Archive | Television

Formula 1 Races Are Now Free to Watch on MBC Action

In case you didn’t know it yet, Formula 1 is now free-to-air in our region since MBC Group acquired the exclusive broadcast rights until 2023. The 21 races along with all practice sessions and qualifications will be free to watch live on MBC Action.

The rights were previously held by beIN Sports which I never had at home, so I’ve been missing the Grand Prix’s for several years now even though I have been a avid follower since 1997 when Nadim Mhanna used to comment on the races on LBC. The only problem though with being a returning fan after all these year is getting familiar with the new faces and all the regulation changes. And even though the opening race took place last week, I think the best way to warm up for the coming ones is by watching a new documentary on Netflix called “Formula 1: Drive to Survive”, which summarizes in 10 episodes everything that happened during the last season with a lot of interviews with the major key players in the championship.

So, here’s to an exciting season, and hoping Ferrari prevails this year!

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Express “Shatfeh” on Bte7la L Hayeit

I was watching Bte7la l 7ayeit on LBC the other day and chuckled a bit when one of the hosts accidentally spilled her cup of coffee.

The situation however got funnier when the director apparently had no problem with a man and his Vileda Promist invading the set to clean the mess and provided an express “shatfeh” during the show! 😀

Check out how it all happened in the video below.

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Lebanese Mir-Jean Bou Chaaya to Direct Netflix First Arabic Original Series

Netflix recently announced it is launching its first Arabic original series titled “Jinn”, which will be directed by Lebanese Mir-Jean Bou Chaaya (best known for Very Big Shot) and written by Jordanian Bassed Ghandour who scripted the Oscar-nominated Theeb.

Fortunately for us, Jinn is neither a Lebanese drama nor Bab El Hara kind of series. On the other hand, it is supernatural thriller that tell the story of teenagers who discover a genie (Jinn in Arabic) in the ancient Jordanian city of Petra.

Filming should start towards the end of the year with a cast from several countries around the Middle East and it should be available for streaming somewhere around 2019. You can read more details about it here.

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I Can’t Believe MTV is Going This Low #el3ama3alMTV

I didn’t feel like I really have to comment on the MTV video that was making rounds on social media website because enough was already being said by the people, and I simply couldn’t have said it better than the video published by El 3ama which garnered hundreds of thousands of views.

The video is unfortunately no more available to view because it was apparently too hard for MTV to digest so they reported it to both Facebook and YouTube for copyright claims, and el3ama’s page on Facebook got consequently suspended for 3 days.

I think it is really a shame for such TV station that has already suffered from censorship by the authorities in the early 2000s when it was shut down for several years to actually do the same with a satirist such as Ghayd Chammas. And it isn’t like what he stated in his video was… MTV and other stations are all delivering very bad content most of the time, they all try to use the sex appeal to attract viewers, and their online presence with their clickbait articles is a complete disaster.

What MTV showed is that is that they are no better than the General Security who censor movies that eventually end up flooding DVD shops around the country. Regardless whether Ghayd is right or wrong in his claims, it is about time for everyone to understand that freedom of speech is a sacred right and fortunately for us there are tens of other websites to publish such content, and I guarantee you will see the video re-uploaded somewhere else with possibly double the views. They could’ve simply let it go but they’re giving it more exposure now that they want it to be taken offline!

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Nemr Abou Nassar Set To Appear on Showtime Comedy Club

Nemr Abou Nassar is set to appear on Showtime Comedy Club tomorrow night (US time) in a special called “No Bombing in Beirut”.

The one hour performance tackles misconceptions western people have about us here in the middle east and was shot in both Lebanon and Los Angeles, however it was edited in a way to show people from both ends of the world laughing at the same jokes to prove that we have more in common than we would think. It is an absolutely great achievement for Nemr to be featured on Showtime and it’s great to see talents like him and Wissam Kamal making it big outside Lebanon.

