Blu-ray Rip

Blu-ray disks hold high definition copies of movies. At 1080p, they have more than 4 times as many pixels as DVD’s 480p. Now there are UHD (or 4K) disks which promise 2160p, but are still expensive and most people can’t see the difference on their TV. I have been buying a lot Blu-rays the last couple of years, hundreds of them now. Many of them come with a digital HD copy that you can get by redeeming a code on a piece of paper in the case. The movie is then available to you to watch and sometimes download through several different services. This is a good deal because you can also buy digital copies of movies, but they often cost more than the Blu-ray. But maybe half of the Blu-rays I have bought did not include a digital copy. Sometimes you can buy a digital copy of a Blu-ray you own through one of the services, Vudu, for $2 (you take a picture of the UPC to prove you have the disk and GPS proves you are at home), which I have done with about 50 movies. But I still have about 100 Blu-rays with no digital and no Vudu copy available.

I decided I could make my own digital copies of my Blu-rays if I got a Blu-ray drive. Now that I have so many titles, it makes a lot of sense since it lowers the cost per movie. Vudu makes it easy to watch movies stored on their site as long as you have internet access plus you can share your account so other people can watch. A Vudu app is built into most smart TVs, including mine and is on my Blu-ray player as well as my Amazon Fire stick. It is harder to play iTunes movies, but iTunes lets you import home-made videos and load them to an iPad which is my main use for digital copies. I could also watch them on my phone or laptop, but the resolution would be wasted on those. At home I can watch homemade digital copies on the Fire stick using Plex. I could change the settings on Plex to allow me to watch movies on the go, but I don’t have a need for that.
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Plex

At some point when I was messing around with trying to get programming to the TV in the back of the house (which I usually only use when exercising) I was playing around with a way to get movies and TV shows from my computer to the TV. The TV isn’t really a smart TV, but it does have Chromecast built in. I wound up casting shows that I had recorded from my DVD’s and put in my phone, which seemed to work better than trying to cast those shows from the computer to the TV via the phone. In the end, I bought an Amazon Fire TV stick for that TV and got a Tablo (for recorded local broadcasts) and Netflix so I didn’t have any shortage of programming. I usually watch Late Night with Seth Myers while exercising and if he isn’t on that week, then something on Netflix. I think at some point in there I looked into options to create a home media center that I could access over the network, but at the time I was only using Chromecast.

Plex All Movies view

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Black Friday

Once again Black Friday is now on Thursday, right after Thanksgiving dinner. So I got to eat a delicious dinner and then drive to Best Buy. This wasn’t a spur of the moment decision, but the result of a year’s worth of patience and research. I had been buying a lot of Blu-rays this year, so there wasn’t much more that I really wanted, plus I don’t feel like this has been a particularly strong year for movie releases, so I really only wanted about five titles.

Similar to last year, Best Buy’s ad generally had the best deals and their Black Friday ad came out in early November. Walmart had a decent ad, but it didn’t say what all they had for sale, instead saying “50 titles at this price,” but only showing 8 titles, leaving you no clue on the other 42. Target had a few okay deals. Frys didn’t really even try this year, with only a small selection of 4K movies for $1 more than Best Buy’s price. I came up with this list of Best Buy picks (the last numbers are the Rotten Tomato and Metacritic scores):

  1. Avengers Infinity War, $6.99, 84/68
  2. Black Panther, $6.99, 97/88
  3. Blade Runner 2049, $5.99, 87/81
  4. Manchester by the Sea, $3.99, 95/96
  5. Paddington 2, $5.99, 100/88

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Return of the Glitch

Last night Best Buy had a special online sale of Black Friday items for their Elite and Elite Plus customers only. I don’t really spend that much at Best Buy, but last year I got their credit card and all of my purchases on that card count as if I was spending there, doubling or tripling for some purchases. I just recently reached Elite Plus status, primarily by using the Best Buy credit card to buy lunch instead of paying cash and getting double credits for every dollar spent. Over the last year they have probably given me over $100 in store credits that I have used mostly for Blu-ray purchases. With all that buying done already, I was thinking Black Friday would be pretty tame this year, picking out about 5 movies I would like to get. However most of those were not available during the preview sale (I still bought 3 movies, 2 of which I didn’t know would be on sale), so I will have to wait for Thursday like everyone else.

I had never been to a Dollar General store before. But if you live long enough, you get all kinds of new experiences. On Blu-ray Forum people were saying that Dollar General would soon be having a Buy One Get One Free sale on Blu-rays. When they ran this sale last year, there was a “glitch” that caused movies to ring up BOGO but also 50% off. The movies in question were all priced at $4.95, dropping the price to $1.24, which is pretty amazing. Maybe not as amazing as $1 like Dollar Tree has, but the selection seems to be better at Dollar General. The sale runs Sunday before Thanksgiving to Wednesday. This morning as stores opened, people reported the return of the glitch. So I looked up where my nearest store was and off I went. Continue reading “Return of the Glitch”

Gravity

One of the few movies where the upgrade to 3D was really worth it was probably Gravity, a space disaster movie that came out in 2013 and wound up at the top of my list of best movies of the year. I got the Blu-ray last year and finally watched it. Just like the first time it kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time and I was blown away by how realistic everything looked. So I watched it and enjoyed it all over again and started watching the making of segments which are really amazing. For the space stuff they had two light sources, earth and sun, and as an actor moved or spun the lights would have to go around the actor since they couldn’t really spin Sandra Bullock and George Clooney that much. So they got robots like they use for making cars and would have one robot hold the camera, one the sun light, and one the earth light and the actor wouldn’t have to move that much. In the scenes that take place in space, really the only thing that was real was the actor’s face. Everything else was pretty much CGI. On scenes inside space ships they had sets (but still did a great job of mimicking weightlessness, which I won’t go into).
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