Latest Animatrix Short Released

martyn s writes "The latest animatrix short, The Second Renaissance, Part 2 is finally out. This short is the continuation of The Second Renaissance Part 1. Taken together, these shorts document how, in the matrix universe, 'Man was the architect of his own demise.'" And here's the BitTorrent link.

Site is fixed

[Odaeus]

If you went along earlier today there would have been the pages accessible to download Part 2, except all of the links pointed to the first episode! I think a professional site could do a bit better than that. As some of you may have discovered after downloading a hundred megabyte file. :)

Totally sweet...wget -c rocks...

[`Sean]

wget -c http://progressive1.stream.aol.com/wb/gl/wbonline/ progressive/thematrix/us/med/animatrixlgfinal_dl.m ov

For those of you who keep getting dropped or get half finished downloads...

BAD LINKS

[ChrisCampbell47]

Those direct links are for the FIRST episode (hence the "Episode1" in the URL). And post the sizes next to the links, these are HUGE (e.g. 140 MB). Better yet, just link to the page, it's really well done and quick.

wrong links

[Anonymous Coward]

The "direct links" are wrong, they point to the episode 1. Here are the correct ones:
http://progressive1.stream.aol.com/wb/gl/wb online/ progressive/thematrix/us/med/2R2_640_dl.zip
http: //progressive1.stream.aol.com/wb/gl/wbonline/ progressive/thematrix/us/med/2R2_480_dl.zip
http: //progressive1.stream.aol.com/wb/gl/wbonline/ progressive/thematrix/us/med/2R2_320_dl.zip

Links might be wrong

[Zakabog]

I think those links are wrong, I only tried the large one. Here's some new links -

Large [aol.com] 640x272 - 138 MB
Medium [aol.com] 480x204 - 87 MB
Small [aol.com] 320x136 - 31 MB

Or you can go here [intothematrix.com].

Animatrix on DVD out soon

[WIAKywbfatw]

The entire series of 9 short CG-Animatrion/Japanese Anime films will soon be available on DVD. Depending on your MPAA stance (and what day of the week it is) follow the white rabbit via one of the links below to pre-order your copy.

Official web site [intothematrix.com]
Amazon US [amazon.com]: available 3 June
Amazon UK [amazon.co.uk]: available 2 June

Re:It's AOL!

[Spy Hunter]

Oh, and here are the REAL links to the second episode (as I post this, the links in the article still point to the first episode).
Medium version (recommended for people with non-godly computers, the large version starts skipping frames) [aol.com]
Large version [aol.com]

Re:Animatrix on DVD out soon

[ymgve]

don't have anything against seeing movies (boycotting the whole movie industry is pointless, there just aren't enough people who care), but there is no way that I would pay $18.74 plus S&H for a DVD of shorts that are available for free online.

Four of them are available online. The remaining five are not - one of them were shown as a pre-movie to Dreamcatcher, the other four will only be available on DVD.

Re:Feeling a little empty after watching

[tdvaughan]

I've read that the original intention was that the rationale behind farming humans was to use them as nodes in a huge parallel processing computer. However, this idea was dropped because it was thought that your average viewer wouldn't understand it. Unfortunately, can't find a link that would back this up. It would be encouraging if this was true, though.

Re:It's AOL!

[Goalie_Ca]

What's the point, I was getting 350 KB/s anyways. I'm sure bittorrent was much much slower.

Re:Minor spolier

[TeknoHog]

This is becoming almost a FAQ, but here goes anyway. AFAIK the initial script used humans in a computing cluster, which would make more sense, but it was considered too difficult for the mundane masses, and it was changed for the final movie.

I'm not sure if that's true though, might be just a rumour. In fact, using human brains in a Beowulf cluster does present some problems, because people would probably find more hints of the reality through the calculations going on in their subconscious minds.

On the other hand, it's marginally possible that humans can be used to extract energy from food such as carbohydrates, even if some entropy is increased in the process. Maybe the alternatives for using that particular fuel were not that efficient or practical. Then again, the food had to be produced somehow, and in the absence of sunlight it would have meant even more wasted energy.

Re:Totally sweet...wget -c rocks...

[SashaM]

Yeah, that's what I did, and now I can watch part 1 again :-(

Instead, use:
wget -c http://progressive1.stream.aol.com/wb/gl/wbonline/ progressive/thematrix/us/med/2R2_320_dl.zip (small - 320x136)
wget -c http://progressive1.stream.aol.com/wb/gl/wbonline/ progressive/thematrix/us/med/2R2_480_dl.zip (medium - 480x204)
wget -c http://progressive1.stream.aol.com/wb/gl/wbonline/ progressive/thematrix/us/med/2R2_640_dl.zip (large - 640x272)

Oh, and don't forget to remove the space slashdot adds after "wbonline/".

