Film festival inspires shopping spree

The film festival season has started here, and it’s already shaping up to be a great year. This month’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival was outstanding, and the even larger San Francisco International Film Festival will start in a few weeks. I’m psyched. In the coming days I’ll try to post more details and movie reviews.

In the meantime, the festivals have reminded me how much I love movies, Asian films especially. This has inspired me to go on a DVD buying spree, including the purchase of some obscure import discs.

If you’re familiar with region codes, you’ll know that foreign DVDs can be problematic: they’re not meant to play in a typical U.S. DVD player (Wikipedia does a good job explaining the economics behind this type of regional lockout). To work around this, my plan has been to rip the troublesome discs to my computer and then re-burn them without the region code restrictions.

“Backing up” DVDs sans copy protection and region restrictions is in a legal grey area, but it’s possible. Free software tools exist, and dual-layer DVD burners are now pretty common. But in practice it has been nothing but hassle: the software is needlessly complicated, my PowerBook’s DVD drive apparently can’t correctly rip foreign discs, and movie studios continue to introduce new forms of copy protection. Even if you can get it to work, dual-layer blank DVDs are expensive (the other option is to reduce the quality of the movie to fit on a cheaper single-layer disc).

So after much frustration today, I made a spontaneous purchase: the OPPO Digital 971H DVD Player. Ohohoho, feel the power. Yes.

Sure, it’s the highest rated DVD player in terms of picture quality, and gets excellent reviews. But check this out:

• DVI output (cable included!)
  My plasma TV has a DVI input, and now I’ll finally be able to use it. I’m hoping for a noticeable improvement in picture quality over my existing analog hookups.
• DiVX playback
  I’m not sure what to expect with this feature, but I think it means I can pop in a DVD-ROM full of DiVX-encoded AVI files. Wouldn’t that be nice?
• Region free
  This is the kicker. OPPO doesn’t advertise it on their site, but a few keystrokes on the remote will put the player in region-free mode. I can now watch foreign DVDs to my heart’s content: no ripping necessary.

Thanks to my complimentary Amazon Prime trial, this guy should be arriving in two days with free shipping. The first disc in my new player will be Iwai Shunji’s 1995 classic Love Letter, one of my recently acquired Japanese imports.

Bring on the movies!

SHINIGAMI ULTIMATE REMIX

Just stumbled across this slightly disturbing Flickr homage to the excellent Bleach anime TV series.

Subterranean rice field

Here’s an interesting tidbit from the latest Economist Tokyo briefing:

A converted bank vault deep beneath the heart of Tokyo’s financial district has been revealed as the unlikely site of a big agricultural breakthrough. In January Pasona, the company that owns the vault, announced that farmers had used it to cultivate the world’s first crop of hydroponic rice, grown without natural light, fresh air or soil.

The entire story is currently about halfway down this page.