While ravenous fans stood in line eagerly awaiting their first glimpse into the newly constructed universe freshly spewed from director George Lucas, I was eagerly awaiting something far different. After watching “The Matrix” debut on the Internet merely 3 days following it’s theatrical debut I predicted that “Episode I” would follow suite. Sure enough, 3 days had passed and a server in Alaska (which previously offered “The Matrix”) distributed “Episode I” in it’s full screen glory. It was a digital treat only for the bandwidth elite. With a running time of 2.5 hours “Episode I” weighs in at a whopping 1.2GB’s. Even with an ISDN line (2 B’s nailed up for 128 kb/s) we’re still talking about 100 hours of download time. (This is where I evilly grin at anyone who hasn’t figured out cable modem rocks) Even my cable modem was pegged out (around 560kb/s) for quite a while. This gave me ample time to research some of the technology that made these wonders of binary possible.

The filenames that were screaming down my cat5 were .bi and .cue files. The .bin files are analogous to .iso files. They are (binary) images of a CD-ROM. The .cue files are simply index files (in readable ASCII) which provide layer and time index information. The movie image is broken up over 2 files, the first of which has finished writing itself to my harddrive. A cursory search for a conversion tool pulls up VCDgear. VCDgear is a wonderfully low-cost (ok it’s freeware) tool that converts the file into a viewable .mpg file. It can even fix bad sectors in case the file experienced some degradation during transmission.

VCD (Video CD) is a fairly new format for storing multimedia on disc. A lot of people out there feel that it should replace the more expensive DVD format. The technical facts are that DVD holds a much higher quality, but VCD is much, MUCH cheaper because of it’s inexpensive media (CD’s). On average a VCD can store 72 minutes of video on a standard CD. For more information please check out the following links:

VCD’s are definitely on a roll now as they gather more and more movies. A recent release list shows over 30 movies including: Replacement Killers, Great Expectations, Hercules, Air Force One, and about 1000 different Asian porn films. My next big predication is of course South Park which has somehow escaped me even a week after it’s debut… someone’s gotta have it by now…