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MOVIES ON A STICK Home viewing has never been so much a jungle as now. In most capital cities, there are now 17 free-to-air channels, with some broadcasters running duplicate programming on some of these with, no doubt, plans to utilise each later for ‘special purposes’. I choices but allowed viewing at any hour or day of n this forest of options there are also shopping programming that we really wanted to watch. channels, an indigenous broadcaster and a And if we really enjoyed a particular movie/program, we community channel (whose future is definitely under a could watch it again . . . and again . . . and again! cloud). And of course, there’s an avalanche of programming It all began when I discovered that two of our home TVs waiting for you on Pay TV sites. Viewer heaven? Not quite! looked like they could accept a USB stick (aka flash drive Back in the 1990s some wit said of US cable television: or thumb drive) that could run movie files downloaded “500 channels and nothing to watch!” from the Internet. But no luck. Well, the truth is that there’s plenty to watch on AusThe first (5-year old) TV did have a USB port but appeared tralian free-to-air television but the majority of current to employ the USB port only for system updates; most curtelevision programming would send an insomniac to sleep! rent “smart TVs” have USB and SD card slots so, if you’re Many of us resort to hiring DVDs to exert a modicum in a buying mode, check out the TVs in your local store. of personal choice. But even there, video rental shops are Moving to the Panasonic PVR I found that this had not facing extinction as people become too lazy to pop down only a USB port but also provided an SD card slot, with the road and pick up a movie, or find the pay-per-view opthe former doubling as an external hard drive port. tions on their pay TV channels offer a ‘good enough’ choice. Grabbing a handful of sticks and an SD card or two I If they’re any good, movies are only released to DVD or swung over to the YouTube site on my computer and with pay-per-view some months or so after the cinema screenthe aid of some streaming software, loaded up the sticks ings. and the cards with a handful of silent movies (one of my The solution to this is to access programming yourself faves) and galloped back to the TV and PVR. and replay it on the home TV and play it when you want to! Success . . . to a degree. Some of the movie files would One way to achieve this is to acquire a Personal Video not play, some faltered or froze. But some did! I’ll discuss Recorder (PVR), which I did recently. This has been a boon this situation later. to viewing at will, with Full-HD quality enjoyable on a However, I still faced the challenge of running my movlarge (HD) screen. ies (and not the broadcasters’) on the second I then found an additional, relatively TV. What to do? simple and cost effective solution that not by Barrie Smith Roaming around eBay and various retail only gave my family a multitude of viewing 24  Silicon Chip siliconchip.com.au sites I discovered a breed of device called a media player which seemed to answer my needs. Kaiser Baas HD Media Hub The Media Hub looked like the legendary ‘black box’, hardly larger than a pack of cards. It had all the input and output slots for my needs: two USB slots that would accept flash drives (or an external hard drive); an SD/MMC slot to take a card; plus audio outputs. Output to the TV was via HDMI. And all this for $58 at my local electronics retailer! Then I fell into a well of techno terror. A month or so after I started my adventure with the unit I fell foul of the Setup button which adjusts the settings of the media hub. My first fumble was to fool around with the Language button; this led to my locking the entire unit into Chinese script! What to do? Luckily, I found the Kaiser Bass help site (http://kaiserbaas.helpserve.com/ Knowledgebase/List) and quickly got the unit back to English. A day or so later, in a lazy moment, I approached the Setup button and activated the button which promised to restore the unit’s default setting — just out of curiosity. This of course completely “bricked” the unit! Back to the retailer. . . swap for a new one . . . take it home and get it going. . . and continued my tour — with careful avoidance of the Setup button! The KB performed OK, running my movies, early TV programs, the occasional MP3 tracks and some family photos. Then this one went down the well too, never to return! At this point I spoke to the Melbourne agent’s point man and discovered that my unit was to be superseded shortly by a new model which promised to fix all my woes. So if you’re going to buy the unit, make sure you get the new model. They’re visually quite different. Kaiser Baas HD Media Hub Plus Vimeo is a US-based site that has movies and TV series for downloading. Popular titles are listed first but searching will reveal thousands more. Note the Plus! This new black box, sized to the equivalent of two playing card packs, has a tiny blue ‘on’ LED at the front and two USB and one memory card slot at the side. You can plug a hard drive into either USB port. The rear panel has a 5V DC input from the supplied power pack, component (Y, Pb, Pr) and composite outputs, a stereo audio output and an HDMI output. The remote control has 27 keys, including an OK button and four directional arrows. The text on some is tiny, about 2mm in height — so get out the reading glasses! siliconchip.com.au On startup we view a row of icons: File Manager, Movie, Photos, Setup etc. If you want to play a movie, some JPEG stills or MP3 tracks, the device is clever enough to sense what files are where, whether they’re stored on USB stick, SD card or hard drive. Tap “Movie” and you select which media (USB1, USB2, card or hard drive) is holding your file. Next is a text list of the files on your chosen media. The whole process