The shows will air on Showtime tomorrow October 7th at 11PM Eastern Time (GMT -4).

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Wissam Kamal to Host “Ridiculousness Arabia” on Comedy Central

I’ve been following Wissam Kamal on YouTube since the early days of his channel and have always loved the series he does such as “Lebanese Father and Son” and “Lebanese Ads: F**k Logic”. The guy solely relies on conveying fun messages instead of clowning around to make us laugh at him like Lebanese TV comedians do, hence why I have always wished to see him running his own show.

Earlier this year he earned some exposure when he appeared with on a hilarious ad for Datsun, and Comedy Central Arabia recently seems to have given him what he deserves by getting him on-board season 2 of “Ridiculousness Arabia”, which makes him the first Lebanese comedian to host a show on this international channel.

The show features viral videos from the internet that are usually failed do-it-yourself attempts at stunts, to which the hosts add their own mock commentary. It will start airing on September 3rd on Comedy Central Arabia which is part of OSN in our region so make sure to tune in!

You can follow Wissam on both YouTube and Facebook for new videos and updates about his work. Also, check the below interview with him and his dad on Min El Ekhir 2 days ago.

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Everybody is Riding The Game of Thrones Wave

There has been a lot of posts on social media over the last week celebrating the new season of Game of Thrones, and some brands just felt obliged to post GoT themed material for the sake of joining the conversation.

I personally found most of the posts dull except for the two by Chevrolet and McDonald’s, the rest appeared more like when Al Rifai feel the urge to post something for Valentine’s day…

Snapshots via Samsoum

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Another Epic Lebanese TV Moment – Cockfight on OTV

OTV hosted Lebanese cleric sheikh Bilal Duqmaq and former Syrian MP Ahmad Shalash to discuss the Syrian war on “Bilmubasher” talk show, but things kept heating up until the two clown eventually decided to end it the way they’re most familiar with, bi ja7shaneh!

The two are known to have extreme views about the Syrian crisis, and I honestly believe TV stations like to get similar people on air for the sole purpose of making such scenes every now and then…

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Are You Following M Media’s Growing Collection?

I subscribed to M Media a few months ago for the sole purpose of watching Bennesbe Labokra Chou again, but soon after I did it I found it hard to cancel my subscription because of their growing collection with titles that never cease to impress me. (They’re soon adding Film Ameriki Tawil by the way)

I personally usually avoid watching Lebanese movies in theaters unless they’re REALLY good, but I still like to watch them in the comfort of my living room (yes even the likes of BéBé). However unlike western movies/series, Lebanese ones are much harder to find online, and M Media has been recently making some great effort adding titles that were produced over the last few years ranging from drama to comedy and documentaries, in addition to famous old plays from the 90s such as “3ammti Najibeh” and “3arisein midreh men wein” with all content being in very good quality. So I have lately been spending time watching stuff that I missed in theater over the last few years (and also learned that Carlos Azar always lands the Jagal roles in his movies).

At $5/month I guess it’s a good deal, and while I know the people at M are doing their best to get more productions onto their platform, I wish they also add old movies from the 70s and 80s such as the ones by the late Maroun Baghdadi for example, I always read he made some great movies during that era but I rarely had access to them. I also don’t think anyone would mind watching Ahmad El-Zein and Mohamad El-Mawla all over again in those cool action movies from the early civil war days!

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This is How I Built My Own Netflix At Home

Ever since we had kids our life changed 180 degrees. With the new responsibilities, my wife and I began spending more time at home, going out less, and naturally started watching more TV at our place.

At the beginning things were quite simple, whenever we had something interesting in mind I would go to some BitTorrent website, download the files, and then transfer them to a USB drive in order to watch them on TV. But as time went my collection became so big that I started losing of what’s on my hard drive, and having to use the USB stick each time I wanted to watch something became annoying. So I started searching for solutions and ended up building my own Netflix at home.

