Movies Redux

I used to have a bad habit of purchasing any movie that I thought looked vaguely interesting.  I would go to Amazon once a month or so and purchase 3-5 movies and spend an evening watching the movies back-to-back and enjoying a “nice” dinner.  Sometimes there would be a theme to the movies such as “horror”, “independent films”, etc.; sometimes not.  Sometimes the movies would be good; sometimes not.  In the end though, I ended up moving to Michigan with a healthy collection of DVD’s, but have since found that with the advent of Netflix that I don’t find it necessary to purchase nearly a fraction of the amount of DVD’s that I used to.  And considering that I don’t watch the movies that I currently own nearly enough to justify spending 20+ dollars on most of them; I’m OK with not owning most of the latest and greatest movies.  Of course if it’s a good movie that’s supernatural in its theme or based on a comic book, I’m usually prone to pick it up.

With my wife off work and with the demand that the baby takes on us, we find ourselves more inclined to watch a movie or read a book than we are to play a computer or console game.  In the past few years if we had a spare time we might watch a movie once a week, but most of our time was spent playing WarCraft.  Now we will probably watch a movie once a day, if not two.  And although it has crossed my mind to increase our Netflix rental agreement, that’s pretty expensive.  Instead we’ve found ourselves turning not only to streaming Netflix’s “instant view” movies from our Tivo, but digitizing our existing movies on a computer and streaming them from our XBox 360.

The bonus of digitizing our movies is that it not only brings new novelty to watching the movies, but it places the movies at “our fingertips” so-to-speak.  It also allows us to put the movies in a format that lets us carry the movies with us on our iPhones.  Of course I’ve played with this before over the years, but I would end up with movies that would have out-of-synch audio tracks, pixilation, or some other defect that would drive me insane and I would eventually stop encoding movies and give up the entire endeavor.  However, after reading guide after guide and trying different tools, all the while protesting any software that would charge me a fee to use it, Maximum PC finally released a guide on how to digitize movies using entirely free software.  (I however deviate from their suggested DVD Decoder, by using DVDFab which I discovered by reading another one of their articles.)

Another great feature about digitizing movies is that we can insert audio tracks into the digital movies, which finally brings me to the product that actually inspired this post:  Rifftrax. 

For those who were fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the names  Mike Nelson (Mike), Bill Corbett (The second voice of Crow, Observer/Brain Guy), and Kevin Murphy (Tom Servo, Professor Bobo, Cambot) are probably familiar.  If not, I definitely recommend looking into watching an episode of Mystery Science Theater (on TV or Netflix), The Film Crew (which has episodes on Hulu and Netflix), or Cinematic Titanic (DVD only).

For those who are unfamiliar with the project, Rifftrax is basically an audio commentary by one or more individuals (usually Mike, Bill, and Kevin) that goes along with a movie.  What you do is you purchase the audio file for around $4.00 and rent the movie it goes along with.  (They also have Video On Demand purchases for some movies from $.99 for short films to $9.99 for others, but since I don’t stream from a PC desktop or use a media center PC it’s not an option for me.) You queue up the movie and the audio and then play them at the same time.  What you end up with is a hysterical commentary on a wide range of movie such as Star Wars, Spiderman, The Dark Knight, Glitter, Next, etc.  It makes for a great evening and is a ton of fun, but most of all it breathes new life into a movie you’ve probably already seen several times before.  At my last count there were around 95 movies that have been “riffed”, and that’s not including the independent film riffs and the user-submitted (and Rifftrax approved) riffs. I personally find them hysterical.

But they’re also great because I can merge them into the digitized films I create as a separate audio track; meaning that with a little bit of extra work I can merge the Rifftrax with the video file and not have to worry about synching them together.  This makes for a better experience overall, and again makes the movies worth watching again; either in their original format or with a hysterical audio commentary.  Plus, although there are only a few of them, sometimes Rifftrax has special commentators such as “Weird Al" Yankovic and Neil Patrick Harris (that’s right.. I said NPH).

You don’t need to be a fan of MST3K to enjoy these and once you purchase the file it’s available from their website in PAL, NTSC, and .riff (the file needed for their desktop player) for quite a while.  I have purchases that are over 2 years old that are still available for download.

Anyway, this is obviously my latest passion and obsession which I thought I would share.  I think it’s a great project and worth supporting.

**Addendum**

It looks like the Rifftrax crew has been able to obtain the rights for some of the older movies and shorts and is releasing them upon DVD on June 16, 2009.  My fault for not looking this up!