Dvd

P.J. Shirdan did not play football in his senior year at Monsignor Bonner High because of a knee injury, but when the NCAA signing date arrives tomorrow, the wide receiver/safety will have a highlight DVD in one hand and a scholarship letter of intent in the other. In the video age, when schools don't have to see a player perform in person to offer him a scholarship, Shirdan can point to his perseverance and football talent as well as the cinematic ability of family friend Mark Verica for making signing day so special.

An Oscar-winning performance by James Coburn is among the new offerings on video this week. Affliction . . (1998) (Universal) 113 minutes. Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek, James Coburn, Willem Dafoe, Mary Beth Hurt. This film of stunning power from Paul Schrader entwines the mystery of a hunting accident that might be murder with the deeper mysteries of the investigator's true affliction: the unhealable wounds of his abusive childhood. Nolte and Coburn lead a superb cast. R (language, adult themes)

Following in the footsteps of its all-time bestseller The Lion King, Walt Disney Home Video has chosen Lion's video anniversary date of March 6, 1996, as the sale date for Pocahontas, priced at $26.99. But the animated story of the strong-willed Indian maiden will be no threat to The Lion King's video record of 27 million copies shipped to stores. The box-office total of Pocahontas was $140 million, less than half the colossal take of Lion, and it will probably prove a little less popular as a videotape.

Looking for a really cool entertainment or productivity gadget to spring on a techie this holiday season? Box up and deliver one of these bright ideas. Super suckers: Here's a wild stocking stuffer - a combination lollipop holder and "bone conduction" music machine that plays sound inside your head when you bite down on the candy. Hasbro's $10 Sound Bites come with three musical themes - Rockin' Guitar, Rockin' Drum and Rockin' Saxophone, plus three special-effects versions - Space Wars, Wacky Toons and Wacky Voices.

A touching fact-based tale set in the 1950s tops this week's list of new movies on video. October Sky . 1/2 (1999) (Universal) 108 minutes. Jake Gyllenhaal, Chris Cooper, William Lee Scott, Laura Dern. Four boys in a West Virginia mining town are inspired by the launching of Sputnik to create their own spaceship in a film that never seems cliched or predictable. This fact-based coming-of-age tale is simply a great moviegoing experience. PG (language, alcohol use). DVD available.

A peculiar porker and a romance with an online twist top this week's list. Babe: Pig in the City (1998) (Universal) $22.98. 96 minutes. James Cromwell, Magda Szubanski, Mickey Rooney, the voices of E.G. Daily, Danny Mann, Glenne Headly, Steven Wright. When the worst happens, Babe assumes the best, and his joyous spirit infuses this charming sequel to the 1995 hit about the swine who would be sheepdog. This time, Babe visits the big city, and his diplomacy makes a pussycat out of a pit bull and unifies disparate animal groups.

Most of the video industry is steering clear of a giant iceberg of a video title this week, and very few other new titles are being released. What's the one pop culture phenomenon that dares to challenge Titanic? Of course: Barney. Titanic 1/2 (1997) (Paramount) $29.95. 194 minutes. Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, Bill Paxton, Gloria Stuart, Suzy Amis, Danny Nucci. The newest digital technology fused to an old-fashioned romance involving star-crossed lovers on the doomed liner.

A bubbly comedy and a thought-provoking documentary top this week's list of new movies on video. The Impostors 1/2 (1998) (Fox) 101 minutes. Oliver Platt, Stanley Tucci, Steve Buscemi, Billy Connolly, Isabella Rossellini, Campbell Scott, Tony Shalhoub, Lily Taylor. A tour de farce and a comedy of champagne effervescence from Tucci that salutes the classics of the '30s. Tucci and Platt star as struggling actors who stow away on a luxury liner during the Depression and discover everyone else on board is playing a role.

French-born, California-based Yves Faroudja is to video technology what Ray Dolby is to audio. Both are engineers who tweak consumer gear, making it do things that are not supposed to be possible. And they do it so well that the entire electronics industry, even the proudest Japanese and European inventors, are ready and willing to license their patents. For more than a decade, Faroudja has argued that we don't need high-definition TV: "We can get better-quality video out of the current 525-line standard.

Americans will have to wait at least a half a year before Titanic docks at video stores. But in apartments all across China, film buffs have been enjoying the Oscar-winning blockbuster for months. Video technology developed in California's Silicon Valley but virtually unknown in the United States is a runaway hit in Asia, and it has turned China into one of the world's biggest markets for pirated foreign movies. Video compact discs, or VCDs, cost about $2, and at $125 or so, the machines that play them are affordable even for Chinese families.

