I had been getting discouraged by the thought that Netflix movies will someday run out for me. Netflix has a lot of Russian movies, but I think I’ve already seen most of the good ones available there. There are some good ones on YouTube, but Alek keeps telling me about others I’d like to see, and I’d like to see some of them in better quality than YouTube has, too.

Now things are looking up. A few weeks ago I discovered MemoCast. In a few weeks, I may drop Netflix and spend my money there instead.

One can sign up for a monthly subscription which allows one to play any movies at any time, but I probably won’t do that. I can’t get subtitles that way. I sometimes do watch movies without subtitles just to see how much I can (and cannot) understand. But usually I can’t understand enough that way.

Instead of the monthly subscription (or in addition to it) MemoCast also makes movies available for download at a price that seems reasonable enough. And subtitles are available for a lot of them — sometimes in both English and Russian.

I gave it a try a few weeks ago by downloading Tot samyy Myunkhgauzen (That Very Munchausen), a Mark Zakharov movie.

There were glitches. I paid by PayPal and was given a few days to do the download. At first the download was unsuccessful. It seemed to me that the movie was not really at the spot on the server where the link said it was. I used the download manager they recommended, but that didn’t help. But their technical support people did respond to my e-mails, and after the 3rd round of e-mails with them apparently fixed the problem, and extended my download period for several days more.

The next problem was getting subtitles to play. They are available as .srt files. I found instructions for adding filters to get Windows Media Player to show them, but the instructions I found left something to the imagination and seemed to be very version specific. And I never got it to work.

I had other things to do over the Christmas holidays, but finally got back to it this week. My oldest son recommended using VLC Media Player. Tonight I downloaded it, installed it, and have been able to play subtitles without a problem. The program has a screen snapshot feature, which I used to take the one shown above. Unfortunately the snapshots don’t include the subtitles, but that’s something I can live with. Sometimes it’s even better that way.

As for the movie, now that I can do more than just enjoy this music, I see it does seem to have a lot to do with the historical Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von Münchhausen, and perhaps has something to do with Munchausen_syndrome, the psychiatric disorder. But I can’t say just what the connection is yet. I hadn’t known about the Baron Munchhausen and Munchausen syndrome until I looked them up yesterday, and the movie has me wondering (in a good way) where the story is going.