DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Welcome to another weekly news roundup. I’ve been thinking about changing the name of this weekly feature, as “Weekly News Roundup” lacks a certain something. Perhaps “Digital Digest’s DVDGuy’s Digital Digest”, or “DVDGuy’s Dazzling Digital Diary”. Umm … I think I will stick with “Weekly News Roundup” for now.

Now for something completely different. Starting with copyright news, Steve Biddle from New Zealand wrote in his blog about trying to do something very simply in Vista that Vista’s DRM system would not allow. All he wanted to do was to simultaneously output 5.1 audio through SPDIF and stereo audio output to his TV, but Vista won’t let him and would only allow SPDIF output at the same time if it carries a 2.0 channel signal. How does having this restriction prevent piracy, I’ll never know. Meanwhile, the troubled Bush administration has launched a new war on terror front, this time a war on copyright infringement. All those terrorists sitting in their caves downloading the latest episodes of Heroes must be quaking in their boots (if they do indeed wear boots). Seriously, does the White House have nothing better to do? They should just get back to what they do best, and that’s to make up intelligence to support yet another war in the Middle East. The MPAA is joining in the fight and says it’s in the best interest of ISPs to filter out “inappropriate” content. Last week (or the week before, I can’t remember), I also reported a story about the MPAA asking Universities to install software toolkits to monitor student’s Internet usages, in a bid to stop campus piracy. It has now been revealed that the “toolkit” may have violated copyright terms since it uses many pieces of open source software, and has modified them without providing the modified source code. The ISP hosting the toolkit has been sent a DMCA notice (haha). Perhaps this ISP should have filtered out the obviously “inappropriate” content. In other words, while the MPAA is forcing people to respect their interpretation of the copyright laws, they themselves might have been breaking the same laws to achieve their aim. Oh the irony.

In HD news, LG has finally launched their dual format drive here in Australia. Their recommended retail price is more than double the store pricing of the same drive in the US, but some have found luck in getting the drive at a more reasonable $AUD 450. It’s still a bit too expensive to mark it as a must-have item for your next computer, but it’s a 50% price drop away from becoming just that. I will probably write another “If I were to buy a new computer today” blog entry this week, like the one I did back in September, and I must just include this drive in my recommended specs. Staying in Australia, retailers are saying the HD DVD people are not doing all they can for the Australian market. There is no point in denying this claim, because HD DVD has had a late and fairly quiet start, while Blu-ray has been going all guns blazing in the promotional stakes. Both sides are still doing poorly on pricing and releases though. The HD DVD side has been relying mostly on the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive here in Australia, which was the only HD DVD player until about 3 months ago. But we still end up paying more and getting less for the add-on drive, as compared to the US in any case, where the pricing of the drive has dropped to less than $130 (although the price has gone back to $180 on Amazon.com at least), and includes 6 movies (we only get 1 free movie in the box). So much for the high Australian dollar. Another problem that people have been having here in Australia is trouble accessing the web content on titles such as Transformers. People with the US version of the movie (thank goodness for region-free HD DVDs) have not had the same problem, and according to the HD DVD group, the web features are very popular indeed. If you really had to compare Blu-ray to HD DVD, then on paper, HD DVD wins in everything but studio support. Early HD DVD release have better picture and sound quality than Blu-ray (most used VC-1, while older Blu-ray movies used the less efficient MPEG-2), most HD DVD releases are 30 GB compared to 25 GB for Blu-ray (BD-50 discs are still a small minority of releases, and HD-51 is coming soon), all HD DVD players and movies support advanced interactive features that not even the newest and most expensive Blu-ray player support and HD DVD hardware is cheaper too. But it doesn’t stop the myth that Blu-ray is superior to HD DVD, a myth that has been propogated by people such as Transformers director Michael Bay. Transformers on HD DVD is probably the best selling movie on either HD format so far, and of course it might sell more if it was a Blu-ray release too, but then I’m sure all his older movies would sell more if they were on HD DVD too. His claim that Microsoft deliberately supports HD DVD to get HD to fail, is tinfoil hat madness. Microsoft has lots of things invested in the success of HD (their VC-1 codec, used by the majority of Blu-ray and HD DVD releases, for one), and their digital distribution plans (of which is doing quite well in the US through Xbox Marketplace) is a completely separate issue. Sony also has digital downloads coming soon for the PS3, so do they wish HD to fail too? As for his claim that Blu-ray is superior …

