Kuniyoshi exhibition of 19th century Japanese prints, Royal Academy, London.

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/kuniyoshi/

It’s a truism that Japanese prints were a precursor of modern manga.  In fact these prints do not look much like modern manga at all.  Modern manga designs are drawn at high speed and are meant to be assimilated in a few seconds as the reader stands on a crowded train or suchlike. The most striking thing about the Kuniyoshi prints, particularly those of warriors, is the riot of finely drawn detail they contain. So much so that one can stand  before a print for a minute or more just trying to take in what one is looking at. Are there three figures there? No, four..five!

It is surprising to learn that the prints were made under conditions of severe censorship imposed by the Shogunate.  At various times pictures of warriors later than 1570 were banned (politically sensitive), as were pictures of ladies of the evening (immoral), and kabuki actors (morally unsound).  Much ingenuity was expended in getting around these regulations. The prints of bijin (beautiful women) are easier to comprehend, as are the scenes of pleasure-boats and suchlike.  Faces are stylised, but in a different way to that commonly seen in modern manga, where the faces, and particularly the eyes, reflect the influence of 20th-century American cartoons.

However there are features in common that one can point to to that link the prints with modern manga (and anime).  The prints have writing on them - sometimes quite a lot of text.  Subjects and treatments appear that are repeated in modern manga. There’s a print in the exhibition of some comic octopi - see the opening credits  of “Natsu no Arashi”  or the print of a horrible spider attacking from above (reminiscent of many a horror anime) and the print of a fight on a rooftop - reminiscent of more than one anime (including Urusai Yatsura, IIRC).

I found the exhibition very worthwhile, and having spent all that money to travel there and get in, I also bought the catalogue, which has all the prints and a lot of explanatory text.

I pulled this off the shelf at random to watch again. It’s a 12-episode TV series from 2003,  later made available in the US by Geneon, and there is also a related movie (or OVA) series “Kara no Kyoukai” from 2007.

While some old series turn out not to have stood the test of time, this series seems even better on second viewing than I remembered. The orphaned Shiki returns to live with what remains of his family, but finds that unpleasant and frightening events are happening around him.    Shiki is not quite what he seems, or even who we thought he was, and the same applies to several other characters, that is, they’re not quite human.

In particular Shiki becomes involved with the white vampire Arcued, who insists that Shiki killed her and chopped her into 17 pieces. Indeed Shiki has a strange ability to see “lines” and when he cuts along these lines with his knife, things fall apart.

Shiki is put under severe stress. His schoolmates note a change in him, but obviously he can’t tell them the truth. He is terrified by the situations Arcueid leads him into, and in his new home he has to resort to sneaking out at night to meet Arcueid and evade the watchful eyes of his beautiful but severe sister, Akiha. The growing relationship between Arcueid and Shiki is well-handled, and the dialog, delivered by some fine voice-actors , makes this unlikely relationship the more believable.  For once, it’s played as a straight drama, with little or no attempt to over-egg it  or inject humour.

The least succesful characters are the ordinary school students, who appear sketchily defined and irritating.

Many people want to convert their old videotapes to DVD or other digital format, but straightforward advice of the form “Buy this, do that and you get this result” are either lacking or so hard to find that many just give up in confusion.

I won’t pretend that this is the definitive guide, but it should point you in the right direction to get started.

Copy to DVDR using set-top DVD recorder I’ve done this and so could you.  A hard disc/DVD recorder makes the work easier. Typically you can copy one or two tapes onto each DVDR, depending what recording quality you select. Commercial tapes are often copy-protected, though!  If you chapter the recording and make a menu, this adds a lot of labour time to the project. Nothing to stop you copying the MPEG-2 recording from a DVD-RW into a computer and processing it further, but expect significant machine time and labour time.

Capture into computer and process into required final format: I’ve trialled this using a capture device.  You can use a TV tuner card, external PC-TV tuner, a DV camcorder, or a dedicated capture device. Once you have the capture device installed, you do have some flexibility and choice in what software you use to control it.  I suggest you use Windows Movie Maker for Windows XP (NOT the Vista version) to begin with.  The obvious target is to burn the video to DVD-Video format. So you need to capture the video without noticeable quality loss, and then reconvert the file into  the final DVD-Video format for burning. I trialled this using WMM to capture a file at 640×480, bit rate 2079KBPS (15 mb/min), and then using NeroVision Express (came bundled with my DVD-burner) to reconvert it and burn it to a DVD, with menu. It worked, and the result isn’t notably worse than the original tape. It was a 2-minute clip and the process and burn time (on a slow 1.7 Ghz Celeron PC) was far in excess of 2 mins.

