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Help me expose my 5yo to Star Wars the proper way.
TheCanMan
GT: Gasman122009JerseyRegistered User regular
GT: Gasman122009JerseyRegistered User regular
I think my oldest son is getting to the point where I think he'd be interested in watching Star Wars and also has the attention span and narrative focus to follow what's going on. But I refuse to expose him to Lucas's bullshit. That seems to leave me with two options. One, I could start perusing thrift shops to buy a VCR and hope that my original VHS tapes haven't disintegrated. Or I can figure out how to burn Harmy's Star Wars Despecialized Edition. I'd rather go for the latter, but I've never burned a movie and don't have any idea what I need to do in order to make a disc that will play on my TV's BluRay player (I'm assuming that's something that's possible, but know so little I'm not even sure about that).
Could someone walk me through the process I need to take and also the equipment/software I need? Will a basic $60 OEM bluray burner be good enough? Is there any free software to accomplish what I want, or is that going to be another expense.
Could someone walk me through the process I need to take and also the equipment/software I need? Will a basic $60 OEM bluray burner be good enough? Is there any free software to accomplish what I want, or is that going to be another expense.
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Otherwise it looks like there's an AVCHD ISO format available, so you can just straight burn that to a disc and it should be playable. Since it's a small enough file you can use a double layer DVD and it will be playable in your bluray player. So if you have an optical dvd drive that has something like "DVD +/- RW DL" on it then you can get a DVD DL disc and burn the file by right clicking on it and selecting burn to disc or something similar. If not then any bluray drive that has write capabilities will allow you to do the same thing to a blurday disc.
edit - for clarification I am assuming you are using windows and that it has some built in capabilities for writing to discs. I'm to lazy to check but I'm pretty sure that's built in to any version of windows past xp, and if not the DVD or Bluray drive typically comes with software that can also burn images (ISO files). Last resort you can grab ImgBurn for free.
double secret edit - My alternate answer is that machete order is the answer you were looking for in your thread title.
And yet (having 2 kids in this age range) ... they fucking love the prequels. Episode 4 is very slow as compared to movies they currently watch.
If you want to expose them to SW, I'd include the Tartakovsky clone wars movie (available on youtube), and the LucasArts Clone wars series. The 1st has very little dialogue, the other series is good, but may not jive with those who are real attached to the original canon.
So there's no special steps where I have to mess with encoding or the codex (two words I have absolutely no understanding of beyond them somehow being related to movie files). I just burn the ISO to a DVD DL disc and it'll play on my Sony Bluray without any further hassles? Awesome.
And I'll definitely be showing them in Machete Order. I'm a bit worried that the flashback might be a bit too confusing for a 5yo, but the benefits are good enough to risk it.
Considering that the 5-7 age bracket is the appropriate audience for things like Arthur, Magic School Bus, Mr. Rodger's Neighborhood, Dora the Explorer, and Veggie Tales I think you are probably jumping the gun for films. Star Wars may be PG, but the other two are PG13. There is literally genocide in the first film.
I love Star Wars, but consider your audience a bit.
This is a very subjective thing. You know your kids best and if you think they can handle it then go for it. I think most very young children who enjoyed it in the very first showings weren't worried about the genocide, they loved the light sabers and space explosions and little green dude. I know I don't show my son anything so insipid and slow I don't enjoy it myself because I'm home with him all day, and he loves looking at the cartoons that many would consider "out of his age range".
tl:dr; Unless you have a really sensitive kid it'll be fine. Also I would totally watch Vaggie Tales.
Ceres is right, as always. When I was a kid Alderaan's blowing up wasn't even really processed over the fun of the flying space ships and lazer swords. I do feel like if you want to introduce a kid to the material probably Rebels is the ideal way to start, since it's targeting the 8-12 age bracket (which your kid may be close enough to to work out) and since it synergies with the later shows more than the earlier ones.
It's also bright, simply plotted, and episodic. All things that help younger viewers comprehend media as they develop.
short version: that's almost certainly all you need, but the older the player is the higher the chances are that it wont work.
long version: "codec" basically stands for compressor/decompressor and is basically the "program" that controls the creation (or rather compression of an existing raw video file) and playback of video/audio files. You can only playback a video/audio file with the same codec that created it. In this case your bluray (or dvd player) has built in codecs for playing the most common types of blurays. H.264 is one of the more common codecs for blurays, and from the orignal link in your OP, the video specs are 1280x720p H264, so you're good to go there.
