Dreams and Where to Get Them: Grow Your Own part 3

 

As I type this, I’m in the process of ripping thirty-plus Hopalong Cassidy movies from their DVD source to digital files. The DVDs were the only way I could ever have gotten to see all these pictures, and the price was more than reasonable, but the discs are poorly compiled: the movies were just shoveled onto discs all anyhow, all out of release order, with no attempt made to organize them. With the movies ripped to digital format, I can stream them from my server in their original release order, with no loss of quality (like we used to get when we copied VHS off the air), and because the Cassidy movies all have runtimes of just over an hour I can fill out an evening’s programming with other content that I have, without having to pause to switch out discs or jump from one player to another. Behold the supremacy of physical media combined with the the power of digital playlists!

If I’d been paying for a streaming service . . . First of all, I don’t know of a streaming service that offers the complete catalog of Hopalong Cassidy westerns; second I’d be at their mercy for  having to view the pictures (probably riddled with commercials) within their time frame, before their rights ran out and the movies got removed; and third I’d have had to pay out a LOT more money, paying the service every single month for a mess of content that I don’t care about in order to access what I want. This way I have Hopalong’s whole ouvre at my fingertips, in my collection, whenever I want to view them — and the suited corporate bastards CAN’T take them away from me!

It should be clear by now that if you don’t have at least a little bit of the Librarian / Collector in your blood, or if you’re one of those people who’s so very very contemporary in your mindset that you can’t stomach anything that was made longer ago than last year, this series of posts is Not For You. 

However if you agree with Peter Bogdanovich that “There are no old movies; just movies that you haven’t seen,” then it’s my hope that something I type here might possibly help you along your journey. 

And if you think of yourself as a film enthusiast but you don’t know who Peter Bogdanovich is, what the hell is the matter with you? Were you raised in a barn? Go out and LOOK HIM UP! Cheezits, what do you think the internet is FOR?

That last point maybe needs to be clarified. Because of course if you’re a young person who didn’t live through it, you can’t be expected to know history by osmosis. But you should have enough curiosity in you to find out. Don’t just say “OH, I don’t know about PAPER MOON or THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, they happened before I was born!” Of course they did, moron. But the stuff is out there. Go out, track them down, research them and WATCH THEM. Nobody blames you for the accident of your birth, but if you have no curiosity about things — that I do blame you for. KING KONG, Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, The Marx Brothers, THE WIZARD OF OZ and the Universal monster movies were made a long time before I was born, but that didn’t stop me from filling my head with their goodness at the earliest opportunity!

Also, I had the advantage of growing up in a world that was not yet glutted with content. Just three networks, and maybe three or four local affiliates who filled out their broadcast day with syndicated reruns and packages of old movies. I also had a father who shared with me his love of ’30s comedians, and access to publications like THE MONSTER TIMES and Forry Ackerman’s FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND, both of which which helped feed my taste for horror movies made in a time before they became really horrible.

So add my voice to the growing chorus: Physical Media, Physical Media, Physical Media. It is the Great Savior of the film buff. Much more economical than any streaming service, plus it puts the power of choice into your hands. If you don’t like the space that it takes up, or don’t have space for it to take up, you can always rip it to digital files, as I described above. Of course this is just one of the reasons why the suited corporate bastards don’t like physical media and don’t want you to have it, and why we must keep buying it. MakeMKV is a really useful little app for converting discs to digital files without loss in quality. You can find it here: https://www.makemkv.com, and if you need instructional videos on how to use it, there are several on YouTube. Connect a disc player to your computer, slide in a disc and you’re off to the races. If you need the files in some other file format than MKV (iTunes won’t play anything other than mp4 Or m4v), then another great little app called Handbrake (https://handbrake.fr) is here to make the conversions.

You already know where to find physical media. Hell fire, your local library probably has a lot of it on loan! If you’re buying, as an alternative to Amazon, you might try www.deepdiscount.com. Critic’s Choice and VCI are two other good sources, and both are publishers as well as retailers, so buying from them encourages future releases. 

But somewhere along the way you are going to discover the value of having digital files in-house that you store on your own media; either discs, a hard drive or a NAS. When that happens, you will want to start exploring the regions of the utterly VAST vaults of the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/). I visit them frequently, and never fail to make a Happy Discovery or three — like for instance, a restored-from-35mm-print of Richard Williams’s vastly under-appreciated animated classic RAGGEDY ANN AND ANDY, in the original widescreen (never issued to home video), available to watch online or download to your system, here: https://archive.org/details/raggedy-ann-andy-a-musical-adventure-1977-35mm-ultra-hd_202307/

And — if your appetite for film, TV and music is as voracious as mine, somewhere along the way you’ll run into something called torrenting. I’m not here to tell you that you should do it, I’m not here to tell you how to do it, but I will say this much: get a VPN. You will need it. I use NordVPN, but it’s in no way a paid promotion, so you’ll have to search on it.

