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You're finally on that plane to Tahiti, and you decide to check what's on for the in-flight movie. Oh-oh, they're running <I>Porky's: Part 12</I>, and you can barely even see the screen 23 rows ahead of you. Then you find the headphones---the type with two plastic tubes coming out of the armrest. Time to whip out some of your own DVDs, sit back with some high-quality headphones, and watch a couple of film versions of <I>Mutiny On The Bounty</I>---the Brando <I>and</I> Gibson varieties.

For the first few days in July, the engineering elite held forth at the posh Fairmont hotel in San Jose to discuss IEEE 1394. Also known as FireWire (Apple Computer), or I-Link (Sony), 1394 is being hailed as a "breakthrough technology for anyone in the world who uses a PC and a Television."

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a concert video in which the camera angle changes every three seconds, and during the charango solo we're shown a close-up of the vocalist drinking bottled water offstage. More than once I've wanted to reach through the TV and throttle the film editor. But if a recent announcement pans out, it could put camera control into the viewer's hands and bring a whole new meaning to the term "interactive television."

At the <A HREF="http://www.digitallivingroom.com/index.html">Digital Living Room</A> conference last week in Laguna Niguel, California, <A HREF="http://www.warnerbros.com">Warner Bros. Online</A> claimed that they have "blended DVD and Internet technology to simultaneously break through the online bandwidth barrier and create a completely new breed of entertainment." Not surprisingly, this DVD/web hybrid technology is called WebDVD.