Tonight I registered and joined Guba. Wrote in the past that I was excited about Guba’s move to provide more realistic, fair pricing for legal online, downloadable movies. It shouldn’t be the same or more for downloading movies online than it is to get in the car and go buy the DVD. My benchmark test for movies to date has been The Cave DVD which was on sale at Best Buy for $9.99 USD. The quality of the movie aside, when we are seeing this sold online for more than $25 and it can’t even be burned to DVD, that’s outrageous.

What does Guba sell The Cave for? $9.99. When you factor in gas for driving to the store, not to mention time, that’s what I’ve been talking about.

I have no idea of the quality of the Guba service or the movies themselves, but I’m signed up now and will be doing some business with them soon. Will have to report later on whether the quality of the movies was good and how easy/hard it was to burn to DVD.

A few things I don’t like about Guba
Guba requires Internet Explorer for full site functionality. Come on, it’s really lame not to support at least the three main browers: IE, Firefox and Safari for all features. It would be nice to also support Opera.

It also appears to be a United States only thing which is a definite bummer for our friends abroad:

With our sincerest apologies to non-United States and Apple, Linux and other non-Windows users, in order to enjoy the GUBA Premium service, you must be located in the United States, and use Windows 2000 or XP with Windows Media Player 9.0 or higher, which support the Windows Media Digital Rights Management System as required by our premium content providers. We will add other DRM support as soon as it becomes available and approved by major premium content providers.

The Guba affiliate program pays 25 cents for each free signup by linking to videos on Guba’s site. I signed up for it and just for disclaimer purposes there are no links to videos that pay us a quarter in this post. I didn’t see a way to link to The Cave with an affiliate link, so that’s a straight link above. It also doesn’t appear to be one of the titles that can be rented for 99 cents. Too bad.

If any other readers who are signed up with Guba know how to link to Guba or movie titles with an affiliate code, please let me know below. Not a big deal though as I didn’t sign up for Guba because of the affiliate program, I signed up after seeing it was available.

More on Guba’s service another day. In the meantime I’d be curious to read below your experiences with Guba, if any. Good, bad, or indifferent. Anybody else tried Guba out yet?

I visited and used Fandango for the first time to purchase tickets to the very first showing tonight at 10pm PST of Snakes on a Plane. Even my wife who just got out of surgery was down for watching Samuel L. Jackson kick some asp. $20.50 after convenience fee for both tickets. Snakes on a Plane wasn’t screened for critics in advance and I’m glad they weren’t around to spoil the fun. I’ll try not to do that here either.

The theater was only about 1/3rd full but it was a lively crowd. The movie starts out in Hawaii and I wondered how and where and when the plane and the snakes would slither into action. A man witnesses a brutal murder and will be needing protection. What does the bad guy he witnessed do to get to him? Load up the plane he’ll be travelling on with a bunch of venomous snakes from all over the world.

Viewers concerned about finding all their favorite snakes won’t be disappointed. King Cobras, rattlesnakes and even, yes, a Boa Constrictor is in the film. Plenty of other colorful snakes slither across luggage, chairs, and near feet. This would definitely not be an ideal film to watch on an airplane.

Snakes is not the typical horror snakes film. Sure, it has the fright moments and snake attacks aplenty (you’ll have to watch it to see who gets the fang treatment) but there isn’t a huge amount of gore overall. There isn’t a love story element either. It’s more like hey we’re trapped on this plane over water and the snakes are closing in film. In that regard it scores high marks in execution. The sounds are well placed and I don’t even remember much in the way of music.

The acting? Samuel L. Jackson got cheers for his multiple f-bomb line that you’ve probably read by now. By the time he utters that line, I agreed with the sentiment and the crowd in the theater applauded loudly. Julianna Margulies sure doesn’t look like she did in the early ER years. Yeah, I know it’s been like 10+ years ago, but she looks like she had a bizarre run-in with a plastic surgeon.

