Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category.

Fun with Diet Coke and Mentos, Part II

You’ve seen the first part, now enjoy the second, this time with a real coke explosion:

Fun with Diet Coke and Mentos, Part I

As promissed earlier, here’s some more info about the happy day when our local mall, Nordcenter Stor, finally completed the expansion.

Hmm… this actually has nothing to do with the Nordcenter, expect for the fact that the coke and mentos was bought there. Anyway, enjoy the movie:

Mencoding movies

A beautiful MPlayer logo I found... Yesterday I made a small five-minute movie with my camera to show Stéphanie around in our new appartment (which she hasn’t seen since she’s still in Switzerland). I thought the movie was small, but what is small in terms to minutes and seconds quickly becomes very large in terms to bits and bytes.

And as we all know: size does matter :-) (I’ve always wanted to include that in one of my posts…)

Seriously, size does matter, especially if you plan on sending the movie to someone. The five minutes of 640×480 MPEG movie weighted in with a whopping 114 MiB. With an upstream bandwidth of only 256 Kb/s (and here is really is Kb/s and not Kib/s since network equiptment don’t follow the binary units) it would take at least an hour to transfer the movie.

So what do you do? You bring our your mencoder and resize it. That was surpricingly easy to do:

mencoder a.mpg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -vop scale=320:240 -oac copy -o b.mpg

That did the trick for me, converting a.mpg into b.mpg which was only 23 MiB. The new movie has about a quarter of the pixels in the old one, and the size reduction fits nicely with that. I guess I could have squizzed it some more by compressing it harder, but I have not investigated how to do that.

Ice Age 2

The other say that I don’t blog enough, so let me blog about this: we went to see Ice Age 2 today. The movie was fun, especially the little mascot Scrat trying to get hold of his acorn. The scene where Sid is kidnapped by mini-sloths who worship him is also very good, but most of the laughs were made by the crazy Scrat.

I also didn’t particularly like the ending which was very happy and predictable. Of course there would be a happy end, I knew that, but it was just a bit too much IMHO. I haven’t seen the first movie in quite a while, but I think it was a bit better.

Holidays — watching vampire movies

Queen of the Damned poster What have I done after my last exam? Nothing much! :-)

So, for example, yesterday Stéphanie and I watched the last hour or so of Queen of the Damned together… on a French channel! Vampire movies can be a bit of fun, and I’ve seen a fair number of episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I’ve never before seen vampires speak French.

The problem is that I’ve never had any French lessons in school, so the language is utterly and completely nonsense to me. I understand when they say “Oui” or “No”, but that’s about it.

So Stéphanie translated for me, but of course that doesn’t really give the same scary feeling like the original :-) And it didn’t help either that neither of us had seen the first hour of the movie, so we probably missed the finer details in the plot. Not that I think the movie had a huge plot, but anyway… :-)