo Create an ac3 audio stream from mp2...
%tools%\ffmpeg -i "%videos%\%1.mp2" -vn -ab 224 -ac 2 -acodec ac3 -y "%1.ac3"

:CLEANUP
::
echo Multiplex streams...
%tools%\mplex -f 8 -S 0 -o "%1.vob" "%videos%\%1.m2v" "%1.ac3"

pause

If your file is called “home_movie1.mp2″, you would call the script like this:

> transcode.bat home_movie1

Before I call this script I use ReJig to demultiplex the .mpg file created by the Hauppage software into an .m2v(mpeg 2 video stream) and an .mp2(mpeg 2 audio stream). I keep all these source video/audio files in a directory called “C:\videos” and all my command line tools (like ffmpeg.exe and mplex.exe) in a directory called “C:\tools”. Just download the latest ffmpeg and mplex and put them in “C:\tools” before you run this. The script uses “C:\transcode” as it’s working directory so create it also before running. When the script finishes transcoding the AC3 it will multiplex the .m2v and the newly created .ac3 into a DVD compliant .vob file. If you don’t want this just comment that part out.