Re:Freenet Link

[mxs]

"as Freenet has a more robust, permanent network"

Care to say what you mean by permanent ? It's no more permanent than BitTorrent; if nobody wants the file, it dies off quickly.

"but will automatically begin to share it, if it becomes popular." ... It will also use the bandwidth avaiable in a rather suboptimal way, to insure privacy and security. BitTorrent does not waste bandwidth, at the price of anonymity.

"That means faster download speeds. The RedHat 9 ISO files were downloading at over 120KB/sec on Freenet."

Hmm. I got a download rate of over 1mbyte/s on the torrent for that; and there were a LOT of people getting fast speeds (I have the logs to prove it ;-)

"There is also the advantage that the link does not go down, when the people close their download windows ;)"

Yeah, the link only goes down when the generous storage & bandwidth providers on the freenet network don't feel like providing this free service anymore ...

Don't get me wrong, FreeNet is a nice system ... Its goals are different from BitTorrent though (anonymity vs. efficient use of bandwidth, privacy vs. speed, everything vs. single-uri, etc.), and in this case, BT is probably the better choice.

If you were to share something that could get you into trouble (say, a complete crack of Microsoft's DRM schemes), you'd probably want to use Freenet instead ;)

Matrix Article in Time

[tbmaddux]

Also, out today (or maybe yesterday?) is a multi-page article in the print magazine, and a flash-laden online version at Time.com [time.com] about The Matrix: Reloaded.

Watch out for spoilers -- there's a multi-page section discussing the plot which is well-marked with warnings.

Corrupted file?

[webslacker]

It appears as though the 480 wide movie and the zip file from the official website are both corrupted.

Re:Site is fixed

[martyn s]

Yeah, it's true, I posted this story before I actually finished downloading the movie, and I included direct download links to the wrong files, to part 1. I was afraid the whole slashdot community would rise up against me, but luckily the editors took those links out and included the bittorrent link instead.

Re:what about nukes EMPs?

[DirtyCowboy]

Nukes don't automatically generate EMP. The military found that the effect occurs when a nuke is detonated high above the ground.

Re:Minor spolier

[Wraithlyn]

All energy on Earth (except geothermal) comes from the Sun originally. Wind, the water cycle, solar power.. everything is driven by the Sun. Sure, there are non-renewable resources such as oil you could harvest, but adding human bodies into the mix as a conversion "solution" is simply ridiculous and makes no sense.

The human body CONSUMES about 1800 calories a day just sitting still.. breathing, pumping blood, etc. Building a power plant out of them would just drain massive amounts of energy, not produce it.

I love the movie, and I'm sure I'll love the sequels too.. but the whole "humans as power sources" thing is complete nonsense and has always bugged me.

mplayer whining

[ArmorFiend]

As usual, no way to watch this in Linux.
Take for expample MPlayer's complaint:

Opening video decoder: [qtvideo] Quicktime Video decoder
Win32 LoadLibrary failed to load: qtmlClient.dll, /usr/lib/win32/qtmlClient.dll, /usr/local/lib/win32/qtmlClient.dll
invalid qt DLL!
VDecoder init failed :(
*** Try to upgrade /roam/dm/.mplayer/codecs.conf from etc/codecs.conf
*** If it still does not work, read DOCS/codecs.html!

DOCS/codecs.html said, a bunch of confusing stuff, mainly "go to our website and get more confused". Why can't video people ever write stuff in english?

Re:.zip??

[jedinite]

Simple - to force people to save the files and not just "stream" them. So a user who wants a file downloads it once, and generally won't need to download it a second time if they want to watch it again (thus saving potential bandwidth).

I run a website where I offer a number of videos for download and I routinely used to get a number of downloads of the same video from the same IP address, more than could be explained by proxy servers. Once I started zipping the files, a lot of that disappeared... enough to be statistically significant. Enough to make a difference in my bandwidth bill...

Re:Feeling a little empty after watching

[dexterman]

I got an advance DVD of all nine movies - "Osiris" is phenomenal, but I have to say that "Beyond" is my favorite. I felt the exact same way about the second installment of "Renaissance" - felt like they could have done alot more with it...

Re:Feeling a little empty after watching

[prnd_ndrd]

Everything you wanted to know about Gnostic references in The Matrix...

Wake Up! Gnosticism and Buddhism in The Matrix [warnerbros.com]

ashaver AT pdx DOT edu