Note: Some capture devices default to 720×576 which IIRC is intended for files destined for DVD-video.

Capture and convert to final compressed format in real-time: This is what I’m trying to develop, and this is what you should look at if you have hundreds of tapes to convert.  Otherwise, by the time you capture them , reprocess them beautifully, burn them to DVD, watch them through, and file them in jewel cases with individually printed labels, you’ll probably have died of old age first.

I’ve used WMM and two different USB 2.0 capture devices to convert 75-min videotapes to a single file intended to be stored on computer media.   Using Windows Movie Maker, File format: .wmv file, Video Proc Amp brightness 119, Audio = Dazzle DVC90 Audio Device, Video Input Source = Composite, Audio Input Source = Microphone (sic.), Audio Input level slider at 50%, “High Quality Video Large” 640×480 pixels, Variable Bit rate. Actual usage about 10MB/min with animated cartoon.   The result is not notably worse than the original, even with the original tape and the digital recording played side by side in sync. Update 31 May 2009 - have transferred some 140 VHS tapes using this method.

I’ve just bought a “Easycap USB 2.0 Video adapter” - a Chinese-made device available from various places for a mere £12 ($20?) or so. It has had positive reviews - except from people who clearly couldn’t figure how to make it work!
The price was too low to resist, so I got one just to check it out and compare with a Dazzle DVC90 which I borrowed.
You have to follow the installation instructions exactly, i.e. install the driver from the CD before plugging in the device, and then plug in the device to complete the software installation. It then appears in the System hardware panel like a sensible device should.
You don’t have to use the Ulead Video Studio supplied - in fact you can control the Easycap with any capture or movie-making software you like.  I tried Amcap,  VirtualDub and  Windows Movie Maker.
I’d recommend using Windows Movie Maker  if you’re a non-expert as it  offers a range  of settings in a format that the average idiot can  understand. The Easycap spec says that it supports NTSC 720×480 @30fps and PAL 720×576 @ 25fps.
I got it to record,  in:
uncompressed, over 1GB of storage per minute (with Amcap)
640×480 PAL, 2079kbps, 15 mb/min storage (.wmv file)
640×480 PAL, 1.5mbps, 10 mb/min storage
320×240 PAL, 3.7mb/min storage
Tha last 3 with Windows Movie Maker (.wmv), with sound from the USB.
All of these gave a viewable result - I’d suggest trying them all and using the setting that suits your requirement.
I  tried a 75minute run. It didn’t crash and the sound stayed in sync. (Usually there’s no sound on preview. If you don’t get sound on playback of your digitized recording,  you need to fiddle with some settings).
I’m not sure what the hardware encoding is doing. It’s supposed to work with low-power PCs (Pentium III 800 and above), but I used a Pentium IV 2.8GHz, 500MB ram 40 GB hard-disk, and it was going flat-out in some of the tests. I don’t know what  process was soaking up all that power.

Verdict: quality is quite adequate for a basic device, with performance comparable to the Pinnacle. Most noticeable difference is that the Easycap clips the right hand side of the sceeen, whereas the Dazzle clips the left side, but to a lesser extent. Usability is good. Unbeatable value for money?

Rideback is one of the more interesting of the winter season anime. Rin Ogata, a college student and former ballet dancer, discovers the college “Rideback” club one rainy day. Ridebacks are a kind of cross between motorcycle and robot. Rin is persuaded to have a go on a red “Fuego” Rideback to pass the time, and discovers that she has a natural affinity for controlling these machines, and that she finds it thrilling.

Politically, she lives in a world controlled by the GGP, who (we are told) are an obscure group who have suddenly conquered the world by the use of advanced military technology. They face some opposition in Japan from a group using terrorist tactics, who also use Ridebacks for their missions.

Soon Rin is racing against a much more experienced female club member, and matching her. She is entered for a national race, but using a less highly modified Rideback, the “Balon” which she doesn’t get on with so well. Afterwards, she uses “Fuego” to rescue her friend from a terrorist attack, in spectacular fashion.

I felt that the weakest part of this so far is the political stuff.  Clearly a major objective of the story is to get a nice-looking girl riding a cool piece of machinery, but the political background lacks some credibility.  To take over the whole world the GGP would have needed some very impressive weaponry and the strategic skill to use it, but we haven’t been shown it so far, and they just look like the usual totalitarian regime.

