Understanding Nothing

UK TV has never sensibly shown The Practice. I first discovered it via an Ally McBeal cross-over episode. The case began in an episode of Ally McBeal, and then continued in an episode of The Practice. In the US I believe the second half ran immediately after the first half (albeit on a different network, which was in itself unusual for a cross-over), but as The Practice didn’t show in the UK at all, we were just left hanging.

I spent a few years not knowing what had happened, until ITV seemed to pick up the second half of the second season of The Practice and show it at obscure times which changed every week (usually sometime between midnight and 2 am on a Friday or Saturday night). I don’t know whether they showed more of it than that, and I just didn’t discover it until half-way through, or whether they just showed half the season. As far as I know they never showed Season 3, or indeed any other season.

About 6 months ago BBC3 picked up Season 3 and showed it. Again, they chopped and changed the times, but I managed to catch almost every episode.

When I started playing with BitTorrent I was able to download the latter half of Season 8, but as I watching Season 3 at the time I didn’t watch any of them, just in case there were spoilers for what I was currently watching. I hoped that the BBC had picked up more than the one season, but of course, they stopped at the end of Season 3.

Then, when I was in San Francisco for Web 2.0, I managed to catch the first episode of Boston Legal, the new spin-off show from it. I was hooked straightaway, and on further investigatation I discovered that Season 8 of The Practice had pretty much changed focus half-way through to feature these new characters at this new firm (and managed it better than the entire cast change in the last, appalling, season of Ally McBeal). So when I came home I watched those last episodes of the Practice I’d downloaded – and it’s some of the best TV I’ve seen in quite some time. James Spader and William Shatner are both excellent, and raised the level by an impressive amount of what was already a really good show. But now I’m hungry for more! I can download Boston Legal every Monday, but I really want to see the first half of Season 8. And of course there still five and half other seasons I haven’t seen yet! I’ve been hoping for DVD releases, but there’s no sign of that. I’ve scoured all the torrent sites I know, but can find nothing.

Tonight, however, I’ve discovered that the new ITV3 channel is showing episode 2:4 through 2:8 one per day next Monday to Friday. They don’t seem to be showing anything more the following week, but hopefully this will be a regular thing. And at least I get to see 5 more episodes!

Later this month, the BBC will launch a pilot project that could lead to all television programmes being made available on the internet. Viewers will be able to scan an online guide and download any show. The plan is to make all television programmes from the previous week available on the internet, using a programme guide similar to that already used on digital television.
Programmes would be viewed on a computer screen or could be burned to a DVD and watched on a television set.

The iMP project is driven by research showing that people increasingly find it difficult to align their highly valued free time with fixed television schedules. Homes with personal video recorders (PVRs), like Sky Plus, already “time-shift” 70 per cent of the programmes they watch to more convenient viewing times.

“The fundamental shift in the music industry and the audio-radio industry to people consuming what they want, how they want, when they want, has given us a pretty clear idea that this is something that’s going to happen to video.”

By launching iMP, the BBC hopes to avoid being left at the mercy of a software giant such as Microsoft, which could try to control the gateway to online television.

— The Independent

Now we just need the commercial channels to find a way of doing the same thing

I recently bought a new DVD player. The one I had from back in 1998 or so has held up reasonably well, but had started sticking or jumping on an increasing number of discs. It also wouldn’t play some VCDs (particularly ones I made myself), and couldn’t play MP3s at all. The player I was going to buy turned out to be discontinued, so I let the guy in Richer Sounds talk me into the the Pioneer DV-2650, which so far seems to be quite good other than the fact that I can’t find out how to make it play in slow motion (there turned out not to be a manual with it, and most of the web sites about it are in German, so it’s all trial and error so far).

Then yesterday I discovered the DVD player with wireless! Being able to play all my downloaded TV without having to burn them to CD would have been very nice indeed. Hopefully by the time I upgrade again this has become standard.

