• 13 Posts
  • 482 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: September 29th, 2023

help-circle


  • You may be underestimating Granny Gertrude’s powers. She will change a setting in a menu you didn’t even know existed. /s

    In my opinion, most modern movies and the like sound perfectly fine, like you said, when in a theater setting. I have a pretty decent home audio setup, and I enjoy going out to the movies for ones that I think will be fun or interesting. I usually do not have much of a problem hearing dialogue (well, I’m hard at hearing, so at least not more issues than I have hearing real world dialogue) and the only times things seem uncomfortably loud is when it seems to be done artistically.

    The problem comes from the fact that most people don’t have a “theater setting” at home, and since media is premixed for theatre setups with no way to adjust it, you’re left with the worst of both worlds. I think that, rather than passing the buck onto the inexperienced user who might not know how or want to fiddle with audio track settings, studios need to start taking people’s actual equipment into consideration when putting out home releases. Most media players give you the option for surround and stereo, but that does not help when the original media file has bad audio mixing from the get-go. If the actual audio tracks were mixed for “theatre” and “home”, I think we’d be in a much better place.



  • You don’t always need to replace the part with something the manufacturer offers as a replacement. Something like a screen board might be hard/ impossible to find an alternative for, but things like buttons or sensors inside of mice are rarely something made specifically by the mouse manufacturer. They can almost always be replaced by an equivalent generic part. Hell, my 3D printer motherboard took a shit on me a couple years ago, and I bought an aftermarket board and installed 3rd party firmware on it to get it up and running again.

    Like you said it’d be great if it were just easy for everyone to do these things, but as devices get more advanced they’re gonna require more advanced knowledge to work on, and not everyone has the time, interest, or resources to learn how to diagnose and repair stuff.








  • The Tolkien Estate (namely Christopher) is incredibly protective of J. R. R.'s works and their integrity. Anything that is produced, they want produced true to his image. That being said they were very much not fans of the theatrical LotR films we know and love by New Line Cinema. Also worth noting that when J. R. R. sold the movie rights back in the 60s, he only sold the movie rights to the LotR trilogy and the Hobbit, but there was an additional clause that stated that if the Silmarillion were to be sold, the company that bought the rights to the LotR/Hobbit would get first dibs on it. So, if they want a Silmarillion movie, they have to offer it to the parent company of New Line Cinema, meaning they’d likely purchase it and produce the movies, which the Tolkien Estate does not want. So, the chances of the rights being sold, at least while New Line Cinema and it’s affiliates exist, are practically zero.

    So, why not make it themselves? Very much for the same reason. I don’t know your familiarity with the Silmarillion, but… it’s very heavy reading. Not to say that it isn’t a good read, or that the story isn’t there, but the first section of the book is a bunch of shapeless angels singing songs about life and accidentally creating the universe, and the remainder of the book has 500 characters with a total of 17 different names that get altered, swapped, and outright changed halfway through the story. A true 1:1 adaption of the book would probably be longer than the original extended trilogy, but be way harder to follow for the average audience. So, major changes would be needed to make it financially viable, which are the exact things the Tolkien Estate does not want New Line Cinema making them.

    TL;DR: The Tolkien Estate has to sell the Silmarillion rights to New Line Cinema before anyone else can buy it, and the Estate didn’t like the other movies so they aren’t going to sell it to them (and thus to anyone). They didn’t like the movies because the movies made too many changes to get the books to work for film, so they certainly will not be the ones to make the major changes that would be necessary to turn J. R. R.'s Bible fanfic into a Hollywood blockbuster.