River’s Edge is a 1986 crime drama, staring Keanu Reeves, Crispin Glover, Ione Skye, Daniel Roebuck and Dennis Hopper and is available on iTunes in HD. It was directed by Tim Hunter, who has had a prolific television career with spanning dozens of cult television shows including: Hannibal, Dexter, Mad Men, Deadwood, Homicide: Life on the Street, Eerie Indiana and Twin Peaks. It was written by Highly rated by critics, and a modest success at the box office, the film is unavailable on Blu-ray, so I thought I’d have a look at the iTunes version to see if it worth your time.
Better Closed Caption Decoding in Python
I’ve just pushed out an improved version of my Closed Caption decoder to GitHub. In addition to decoding closed captions to SRT or SCC formats, it includes the following improvements:
- XDS packet decoding
- Improved handling of noisy and non-standard video
- More complete handling of esoteric characters
- Much easy to use in embedded projects due to separation into core library
- A few performance improvements
- Pre-built command line version for windows (PyInstaller generated)
The software is entirely public domain – so feel free to use it in your own projects.
You’ll still need FFMpeg installed – but effortless static builds for windows can be found here. I’ll try and get an OSX binary built in the next few days.
I’d still like to move the project further forwards still – but I really need ‘real-world’ closed-caption samples to make it happen. If you are interested in decoding closed captions, and would like to see this tool improved, please reach out to me: we may be able to help each other.
Witness – Japanese/Italian Blu-ray vs iTunes HD
Witness is a 1985 Amishsploitation-thriller staring Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis and directed by Peter Weir. Three writers share credit: William Kelley, Pamela Wallace and Earl W. Wallace. Winning Oscars for its screenplay and editing as well as opening the Cannes film-festival, and being the eighth highest grossing film in the US in 1985, the film was a commercial and critical success. It is not yet available on Blu-Ray in the US, though international editions (which are basically the same disc) are available. I thought I’d compare the Blu-Ray with the iTunes 1080p edition to see which is worth your time.