is graphically displayed and easy to navigate. Tap your selected title and in seconds, up comes the show. December 2014  25 The newer Kaiser Baas Plus Media Hub. This one has proven to be a reliable, really great performer and I highly recommend it! My first Kaiser Baas Media Hub. It worked fine at first, then developed significant problems. I took it back! The range of control on the remote is exceptional: audio levels; brightness; vary the screen proportions (4:3, 16:9, pan & scan, etc); scan fast forward/reverse/freeze; return to the previous function and so on. I have come across the odd title that has vision & sound out of sync. The KB unit has an audio sync corrector; it has plus and minus variations of up to 9 milliseconds. But I found this was not enough to do the trick on a suspect movie. Obviously it needs more than 9ms adjustment (that’s not real long!). Supplied with the unit are a power adaptor, remote control, warranty card, user guide, quick start guide, 2 AAA batteries and HDMI cable. Be careful of the last item: with some models, it’s a rather expensive “option”. Overall, I was delighted with the gear. It performed with great aplomb. First catch a movie For Mac: (www.wondershare.com/pro/mac-free-youtubedownloader.html) and for Windows: (http://www.wondershare.com/pro/free-youtube-downloader.html). This worked fine for a month or two, then failed. Luckily, I managed to extract a refund from the developer. I have since used the freeware RealPlayer Downloader (now renamed RealPlayer Cloud) and found at www.real. com/realplayer/cloud/international Then there’s ‘Final Video Downloader’ for Windows (www.finalvideodownloader.com). And there are quite a few others. My choice is the freeware YTD Video Downloader, found at www.ytddownloader.com/mac/ this is for Mac users. Windows fans can head for http://ytd-video-downloader. en.softonic.com/download The Mac version I can swear by but I have not tried the Windows flavour. YTD Video Downloader is much more than a mere downloader. You begin by pasting the URL (with Liberty, for example, it is www.youtube.com/watch? v=cyKRNCWZN8&spfreload=1) into the software’s panel. You select the destination on your computer… I chose Desktop. Then you simply tap the Download button and away it goes. The default format is MPEG4 but there are other options, such as QuickTime Movie, WMV etc. It works like a dream. Once downloaded, you simply copy the MPEG4 file to a USB stick or SD card and slip it into the Kaiser Baas player. Early on you’ll find that a cheap 2GB USB stick will suffice but when your enjoyment and ambitions expand, I suggest you pick up a larger stick. As Mrs Beaton is famously supposed to have once said “first catch your hare” (she didn’t, but that’s apocrypha for you) you need to first “catch” your movies. So go and get some video for your player. Start at www.youtube.com Type in “Laurel and Hardy” and up comes a list of their early comedies, some silent, some with sound with varying running times. Top of the YouTube list is Liberty, an early sound short running 17m 57s. Next step is to download Liberty. Unless your computer came preloaded with appropriate software, you cannot simply download and store video from YouTube – you need some software application to perform the task for you. There are many – some are commercial while some are freeware. Early on I tried a paid app: Wonder- Just one of the many menu screens on the Kaiser Bass Media Player. It has clear share Free YouTube Downloader. graphics to guide you through its operations. 26  Silicon Chip siliconchip.com.au There are many other “media centres” on the market, with a wide range of prices and features. On the left is one of the ‘Noontec’ range available from Altronics (www.altronics.com.au). The $59.95 Edimax 18 CV-7428nS from Jaycar (www. jaycar.com.au) also sports WiFi. Some full movies at the full resolution of 1080p can soak up nearly 2GB. A half hour TV program like The Twilight Zone can account for nearly 500MB at full res. Of course with a big fat hard drive you’re really cooking with gas. On the matter of what format to save your USB movie in I have found that, on occasions, I have needed to convert the clip to other formats, like AVI, QuickTime Movie, MKV, FLV and others. The whole format thing is a can of worms which could form another story in this magazine! This conversion can be achieved with YTD Video Downloader or other apps like FLV Crunch for Mac or Windows (http://flv-crunch-mac.en.softonic.com/mac/download and http://free-flv-converter.en.softonic.com). On occasions you’ll find the audio and video are out of sync. You can use a third party video editor like Windows Movie Maker or iMovie (Mac) to change the relative length of your audio or video tracks. Downloading this content and more particularly, anything with a strong audio content, can lead to other avenues. For instance: you download an MPEG4 file of say, a concert YOUR CHOICE – and it is ENORMOUS! The world of movies and TV shows is only a mouse-click away! It really is extraordinary how much top material is out there, just waiting for you to discover and feed it to your media player. In my own case I started out with a large dose of the 50s/60s TV series The Twilight Zone, hosted and mostly written by the master talent, Rod Serling. These are quite extraordinary in their originality and production values. Some are a half hour in length, some a full hour. Many of the players were newcomers to the siliconchip.com.au small screen… like Dennis Hopper, Burgess Meredith, Jack Klugman, William Shatner, Keenan and Ed Wynn, Robert Duvall etc. Regarding copyright of Twilight Zone, I discovered that the production company failed to renew copyright in the original series. Another in my collection is The General, a classic silent comedy film made in 1926 and starring Buster Keaton. Then there’s Monty Python, the Two Ronnies series, Dad’s Army, early classics such as Nosferatu (1922), an early Jekyll & Hyde movie, recent action films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude van Damme and others. Australian films are there, of course: The Tunnel (2011), The Odd Angry Shot (1979), FJ Holden (1977) and many others. I have Chinese classics: Farewell My Concubine (1993), Yellow Earth (1984) and others plus British, French, Swedish, American classics. There’s even the odd Disney title! You’d be surprised what you can find – and they’re all there for your USB stick, SD card, external hard drive and the media player. December 2014  27 Western Digital’s UNMI Video Streaming Player supports a wide variety of entertainment options. It has built-in WiFi and Ethernet connectivity for high-speed Internet access so is ideal for streaming services. that runs for an hour and convert it to an MP3 audio file. Most current car radios can play audio from a USB stick. Or you could convert the MP3 to a CD for home use. Vimeo Don’t ignore Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/watch). This is a US-based video-sharing website on which users can upload, share and view videos. Not only will you find movies and TV series but the site holds many, many home-made versions of the title you’re searching for. Netflix There are a few ways to watch Netflix, bearing in mind that Australian viewers are normally blocked from doing so. As a subscription service, ABC News informs “Netflix charges a fee to watch television series and movies ad-free and now has 50 million digital subscribers in the Americas and some parts of Europe”. The company also produces original television content, including “House Of Cards” and “Orange Is The New Black.” It’s expected that Netflix may land in Oz some time in early 2015. In the meantime ABC News estimates that “as many as 200,000 people are getting around the geoblock to sign up.” Geoblocks are simply a means of stopping you downloading content from certain areas to other areas (eg, USA to Australia!). They’re not particularly difficult to by- pass. One way is to head for www.netflixaustralianow. com.au/netflix/netflix-in-australia/ Here you’ll also find notes from those who have cracked the geoblock and are currently enjoying the service. Of course there will be many readers who don’t want to go rogue and “illegally” engage Netflix. Another factor is that many of these “cracking” methods call for you to supply your personal credit cards details as well as email address. Personally, I’m very wary of such a situation. More Players The Kaiser Baas unit is a device that could expand your viewing options at a low cost. Of course, once you start looking around, you will find there are quite a few other media players, some with more features and some with WiFi capabilities. Kaiser Baas has another model that has WiFi as well as the USB reading feature. It’s around $100. Western Digital’s ~$130 Live Streaming Player has two USB ports, an SD card slot and has Wifi connectivity. Then there’s Jaycar and its $59.95 Edimax Wi-Fi Bridge that connects with the Internet and up to five devices, such as games consoles, Blu-ray players and others. Altronics market the Moviedock and Noontec ranges of media players. The $50 Moviedock A3IIS HD Media Player supports USB, HD and cards plus an Internet link, while the $86.50 Moviedock A3S HD Media Player has slots for USB sticks and SD/MMC cards. Altronics’ Noontec $50 NAS Media Centre Gigalink unit offers hard drive support as well as USB sticks and the $95 Noontec V7S HD model offers a USB port, card slot and external hard drive connectivity. The Noontec A6S model has similar specs and costs $115. The Noontec V972 Dual Tuner HD PVR takes the game further, with an in-built dual tuner, HD support, USB and card slots and WiFi and retails for $199. The $149 Noontec V9S model has slots for hard drive and USB slots. PIRACY, ILLEGAL DOWNLOADS AND COPYRIGHT – WHERE DO YOU STAND? You often see comment about “piracy”, “copyright” and “illegal downloads” raised in the popular press, particularly where new movies (some not even released in Australia) or popular TV series (held back in Australia mainly for ratings purposes) are downloaded from overseas via the net. But what makes these downloads illegal? It must be understood that the owners of the film or program, or those who are licenced to release it locally, have quite clearly-defined rights under copyright law. If they want to geographically restrict distribution or even withhold availability completely, they are perfectly within their rights to do so. Even if the film or program on the net which you can get access has been placed there legitimately (unlikely – it has quite possibly been sourced illegally) you are breaking copyright – and the law – if the owner says you can’t download it. There is no excuse under copyright law for those who say “well, it shouldn’t have been held back here because people have a right to watch it”. No they don’t, not if the 28  Silicon Chip owner or licencee say they don’t! The owners/distributors have every right to do what they want – it’s their property! There is no real difference in bringing a DVD of an unreleased movie back from overseas and making copies to flog off at markets, online, etc. It is illegal! Downloading from paid sources (part of the fee you pay goes to the owners) or from archives where copyright has expired or has been released is quite a different matter – and this is what this article is all about. As far as sites like “YouTube” are concerened, it’s a bit hit-and-miss. While a lot of content is uploaded by commercial organisations as part of their marketing efforts, a huge variety of content is actually copyrighted material and strictly speaking, shouldn’t be there. Much of it has been uploaded by (well-meaning?) YouTubers without any permission to do so. The fact that you can download something from a website does not imply that you legally may! SC siliconchip.com.au