There’s a lot of HD news this week, so let’s start a new paragraph. Analysts have predicted that there will be parity between the two competing HD formats for the foreseeable future. I can’t see either format just fading away unless the studios all become exclusive for one side, so protect yourself by becoming format neutral. There are always rumours floating around the Warner Brothers, the only studio to be format neutral, is going to go format exclusive and supports Blu-ray only. You can read about what I think of this rumour in the link, but suffice to say, I don’t think it will happen (if anything, it might go the other way). HD DVD is certainly the weaker of the two sides when it comes to sales figures (although beware that the often quoted Nielsen HD sales figures do not include Wal-Mart, which came into the HD game quite late, but is now having an influence on things by being HD DVD exclusive, the Sony PS3 apart), but I can’t help but feel that it has a more mature strategy, rather than the “let’s sell as many PS3s as possible at a loss so we have lots of Blu-ray players in people’s homes, even if they don’t know what Blu-ray is” approach. There is a nice article that summarises the state of HD DVD, and its well worth a read. Speaking of the PS3, more and more rumours suggest that it will become Blu-ray profile 1.1 or 2.0 sometime soon. Unless there is some technical problem that prevents 1.1 or 2.0 certification (eg. if the cell processor can’t handle simultaneous multi-track video and audio decoding), then it’s a “when” not “if” in my opinion (that’s why I purchased a PS3 as my Blu-ray player). Still, it might take a while since there are hardly any 1.1, let alone 2.0, movies on sale. And we’re still waiting for DivX support, which was announced weeks before, but in that time, the Xbox 360 went ahead and added support for it already. YouTube HD coming soon via H.264? Not so far fetched with the power H.264 can offer.

On that note, it’s on to gaming. Is it me or is the line between gaming and HD getting blurrier by the minute? Of course, here on Digital Digest we primarily cover the video aspect of gaming, so we’ve already intentionally blurred the lines. The holiday sales period is an important period to see which console will dominate in the year ahead. Analysts predict that the Xbox 360 and Wii will be side by side, followed by the PS3 by some distance (although not as distant as it used to be). Meanwhile, Nintendo has pulled ads for the Wii because demand is so high. Putting on Michael Bay’s tinfoil hat for a minute - does anybody else think that Nintendo might be deliberately not producing enough Wii’s to keep the demand up? It’s had a whole year to get the production up (Wii was last Christmas’ most wanted gift too), and it doesn’t seemed to have helped (if anything, this year’s stock is even less sufficient). And if you look at the low number of games being released in the same period, which would have crippled any other console, you do wonder why demand is still so high. Of course, that’s just conspiracy talk - the most likely explanation is that Wii is attracting non-gamers, and that’s a huge group of people who suddenly want a Wii for Christmas. Or that some people are hoarding stock to sell at a premium on eBay or something.

So that’s it for another week. While you are all busy going from store to store to try and find a Wii, I will be here as usual gathering the news and writing page fulls of nonsense ready for next week’s Dazzling Digital Diary. See you then.

So another Sunday, and another news roundup. There really ought to be some rule to forbid working on a Sunday, but then it would just mean more work on Mondays. There really ought to be some rule to forbid working on a Monday …

In copyright news, in a Slysoft newsletter, a claim was made that BD+ copy protection, the additional layer of copy protection that Blu-ray owners enjoy, will be defeated soon. Everybody probably still remembers the statement that Richard Doherty, (ex?) analyst at Envisioneering Group made in regards to BD+:

BD+, unlike AACS, which suffered a partial hack last year, won’t likely be breached for 10 years

Not exactly 10 years, but 0.5 years is not bad. Surprisingly, this was the only bit of important copyright related news for the week … the RIAA/MPAA must be on holidays. Although with so many OiNK replacement sites popping up, there will have a lot of work to do when they come back.

