To quote from the original Movie Night charter:

  Movie Night is organized by and for friends and members of the UC
  Berkeley Astronomy Department. Its mission is to present movies few 
  have seen, but all will enjoy. This mission is often ignored, but its
  spirit always lives on.

Past Movies:

Here's a list of movies that might be worth watching. If you have any suggestions, use The Power Of The Interweb and edit the wiki page with your ideas. The more you attend Movie Night, the more likely your suggestion is to be heeded …

• Hands on a Hardbody (not on NetFlix yet)
• Hoop Dreams (basketball season)
• When We Were Kings
• The Thin Man
• Sansho the Bailiff / Sansho dayu : “I have seen 'Sansho' only once, a decade ago, emerging from the cinema a broken man but calm in my conviction that I had never seen anything better; I have not dared watch it again, reluctant to ruin the spell, but also because the human heart was not designed to weather such an ordeal.” – Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 9/11/06.
• Touching the Void

If we ever run out of suggestions, well, here are a few things I've always wanted to see:

• The Towering Inferno (last screened in 2001)
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
• La Strada
• The Fly (1986)
• The Last Temptation of Christ (last screened 2000)
• The Fog of War
• United 93
• Army of Shadows / L'Armeé des ombres
• To Live / Ikiru (1952)
• Enter the Dragon
• Blowup
• Lawrence of Arabia (1962; last screened 2004)
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
• Delicatessen
• Sudden Impact
• Sunset Blvd.
• Twelve Angry Men
• Double Indemnity
• Dog Day Afternoon
• The Seven Deadly Sins / Les sept péchés capitaux (1962)
• Band of Outsiders / Bande à Part
• Three Colors: Red / Trois couleurs: rouge (or White or Blue)
• a film in The Decalogue / Dekalog
• Chungking Express / Chung hing sam lam
• 8 1/2
• Tokyo Story / Tokyo monogatari
• A Touch of Zen / Hsia nu
• Kandahar / Safar e Ghandehar
• Ong-Bak : The Thai Warrior
• Diabolique / Les Diaboliques
• Trainspotting
• The Bicycle Thief / Ladri di biciclette (last screened 2003)
• Solaris / Solyaris (1972)
• Eraserhead

The inagural Movie Night movie was The Last Supper. It was repeated for the restarting of Movie Night in 2006.

Also, certain movies opening in theaters might be worth seeing; including anything that stars Daniel-Day Lewis.

Movie Night also occationally gets taken over by its evil twin, Bad Movie Night, for screenings of such gems as Highway to Hell, McBain, Maximum Overdrive, or The Warriors. These screenings usually involve a more select announcement list, a big living room, and beer.

On the third floor of Campbell Hall we have an awesome (and under-utilized) 9-panel wall display with speakers attached. Unfortunately, using this display is not straightforward - you can't just plug into the back of it. There are two ways to interface:

1. Connect over wifi with MirrorOP
2. Connect to the Mac computer that is directly plugged in to the display

The first is great for presentations, but much too slow/buggy for watching a movie. The second works great, but we do not have access to the physical computer, so we have to improvise.

Any movie accessible with a browser is easy (i.e. NetFlix). Just fire up chrome/firefox/whatever and go watch it.

DVDs (or movies on a hard drive) are hard but totally possible.

CAUTION: the movie-streaming system described below is fragile, at best.

When has the difficulty of a task ever dissuaded UCB grad students? (Ok, actually a lot. But ignore that for now.) Let's watch a goddamn DVD on that 9-panel display!
PLAN: we will use a desktop computer to play the DVD and stream it over the network to the Mac 9-panel computer.

Set up the stream server

1. Locate a Linux computer in Campbell with a DVD drive (preferably plugged into Ethernet rather than on WiFi). It needs to be running an SSH server that you can log in to.
2. Confirm that you can play your DVD using VLC
   1. Note that you may need to enable DVD playback on Linux machines
   2. Set up the web interface for VLC
      1. You may want to set a web password. By default the user name field is blank.
      2. We'll set up port forwarding over SSH from the other computer, so don't worry about firewall issues or anything
3. Log in to the 9-panel computer
   1. The mouse and keyboard are stored in the 5th floor office
      1. You must have the correct mouse and keyboard, and you should confirm that the batteries aren't dead
      2. The login password to the computer is printed on the keyboard
4. Open up two SSH tunnels to the streaming server from the 9-panel computer
   1. You need to forward ports 8080 (the web interface to VLC) and 8081 (where we'll stream the movie itself)
      1. port 8080:

          ssh -L 8080:localhost:8080 your_name@your_server 

      2. port 8081:

          ssh -L 8081:localhost:8081 your_name@your_server 

      3. Sometimes these tunnels will be shut down if there's no activity. You can run the following command in those SSH tunnels to prevent that:

          watch -n 30 echo 'hello i am alive' 

5. Run VLC on the server and stream the output to port 8081 (I usually just do this within one of the SSH instances above).
   1. command:

       vlc -vvv dvdsimple:///dev/cdrom --disc-caching=30000 --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=3000,ab=256,deinterlace}:standard{access=http,mux=ts,dst=:8081}' 

   2. Some parameters you may like to change:
      1. Location of dvd drive:

         /dev/cdrom

      2. Size of disk-read buffer in milliseconds:

          --disc-caching=30000 

      3. Bitrate of video stream:

         vb=3000

      4. Bitrate of audio stream:

         ab=256

      5. Port you're streaming to:

         dst=:8081

      6. Other examples
      7. full guide to streaming
6. Open VLC on the 9-panel computer (should be on the desktop) and the remote control
   1. In VLC, open a Network location and go to

       http://localhost:8081 

   2. In a browser, go to

       localhost:8080 

7. Enjoy.