Category: Movies

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Movies

Has IMDbs rating system lost its touch with reality

I used to view the IMDb voting system as one of the greatest examples of why the wisdom of crowds is often much more in touch with reality than a panel of experts but lately some “b-movies” have been getting excellent initial scores. First it was Snakes on a Plane that started above 8.0 but now is at 6.5, and then we have AvP2 which apparently started at above 7.5 but now is below 6. The following comment on IMDb more or less summed up my feelings:

This movie really sucked. In fact, after using the IMDb for some years, I just now registered to be able to vote and comment on how bad this movie sucks.

Just before I went to see this, I looked it up here and was positively surprised to find a 7.6 rating with >800 votes. But what I saw at the theater makes me think that all the money the studio saved on writers and cast was spend on > 400 people who rated this thing 10.

Are movie studies actively abusing systems like IMDb to try and lure people into the theaters? And if they are, what will iMDB do about to not become irrelevant?

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Movies

Very interesting documentary about Copyright

I bumped into this documentary (Good Copy Bad Copy) about copyright yesterday. The documentary is made by 3 danish guys and is really interesting in that it tells the story about copyright from the view of countries in four different continents (USA, Russia, Nigeria and Brazil). In case you havn’t read the wonderful inspiring books by Lawrence Lessig this video is an excellent introduction and will only steal away one single hour of your life 🙂

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Movies

Time for a free alternative to iMDB?

After writing my last blog post, I wrote to iMDB to hear what they thought about my first suggestion. They have a whole department for this kind of stuff 🙂 Sadly they weren’t that happy about it: “The minimum cost to license data from IMDb is US$15,000 per year. If that is within your budget […]”. So I guess I’m back to the second solution: create a library for passing iMDB html pages. While thinking about the whole thing yesterday, it hit me (hard), that it’s quite strange there is no wiki-like site available for this. The idea is to use a wiki-like site, with a little stricter syntax so that it’s easier to pass, colored with a voting system. The same concept could also be used for music. While wikipedia does have some classic movies, it does miss the voting feature. So why hasn’t this been created before?

Categories
Movies My Media System

imdb page layout restructuring

Seems imdb has changed their page layout again. This is bad news for all parsers, such as MMS, which relies on the format of the html structure for fetching information. Luckily MMS has already been updated and now works with the latest page layout. Expect a release soonish. There are two things I would like to do to better this current playing catch up situation:

  1. Find out if imdb is willing to give FOSS projects access to their xml data
  2. Create a library, like imdbpy but in c++, to encapsulate the imdb parsing if 1 fails
Categories
HTPC Movies My Media System Personal

Building a 100″ projector screen

I have so far projected the picture of my Sanyo PLV-Z4 projector onto the wall. Clearly this is not optimal, so I have been looking for a screen for a while. I decided to built it DIY-style this weekend. It’s a lot cheaper than buying one from new and can give excellent results. Plus there is nothing to beat the feeling of having created something yourself.

For the project the following materials was used:

  • 228x131cm 16mm MDF board (screen size calculator).
  • 40mm wide wood frame
  • 1 liter of very low gloss paint. The color code used was S-1502B (I think it’s a european standard).
  • 100 ml very low gloss black paint.

The wood was bought at Bauhaus and the paint at the local paint shop.

After we carried the board up the stairs it was quite clear that it was perhaps a little too big for the wall. But after some rearranging we got it to fit 🙂

Here’s a picture of the screen being painted.

painted projector screen

I have been super happy with how it turned out. First a picture of a TV source (4:3) projected on the screen.

projector screen 4:3

Finally a picture of the result with a 16:9 source.
projector screen 16:9

Sadly the camera on my phone doesn’t do the final result justice. More pictures with real camera here on flickr.

Categories
Movies On the web

The Corporation

I saw the documentary The Corporation today. Extremely interesting movie. A very cool thing is that they created a divx version of the movie and is distributing it on bittorrent making it very easy to get.  They then plead people to donate at the start of the movie. Interesting concept, I really hope it works for them. The movie touches a number of very interesting topics related to corporations, including governments, patents, science, marketing, environmentalism etc., besides explaining in a very clear way what corporations are.

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Movies

Who killed the electric car

I watched a very interesting movie today. The most fascinating thing about the movie was the prototype peoples love for the car. No one wanted to give the car back when they were asked to deliver them back. The people even did a small demonstration when they found out the cars were being destroyed. Most companies would kill for such a loyal following, makes you wonder just what the hell was going on…