‘GLOW’ Is the Past and the Future of Women’s Wrestling
Phil Nelson An excellent review and historical contextualizing of Netflix’s new Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling show, by Mairead Small Staid for the Ringer.
Netflix App now available For iOS
For the price of an $8.99/month Netflix account, you can now carry the service in your pocket. If you’re in the US, that is.
Fix Netflix “Watch Instantly” Audio Volume With Audio Hijack
If you’re a user of Netflix’s Watch Instantly service you’ve no doubt come upon at least a couple videos that are too quiet to hear without straining, even with your speakers cranked. Mac users: Fear not. The audio-twisting protozoans at Rogue Amoeba have an app called Audio Hijack Pro, the Swiss-army knife of Mac system audio. In addition to letting you record audio from any Mac OS X application (while it is running), it also allows you to apply various effects to the live audio stream. Obviously, in order to use Audio Hijack, you have to download it. Do so.
1. Open Audio Hijack
Audio Hijack has a lot of settings and switch, and it’s user interface may seem a little abstract to the first-time user. What we’re going to do only takes three clicks, though. First, select Safari from the pane on the left side of the screen. Then click “Hijack” in the top left of the window. Audio Hijack may ask you to restart Safari. Next click the Effects tab in the right panel. Your screen will look like this:
The one we’re interested in is turning up the Gain, which will actually pump the Audio coming from Safari up over the “100%” system limit. For now, though, you have to load up your movie on Netflix.
2. Start Playing The Movie on Netflix
I’ll assume you now how to do this, otherwise you wouldn’t even know if you had a problem with quiet audio. While the movie is playing, switch back to Audio Hijack. This was we can tweak the audio in real time, to get the right volume.
3. Pump Up The Volume
Click the slider on the Gain control in the top left of the Effects window shown in the picture above. Drag it to the right to pump up the volume, up to a maximum of 238%. That should be plenty for any quiet Netflix movie.
Due to the general awesomeness of Audio Hijack, this trick works for ANY application in OS X.
Turning down Netflix
Netflix refuses copyright holder’s request to stream her film without DRM. Nina Paley (the filmmaker) owns the film outright. There are no rights issues whatsoever. I believe the issue here is related to this culture we have where we assume everyone is a criminal. It’s actually more work for Netflix to let people watch a movie without digitally encrypting it than it is to just encrypt everything. I doubt Netflix’s service was designed to even support sending a movie in the clear, without DRM. It’d probably cost them tens of thousands of dollars to modify it.
Either that, or Netflix thinks their job is protecting copyright holders from themselves. Must be hard, knowing what’s best for everyone.
The Netflix Prize Has A Winner
The two leading teams BellKor in BigChaos and Pragmatic Theory combined their talents to push over the 10% finish line. $1 million split 7 ways still sounds pretty damn good. Netflix also allows the winners to sell their algorithms to anyone else they like.
As Shawn Medero points out, the other teams have 30 days in which to submit their solutions, as well.
Blockbuster Is Circling The Drain
In a letter to the SEC, Blockbuster expressed “substantial doubt” about its “ability to continue.”
Meanwhile, Netflix’s stock has doubled in the last 6 months.