I’m also following:

Toradora! but the script seems (episodes 19,20) to be running out of steam. In episode 19 there is a lot of random and somewhat pointless action, and there is little sign that the scriptwriters are going to get a grip and resolve the relationships between the characters.  Nevertheless I like the small and furious Taiga Aisaka, the caring Ryūji Takasu, the redhaired and changeable Minori Kushieda, and the tall, clever and gorgeous teen model Ami Kawashima. This series seem set to end in some disappointing and infantile way. Could it be that the “light novels” this is based on are also disappointing and infantile?

Maria-sama ga Miteru 4th: Back on form again with a uniformly interesting 4th series.  Sachiko has charged Yumi with finding someone to be her younger ’sister’, but will it be Kanoko, Touko, or someone else? At episode 6, Yumi seems little nearer to making her mind up.

I also downloaded “Macross - do You Remember Love” Curious to see this 25-year old movie again; I first saw it at an anime convention, and later got a dub release of it (possibly as “Clash of the Bionoids”) M-DYRL is a an alternate retelling of the events of the original Macross television series, with new animation. Super Dimension Fortress Macross, to give it its full title, is a huge space ship that can transform itself for battle to something that looks more like a giant robot. The film revolves around three chief characters, Hikaru Ichijyo (a hot-shot pilot), coquettish pop-star Lynn Minmay, and the Fortress’ first mate Misa Hayase.

Sora wo kakeru shoujo (The Girl who Leapt Through Space) is a light space fantasy/comedy about a schoolgirl who resists an attempt by her family to marry her off to somebody she has never met, by embarking on an adventure involving a deserted space-colony controlled by a talking computer. On the whole I’d rather watch Macross DYRL.

Also checked: Genji Monigatari Sennenki - an anime adaptation of the famous Japanese classic writings. Gorgeous to look at, and the first episode is unexpectedly full of sex and sensuality.  Kurozuka first episode set in the historic Heian era, I think - fleeing noble is given refuge by a beautiful but blood-thirsty immortal.  Gorgeously animated, but have the feeling that the plot goes rapidly downhill as it goes rapidly future-wards.  Michiko to Hatchin is set in South America (where real-life Japanese settlers have a small foothold). Poorhouse girl being graphically and grossly mistreated by a selfish family of bourgeoisie who have “rescued” her is reclaimed by  her gun-toting criminal mother, who in a keynote scene arrives crashing through the window on a motorcycle. Looks like a lot of fun.

Over the winter I have been reading several books related to Germany and World War 2.
The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940 1945 by J Friedrich. This is about the destruction of German cities by aerial bombing, and from a German point of view. It reveals quite a number of facts that make uncomfortable reading today. The destruction by the end of the war was remarkably complete, with no German city or town of any size escaping destruction, and in most cases suffering the destruction of something like 75% of the buildings. Many towns and cities were so shattered that they had almost ceased to exist. Civilian casualties were correspondingly high. The author describes the suffering of the bombed population, and rather pointedly, town by town, describes the fine or historic buildings that existed pre-war and were destroyed in the bombing. There was little pretence at precision bombing of military targets; at first, area bombing was all that was possible, and when it proved singularly destructive, area fire-bombing was refined, and if the primary target was masked by bad weather, a secondary target of no military importance would do, or failing that, anything German.

The cost to the attacking airforces in men and material was also high. And for what? The fire-bombing was designed to break civilian morale, and in this it signally failed, just as it failed in Britain.  In the latter, post-Normandy phase of the war, when the bomber fleets went increasingly unchallenged, the raids were supposed to encourage the German troops and civilians to surrender, but, as the author points out, they lived in a totalitarian state, and it is very difficult to surrender to an air force…

(No wonder the British and American governments have been unwilling to condemn the recent Israeli bombing of Gaza in forthright terms.)

After the Reich by Giles MacDonogh. This is a massive 600-page book about what happened in the German territories after the end of the war in Europe. The dying didn’t stop in May 1945, when Germany surrendered, and things didn’t start to get better till around 1948.

3.6 million homes had been destroyed, leaving 7.5 million homeless. As many as 16.5 million Germans were to be driven from their homes, and some two and a quarter million would die during the expulsions from the south and east. The victorious Russians seized eastern territories from Poland, and gave to the Poles large tracts of eastern Germany, lands such as East Prussia that lie now deep within 21th century Poland. The nine million Germans living here were driven out of their homes, beaten, robbed and starved. Tens of thousands of those trying to flee died in refugee ships sunk by the Russian forces in the Baltic. Others died when trying to escape across the sea-ice. Others died of starvation while waiting for permission to travel westwards. It was a similar picture in the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia.  The ethnic Germans were forced to flee to Germany, but not before the victorious Czechs had rounded them up into unofficial concentration camps, where they were beaten up, robbed, starved and sometimes killed.

