Oct 2011 BD Purchase Part 2 – Macross Frontier Movie 2 Sayonara No Tsubasa マクロスF 恋離飛翼~サヨナラノツバサ~

 

 

So after waiting patiently for two weeks, I finally got my Macross movie 2 Collector’s Edition.

At 10,000 Yen, approx. $140 for this box, it’s absolutely THE most expensive Blu-ray box I’ve ever spent, and it’s only for a single movie (oh, well, a game too).

The collector’s edition has more external bonuses, all the first and second row items are bonuses for this Hybrid special edition. If you buy the regular edition, you only get the bottom row stuff, which is the movie itself and a box. I think it’s worth the extra $40 for the special edition.



The movie itself comes with a 48 page booklet and a box, same as last movie – Itsuwari no utahime (false songstress). Movie spec is 1080p 24fps video, LPCM 2.0 and DTS-HD MA 5.1, same as last time. It came with the game Macross Last Frontier. Unlike the movie’s bundle with the Macross Trial Frontier, I think this is actually a full game. The game play is about the same, but it has some ground fighting inside MF islands mimicking the scenes from the movies. There are quite a few trophies, but it’s a lot harder to get unlike in Trial Frontier.

Now moving on to bonuses for special edition. First you get the 原画 Original Drawing (60 total) collection and Blu-ray jacket posters (37 total) collection.

You also get the AR script books, print out ones. Each one has over 500 pages. This is a big reason I chose the special edition.

And you get the shrink sized pamphlets they gave away during the movies. I’m not sure how big the original is, but these are decent booklets. It’s a bargain for the movie goers, considering the ticketing price in Japan isn’t significantly higher than the ever increasing US prices…

Last thing for the physical goods is the film strip, I have a little better luck this time. I got Cathy Glass with Bobby standing on Macross Quarter’s bridge.

Aside from all these physical goods, you also get redeemable code for two exclusive PS3 themes. Of course you need a Japanese PSN account. The themes are poorly made IMO, icons are very repetitive and not complete.

Now putting the two movies side by side.



The big box is designed to hold both movies. And it does fit everything as you can see.

Samsung NP350U2B-A01 12.5in Notebook Brief Review/Initial Impression

 

 

 

Another notebook bought for other people. This time it’s an ultraportable.

Here are some spec from Amazon:

 

Product Features

• 2.30 GHz Intel Core i5-2410m "Sandy Bridge" dual-core processor
• 4 GB of installed DDR3 RAM
• 500 GB SATA hard drive
• 12.5-inch LED-backlit widescreen display, Intel GMA HD graphics
• Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium

Processor, Memory, and Motherboard

• Hardware Platform: PC
• Processor: 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5
• Number of Processors: 2
• RAM: 4 MB
• RAM Type: SODIMM

Hard Drive

• Size: 500 GB
• Type: Serial ATA

Cases and Expandability

• Size (LWH): 11.77 inches, 7.7 inches, 0.98 inches
• Weight: 3.09 pounds

Well, this Samsung is the first ultraportable notebook I’ve ever used. Model number is Samsung NP350U2B-A01. Here is my initial impression about it after using it for around 10 hours. The size is between the popular 12in and 13.3in. The weight is around 3lb which is pretty light IMO. And it’s under 1in thin.

In comparison with an HP touochpad.

Now the screen does have anti-glare coating, which made it easier to view under sunlight or rooms with lots of ambient light. The screen has a standard 1366*768 resolution, good enough for such a small screen IMO. The highest brightness is the not as bright as other laptops I’ve used. But it does the job. Overall color reproduction seems decent. There is a webcam on the bezel as well. But the mic is underneath the keyboard as seen below unlike majority of the laptops which have these two built next to each other.

There’s no backlight on the keyboard. The thing I don’t like about this keyboard layout is that there are no dedicated pg up and pg dn buttons, instead you have to press Fn combo key to get them. The touchpad is pretty sensitive out of the box, I don’t have to do any adjustment for sensitivity. But it doesn’t have vertical/horizontal scrolling enabled out of the box…. I have to enable it in the software.

Also as you can see, there are a few LED lights on the keyboard/palm rest area. Good thing is they are blue and not super bright, which is very good for use under dark room. Bad thing is that once you close the lid, you can’t see any of these status LED, including the power charging and ON/OFF LED… Also there are no dedicated wireless on/off switch. The laptop claims a 3s quick start feature which from closing the lid to sleep mode to opening the lid to OS, it requires only 3s. From the testing I got, it seems work well, but I don’t have any heavy software running in the background. Also not sure if there needs to be some Samsung specific software to make it work.

Move on to the expansion slots, on the right side, it has earphone/mic, SD card reader, 1xUSB 2.0 port, 1 VGA port (comes with adapter), and a Kensington slot. The audio chip is a Realtek chip with some Samsung custom plug-in throw in. There are two speakers underneath the laptop, at the front palm resting area. The sound quality is bearable. They aren’t very loud though.

On the left side, it has power plug, LAN port (not sure if it’s a gigabit port), HDMI, and 1x USB 2.0 ports. The HDMI is provided by the onboard Intel HD 3000 graphics.

For wireless connection, you get the standard wifi b/g/n (I think it’s an Intel chip), and Bluetooth 3.0. For some reason you can’t turn off Bluetooth permanently, you can turn it off via Samsung’s software control panel, but the next time it reboots, the Bluetooth radio turns on automatically.