Recently I’ve been playing a lot with BitTorrent, downloading US TV series, burning them to CD, and watching them with my DVD player. Some of the new series have been rather good, and it could be years before they ever reach the UK – if at all. We’re only just reached Season 3 of The Practice, which is being shown inconsistently on BBC3, whereas this way I can watch Season 8 (Of course I’d really like to see all the seasons inbetween, but I haven’t found a source for those yet). Thanks to a recommendation by Aaron Swartz I started watching Wonderfalls, which has now been cancelled after 4 episodes, so I doubt it’ll ever reach UK TV. Century City has similarly been cancelled, so the only new show I’m left with is the DA. (Update: It seems that they only made 4 episodes of The DA, and they won’t be asking for more, so that’s 0 out of 3 remaining…)

It’s been an interesting experience learning the ins and outs of this subculture. BitTorrent itself is very simple (and very clever), but fairly basic. There are an increasing number of add-ons with better interfaces. I used burst for a while, but as you could only limit the bandwidth per file being shared (to a minimum to 10k/sec each) I couldn’t really continue to share files I’d downloaded for very long without all my bandwidth being sucked up. So I’ve switched to bitcomet, which is much more impressive all round, and which lets me set a global upload/download rate, so I can continue to share files when I’m done downloading (and has a much nicer interface).

Actually dealing with the downloaded files has required even more searching, learning, and experimentation. Ever since I playing with downloading music videos off Gnutella, I knew that there were different codecs, but didn’t really know very much about it, or how to deal with formats that Winamp or Windows Media Player couldn’t handle.

GSpot was a great find for this. You simply drag a file to it and it analyses it and tells you whether you have the right combination of Video and Audio codecs to play it. The only thing it’s missing is some way of telling you how to get any codec you’re missing. I had another piece of software that would do that, but I can’t find it now (and it gave me a bum steer on one codec – when I installed it all my others stopped working. Thankfully GSpot was able to identify that and tell me what to remove).

Assuming I can play the file, then the next stage is burning it to CD. Nero seems to be the clear winner in these stakes. It’s a simple matter of dropping the files on, customising the menu, and hitting Go. If the video is .mpeg already then it’ll start burning right away, and be done in a couple of minutes. If it’s .avi then it’ll convert it (it’s taking something pretty close to real time to convert for me at the minute), and then burn that.

Yesterday I had my biggest challenge to date: an OGM file. This played fine on my desktop, as Winamp has OGG support built in. But Nero choked on it. GSpot unhelpfully reported that I didn’t have the audio codec, but still claimed to be able to render it fine. I did a few searches, and tried some other software: Video Edit Magic, Boilsoft, WinMPG Video Convert and the like, but nothing liked the file, or could even really tell me why not.

Eventually I discovered VDubMod. It opened the OGM file and let me write out the audio stream as WAV, which I could then convert to MP3 with dBpowerAMP. Then I layered that back on the OGM with VDubMod, and disabled the original OGG audio track. Then I could write the file out as .avi, and burn it to CD. VDubMod also lets you split .avi files, which means that I should now be able to watch the Pilot of the US version of Touching Evil, which was too long for a single VCD.

My only remaining challenge (for the minute) is to work out what’s going on with the episodes of Sports Night that I’m getting from torrentz.com. I couldn’t get them to work at all on my PC, and when I burned one I got a picture but no sound. Installing the ac3 audio codec seems to have done the trick as far as GSpot is concerned, but playing them on my PC now gives me sound, but no picture. I’m assuming it’s something to do with the “Stream Type” which is listed as: ‘AVI, “rec list” style’, which I’ve never seen before. As I got a picture last time I burned them, hopefully I’ll still get it again – only this time with sound, but I’d still prefer being able to get it working on my PC first.

Once upon a time lots of singles would be released with lots of extra B-Sides. It was quite common that a single release would comprise of 2 CD singles, each with 3 bonus tracks, a 12″ with another 3, and a 7″/cassingle with yet another, thus hooking fans and collectors into purchasing all 4, but giving an album’s worth of otherwise unreleased tracks. Even if they didn’t expect you to buy the vinyl, you’d still get 6 new tracks with the 2 CDs (which were often imported back into the UK as an EP from the US).

These days it seems you’re not allowed to do this. According to the Offical Chart Rules [pdf], now only 3 versions of a single can count towards the charts, and you can only have 3 distinct tracks on a CD single (although you can have alternate versions of the main track).

Also, no individual release can be over 20 minutes long, unless you only have different remixes of the same song, in which case you can have any number of them, as long as the total running time is no longer than 40 minutes.

But of course none of this could possibly contribute any understanding whatsoever to the declining sales…

To get into the Top 10 list of the Television Sets per Population, your country needs to have over 635 televisions per 1000 people.

To make it to the top of the list, you need to have over 1.2 televisions per person, so that you can displace Christmas Island!