More happy things

[mmcirvin]

1. Via Daring Fireball: Microsoft distributes Flip4Mac's QuickTime Windows Media component for free, so now you can play (non-DRMed) Windows Media files on your Mac in anything that uses QuickTime, instead of using Microsoft's player. It really works. Very nice.

Not so happy: After playing with it a while, I see that the component seems to have a marked tendency to make the application crash when the clip ends. I don't know what's up with that.

2. After a long, long wait in which huge numbers of Americans watched it over BitTorrent, the first season of the new Doctor Who is coming to the US on the Sci-Fi Channel in March. I hope they don't mangle it too badly. While the new series has had its ups and downs, it's well worth watching, and the two-parter "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" is one of my favorite pieces of TV science fiction ever; don't miss it.

Comments

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

BBC just started up a new addition to its alarmingly well-populated sci-fi comedy genre with Hyperdrive (http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/hyperdrive/).

I found the first one pretty funny; it didn't go overboard with being a parody of all that came before it, and though one subplot was quite familiar, the main plot was both quite funny and not cryptically British. Like all british^W sci-fi comedies, there's only a small percentage of competent crew members, but the rest, at least, break out of the sci-fi stereotypes, if not totally free from comedy stereotypes. Works decently, I think.

As far as I can tell, it airs Wednesdays with repeats on Sunday. And it can be found probably in the same place you get Dr. Who.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

1. Thanks for Flip4Mac, very nice!

2. It's that long wait which boggles my mind. Don't they know they could severely curtail BitTorrent use if they got on the pony a bit sooner? And why SciFi Channel and not BBC America? I know I like to rag on BBC America, but geez.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

BBC America would have had to buy the show. My impression is that the BBC's asking price was higher than BBC America could possibly afford, because they figured some bigger player was going to snap it up. But the show doesn't have a lot of sleaze or gore and only occasionally features explosions, so I'm a little surprised that the Sci-Fi Channel even bit; my guess was that it was going to appear on A&E or Bravo without much fanfare two or three years from now. But the Sci-Fi Channel displayed a little intelligence for once, or maybe the BBC came down a little; I'd like to know more about what finally happened.

[aderack.livejournal.com]

Sci-Fi still seems rather noncommittal about the series. They've an option for season two, that presumably they'll pick up on only if they get the ratings the BBC is promising.

Though this is speculation on my part, I get the idea the BBC settled for a somewhat lower price in exchange for help in marketing the new series and the DVD set when it comes out (now in July). The details feel bedgrudging to me. Like the BBC showed them the ratings figures (in the UK and elsewhere), all the awards the series had won, etcetera, etcetera, until Sci-Fi eventually caved in and said "Fine, all right -- we'll give it a shot. We still don't get what the big deal is, but if the first season justifies itself, maybe we'll talk again later."

I'm curious what they'll do for presentation. I know the series aired with commercial breaks in Canada. There aren't many natural places to shoehorn them in, though. The positive thing is, I assume if the first thirteen episodes do well enough, Sci-Fi can just stampede ahead into season two, which will have aired by then in both the UK and Canada.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

Apparently they just happened to overlook the bug that Flip4Mac crashes all the time for everyone. 2.0.1 is fixed. However, 2.0 also claims to support WMV3-in-AVI, but it seems this doesn't work for anyone either, but just gives the useful error message "unknown error (-50)".

It's a nice plugin to have, but the developers seem a little bit optimistic.

Also, no matter how much I prefer OS X to Windows, OS X is really lacking in the video playback architecture department. QuickTime is nowhere near Windows' DirectShow in terms of actually working. It's just plain silly that a plugin that decodes the WMV video streams in files needs to actually handle the container format, too. DirectShow (and most open-source all-in-one video players) properly splits up the work of components into demuxers, decoders, renderers and so on, and builds graphs to combine them to play files. QuickTime is feeling horribly outdated in this respect.