WHAT A WEEK for Deadheads! More than 38 hours of Grateful Dead concerts are newly gathered and available on a DVD box set. There's a just-opened Dead exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. And on Thursday the tribes will gather at theaters nationwide for a "Meet Up at the Movies" concert special. Out today from Shout! Factory, the 14-DVD, 38-hours-plus Grateful Dead box set "All the Years Combine: The DVD Collection" gathers everything the band ever officially issued on VHS, Laserdisc and DVD, packed into a compact box and (relatively)

ONE OF THE bigger events on TV this spring will be the second season of HBO's "Game of Thrones," starting April 1. You can see why that is cause for celebration today, when the first season appears in detailed DVD and Blu-ray sets from HBO Home Entertainment. The first TV season proved largely up to the demands of George R.R. Martin's text over 10 episodes, both in maintaining his tone and the sense of mystery pervading the novel, and in letting the characters be as flawed as Martin wanted.

I THINK I'VE been living in Philly too long. Apparently, I don't know the difference between a hard sell and a shakedown. The hard sell came at the hands of Rocco Martinez, 29, a likable amateur videographer who tried his best to sell me a video of a Philadelphia Parking Authority enforcement agent supposedly accepting a bootleg DVD in return for rescinding a parking ticket. The shakedown allegedly came when Martinez tried just as hard to sell the same video to PPA Executive Director Vince Fenerty.

What can you say about U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), the gun totin' hero of FX's mordant 21st-century TV lawman series, Justified ? Givens is devilishly handsome - and altogether devilish, but in a lovable way. He's a crack shot. And he always gets his man - or woman. But not before suffering a few bruises and a whole lot of humiliation. Lexington, Ky.'s wiseacre lawman was created years ago by crime writer Elmore Leonard, but he seems tailor-made for Olyphant ( Deadwood , Damages )

I've spent much of my reading life trying to figure it out: What is it about the work of John le Carré that draws me back to his books again and again? Le Carré (real name, David Cornwell), a former British spy turned best-selling novelist, is a master plotter - but so is Arthur Conan Doyle. He's a marvelous creator of dialogue - but so is Elmore Leonard. He is darkly hilarious in that dry, British manner - but so are any number of contemporary English novelists. My humble conclusion: It's the themes of loyalty and betrayal at the core of le Carré's work that have made some of his stories tales for the ages.

George Smiley, the soft-spoken, reticent, aging MI6 officer featured in five of John le Carré's best novels, is one of the most memorable, and moving, fictional spies in the genre. That is partly because of Alec Guinness, who played Smiley in two British Broadcasting Corp. mini-series, 1979's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and 1982's Smiley's People . Acorn Media has released both series to coincide with the Dec. 6 release of Tomas Alfredson's big-screen remake of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy , featuring Gary Oldman as Smiley.

SAN FRANCISCO - Netflix is raising its prices by as much as 60 percent for millions of subscribers who want to rent DVDs by mail and watch video on the Internet. The company is separating the two options so that subscribers who want both will have to buy separate plans totaling at least $16 per month. Netflix Inc. had been bundling both options in a single package, available for as low as $10 per month. New subscribers will have to pay the new prices immediately. The changes take effect Sept.

LOS ANGELES - Getting comedies onto the big screen has become a sobering business in Hollywood. Once one of the movie industry's most successful genres, with stars such as Eddie Murphy and Will Ferrell boasting $20 million paychecks, comedy films are now among the most challenging propositions for the studios that bankroll them. The fact that they typically aren't popular overseas - where culturally specific humor can be difficult to translate - has become a larger obstacle in an increasingly global film business.

IF YOU'VE been waiting for yet another DVD configuration of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, this is your week. "Rings" has a new "definitive" package comprising 15(!) discs with enough behind-the-scenes material to keep fans busy until Peter Jackson finishes "The Hobbit," prompting yet another DVD package. Elsewhere, there is "Sucker Punch," Zack Snyder's superindulgent fantasy about female psych-ward inmates who imagine themselves to be Nazi-fighting strippers, or something.

ED HELMS' "Hangover 2" made 40 times as much money and was about half as funny as his indie comedy "Cedar Rapids," released a few months earlier, now on DVD. Helms stars as an impossibly square guy who attends a regional insurance convention, where he's hazed and ultimately helped by fellow delegates (John C. Reilly, Anne Heche, Isiah Whitlock Jr.). The movie is offbeat and has a good heart - it's unusually generous to its Midwestern characters, and resolves itself in surprising ways.