I’ve been avoiding buying DVDs for a while, to let my budget settle down under the new mortgage load. The other day, while reading a thread on the ArsTechnica forums, I was reminded that I was interested in watching the GitS: SAC (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex) series. So I popped around to play.com and went browsing. 7.50 quid per DVD isn’t the cheapest price ever, but it is fairly good. Also picked up the beginning of the Cowboy Bebop series – I’ve already seen them from when I lived in the USA, but figured I’d like to watch them again.

The DVDs arrived yesterday, and the first candidate for the screen was SAC. Unfortunately, xine couldn’t read the DVD, muttering about CSS decoding not possible because of libdvdread. I guess the Debian/Ubuntu folks decided to avoid any legal issues that CSS presents. Fortunately, there’s also an easy workaround provided, courtesy of the Ubuntu Wiki. 5 minutes later my machine had compiled the CSS library, and xine was happily reading the DVD.

Shirow Masamune writes a pretty good story – but that’s what pretty much every other review says :) I thoroughly enjoyed the first 4 episodes, and loved the Tachikomas – they had me laughing the moment they showed up. Their chirpy voices were absolutely brilliant, and lent the right amount of quirkiness to them. The second DVD was a bit of a letdown, containing the same 4 episodes in DTS format, but that’s what I get for skimming the page. I’ll have to install a 5.1 capable DVD system one of these days, just to see what I’m missing in the positional audio.