Today is the day Diggnation come out for members. Usually on this day, I would download Xvid Diggnation from a mirror. Unfortunately the mirror I use isn’t mirroring this week and I cannot find an alternative so I can get Diggnation early. This makes me uneasy because I am missing out and it has also ruined my Saturday Schedule.

Generally how it goes is on Saturday, I download Diggnation early in Xvid format to watch at night time. Then the next day, Sunday, I download the Quicktime HD H.264 and watch it at night then again too. This has been my weekend schedule for the past… 3 weeks now (I think) and I do not like my schedule being disrupted.

I am also thinking about downloading Diggnation a 3rd time each week, once in iTunes so I can put it on my iPod Classic when I get it. I’m not sure if it is worth it though. I wish I could just throw the Quicktime HD or Xvid onto it but iPods don’t support it. I vote for DivX/XviD support in Apple products!!!

The other day when I tried to open a movie in Quicktime, my computer crashed. Quicktime is a frustrating piece of software for me, it doesn’t do video very well for me. It can play video on an external source, whether its a USB Drive or a Network Drive or a Memory Stick of some description. The only thing it can’t do it play videos that are saved onto my hard drive. I just don’t get it and why, 6 months later, it hasn’t bean fixed.

After some searching on the internet, apparently Apple blames nVidia for a bad driver for its Serial ATA driver and nVidia blames Apples bad software. No one seems to want to take responsibility for this and it is a pain in the arse for me and other people with this problem. People have been somewhat forced to use Quicktime alternatives. I eventually gave up and decided to take that route too.

I downloaded VLC Player and it pissed me off from the word go. It played video fine but it done annoying things that pissed me off. First off it made itself the default for all video formats. It would have been nice if it asked me first and not just presumed that I would want it like that. Trying to get it back to my original configuration was a pain in the neck and resulted in my uninstalling it and fixing settings individually to get it back exactly to the way it was.

After reinstalling it, I watched a H.264 HD video. I was disappointed with the quality becuase it was not as good as the quality Quicktime offered. It was extremely apparent when the podcast, Diggnation, displayed websites which were crystal clear and readable in Quicktime, but were slightly pixelated and harder to read in VLC. Another tedious thing is the volume control in VLC which is not simple to use and also thanks to Vista, makes it animated, which can be distracting when watching video at times.

Everyone is going to blame Vista and say thats what I get for being an early adopter, or a user in general. Yes I accept that but that is not going to make me switchback to XP. My XP days are over and I am only looking forward now. On the Quicktime problem, I have two options, put my videos on an external drive and play them from there in Quicktime, or play them with VLC but suffer because if degraded quality. I guess I’m gunna have to live with an annoyance either way so it’s whatever one is more convenient so VLC it is, unfortunately!

UPDATE: I have made a retraction to one of the things mentioned in this post. You can find it here.