In the Soviet-held territories, Russian soldiers raped and robbed at will, and in the French sectors the French colonial troops were equally energetic rapists. Everywhere, mobs of hungry and homeless former prisoners and slave workers took revenge against the Germans. The victorious Allies were slow to take control and restore order, and were more interested in apportioning blame and sorting out the more guilty from the less guilty in a wide-sweeping “de-Nazification” process.  The prevailing feeling was that the German people as a whole deserved to be punished, and as is well known a number of prominent Nazis were tried and sentenced at Nuremburg. In the West, the Allied troops were given orders forbidding “fraternisation”. In the Soviet sector, rape and looting were tolerated at the highest  level, right up to the Kremlin. Soviet troops stole anything that took their fancy, being particularly attracted to watches, gramophones and bicycles. Much German factory machinery was removed, particularly in the Soviet sector.

Meanwhile the Germans starved and shivered among the rubble. In any case, with the most fertile farmlands under Soviet occupation, there wasn’t enough food in Europe to feed them. Mostly, it was not the criminals who were raped, starved, tortured or bludgeoned to death, but women, children and old men.  And despite the trials, quite a number of nasty Nazi war criminals escaped any punishment.

A striking feature of the book is the personal stories of individual Germans caught up in the aftermath of the war. Collectively, they paid a terrible price for having lived in Hitler’s Reich.

Reading the whole 600 pages, and the accounts of what happened to individual Germans, one cannot help but feel that this is a second holocaust that has been largely unknown to history, and that if it hadn’t been for two events: (1) the war and (2) the Jewish Holocaust, the fate of the German populations would have been the cause of some international outcry. As it was, they paid a terrible price for living in Hitler’s Reich.

Also received:

World War Two BEHIND CLOSED DOORS by Laurence Rees.  This book accompanies a six-part BBC documentary series.  This is a well-written and revealing book about the Allied leaders’ dealings with the Soviet leader, Stalin.  British readers may recollect that the trigger for Britain declaring war on Germany was the German invasion of Poland.  A few days earlier the Germans and the Soviets, formerly ideological enemies, had concluded a treaty of convenience. Rees explains the reasons why they did this. There had been feelers from the West about a possible treaty with the Soviet Union, but Stalin saw little point in making a treaty with unsympathetic nations. And two weeks after the Germans invaded Poland,  the Soviets invaded Poland from the east. Their occupation had all the usual features of Soviet rule: terror, the pretence of coming to liberate, the destruction of the monied and educated classes, arbitrary arrests, mass murder, deportations, pillage, and the devaluing of the Polish zloty.

So did we declare war on the Soviet Union in defence of Poland? No we didn’t, because Britain had little enthusiasm for a war with the Soviet Union. There was also a secret treaty with the Poles that limited Britain’s obligation to defending them against attack from Germany.  And did the conclusuion of WW2 leave Poland at liberty? No it didn’t; in common with the rest of Eastern Europe, the Poles endured another four decades of tyranny.

In 1941, however, Hitler found it expedient to break his treaty and mount a blitzkreig invasion of the Soviet nion. Stalin ignored warnings that an invasion was imminent, but later stalled the Nazi advance with his characteristic determination and brutality.

Rees criticises Churchill and Roosevelt for their poor handling of meetings with the Soviet leader. Stalin made demands for an immediate second front in Europe, and for massive shipments of war supplies, niether of which Britain could readily accomplish.

In the Ruins of the Reich - Douglas Botting. An earlier work, one of the sources mentioned in “After the Reich.”

A Strange Enemy People - Germans under the British 1945-50 by Patricia Meehan. An earlier work, one of the sources mentioned in “After the Reich”.

Postwar - a history of Europe since 1945 by Tony Judt. Massive 900-page volume giving the political, social and economic history of Europe from 1945-2005. ‘A masterpiece of schloarship’.

Thought it would be a neat idea to install the Media Center Edition OEM on the PC I put together myself for multimedia purposes. So I bought the OEM and had a go at installing it. Turned out not to be such a great idea, so be warned.

OEM means for original equipment manufacturers, so it’s assumed that you know what to do with the software, which includes the following:

How to install it, which isn’t as simple as you might think (now that I’ve warned you, you can Google for details). Get it wrong, and you’ll find that the Media Center interface doesn’t install, and Internet Explorer and Media Player are hidden.

