The Museum Of Modern Thinking

Chroma-key, colour-seperation overlay, blue-screen, green-screen… It’s come a long way, and this vid proves it. I can’t believe how many shows now use it, even Ugly Betty – yeah, I watch it, so what?!

As you’ll tell from the vid, it’s from Stargate Studios, and is amazing work… It’s stunning how far special effects have come in recent years, e.g. the burly man brawl in that 2nd Matrix film that was never made, any number of kid’s films, Avata – well, almost Just need to get out of the uncanny valley

H/T to Mike at The Raw Feed.

Seriously, you think you’ve seen it all, and yet people still come up with creative, amazing ways of entertaining everyone. This, from the Swedish techno-pop duo called Rymdreglage, is a real “retro” blast. If you grew up with loading games off tape, you’ll enjoy it:

H/T to Kotaku

One area I am rather happy with in the XBox 360 Fall Update is support for DivX / XVid. After applying the update tonight, I then attempted to play (via Media Center on the Xbox) some DivX movies I had. Much to my dismay, I kept on getting a message saying the codec was missing. After much faffing about with trying to discover the DivX codec used (for it to work on the XBox it needs to be encided with DivX 5 or higher), I hit the XBox forums.

Eventually, I found the answer in a thread, and I thought I’d post up my steps here in case it assists someone:

1. Installed Fall update (of course)
2. Installed Optional Media Update (Games blade – All Games – Optional Media Update)
3. On my PC, set up Media Sharing in Windows Media Player 11 (Library – Media Sharing…) – it recognised my 360 as being present
4. On the 360, on Media – Videos, hit X to change Source to Computer (unsurprisingly, it recognised my PC)
5. Marvel at the list of movies from PC on your 360 (not 100% if you can “go higher” in the folder tree from My Videos) – play one!

It’s rather good to be able to stream my DivX files from PC to XBox so I can watch them on a proper TV, it’s certainly something I could have done with during my recent convalescence following my (not my fault!) car crash That aside, I can now turn my laptop into a DVR with the help of a TV tuner USB stick, GB-PVR (PVR software) and an aerial splitter. I always miss a few shows that I like (My Name Is Earl, Scrubs, Dispatches, etc.), so this will be a good solution until we upgrade all the TV-related gubbins.