Elton One

I don’t watch much TV anymore but I do watch a lot of different things online, both to get away from the adverts and channel surfing to things I don’t want to watch, but mainly because I can watch what I want when I want. This is great, but one thing I do miss is waiting for the next episode of a series to air. Back in the days of 56k you could only watch new episodes on the day they came out and on TV, and I never had Sky; just BBC 1 and 2, ITV and Channel 4 (Channel 5 never worked), so waiting for a Simpson’s I hadn’t seen or the new Johnathan Creek was genuinly something to look forward to. My sister used to sulk for days if she missed one episode of Neighbour’s - now you can probably watch it all online and see all the cast naked. Even Madge Harold Bishop.

The current and previous seasons (11 and 12) of South Park have been put up online about six hours after they air in america which is impressive and unstoppable because within a few days there are hundreds of copies up all over the place and that’s great - everyone can see a new release at the same time. I’ve really enjoyed waiting for the next South Park (”Over Logging”, S12E06 is, again, awesome), and now I’ve found another new release series to look forward to

Now like most anime and manga I’ve seen, there is no point trying to comprehend what is happening either visually or narratively using any preconceptions from British or american equivilants. Just go with it; so a naked girl has just appeared in your bath and she tells you she’s from Planet Deviluke and her name’s Lala and she’s got an “all purpose costume robot” she invented called Peke which, when she wants a new outfit, morphs into what ever she feels like wearing and it’s all very, very sexual.

I’d go with that. You pretty much always find out eventually what is happening, just not in the usual obvious way. For any one who likes manga pantie and tit shots, this is the show for you. Jay. For any one else who just likes manga this show is also for you; it’s cute, it’s funny, it’s drawn by Kentaro Yabuki and has lots of interesting uses of distortion and sketch styles, the titles are great, video game style music starts playing at all the best times, Lala has loads of crazy robot inventions and all the manga girls are well cute. What else do you need?

I-O!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Love-Ru

Check out all the episodes out so far here:

http://www.veoh.com/channels/-ToLOVERu-

After several years of using a multitude of applications under OS X to play videos locally and over a network, I have come to the following conclusions:

• Quicktime is a nice application but has limited support for a large number of file types (avi, divx, flv) and despite the availability of additional codecs (such as FlipForMac for Flash) I have never been able to consistently play all the file types I have. Network playback is also very hit and miss, and without the ability to change the cache size playback that does work is often very jittery. Not being Open Source and with the newest versions supporting DRM really puts the nail in the coffin, although Quicktime is a powerful application.
• VLC is also a nice application with good support for all the file types I use and a great deal of options but it is hard to find what you are looking for in the preferences and documentation. Local playback is great but network playback is not so good and despite playing around with the cache size, playback is almost always jittery and I get the following error:
  

  

  
  On checking the forums it seems a large amount of OS X users have similar problems and the developers, despite VLC’s awesome cross-platform support, are not so interested in developing further to solve this problem (see here).

• MPlayer has consistently proven to be very effective for both playing files locally and over a network, and with simple visual preference options backed up by advanced command line
  functionality and good online documentation it is a powerful application. Cache size can be altered in Preferences/Miscellaneous by ticking Additional Parameters and entering
  -cache 10000
  with the value representing kilobytes. 10000 works great for me with minimal load time and no jittering. This will load the specified amount before playback commences and continue to stay that far ahead as playback continues unlike VLC which loads the amount specified in the cache but after this amount has been played the jittering kicks in (the cache seems to be a one time pre-load).

  

  N.B. It is important to note that for this to take effect in MPlayer “Use cache (slow media)” needs to be ticked in Preferences/Miscellaneous, otherwise you get jittery playback regardless of specifying the cache size in Additional Parameters.
  
  

Conclusion

If you want to play local and network video using OS X with no jittering or other playback errors, MPlayer with the additional cache parameter is your best bet.

I have been using MPlayer Version 1.0 rc1 with OS X 10.4.8 on an Intel machine and MPlayer OS X Version 2.0b9r5 on OS X 10.4 & OS X 10.4.11 on a PPC machine.

Intel machine is great, PPC machine plays back with no jittering but audio is half speed and through the left channel only. I will endeavour to solve this problem.

Jay just completed Call Of Duty 4 on hard and when you do that, you get this wicked bonus level. Took us a good hour or so to clock it (I was close but not close enough) and this video pretty well acts as a review for the game and sums up just how good it all is.

Get it and play it, it’s ace.

UPDATE  - I just completed this too.  I’m not very good at games in general although I have got better recently and this is the first game apart from sonic the hedgehog on the game gear I’ve ever finished.  Well good.  Now I just need to kill three guys in a row with my knife and find all the terrorist intelligence and I’ve fully clocked it.  Haha.