Star Wars, Computers, Nerdiness and Distractions

I hope you'll forgive this slightly nerdy post, but I'm a bit fed up with just posting stuff about my anxiety and depression. Probably nearly as fed up as you are with reading it.

Now you may have heard about a little series of films called Star Wars and how I think the original trilogy are like the best ever. You may also know that I hate the prequels with a passion. Seriously, I've never watched any of them, nor do I ever want to. I also hate the way that George Lucas keeps buggering about with the original trilogy.

Now in my quest to find the original, unmolested 1977 version of Star Wars I purchased the 2006 Limited Edition of Star Wars which contains the original 1977 movie as a bonus disc. This is fantastic and just what I wanted. But then I heard about Harmy's Star Wars Despecialised Edition. This guy has basically painstakingly reconstructed the original 1977 theatrical release of Star Wars using the best source material he could find (seriously, the guy deserves a medal). Now as he states this is a fan edit and is not to be bought or sold, and is only to be downloaded by people who own official releases only. But I thought hey, I fall into that category, so I went hunting for it.

So after some searching I downloaded an 8.5gb file which turned out to be a blu-ray .iso file. Problem is, I don't have a blu-ray burner in my computer, or even a blu-ray player to play a disc on. I tried playing the .iso file on my linux desktop computer in VLC, but to no avail. (By the way, VLC is the best video player ever, seriously). So I'm stuck with a blu-ray image that I can't burn to a disc or play. Hmmm...

So then after a bit of googling I found out I could mount the .iso file in linux as a read-only folder (but then of course read-only access is all I need). So I created an empty 'starwars' folder in my home directory. Then I went to the terminal and typed:

sudo mount -o loop -t udf /home/james/SWDEED.ISO /home/james/starwars

Then I looked at the 'starwars' folder in my home directory and the contents of the .iso file were there. Yay!  So I went to the 'Open Disc' menu in VLC, selected 'BluRay' and then selected the 'starwars' folder. Hey presto, it only bloody worked!  So I can now watch the best quality version of one of the greatest films ever on my desktop PC. That's great, but I wasn't done there.

What I really wanted to do was stream the film from my Windows 7 netbook over wifi to my Roku box. I knew my netbook wasn't up to the job of playing an 8.5gb video file, let alone trying to stream it over a wifi connection. So what to do now?  I had a poke around in the 'starwars' folder and ended up in the BDMV/STREAM folder. In there was a file called 00000.m2ts and it was 8.5gb in size. This had to be the actual movie file. I tried to open it in VLC and sure enough it played. So if I could convert this file into a more manageable-sized format then I could stream that file over wifi.

Step forward WinFF. Basically this lets you convert stuff into other stuff (I dumbed it down as much as I could). So long story short, I converted the 8.5gb .m2ts file to a much more manageable 1.2gb .mp4 file.

So then I copied the .mp4 file over to my netbook. This was the moment of truth. Would my netbook be able to stream the film to my Roku box without any glitches or pauses during playback?  Thankfully the answer was yes!  So now I can watch Star Wars on my Roku box, and more importantly in bed. Yes, I just wanted to watch Star Wars in bed, okay?  Happy now?  If you wonder why I went to all this trouble, just have a look at the result. The original Star Wars has never looked so beautiful. If you still don't get it then I guess you probably don't get Star Wars. It's okay, I forgive you.

So you may be wondering why I've written this. As I said, it was partly to give you a break from all the anxiety and depression stuff. But the other reason is that it's a welcome distraction for my mind. Getting to the desired outcome in the process I've outlined above involved a number of hurdles and challenges. This is the nerdy stuff my brain loves and it helps me forget about how crap I am at the rest of my life, if only for a while.

When it comes to overcoming challenges of a technical nature, there's no denying it, I rock. Now if I can just apply that sort of positive mental attitude to the rest of my life I'll be set.