MST128K

My life in the past few days has been over­ta­ken by MST3K. I dis­co­ve­red that there’s a video ver­sion of Winamp’s Shout­Cast, with some chan­nels strea­ming tv shows 24 hours a day. Two of these chan­nels stream MST3K, and though the streams are usually maxed out on vie­wers, for $4 my IP is on the VIP list of this stream, which means unin­te­rrup­ted MST3K until March 31.

When a KTMA-era mini-marathon was sche­du­led last wee­kend, I knew I had to “tape” it. I pro­bably could have gues­sed that these epi­so­des are rea­dily avai­la­ble via various p2p out­lets, but I also would have gues­sed (rightly) that the files are kept extre­mely large for the sake of qua­lity. Ideally I wan­ted to save video from the stream in very low qua­lity; nearly all of an MST3K epi­sode is silhouet­tes and bad movies any­way, so this could hardly be con­si­de­red “compromise.”

The only pro­gram I’d heard of that might be capa­ble of cap­tu­ring strea­ming video was Stream­Box VCR, but from what I’d gathe­red it was ridd­led with legal issues and bugs. I’ve also had terri­ble luck with video soft­ware in gene­ral, so I wasn’t hope­ful. But I quickly stum­bled upon Net Trans­port, “a fas­ter, exci­ting, and the most power­ful down­loa­ding tool that you ever saw [sic, sic, sic],” light­weight and with no nags or spy­ware. I was ama­zed when within a few minu­tes I was recor­ding KTMA epi­sode 5 in ShoutCast’s 128kbps, meg-a-minute .nsv format.

Recor­ding is still kind of a pain — it’s very manual so I ine­vi­tably lose a few seconds at the begin­ning of each epi­sode if there’s a quick turn-around; I can’t know exactly when a par­ti­cu­lar epi­sode will start, so sche­du­ling is out of the ques­tion; memory shor­ta­ges have bro­ken the stream once or twice; and the sup­port lifes­pan and edi­ting capa­bi­li­ties of the .nsv for­mat are both questionable.

When I’m not fran­ti­cally con­fi­gu­ring a recor­ding ses­sion, I’m lear­ning a lot about the show I ditched bit­terly after Joel left, cur­sing my mom for taping over my Tur­key Day collec­tion, sha­ming the ungra­te­ful 14-year-old who took the show so for gran­ted, and trying to relive all the endear­ment and won­der that surroun­ded the show and its fans. I found out that the MST3K Info Club still kind of exists, and I finally became a mem­ber, for wha­te­ver that’s worth. Best Brains put out a “Scrap­book Tape” in 1995 that boasts the most in-depth look at the show ever com­po­sed. And in the first epi­sode of the tenth sea­son, when can­ce­lla­tion had been made offi­cial, Joel briefly retur­ned to the SoL:

Eerie.

Some more links:

• The MST3K Refe­rence Guide: Use­ful site inc­lu­des photo gallery, artic­les, epi­sode gui­des, etc. Great place to find ima­ges from the KTMA epi­so­des if you’ve never seen them.
• The Almost But Not Quite Com­plete His­tory of MST3K: Very, very, very thorough.
• MST3K DAP: the Digi­tal Archive Pro­ject keeps non-Rhino-releases in digi­tal cir­cu­la­tion, at about 700 megs an epi­sode for easy storage.