As an ultraportable, this notebook doesn’t have an optical drive. But ironically Samsung does provide a recovery disc. I haven’t seen recovery disc for the past few years now…

The battery lasts about a good 6hr after a first time fully charged. The power brick is pretty small and portable. It has PowerPlus Battery, a similar technology as SONY’s Battery Care function where it charges the battery upto 80% full, and able to retain the charges for upto 1000 times.

 

 

Up until now, you must be wondering where’s the fan? Well, it’s behind the machine. It generates very little heat, and is very quite. Out of the box, the power scheme is using Samsung’s optimized power scheme. There is an even quieter mode which can help with the battery time too.

 

It comes with a 500GB HDD, upon starting, it gives you the option to partition the drive which is very nice. The minimum size you can set for the C drive is 50GB.

 

The OS is the standard win7 Home Premium 64bit, preloaded software is minimal, the only nag software is the Norton antivirus.

 

Packed with an i5 2nd gen CPU, and 4GB DDR3 memory, the overall operation is quite snappy. But due to the time I have, I only tested windows experience index which seems pretty high except for the graphics, windows media center, and youtube video.

Conclusion:

For the short period of time I tried this machine, I seem to have no issues with it. I hope it stays the same way, still a bit worry about Samsung quality though since its laptop line is pretty new. The only concern I have is the status LED are not visible once the lid is closed, so that you don’t know exactly if the machine is running or not since the heat generation is minimal. As far as ultraportables are concerned, I think the battery life is solid for its 6 cell battery.









 

Oct 2011 BD Purchase Part 1 – Harry Potter, etc

 

 

 Some random purchases made this month, was expecting Macross Frontier Movie 2 coming, but these pop up. So with the two more Harry Potter movies (Bestbuy exclusives), I now have six movies, two movies away from a complete collection. Last time I was buy these Harry Potter movies were way back in 2007 I believe, when HD-DVD was on the verge on disappearing. And the two bottom from target has to be the cheapest Blu-rays I’ve ever got, just in time compensating the ultra expensive Macross Frontier Movie 2.

CIFS mounting – webOS vs. Android

 

So I’ve been experimenting CIFS mounting on both webOS and Android lately. The CIFS mounting mounts a windows SAMBA network and displays as a folder in webOS or Android system, so that you can access your network share files as if they are local files. It’s a cool way to share music and video files, the ones that are typically large in size and cannot be conveniently copied or limited by the size of internal storage of Touchpad (32GB is still small). For my personal interest, I’m particularly interested in playing large video files (mkv) on Touchpad without transcoding. So let’s see how it plays out on Touchpad.

So on the webOS side, we have Network Drives, a homebrew CIFS mounting program. It was relatively easy to use. It supports unicode. Other programs including Kalemsoft media player and Internalz pro (need to enable hidden files) can access the shared files. The only issue I have with this program is sometimes I’m unable to unmount it unless I reboot. But otherwise it’s been pretty solid. Now the video playback part, on webOS, we only have two choices aside from the official player: Touchplayer (a port of mplayer) and Kalemsoft media player. Touchplayer only does soft decoding, and for me it’s not working at all. Kalemsoft media player, $5.99 is probably the only and the best choice for webOS platform. It does play majority of the video formats. It plays mkv to some degree since there are so many codecs supported by the format, it’s not easy to play everything. As for the mounting part, since it’s using wifi, anything HD or high bitrate will have trouble play smoothly.

For Kalemsoft media player, the 0.4 update is quite significant. It can read unicode pretty well. It has a really well thought interface that includes a preview window with stream selector. BTW, it has really good performance with wmv. The wmv files shared from Japanese P2P somehow are packed differently with the audio, so that my PS3 always have problem picking up the audio, same thing happened on Android platform, but Kalemsoft plays them without any issue.

It even detects the secondary video stream from some Japanese ts streams. But unfortunately as the stream is HD, it’s unable to stream it smoothly. It’s more like playing powerpoint…

The 0.4 beta now supports srt, ssa, and ass subtitles. But unfortunately you don’t have much control over how to display them. First off, there’s no border on the subtitles, well you can choose to show the backgrounds like the hearing aid type, but for normal subtitles, there’s just no border which means if you were playing any 4:3 content, the subtitles will go blend into the background. You do get the choice to set a few, mostly primary/secondary colors, but white is always my preference. You can’t control the subtitle position, which means for 16:9 content, the subtitles will show up in the black bar, a good way to solve the color blending problem… Also the default font size, even with the largest, it’s still on the small side as seen in the screen cap. For mkv, I tried some 720P anime fansubs, which played pretty well. But for high bitrate HD video, especially the ones with DTS, it still choked. But still, these are the best result you’ll ever seen on touchpad without transcoding.

 

On the Android side, we have CifsManager. It is not very intuitive as it requires rooting and the matching kernel module (cifs.ko) file in order to display files in unicode, otherwise you get a bunch of squares. Or another choice is ES file explorer, which supports SMB share directory, not in the same sense as real mounting, but it’s just far more straightforward.

And for the players, we have tons of choices, but the results are quite similar – they don’t work as good as Kalemsoft media player for webOS. It maybe a problem with current CM mod not fully enable hardware acceleration or software decoding, or video players for Android just plain suck.