As Far As I Can Tell

A few days ago I ruined my DVD player.

I’ve been watching a lot of SVCDs that I download off of newsgroups lately. If I miss an episode of The Sopranos or The Simpsons, it’s no big deal, I just download it a couple of days later.

My Mintek DVD player didn’t officially support playing SVCDs; you had to select the file off of the disc manually instead of it just pressing play. Also, it cuts out 5 minutes before the end of any video, forcing me to watch the last 5 minutes on my computer. I wanted to see if there were any firmware upgrades to fix the cut-off problem, and I found this page.

I did some research and it seemed that everyone had been successful in upgrading their firmware to the version recommended, even though it was for a different brand DVD player. Long story short—it didn’t work, and now the startup screen just blinks on and off without loading the disc. So if you have the Mintek DVD-2580, and you’re thinking about upgrading the firmware, be warned.

I went out and got the Norcent DP-300 for $60 and I’m pretty happy with it. It fully supports SVCDs and has other pirate friendly features like letting you listen to just the right or left audio channel. Lots of pirated movies from China are encoded with Chinese in one channel and English in the other.

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I saw a lecture last night by LOT/EK, a NYC based architecture duo that builds really interesting buildings and installations. Their work focuses on re-using and appropriating existing materials such as shipping crates, water towers, oil tankers, and airplanes.

I’m a sucker for the themes of module based system, customization, and multi-program design. I guess that’s why I like their work so much. I’ve actually been able to experience two of their installations first hand: Ret>Inevitable 1.5: Cinema at the Crossroads at Art Chicago 1999 and the listening environment that they created for the Whitney’s Bitstreams exhibition in 2001.