On one hand, kick ass body… I think it moved. On the other hand… I think that’s the face of a trucker after a long haul, and I regret posting my first comment. If there’s a god, he’s got a sick sense of humor creating all these women with Longoriaitis. Someone tell the dude in the photo to stick to my 5 rules.
Thanks to HBO-HD, I’ve completed the entire Star Wars franchise (all 6 movies) in HDTV. Presented beautifully in OAR, these screenshots show how well LucasFilm restored these 70’s and 80’s classics. I was never a huge Star Wars fan… I’ve seen all the movies, but you’ll never see me attend one of those conventions dressed up as Darth Vader. In fact, it was playing Lego Star Wars that got me interested again.
More pics below from the series.
Ouch… looks like the owner hydroplaned on a puddle of water and spun out in a ditch. Considering the car costs $1.5m USD, I’ll bet it costs a Ferrari F430 or 2 to fix that.
The french version of F1-Live.com reports that French channel TF1 will be broadcasting the entire 2007 season in 16:9 aspect ratio. I don’t understand french, but using Google translation tools to get as much info as I can, the article reveals that HDTV owners will get a 16:9 image (not sure if it’s 480i SD or actual HDTV) while SD viewers will get a slightly cropped 14:9 image.
Does that mean SD viewers worldwide will get the 14:9 image? In the US, SpeedTV holds the rights for F1 (along with Fox), and SpeedTV doesn’t have a HD channel yet (DirecTV will carry SpeedHD in fall ‘07)… will they get the 14:9 image? And the few races broadcast on Fox (which does have a HD channel), is it 16:9? In Canada, TSN has the rights, and they have a full time HDTV channel, do we get 16:9 for us up north? I’ll start praying to the F1 gods now for some HDTV goodness.
An update to an earlier post, I downloaded the episode as soon as I got home from work yesterday. Thanks to my 10mbps internet connection, as well as fast Microsoft servers, the episode took about 20 minutes to download. We played a few games of Street Fighter 2 Hyper Fighting on XBOX Live Arcade while it was downloading to pass time, and was surprised that it was done so quick (I was 5-0, if anyone cares).
All I have to say is… WOW. Most cartoons don’t look much better in HD compared to ghettovision, but this episode looked amazing. Well, sorta… it looked amazing when they switched to the anime style of animation as shown in the screenshot above. When they were back to the classic style of animation, it was noticably better than the SD counterpart, much more so than other cartoons. I think this has to do with the fact that the later part of the series is done in Maya, so they can pretty much output in *any* resolution they want.
Everyone at my house agreed that it was much more enjoyable in HDTV, crisp sharp images, and best of all… it filled up the entire 16:9 screen real estate. No black bars, no stretchy superfat Cartman. Hopefully, the positive feedback that I’ve seen around the net will strike a deal between Microsoft and Comedy Central, so we can buy episodes on XBOX Live Marketplace. IÂ for one wouldn’t mind paying $5 an episode in HDTV.
The FIA finalized a tire rule change to allow viewers to differentiate between hard and soft compounds (much like ChampCar series). It’s not clear how this will be done, ChampCar uses red sidewalls, whatever they do, it will be clear to trackside spectators as well as TV viewers.
Subsection 4 of Article 25.1B now reads: “(Each tyre specification) must be of one homogenous compound and visibly distinguishable from one another when a car is on the track.”
Another rule change that was implemented for this year is unique coloring of the in-car camera above the airbox so viewers can differentiate between drivers, as some drivers share similar helmet design, making it tough to know who’s who.
