Category Archives: Movie

Solo: A Star Wars Story Added to Blu-ray Collection

Over Christmas I got Solo: A Star Wars Story Blu-ray as a gift. I have added it to my DVD/Home Theater page to reflect the addition. Even though it had some issues and things that could have been done better, I still enjoyed it. I also did not have any problems with Alden Ehrenreich who played Han Solo. 🙂

I’ve included a trailer as well.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi Added to Blu-ray Collection

Well, being the Star Wars fan that I am, I had to go out and get Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi on Blu-ray and add it to my collection. I’ve updated my DVD/Home Theater page accordingly.

It was certainly one of the more polarizing episodes depending on what your expectations were. I’ll let this Honest Trailer by Screen Junkies explain it. 😃

Anyway, upon my second viewing of it (only saw it once in the theater), it was more enjoyable and caught a few things I had missed before. I still think Vice Admiral Holdo didn’t need to sacrifice herself. I mean, Star Wars has droids out the wazoo that can pilot ships.

Anyway, looking forward to the Solo and Episode IX movies later.

Recording MP3 Versions of MIDI Movie Themes

Because Firefox has basically stopped all plugins from working except Flash since version 52 and workarounds failing with version 55 (ugh..), none of my DVD and Blu-ray pages that have an embedded MIDI player using the Microsoft’s Windows Media Player plugin work any longer. So, I decided to record MP3 versions of them which can be played using a standard HTML5 <audio> tag that all modern browsers support.

Audacity and XMPlay

Originally, I used Cool Edit 2000 which I’ve had a licensed copy of for some time. I recorded The Best of Benny Hill theme using it. Since then, I’ve been using Audacity to record the audio while using XMPlay to play the MIDI file. I then exported the audio as a MP3 using the Lame library. I used the Extreme quality preset during the export. So, now on pages like Star Wars IV: A New Hope, there’s a MP3 player as well. Since I’m using the MediaElements.js HTML5 video player on these pages, I decided to their MP3 player also.

Now I need to figure out what I’m going to do with my General MIDI page, if anything. Hmmm… 😖 For now, at least, the Windows Media Player plugin still works in Firefox ESR 52.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Added to Blu-ray Collection

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Blu-ray coverWell, I had to add Rogue One: A Star Wars Story to my Blu-ray collection. I have also updated my Home Theater page accordingly. It is an excellent movie which I highly recommend. Thankfully my Blu-ray player had no issues with it. 🙂

Also, as a follow-up to my earlier post, DVD/Blu-ray Pages Updated With HTML5 Player, I have completed adding trailers to all the movie pages where one was available to download or create. Many of them list a page created date of “Before March 19, 2003” because that’s the earliest time I could figure out based on file dates. That date was probably when I copied the images over to a new PC or hard drive and is why they were are all the same.