Using my mobile I currently can browse everything I have ever downloaded on a sleek and nice interface (like the one above), and it only takes a second to play whatever I want on my TV which isn’t even a smart one!

The reason I’m sharing how to do it is simply because the setup has always impressed my friends especially when they’re around to watch our favorite series, moreover it’s a convenient solution to control what your kids are watching instead of letting them browse YouTube and stumble upon horrible videos.

Anyway, here’s all you need to set it up.

A Faster Wi-Fi

Playing multimedia over your home network means you will need a relatively fast router. In my case the media I stream within my local network is almost all in Full HD resolution, so my home router has to cope with some good amount of bandwidth, which is why I opted to get a TP-Link Archer D5. It is a 1200Mbps ADSL modem router that runs on two channels simultaneously, a 300Mbps 2.4Ghz channel that I use for my older devices, and a 867Mbps 5.0Ghz channel that I dedicated for newer devices equipped with “fast” Wi-Fi adapters (802.11ac) and this is the channel that I use for media streaming to my TV. Another important detail to add is that it has Gigabit LAN ports.

Network Attached Storage (NAS)

A network storage is a hard drive that you connect to your home router via eithernet in order to acess your files from any device you have. Think of it as your own private Dropbox or Google Drive. The one I have is a 4TB Western Digital My Cloud box that I bought for ~$250 two years ago. Once you go past its easy setup, just map it to your computer in order for it to appear under “My Computer” (if you are using Windows) and from there on you can easily access it just like a regular drive to store your files on it. It’s very important for this storage box to also have a Gigabit ethernet port to ensure high speed file transfer.

A NAS is not mandatory for the setup to work though and you can rely on your computer hard drive instead, but with HD movies having an average size of 3-4GB you can never have enough storage. I personally have a Lenovo Yoga 900 laptop with 256GB storage, so instead of storing downloaded files locally I transfer them to the NAS instead.

Google Chromecast

I have a 46″ Samsung TV that I bought back in 2011 when smart TVs were not really a thing back then. Chromecast is a small device that you can plug to an HDMI port in your TV in order to be able to cast or mirror the things you see on your phone or laptop to the TV. It makes watching videos off the internet (whether on YouTube or reruns from TV websites) much cooler.

Plex Media Server

This is the software that does all the magic and you can download it for free from Plex.tv for both computers and mobiles. Setting up Plex is also quite easy, once your install it on your PC open it using your browser and point it to where you have all your media files stored (in my case the storage box), then just give it a bit of time to download the needed metadata which includes the plot of each movie or series episode you have, along with their posters and rating.

Putting it All Together

This is the easiest part, just lay back and make sure your computer is powered on since that’s where the Plex server will be running, and then launch the Plex app on your mobile to browse your catalog and cast whatever you want to your TV.

What happens in the background can be summarized as follows, your mobile communicates with the Plex server on your computer, orders it to fetch the desired movie from your network storage and to mirror it on your TV via Google Chromecast.

Tweaks

  • Instead of manually moving the new media files you download to the network drive, you can use small handy tools like SyncToy (using the option “contribute”) to automatically transfer newly downloaded files to the network.
  • Plex also has the capability to automatically download the matching subtitles for your media file, so you can turn on that option to save time searching on SubScene and the alike.
  • If you want to avoid keeping your computer on whenever you want to watch something, then you can buy a Raspberry Pi 3 (a small computer the size of a pack of cigarettes), install Plex server on it and then attach it to your router. This way you will make it act as a mini server on your network.
  • To avoid manually checking for new episode of your favorite series you can use special BitTorrent clients such as DuckieTV that can do this automatically for you.
  • Since Plex allows creation of multiple channels with different content each, I created a special channel for my little boy with cartoon and animated stuff and just taught him how to use the Plex App on his iPad. This way I can control what he watches and avoid these sick videos on YouTube.

And this is pretty much it! If you intend to build something similar and needed some help then just let me know in the comments.

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