Margulies plays a heroic stewardess and she shows the moxie she had as nurse on ER. It’s a familiar role for her. Other bit part characters include the guy who played Fat Albert and on Saturday Night Live, Kenan Thompson. Kenan does a good job with the sparse lines he has. It’s unfortunate his character didn’t have more fleshing out in the first part of the film. Overall the acting was OK, not great, not bad.

There are numerous comedic moments to break up the suspense. Oh, and yes, there are unclothed boobies, which is a necessity for any good rated R flick.

Snakes didn’t creep me out like the 1973 movie with Dirk Benedict called Sssss, but it’s in my top 5 all time snake movie favorite list. I only caught one time where a snake struck a glass cage. I’m sure if/when it comes out on DVD there will be other obvious scenes where the snakes are clearly caged to protect the actors. Overall an enjoyable disruption. Snakes doesn’t live up to the insane amount of hype it received, but it’s not a bad film and was worth the 20 bones plus popcorn. Bring on the sequel.

Grade: B+

I’m a strong believer in taking time out to relax, refresh and regenerate. Traditionally we have done most of this R&R time during July, but we only got away for a day and a half to Ocean Shores earlier in the month and that wasn’t nearly enough to bring the batteries back to full power.

So it’s now time for my wife and I to skip town for more significant rest and relaxation. When it came time to pack a computer we both looked at each other and shook our heads. No Tablet PC, no laptop, no pocket PC. Really, what kind of vacation is it with a geek bag in tow?

Not sure exactly how long we will be gone, but readers have a few different options if this blog seems a little skeleton-like for a little bit:

1) discover some other blogs not in vacation mode
2) search and scour the Hmm archives. Gold in them thar hills.
3) take a vacation yourselves. Hey, you deserve it.

For this coming Thursday I have scheduled one post to appear that I had intended to be published today. Fellow bloggers wondering how they might get some of their favorite blogger’s attention hopefully will find that useful. I thought about scheduling more unpublished posts to appear in the days that we’re gone but ultimately decided against it this time. I decided a break in the flow for readers once in awhile might be appreciated. Please let me know in the comments if the next time we plan to leave if you would like me to schedule more posts. I have plenty that could be used for downtime if readers want me to use them. Heaven knows my eyes are tired, at least some of your eyes must be too.

It could be a little while before there is another new post after the one Thursday unless we see some irresistable deal on a new computer (buy a computer on vacation? Say it isn’t so!), so let me take this time to thank all of you for reading, subscribing and supporting this blog and in particular my daily writings.

There also won’t be a Hmmcast this coming Friday. We’ll cover both weeks of posts here on August 11 or August 18th should our vacation span longer.

As we embark on this vacation, MakeYouGoHmm.com is currently enjoying some of its best daily average traffic numbers ever, this year comfortably ahead of prior years so far to date and looking to be the best ever for traffic and ad revenue. You can follow the third party site meter stats by clicking on the home page. We’ve always shared these numbers. Subscriber numbers are up too and, well, life is good here.

I should confess that we’re not going to be completely geekless on this trip. The digital camera is going and we have our eyes set on a new video camera that we might pick up along the way.

Now off to star in our own movie without Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The one without the geek toys.

