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While experiments at Large Hadron Collider are frozen till spring, I’ve got into my own experiment: setting a record on continuous video recording.

Today my MGM TV channel subscription had to expire. I decided to leave a remembrance of the channel by recording a night’s worth of movies.

I’ve set up VirtualDub to capture PAL video stream 720×576 from Composite video and encode it real-time in DivX (1-pass quality-based, quantizer 4) 576×464 @25fps deinterlaced with 48kHz 16bit audio in MP3 @192kbps.

To my surprise, the TV subscription did not end. (Or the “end” doesn’t come into effect until after a user flips channels away from expired ones? It’s DVB-C Conax.) Anyway, I thought, fine, let it record until HDD’s full.

So far 12 full hours of video has been recorded, file size 7.6 GB.

Looks like I’ve got a day-off from news – cannot switch channels!

UPDATE

After 21 hours and 16 minutes into recording the STB displayed a message

Scrambled Channel
Smart card not paired

and refused to show the channel again. All other channels continued to work just fine!

Re-inserting the card didn’t help. It took as much as cold STB restart to restore this one channel.

Do they care I watch only my single favourite channel as long as I pay for the whole pack?
Or is this a kind of protection against small illegal re-broadcasters?

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Потянуло на фантастику, b0ris посоветовал фильм “Посредник”, как последний достойный советский представитель жанра (снят в 1989 по повести 1971 года).

Фантастики я всё-таки не получил: по мере продвижения в фильме перед зрителем аллегорически разворачивается модель наших сегодняшних реалий.
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Чуть ли не в каждом художественном фильме имеется хотя бы одна сценка с телефоном. А если кино американское, то телефонный номер обязательно будет начинаться на 555.
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Лишь в день открытия фестиваля православного кино «Покров» 10 октября в Укаинском Доме был показан единственный полнометражный художественный фильм (отличная лента – «12», премьера – Никита Михалков, Валентин Гафт и другие звёзды). Да и тот внеконкурсный.

Остальные работы (а их было около 40) носили публицистический характер и вся их демонстрация была похожа на… кино-блог. Или видео-блог – vlog, как это принято называть в интернет – несмотря на размеры зала, использовался обычный цифровой видеопроектор.
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The excellent “The Three Musketeers” by George Sidney (1948) on TCM reminded me of numerous disputes of colorizing old movies.

And I thought I got the idea, at least with the old movies depicting even older epochs – like in the case with the Musketeers.

See, the idea is that a color movie of 40’s is as much unusual as a B&W movie of a more recent period, like “Schindler’s List” (1993)

What is common in these two situations – the events portrayed are greatly divided from the times they are played by actors. So the purpose of the artificial addition (”colorization”) or removing (b&w shooting) of the color might very likely be an attempt of amplifying a dramatic impact on a viewer with the improbable connection of the Unconnectable (subsets of Time in this case)