Anyway — searching is a good habit to get into. Don’t know the answer? Not a problem and not a kick against you. You know where to find the answer, and that’s literally All That Matters. Search, search. Search. How else do you learn? How else do you make Wonderful Discoveries? And no matter when you were born, or where your interests lie, Wonderful Discoveries are what it’s all about. 

—Thorn.

Bits and Bobs: Grow Your Own, Part Two

 

There’s a fellow over on YouTube who found a way to recreate Twentieth-Century-style television in his own home. As I understand it, he populated a server with three different playlists offering three full sets of content, operating live and independently, and then plugged it into a vintage analog television. While I’d never go this far, it does show what’s possible using everyday tech that we didn’t have access to back then, with a little ingenuity and some programming skills. Here’s the link: https://youtu.be/k_BkD85yIg0?si=8WhzrqTXJUcJruQG

He managed on a much grander scale what I’ve been doing for the past decade and a half: acting as the Programming Director for my own imaginary TV station. This currently involves gathering,  planning and implementing three hours of entertainment every night, the equivalent of what used to be considered Prime Time back in the day.

It didn’t start that way, but the writing went up on the wall back in the early ‘80s with the introduction of home video machines: VHS and Betamax. I was an early adopter, or as early as I could afford to be. It was the Big Game-Changer for we the Great TV-viewing public: suddenly we were no longer at the mercy of the Big Three all-powerful TV networks (plus PBS). Not only could we decide what we wanted to watch when we wanted too watch it, but we could preserve our favorite television series and films so that they would always be there for us when we wished (and had the time) to revisit them.

The concept of the private individual as video librarians had never really occurred to professional TV programmers until that day — but some of us were already well-acquainted with keeping personal libraries of the books we read and the the records we loved and the comics that we gathered. Adding TV and Movies into the mixture was a natural. The introduction of DVD turned the trickle of home video enthusiasts into an explosion. And I guess the point of this longish ramble is that if you’re going to take on the responsibility of being your own Programming Director, it helps if you already have that Librarian Instinct, and you’ve been Gathering Material for a long while. That’s part of the job that never stops. 

I don’t have to tell you that cable and networks and streaming services are crap, and Expensive Crap at that. It’s something I hear all the time. What you should know is that you don’t need them. What you should know is that no one understands what you like better than you do, and nothing is more satisfying than arranging your life by your own design. Whatever that means to you. In the area of video entertainment, paying for streaming services is far and away the least cost-effective way of doing it. 

I lost access to free over-the-air TV when I moved into town from the country in 2010. This was a blow, as I’d lived all my life with free over-the-air TV.  For a while, I tried filling the gap with a DirecTV subscription; but this was really unsatisfactory for reasons that you’re all probably familiar with. Oh, I found a few things to watch, even discovered some new things — but I also found that the old reliable DVDs, and then Blu-Rays, and then digital files streamed in my own house from my own computer, served me better. 

I now have a set-up that relies on all three, plus the odd free service such as YouTube. It’s a set-up that I figured out for myself, over a long time; and though it’s hardly the state of the art, it works for me. Your mileage may vary, and there are plenty of tech-savvy channels and articles out there to show you what’s the latest and greatest. My interest doesn’t particularly lie in the tech side of things, and it’s not what I’m going to be focusing on in this series, but you’re going to need something akin to these basics at the start:

• A television and sound system that’s right for your space
• A blu-ray player
• A region-free DVD player (very important!)
• A TV steaming box (I use AppleTV, but any will work so long as they offer the ability to connect to your server)
• A dedicated server computer. If you have an older computer that you’ve retired for everyday use, it will be perfect for this purpose. It doesn’t have to be the best and the brightest. It just has to run.
• Home Wi-fi.
• On the software side you will need installed on your server (or TV box or both) some kind of media player: Itunes and Infuse are the two I use.
• And most important: Time, plenty of it, and the librarian’s dedication and curiosity to sniff out the programming that tickles your fancy wherever it may be.

Here’s a tech link that I found helpful: https://theaterdiy.com/how-to-set-up-a-media-server-for-a-home-theater/

Connect your TV to the speakers, the disc players and the box, make sure the Wifi is up and running, connect the box to your server computer, and you’re ready to roll — that’s all the tech I know or care about. The only thing needed now is to take responsibility for the Programming. 

Because just as it’s true that You Are What You Eat, it’s also true that You Are What You Put into your Eyes and Ears and Brain, and you need to feed yourself a Balanced Diet. You wouldn’t walk down the street picking up and eating any piece of trash that you saw, would you? The same is true for content. And creating the daily menu is a job that will suck up just as many hours as you care to throw at it.  

The good news is that you have all of History to choose from, without limit. Over the next few installments I’m going to post links to resources, providing examples, discussing the history of broadcast entertainment and going over my own weekly schedule in detail. I hope you’ll follow me down this odd Road of Yellow Bricks. If you do, I’ll be the Man Behind the Curtain at journey’s end.

—Thorn.