- Wow, check out this spam art. Plants created from spam? I’d like to be able to turn a program like this onto the comment spammers and make art out of their trash.
- Maybe not on Satellite Radio. I have considered making the plunge on several occasions but have passed because we wouldn’t use it enough. Q2 revenues for both XM and Sirirus are down. Maybe the Howard Stern impact is starting to wear off? XM down more than Sirius. [source: Washington Post]
- Sacrilige! Monopoly is dumping cash for plastic? I really liked those dark gold 500 bills. And a VISA logo on the card reader too? Just don’t take away the dump that is Baltic Avenue. [source: Makezine]
- No reason for further Vista delay says Microsoft, but is speech recognition still not ready for primetime? My last experience trying SR out on the Tablet PC was met with similar frustration. It will be great when we can really get to voice activated menus. Even our car which uses OnStar — the best real world experience in our life with SR — still has problems, especially when there is a lot of road noise or rain.
- Google Adwords now shows publishers invalid click estimates, nice feature that should help with transparency. Now if only Adsense affiliates would get the same/similar stats.
- Kevin Smith, the guy behind Clerks and Jay and Silent Bob artfully uses his blog to defend a contest that offended a critic over names being used in the credits of Clerks II.
- PDA and cell phone users, Google Maps now has a mobile portal: google.com/gmm
- Mark Cuban is offering a job to anybody that can come up with a good idea that isn’t already being tried for how to get more people into the theaters to watch his HDTV movies. 144 suggestions comments of this writing.
- Zennstrom and Friis who created disruptive products in Kazaa and Skype are creating something behind the scenes that will allow trading of videos, according to Businessweek, codename: The Venice Project. And speaking of Kazaa, they settled with the RIAA for $115 million and are going legit.
- A programmer claims, under oath on video, that he was asked to create a program that would fix the Florida elections. Great, now how long before we see an O’Reilly book called: Election Hacks?

- Couchsurfing.com thought to be lost forever after a database problem is back with v2.0 thanks to a community and web caches [via Wired]. Have you backed up your favorite database lately?
- Possible Presential candidate elect in 2008, John Edwards, is using Bittorrent.
- Zillow will share its zestimates with Yahoo Real Estate searches. Meanwhile, Yahoo stock is taking a serious pounding (down almost 20% as of this writing) today on the heels of admitting they wouldn’t be updating their ad platform until Q4 2006 [earnings recap transcript here]. Ouch, I lost some money with my YHOO stock today.
- This was destined to be: YouTube being sued over 1992 riots video being posted (copyright infringement)
- Is the Indian government blocking blogspot, Typepad and Geocities? Dina Mehta, an India local, is blogging the details. Reader perspective: this sucks, use a proxy. Webmaster perspective: yet another reason to stay away from third party hosted sites for any long term serious project.
- Morning Sidekick Radio parody of James Blunt “your beautiful” as “my cubicle” [mp3] via thatedeguy.
- a podcast [mp3] with host Xbox Larry Hryb AKA Major Nelson with an interesting interview on HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. If you want to listen to the technical difference between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray as well as why the Xbox 360 is going to support HD-DVD instead of Blu-Ray. Also, more detailed information about Xbox Live Arcade Wednesday which will be the day that new Live Arcade titles will be released (08:00 GMT). The plan, though nothing official, is to try and make it a weekly gig and if they miss a week we might see a two games in a week release the following. This will be a huge success. It is already. Note, that Windows Media Player users can get an enhanced WMA version of the podcast with automatic URL flips [URL flips automatically change Internet Explorer when Hryb talks about a URL]

The movie The Cave is becoming my benchmark for what’s wrong with buying DVDs online. It’s an example of a subpar movie that is being peddled around the net for too much money. I’ve seen this movie selling for close to $30 that was available at Best Buy for $9.99. Note the Cinemax motto in the screenshot below:

Sorry, Cinemax, your idea of the future doesn’t even work with the Firefox browser.

The future of DVD burning buying has already been here and has been happening without Hollywood’s consent. Although we currently own 459 DVDs — and I only know this number because we keep an inventory of them using Delicious Library, BTW — I have never burned an archive copy of one of them. Whether or not it’s legal to do that these days, I’m not sure. There once was the ability afforded in copyright to make archival copies and I believe we’re still provided that (?) but I’m not sure any more with all the legal activity surrounding illegal internet distribution. Any readers know the legalities on this? I would sure like to think that the $10,000-$15,000 worth of DVDs we own can be copied so we can continue to own them well into the future if the source gets scratched/ruined. Or will they meet the same obsolescence of laserdiscs and VHS? If so, maybe we should stop buying/collecting and prepare the eBay listing now to reap the maximum return? Or will they become more valuable once they are obseleted?

