Tonight the BBC finally got round to showing Once More With Feeling the musical episode of Buffy. But for some reason they decided to go back on what they had previously said and only showed the 45 minute version. Having previously seen the extended version on Sky, the cuts were very obvious to me.
Luckily for me I just happen to have a MPEG of the full version laying around on a hard disk so I decided to watch that as well to remind me of how good it originally was. As I tried to play it I discovered that somehow in the upgrade from Rehat 7.2 to 8.0 I'd lost my MPEG player app. A couple of minutes at rpmfind and it was reinstalled and I was happily watching the show.
I should have stopped there. But I didn't.
I decided to see if I could find any better MPEG player on the net. I came across VLC which sounded very shiny, so I started downloading RPMs. Of course all of the RPMs i downloaded needed other RPMs installed before I could install them, so it took me about half an hour to track down and install all of the dependencies.
Once I'd done that I found that VLC could play MPEGs, but I was only getting audio. The video was blank. I went back to my orignal MPEG player only to find that I'd infected that with the same disease.
So now I've got about half an hour's worth of RPM installations to back out. That's going to have to wait until tomorrow.
And I still didn't get to see all of Once More With Feeling.
I've yet to have a codec problem with it, though I do find reconfiguring the TV takes too many button presses to get both the audio and visual to display at the same time - though again I think that's a quirk of my setup rather than a fault of the format.
(Though it was a shame they cut the musical style opening with the characters getting ready in the morning).
Re:Once More With Cuts
davorg on 2003-01-03T14:45:05
Can't agree with that I'm afraid. The cut version removes a lot of stuff that I enjoyed - especially Buffy's song What Can't We Face which follows right after I've Got A Theory. It's great largely for the lines:
We have to try
We'll pay the price It's do or die
Hey, I’ve died twice
