Open Mind, Insert Thought

The story starts, as so many good stories do, in Vegas.  Through a magnificent turn of events, I found myself in a suite at the Wynn with the cool (and very hospitable) founders of Sling Media and two of my bandmates from Soul Patch (Ryan and Jason, who also happen to be VCs with Foundry Group, formerly of Mobius).  As a band, Ryan, Jason and I had just taken over the Rockband setup in the suite, played over the plasma mounted in front of those insane floor-to-ceiling gold-tinted windows the Wynn is known for.  We rocked Dani California hard (proud to say I scored 100% for my efforts on vocals!), and given how much we seemed to have loved the game, the guys from Sling had us watch the Guitar Queer-o episode of South Park.  While they were setting everything up to watch the show, I heard "I just grabbed the torrent for this last week."  We watched, and after laughing until I cried, I knew I had to have this episode.

Here’s where the confessional part of the post comes in – I had never before used BitTorrent.  Certainly I knew how the technology worked, but I’d never taken the time to make use of it myself.  So, I grab the BitTorrent-brand BitTorrent client and set about searching for South Park torrents.  Find the one I wanted and fire it up.  This probably means I owe someone somewhere the entire cost of creating every South Park ever in existence, so I’m not sure why I’m writing this.  Anyhow, once I have the finished package all pieced together, I pop it open.  Not a video in site, only .rar files.  Not only had the original been broken into torrent pieces, the original original was broken into a multi-volume RAR archive.  So now I’m off to try to find some shareware to combine these.  WinRAR does the trick and has a free trial period (if I use it ever again, I’ll buy it – fine).  Okey doke, now we’re off and running.  Files are combined and I get a single .wmv out the other end.  But it won’t run – I get sound but no video in Media Player.  Back to the original torrent site, and I’m warned that most of the files here are probably encoded with DivX, but then again maybe another codec is used.  They suggest playing all the files with VLC media player to be sure I have all the codecs needed.  OK, so I download that.  Now it’s working great – on my PC.  But I want to play it in the family room from my Mac Mini (here’s where a Slingbox would come in handy, eh?).  I take a look at the stream info through VLC and, sure enough, I need DivX.  I bring the .wmv over to the Mac Mini (good thing I already have Flip4Mac installed there, which allows QuickTime to play .wmv files), and I grab the DivX codec off their site.  Then – success!  It works!!

I play the episode for Jenni and she laughs until she cries, too.  And I feel like a master of the fractured, incredibly non-user-friendly world of torrents.