Permanent ownership clause with transfer rights
For me the most attractive buy for digital media and paying more than a physical copy today would be digital media with a permanent ownership clause and including transfer rights meaning we could will our collection to our children or give them away / sell them to others. Why isn’t anybody selling me this digital media deal online? That would be the future of DVD burning (think I’ll leave this one) because the primary legitimate reason to burn DVDs is for archival storage. But take a minute and read the Terms of Service of these online media sites, they are severely restrictive. All of them.

Instead we are getting a more expensive, handcuffed “up to 3 computers and burn to one DVD” movie offer that doesn’t have cover art and packaging and special features/extras. This isn’t worth more money — $19.99+ for any single title movies out there (TV sets, perhaps yes) — especially movies like The Cave. Some online database could be maintained at the point of sale and that authorization of ownership could be given/sold/transferred to another person. This way when we want to give up or sell our right to Titanic which we legally purchased, we can transfer to somebody else, just as we would do with a physical item via eBay. An entire online marketplace could revolve around trading these digital licenses. DRM hasn’t worked like this, though. It’s been an abject failure in emulating physical property.

Unfortunately, I’m not aware of anybody that legally allows such provisions. This is why our family still buys mostly physical media. You can count the number of DRM-laden music tracks our family has purchased on one hand. Physical media has value that can easily be claimed on insurance in case of fire or theft. Value that can be bartered, sold or donated to charity.

Yesterday’s iTunes to rent movies rumor drew similar complaints about pricing but I didn’t mention how it has gotten really old buying the same media on different formats and the solution I see which is offering consumers this digital permanent ownership clause with transfer rights. Hollywood and the record companies keep wanting us to support DRM-encumbered formats for more money and wonder why we are protesting the trend.

Hollywood wants us to buy Miracle on 34th Street on VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, and the next format. An online permanent ownership with transfer clause like I’m suggesting threatens another half dozen or more format purchase over my lifetime. At least that’s one perception, even if it’s not reality. If they offer something cool that I can’t get with my existing version of the movie, I might buy the newer format version anyway.

Until this changes, the future of DVD burning buying isn’t here yet. They are still living in The Cave.

10:34am PST Doh! I used “burning” instead of “buying” like the Cinemanow webpage says. This goes with my million dollar calculation error in the last post. Argh. Hope this bug-ridden Wednesday doesn’t continue! (and here I used “article” instead of webpage” — what a day)

A new Think Secret rumor suggests iTunes will be doing movie rentals instead of movie sales as has been previously believed and that this will be announced during CEO Steve Jobs keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference starting Monday August 7.

Assuming this rumor is true and I seriously have doubts, if the rentals are priced like Movielink, Cinemanow, etc., it’s going to tank. Nobody wants to pay $3-5 per new movie rental online, even through iTunes (which this name continues to sound bizarre for non-music media, when are they going to change it?). Haven’t enough netizens voted with their wallets on pricing? Movielink has been up for sale for awhile and there doesn’t appear to be flocks of interested suitors.

Meanwhile, Hollywood is moving laboriously toward a model that netizens do like with deals like Guba which allow burning movies purchased online to a single DVD. The Cave currently costs $13.99 via Guba, which is still a few dollars more than we saw the DVD at Best Buy on sale for $9.99 + tax. TV series like Babylon 5 Season 1 cost $1.79 per episode via Guba for a total of $41.17 (and each episode must be purchased individually) and this includes no extras/special features (right?) or packaging. Amazon is selling the Babylon 5 - The Complete First Season (affiliate) DVD for $43.93 with all the goodies and packaging. It’s encouraging to see the movie deal online getting closer, but I will continue to bang the drum that the deal online must be priced less to be successful, just like buying music. Collectors and fans want the packaging and cover art.