It comes on two CDs, or on one DVD - the DVD may throw up a request during installation for the 2nd CD if you haven’t followed the instructions!

It’s rather fussy about hardware; for instance if you thought it would work with a ATI Radeon 7000 video card you’ll soon find out your mistake. The drivers can still be installed but WMC will have nothing to do with the “Catalyst” utility. (though I did find a free download that went in the toolbar and did a much better job of controlling the TV-out.)

It is incompatible with the BBC’s iplayer download (the 2008 regular version). Heck knows why; the similar 4OD works just fine.

My advice is, unless you have some good reason for using WMC and know how to make up a complete hardware/software package that will work, give it a miss and use Windows XP Pro instead.  You should be able to get XP Pro to do what you want.  If a certain Ebay retailer is to believed, you can even get a freeware Media Center-like interface.

FYI one of the MS Vista editions incorporates Media Center functions, or so I’m told.

I’ve been enjoying Toradora!, Nodame Cantabile Paris Chapter, Eve no Jikan, and Kannagi. Sampled some others which I didn’t pursue.

Kannagi is another boy-meets-magical-girl anime. That said, it’s a delightful series. The hero carves a figure of a girl out of an old tree-trunk which came from the site of a shrine. He is shocked when the carving disintegrates and in its place appears an attactive girl, Nagi, who seems to be a manifestation of the shrine-goddess Kannagi. In time-honoured fashion, Nagi comes to live with him. The resulting complications are well handled, and are much to do with finding out who exactly Nagi is, a subject about which she herself seems vague. And she’s an appealing character, whih long hair, long legs and a white swishy miniskirt which probably absorbed much of the animation budget… There’s quite a lot of mild fanservice here.

Just had the disagreeable experience of setting up an Orange “Livebox” wireless modem/firewall/router.

The box does work, but the experience is much more trying than it might be if some extra information was provided.

Prompts for firewall to be turned off: Turn off firewall, and also uninstall Adobe Flash 9, Flash 10, and anything else you think might be causing it.

Network Settings for computer connected with wired cable: in case of setup troubles, set them to the final setting of “Obtain IP address automatically” & “Obtain DNS server address automatically”

You should be able to get to the setup via a new Orange icon on the desktop. In case of bother, note that the Livebox setup address is 192.168.1.1

In case you are wondering, the setup username and password are admin/admin. You could I presume change them to something less obvious.

If you have a network switch, you could plug it into the Yellow network port (or the Red, if you have removed the setup cable) on the Livebox. Any computers connected to the switch can then use the Livebox broadband connection.  They can also browse shared files on the computer used for the set-up. Whether all the other computers can see each other seems to be another story. 

Addendum: I’ve been using the Livebox as a wired router/firewall for several days and find it works well. It seems that one is expected to leave it on all the time & connected to the Internet while the computers are in use. As soon as the computers are turned on and allowed to boot up, they have a live Internet connection. (just like the computers at work). It works with Linux clients too.

–

I had a reason for setting up ICS (wanted to connect a modem-less Linux PC to the Internet) so had a go at setting it up.

There’s no shortage of advice on the Internet, starting with microsoft.com and continuing around sundry forums and websites. It’s not so easy to find out exactly what to do for one’s particular hardware, and rather a lot of the advice is biased towards one particular solution, rather than explaining what range of solutions should work.

First, ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) is a scheme whereby one computer, equipped with a modem or suchlike device, provides a connection to the Internet and shares it with other computers via a local network.

Here’s what I found worked:

Used a computer running Windows XP Pro SP2 as the host. This computer had in effect two network ports; one connected to the Internet via USB2 ADSL modem, and the other, RJ45 port, connected to a wired 100MB network via a 5-port switch.

Ran the ICS setup wizard on the host. This sets up the host on a workgroup MSHOME  with IP address 192.168.0.1

Made the wizard’s floppy disk and used it to set up a Win98 client computer and a WinXP client computer as follows: workgroup MSHOME,  LAN addresses acquired automatically (DHCP), Internet addresses acquired automatically (DHCP)

Manually configured two Linux clients with LAN addresses acquired automatically (DHCP), Internet addresses acquired automatically (DHCP)

Turned off the ZoneAlarm software firewall on the host. Turned on the Windows XP firewall and added an exception for Port 80 on the local network. (This allows HTTP traffic from the clients).

The Linux clients show a Windows network, with workgroup MSHOME, in their file browsers.

