Robert Parker & Charlie Rose

You miss the nuance of seeing Parker speak if you just read the transcript. He's a pretty sharp guy, quite articulate, and passionate about fine wines. Worth a look at the video.

Tom S

If you tell us where to get it in Europe, you're da man, man!

M.

Hmm, I doubt that you'll be seeing it on the air there anytime soon - but I could burn off a copy and mail it to Ian for you folks in Europe to pass around. It won't be PAL, so you'd have to play it on your computer.

Tom S

If we've GOT to post upside down.

Like NSTC but for the rest of the world except France.

Salut/Hi Richard Neidich,

le/on Thu, 17 Feb 2005 14:29:00 GMT, tu disais/you said:-

Beautiful idea - thank you in advance!

M.

I have rendered it to VCD. All I have to do is mail it. :^)

Tom S

Hmm - sorry, what's VCD? If that's audible by 5 years old PCs, than go ahead (use the reply button to get my e-mail-adress).

Well, wait a minute, how many megs in that file?

M.

Tom

Is it possible to upload it somewhere where we can download it. I'm guessing that it's about 500MBs?

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Ok, ok - I'm not a video/movie addict. Forgeddaboutit ...

M.

I did not capture that interview. Hopefully I can explain a little more about the format issues, or perhaps confuse it even more, as someone might want to record something concernig wine in the future.

First, I only record video to DVD. The price of blank discs has dropped to well under US$1 when you buy them in 100 lots, and they hold over 4 GB, while a CD video format holds well under 1 GB. Double layer discs now used for many commercial DVD movies are now available as blanks for burning, but they still are expensive. You can get 1 hour of top quality video on a single layer disc and about 2 hours on a double layer disc. You can compress to double these playing times without much loss of quality on many video sources.

First you have to capture the movie as a mpeg-2, and this requires either a special internal or external capture device for the computer. I use the ADS Instant DVD+DV device to capture either analog video or digital video from camcorders. Your connect the audio and video outputs of a satellite TV receiver or what other type of video device you have to the input of the capture device. The capture device, if external, connects to the computer with either a USB2 or firewire cable. You can control capture of the video in many ways using the computer screen as a monitor. The needed capture software comes with the capture device. Assuming you have a DVD burner on the computer, you next need a program to convert the mpeg-2 to standard DVD video format and to burn it to a blank DVD. Both the Nero 6 ultra edition and Roxio 7 media program sets will do this, and I have used both. Both allow you to select either PAL or or the format we use in the US and in Japan. I would have no way of knowing if a PAL DVD that I produced worked on a conventioal stand alone DVD player, since mine plays only the standard US format. Also a few DVDs recorded on a computer will not play on a few DVD players - mainly older ones. For those who need to play TV in several formats, there are converters for this and the price for them is much less than in the past.

Commercial DVDs are another matter. Most are protected in several ways, even if you have a disc in the right format for your DVD player and TV. They often are encrypted to avoid both digital and analog duplication. Also they have regional codes and will play only on DVD players sold in a region with the same code. This allows movie companies great control in how they release movies and DVDs in various countries. And of course hackers have completely cracked all of this protection and supply free programs to do it on a computer from servers out of the reach of Hollywood lawyers.

My mailbox is always full to avoid spam. To contact me, erase snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net from my email address. Then add snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com . I do not check this box every day, so post if you need a quick response.

Way too many for me to e-mail it! About 400 MB. Not to worry though; a copy on VCD is on its way to Ian as of yesterday.

Tom S

I have my own ways of doing that. I recorded the Parker interview from a terrestrial HDTV broadcast onto the hard drive of my DVD deck, dubbed it to a DVD-RAM disk, slotted that into my computer, rendered the VRO file to VCD format and burned it to a CD. I _could_ have simply copied it to DVD-R in the first place, but that may or may not have been readable in Europe. I _know_ the VCD will play.

Tom S

That's about right, but I don't want to do anything that may encourage the Feds to come knocking on my door.

I wonder if there's a Bit Torrent site carrying it?

Tom S

It was suggested to put the video up on the web. Like Tom, I would not want to put a complete recent program up on a site for the general public because of copyright issues-at least in the US. PBS might not be as aggressive as movie companies, but I would not care to find out the hard way. However this program could have easily been put up in the wmv format to stream on the WMP player that nearly all recent computers have, or that is free download. Since the important part of this interview is audio, you could use a low bit rate of about 31 K bits/second which would give a small, poor quality image, but decent sound. The complete wmv you put up on the server probably would be under

20 MB in this case and would be viewable as streaming video that starts nearly at once on even a good 56K dialup connection. The Windows Media Encoder needed to generate the streaming wmv files for the web is a free download from Microsoft. Real also has a free encoder for Real audio and video files.

My mailbox is always full to avoid spam. To contact me, erase snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net from my email address. Then add snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com . I do not check this box every day, so post if you need a quick response.

For those of you who have not seen the video, RMP Jr aka the Pope of Parkton, seemed more relaxed then in his previous Rose interview as did Rose who in the earlier interview almost wet his drawers over the 2000 Bordeaux vintage. Bob was always a subtle self promoter from the time I first met him in 1978 or so, but I believe he has accepted his noteriety more in the last few years then before and that was reflected in the interview. He is no longer "the new kid on the block" fighting for confirmation from the British wine community or the French propriators/merchants. He has set a proactive style of consumer-oriented criticism and created a possesed band of cork-dorks and acolytes among consumers who are at best an annoyance to local merchants. There are many who take the Wine Advocate scores and commentary in the way it was meant as a guide, but there are those who become frenetic in their search for 95+ point wines and insistence that they imbibe nothing less rated. None of this seems to faze Parker, in private, and as he showed in the Rose piece he still is mildly amused by his ascendency to fame and fortune. How awful would our hobby be if he were as heavy handed as the Wine Spectator or as dense to Americans as Michael Broadbent?