If this alleged movie rental pricing should be priced more than $1.99 like the TV to videos in iTMS, why pay that much when you can get an unlimited movie rental plan (2 movies at a time) at places like Hollywood Video for $27/month? Even with gas prices and travel factored in, if you rent more than say 12 movies a month (that’s a mere six trips to the movie store) the convenience factor isn’t worth it.

If Apple were to put all movie rentals — new, old, etc — on par with buying iTunes song (99 cents each) then movie rentals via iTunes could be seriously disruptive. I don’t see that happening, though. If this Think Secret movie rental rumor has any legs and again, I doubt it, then they are going to make them too expensive. I think Steve Jobs should keep fighting for $9.99 (or less) pricing for all online movies with an option to burn to DVD like Guba.

Whatever actually happens in the coming days, it’s encouraging to see Hollywood moving a little closer to what online consumers desire.

Hat tip to LUX.ET.UMBRA

Let the fire sales begin, Sony is axing the UMD, says Gamespot. UMD is done, dead, zilch, kaput. So what does Sony do? Announce a new entertainment pak called the Memory Stick Entertainment Packs (MSEP) that contained movies on a Sony Memory stick, of course.

Sony, who isn’t a stranger to failed entertainment formats (Betamax, MiniDisc, soon Blu-Ray) has been losing support for UMD for awhile now. In march, Universal and Paramount stopped releasing its movies on UMD, and Wal-Mart and Best Buy recently decreased their presence in stores.

The emphasis on the Cinematical quote above is mine. Who is psyched about Blu-Ray now? Sure, if it comes with the PS3 it might get some juice like UMDs did on the PSP, but this clearly shows that having a cool gaming system doesn’t guarantee the success of a proprietary format.

Nearly a year ago I called UMDs a collector’s item when reading reports that they were selling well (August 2005) — was that just marketing spin or what? — and then came the stories that they were causing confusion in stores (January 2006). And now this. Talk about a short lifespan.

Keep your eyes peeled for the UMD bargain bins.

Forget abut HD-DVD and Blu-Ray for now, imagine storing your entire collection on one piece of media. This has been the promise and allure of holographic storage, but there is another storage type that could be on the horizon beyond that.

Scientist Professor V Renugopalakrishna is working on a protein-based storage system:

The new protein-based DVD will have advantages over current optical storage devices such as the Blue-ray as well, because the information is stored in proteins that are only a few nanometres across.

“The protein-based DVDs will be able to store at least 20 times more than the Blue-ray and eventually even up to 50,000 gigabytes (about 50 terabytes) of information. You can pack literally thousands and thousands of those proteins on a media like a DVD, a CD or a film or whatever,” he said.

This is all wishful thinking at this point so don’t get too excited but it is fascinating imagining the demise of hard drives. And web based storage? Who would bother if/when they could carry around their entire life on a DVD? Piracy alarmists will not be psyched, but I’m sure there will be advances in anti-piracy and DRM long before protein-based storage does or does not become a real world option.

And it looks like we’re going to have to live through at least two more iterations of storage technology (HD-DVD/Blu-Ray and then holographic) before getting anywhere near these types of massive storage options. Expensive future for those who repeatedly keep buying the same media on newer, faster, better formats.

Since buying an iSight camera for our Mac in November 2005 I haven’t used it much. Not really that into the whole webcam scene so the camera has sort of sat perched on the monitor waiting on a friend.

Over about the same time I’ve been searching for a good way to inventory our collection of movies, games, CDs and books. I’d read and heard lots of good things about Delicious Library (Mac, Regular price $40) but what has kept me away from using that was that it was a Mac-only program.

Sunday I finally downloaded the program and then started scanning our DVD bar codes with the iSight. The virtual shelves started to fill. The demo version of the program lets you scan in up to 25 items. Before I reached even 20, I moved for the plastic. I paid $43 and some change after sales tax. As of this writing — if only I had waited, bummer — the price is now $35 + tax, so you can save a few bones over what I paid.

