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Fifth Element still rocks, so does Boxee

Last night we watched The Fifth Element again rather than waste time on the Oscars, and I do not regret that decision. The Fifth Element is stunning and spectacular, and I finally got to hear the Dolby Digital surround soundtrack as some recent EBay acquisitions all work together (our copy of the movie is on LaserDisc, and we needed a LaserDisc Player able to detect the AC-3 encoding and send it out over RF modulation; an external RF demodulator, and a receiver able to read the Dolby Digital stream and break it into 5.1 surround sound).

In other news, Hulu, under pressure from it’s big media corporate owners, caved to their petulant demands and made Boxee remove Hulu streams of television content. It appears that the big media owners of the shows do not want you seeing their advertising on your television, but it is ok if you see that same advertising on a computer. They are clueless, for we simply plugged our laptop into our TV (micro-DVI adaptor to S-Video, then S-Video into the receiver for up-conversion to 720p HDMI/DVI to the TV) and watched the episode of Dollhouse we missed Friday night because the old DishPVR keeps having internal conflicts with it’s own programming.

Boxee on our AppleTV remains an awesome way to watch television, even without Hulu (which amounts to even without some networks).

A word of advice to big media conglomerates: we will watch the television we like to watch on any damn screen we want to, you simply have no control over that. Your futile attempts to block that activity will fail, and only make the piracy option (commercial free) more and more attractive by comparison.

The irony is, that via ordinary feed and PVR/DVR I can watch my shows without commercials on any TV I like. But when the PVR fails, and I go to your website to watch the show – I see commercials. If you make it hard to do that I’ll be forced to use pirated copies to catch the few shows I miss on PVR; but those will also be without commercials. Seems to me that if you want us to watch your damned annoying ads, you’ll make it trivially easy to watch your shows with embedded ads – as we are too damned lazy to pirate when the show is available.

Put your feeds back on Boxee or something else that makes this easy.

Oh – a little gem was on the PVR last night, Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations show had a very funny episode on Food Porn!

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