Confusingly video/audio streams are typically wrapped in a "container" as well. So you have the codec which does the actual decompression of the video stream, and the container which tells the software what to do when. Containers are the file types that you're used to seeing: avi, mpeg, mov, mkv, ect.. Bluray players can typically only deal with a few types of containers. Every bluray player can do the bluray disc containers (BDAV/BDMV), but almost all newer players (last few years maybe?) can also read AVCHD containers. So you should be ok there.
Then of course there's the actual burning to disc process as well. My understanding is there are yet another set of formats that indicate how you actually store/read information on discs. ISO files are typically just exact copies of the data in the on disc format. So you should be able to burn it directly to a disc without any trouble. Of course if it's the wrong format then it may not be readable on your bluray player and you'll have to mount the iso image to read the actual data, and then burn it to a disc using the right disc format. I'm not really familiar with disc formats but I'm guessing you should be fine since the author was intending people to burn this file for playback on bluray players.
edit - Did a little research on the last paragraph and my terminology is a somewhat wrong. When you burn to a cd/dvd/bluray you have to specify the filesystem, the same way you would have to specify a filesystem for a newly formatted HDD or SSD. Although the filesystems for discs are different than those for hdd's and ssd's, with udf 2.5 being the filesystem you want for bluray players. Since the ISO file is just an exact (bit by bit) copy of a set of data, you can create iso files from any filesystem. I don't see anything in the original link indicating the filesystem used, but I'm guessing it's one that's compatible with bluray players since that was the intended use of the file.
This is really interesting, because I was petrified of the first two prequels when I was that age (the third one hadn't come out yet,) but the first three movies didn't scare me at all. Maybe it depends on what sorts of things scare your kid?
Like in my case, angry faces, explicit violence, and intense fighting really terrified me. Theoretical, implied, and down-played violence never has. So while I "got" that the destruction of Alderaan was really, really, bad, Darth Maul scared me a lot more. (But I'm also the kind of person who has to leave the room during the fight scenes in Rocky, yet has no problem watching documentary after documentary on the holocaust and World War II. So maybe I'm weird.)
I'm less concerned that the themes will be too much for him than I am concerned that he doesn't have the attention span to focus on a narrative for 5 movies. He's already experienced PGish violence and monsters and such and handles is just fine. At least in the superhero/fantasy setting anyways, since it seems easier to differenciate them from real life. His favorite games are the Lego Marvel & DC games, so after becoming familiar with all the characters we let him start watching the Ironman, Dark Knight (we skipped TDK because between Leger's Joker and the visual of Two-Face, it seems like it'd be a bit too much for him still), and Spiderman movies. And I couldn't resist letting him watch Pacific Rim (he grabs his big rubber T-Rex and a Talk-n-Learn Robot that's comparable in size and smashes them together while watching it).
Right now, with these kind of movies we're more worried about language than violence. I'm always annoyed by the random word or two of profanity in these kind of movies. Like, Ironman 3 is completely free from hard language except for when Tony tells the little boy to "Not be a pussy" about his father leaving. Or in Pacific Rim, does the younger Hansen really have to tell Raleigh that he'll "drop him like a hunk of Kaiju shit"? Just because you can use a couple words of profanity and maintain your rating doesn't mean you have to. I'm getting real tired of having to cough at the exact same place every time. But I digress.
So thematically, I don't think Star Wars will be a problem. But he has the attention span of a gnat and getting him to focus on anything for more than 20min is like fighting the wind. Most of those movies had to be viewed several times before the never-ending stream of questions slowed down. I may be jumping the gun a bit, but I probably won't really know until we try to watch Ep IV. He has a Lego Star Wars game, so I'm hoping that having some knowledge of some of the characters will help. We'll see. If IV doesn't go over too well, I'll hold off for a couple more years before trying again.
Oh, right. Good call. I forgot about that part. Hmm, that throws a wrench in the plan.