Notes: Nowadays most home installations use a physically separate router box rather than using ICS.

Hardly any of the recent advice mentions using wired networks rather than wireless or powerline networking. This is strange - perhaps it is thought that wiring up a wired network with RJ45 terminated cables is too much bother for the home user! In fact, wired networks are no trouble at all once the wires are plugged in, which is more than can be said for wireless. Wireless has well-documented security problems. And sometimes it won’t work at all.  The IT person installed wireless networking in our lab where I work, but after a week or so it all had to be stripped out and replaced with a wired network. The wireless network was useless in an electrically noisy environment.

You might be put off by the idea of drilling cable holes in your home. However there is little in the interior of the average home to resist the determined driller. A power drill will soon put a 3/4″ hole through plasterboard, floorboard, lightweight partitioning or building block (but check where the pipes, joists and power cables go first).  And when you move out, a dab of filler and a lick of paint should make good the holes.

You can change the LAN DNS address from 192.168.0.1 if you want - some say this would improve security. The LAN could use fixed addressing (i.e. 192.168.0.2 etc) instead of DHCP if you want, though I didn’t test this.  One source said that you had to use fixed LAN addressing with Linux clients, but this is clearly untrue.

It is assumed that all the computers on the network have the relevant drivers for TCP/IP networking installed on them…

The free version of Zonealarm is incompatible with ICS - it seems you have to upgrade to the paid-for Pro version.  The Windows XP firewall was OK but only after I set port 80 as an exception for the local network (LAN), naming the exception HTTP80. Port 80 is used for HTTP and the exception allows web browsers on the client to work.

If you poke around in the control panels you can turn on an icon which shows on the XP client toolbar when the host is connected to the internet.

You may notice that time display on the clients is now synchronised to the host.

When it doesn’t work: Check your setup is correct.  Use file-share browsing to check that you can browse from and to all the computers on the network. If you can’t, you have a problem.  If some computers can’t see others or be seen by them, try disabling the local network (in the Windows control panel) and then enabling it. This worked for me in clearing a hangup.

If none of the clients can browse the Internet even though you see indications that it’s connected, try turning off the software firewall (or firewalls!) on the host. If that cures the problem, fix the firewall! Running with no firewall in place is a very bad practice.

It is important that the host computer should have two network ports (e.g. one USB modem and one RJ45 port) otherwise your ISP will get very annoyed about the lack of separation between local and Internet addressing, and may disconnect you.

I have been trialling a Linux distribution called “Mint” (Linux Mint 6 “Felicia”). The plus point about this distribution is that, unlike most Linux distributions, it plays all the filetypes of interest to downloaders of anime, straight out of the box.  For instance it plays .mkv   and .mp4 files.
One can play these files with other Linux distributions, but only after a severe encounter with Linux jargon in the course of finding the required codecs (libxine1) and figuring out how to install them.

As for how well Mint works:  it can be used as a “live CD” or properly  installed to the hard disc.  The live CD operation is extremely slow. Once installed, I found it was still a bit slow and grindy, (however I installed it on a very old and small hard drive so it was not a definitive test.) It did play all the filetypes I tried. However I found an annoying bug in that the network browsing didn’t work. It seems I’m not the only one to find this, and following advice found online, I installed  “fusesmb” and  “smb4k”.   Before  I fired either of these up, however, I found that the network browsing had sprung into life, which left me wondering  if the real issue is that  one has to  double-click on the network  icon to open it, rather than the  single-click which works elsewhere in Linux file browsers.  Another annoying thing about Mint is that there are no helpfiles worth mentioning either in the installation or online! (But it is based on Ubuntu, which has reams of help).

I tried benchmarking just how well my hardware handled anime video files. The details won’t be of great interest to you, unless you are using older PCs, however:
Turns out that SuSE Linux 10.0 uses slightly less processor power for this task than Windows XP, on identical hardware. (a measure of codec efficiency). Mint (on which even the system monitor program consumed a noticeable amount of power) was less efficient than SuSE in my test.
Also these PCs didn’t like larger (i.e. HD) .mkv files, which caused the processor demand to ramp up towards 100% even on the better machine of the two.  Demand on SD .mkv files was a quarter that on HD.

Addendum: The SuSE Linux 10.0 hopefully can be upgraded online and then configured to use the BBC’s beta version iplayer downloader for Linux. Hopefully this will allow programs to be downloaded for later viewing. The Mint Linux, meanwhile, refuses to load either from the hard-disk or the live CD.

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