Godzilla and first world problems.

I grabbed my Godzilla Millenium series DVDs from the folks' place as I was just in the mood to rewatch the lot of them. Problem is they're the cheap Hong Kong versions, not the expensive Japanese ones, which have a problem. It's just the one problem, but most of the DVDs are designed for 4:3 televisions and non-anamorphic. Which on a widescreen telly means you have to watch either in 4:3 with massive borders along all sides, Subtitles which is not quite the coorect aspect ratio, with enough squishing to be annoying, or in proper aspect ratio, which means you can't read two-thirds of the subtitles.

Currently ripping Godzilla X Mechagodzilla to the hard drive to see if my Cyclone Primus V2 can help as it may override the default subtitle placement. If not I may just have to do some very lengthy re-encoding.

I kind of hope with the upcoming seocnd Hollywood go at Godzilla that someone buckles down and releases a decent boxset in the West. There was one in Japan before Final Wars but good luck getting a hold of that. There are five Japanese boxsets of between four and seven movies each, but they range from £86 to £168 quid, which is a bit much.

Sorted, respect due.

So I solved the Godzilla DVD viewing problems using a nice wee program called MakeMKV which rips your DVDs straight to an MKV file without any of that time-consuming video re-encoding. I got the first DVD done and got three others done while i was watching that, so it's quite speedy even on this dilapidated old desktop.

After ripping to MKV the combination of 16:9 on the Cyclone Primus, Cinema on the telly and offsetting the subtitles so they don't disappear off the bottom of the screen and I've got virtually full screen with subs. Joy!

Will also be useful for the podcast if there's a movie only one of us owns on DVD.