Delicious Library makes the inventory process fun. It’s like the first time you scan your own groceries.

In a mere couple hours time we scanned the bar codes of most of our DVD collection (over 400 and counting). Unfortunately, some movies didn’t have bar codes like Futurama, The Simpsons, Star Trek The Next Generation and others so I had to use the Enter Title option. To enter a new item just hold down the Apple key + N and type in the title. Though we’re not done entering all the DVDs, and we haven’t even started on the games or CDs, the movie process was fairly smooth and fast. A couple hours may seem like a lot, but I can only imagine if we tried entering in all the information for each DVD by hand, including Amazon review and codes.

A video window that can be sized bigger with red lines allows you to line up the bar code with the iSight. Some bar codes seemed to scan better than others but overall the experience worked pretty good.

Once you scan an item a beep sound will be heard and shortly followed by a speech synthesized voice reading back the title. Our middle teenage son got a kick out of the computer saying Meet The Fockers with a “u” instead of an “o.”

Also, there are a couple of easter egg messages like when we scanned the original Star Wars Trilogy on DVD an additional sound file played whispered: “I am your father.” Clever.

Sorting and searching
The interface is graphically pleasing allowing multiple ways to sort, scale the item’s size and search through your virtual shelf of items.

The search is along the bottom and seemed to work fairly ok. I put in “Vader” and nothing was returned, but a search for “star” returned 23 DVDs including Starship Troopers and Star Trek as well as more unusual titles like Dogtown and Z Boys, Dickie Roberts and Bounce. The search is dynamic and will respond to what you type in AJAX-type fashion, but performed a little on the sluggish side. This might be the fault of my 256 MB RAM eMac and be snappier and more responsive on a faster Mac. Also, the search seemed somewhat limited in scope. For example, I searched for “ben affleck” and nothing was returned. So the search works primarily off the title field? That search should have returned Pearl Harbor, Paycheck, Bounce and more, but the shelf remained empty. Sometimes I don’t remember the title of a movie, only those who played in it, or perhaps a bit of what it is about.

Note: there also is a voice search option which I didn’t test for this review.

As for sorting, these are the following comprehensive options:

- title, creator, amazon users (?), played / read
- secondary stuff: series, numbers in series, genres, publisher/label, release date, edition, format, # of media, language, rare
- movie: starred rating, MPAA rating, theatrical debut, features, running time
- collecting: retail price, currrent value, purchase price, purchase date, used, condition, signed item
- where: location in building, owner
- creation: creation time, lookup time, Amazon #, u.p.c

Import/Export
Even though this is a Mac-only program, it still allows exporting the data to a tab-delimited file so you could take and import into a Windows inventory program. Conversely you can import from a tab-delimited file too, although scanning with the iSight is more than half the fun of using this program. Our kids liked that part anyway.

Borrowers
As the name implies, you can also check out and track any item loaned to other people or even yourself (I suppose this would be useful for tracking items kept in different places?). To create a borrower just click the icon with the person + next to it in the lower lefthand corner of the interface and then choose “New Person.” From there you enter in the first name, last name and email address of the borrower. To delete a borrower, highlight the borrower name and then navigate to Edit -> Delete borrower.

Multiple shelves
For those who want to have multiple shelves, that’s no problem either. Simply click on the shelf + icon in the lower lefthand corner of the interface. Then name your new shelf and start importing, scanning or typing in items.

Final thoughts
Delicious Library is a great example of a feature intensive, but not feature-bloated program. Anybody with a Mac and an iSight camera should be able to use this program without consulting the Help menu first. No surprise that it was chosen for an Apple Design Award for the 2005 Best Mac OS X User Experience and received 4 1/2 mice from Macworld. This is how commercial software should be built and deployed. The creators of the program are in the Seattle area too it seems. They should make a version for Windows, especially now with the switch to Intel Macs. Grade: A