In HD news, Fox is set to release the very first BD 1.1 disc for the sci-fi movie Sunshine. This is the first Blu-ray disc to feature picture-in-picture technology, which has been present on HD DVD almost from day one. To access the feature, people will need to have a BD 1.1 player, of which there is only one on the market (in standalone form anyway), the newly released Panasonic DMP-BD30. PS3 owners should expect a firmware update to get themselves up to at least 1.1 standard (although the PS3 is good enough for 2.0 in any case). Will the disc play properly on 1.0 players? We will find out soon enough. The news this week has all been about HD DVD’s price drops. Several special Black Friday sales have ensured that not only did HD DVD standalones break the $200 barrier, it broke the $100 barrier too. $98 for a standalone HD DVD player from Toshiba (the superceded HD-A2) that has built in DVD upscaling and comes with 5 free HD DVD movies - that’s really just too good to be true. It sure beats spending $500+ here in Australia to buy a similar player that only comes with 3 movies. K-Mart has saw the trend, and will now offer the HD-A2 as their only HD DVD or Blu-ray standalone for sale this Christmas. They will still sell the PS3 (as well as the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on) so talk of them going exclusive is not factual. The HD-A2 is not a bad player. It lacks 1080p output, but as this DigiWiki entry explains, it’s not a problem at all for people with 1080p displays while playing back film content. To continue with the HD DVD news, Toshiba has showed off their new HD DVD recorder, now supporting HD Rec, a format that uses H.264 to record to standard DVD discs, allowing 2 hours of HD content to be stored. Remember that Toshiba’s initial idea for HD was to use existing DVD/red laser technology and combine that with a new more efficient codec (H.264 of VC-1). It’s just as well then that Ritek will soon launch HD DVD recordable discs. Asus is also launching their quietest HD DVD-ROM drive yet, designed for home theatre PCs.

On that note, let’s move to gaming. Sort of. I’m very impressed with Nvidia’s new 8800 GT card as I noted in an earlier blog post. It combines the 3D performance of the 8800 GTS, with the HD acceleration of the 8600 GTS, and then makes the whole thing even more efficient as to even allow a passive cooled version for building an ultra quiet home theatre PC. Nvidia will be releasing a new GTS card too based on similar changes, so that might even more more attractive. And while ATI’s Radeon HD 2xxx series has been somewhat of a disappointment, you should never rule them out because you are only as good as your last GPU.

Now moving onto gaming properly, there was rumours that IPTV was coming to the Xbox 360 in the Fall update, but Microsoft has quashed the rumours by saying that it’s not in the Fall update, but will be here soon enough anyway. Another week and another developer, this time Midway Chicago’s studio head Mike Bilder, saying the PS3 is a pain in the ass to work with. But he does offer a solution - develop for the PS3 first to work around the problems, and then port over to the other systems. Specifically, he says:

Just, to be honest, the hardware differences in memory and processor on the PS3 vs. traditional PC and 360, it makes it a challenge, and it’s representative. Everybody’s having a challenge in the industry right now.

[And about using the PS3 as the lead development platform]

The difficulty you run into there, at least in the last generation, was that the Xbox was considerably more powerful than the PS2, and you found that people didn’t always take advantage of the hardware. Whereas with the PS3 and the 360, it’s certainly more of a level playing field, so I don’t think it’s necessarily a negative to put the PS3 first [as the lead development platform]. But it does help mitigate some of that risk in framerate, memory, technology, just the hardware differences.

That’s definitely a solution to a problem, find out what you can and cannot do on the PS3 first, and once the code is done, you can be sure that it will probably work on the other consoles too because they are a bit more flexible to work with than the PS3.  The quality will be the same too, according to Bilder, because there’s not much difference between the two main consoles (and the Xbox 360 development is flexible enough to allow ports to it to run quite well). Of course, smaller developers who don’t have the resources of Midway might simply skip the PS3 to work on platforms that have the biggest install base and with less development problems.

So that’s it then for a week that has been dominated by HD DVD news, with relatively very little news in other areas. If I didn’t know better, I would say that the HD DVD promotion machine has finally started rolling, and just in time for the holidays too. Blu-ray will come back next week with more news to counter, no doubt. See you then.

When I posted about my recommended computer specs back in September, I chose the 640 MB version of the GeForce 8800 GTS, but it was far from my first choice. I said at the time that:

… but what I want is a card that combines the HD acceleration (PureVideo HD or AVIVO HD) of the 8600 GTS (or HD 2400 XT) with the 3D performance of the 8800 GTS. Again, waiting 6 months will probably make this possible.

Well, I didn’t have to wait 6 months (although 6 months from the day that the 8800 series was first announced is more accurate), Nvidia has just announced the introduction of the 512 MB 8800 GT.

So what’s new in the 8800 GT? The 8800 GT has a new GPU, the G92. It is essentially a die shrink of the existing G80 GPU as found in the other 8800 series cards. The G80 required an external display chip to support the dual-link DVI outputs, but now the display chip is integrated into the GPU which significantly reduces manufacturing costs. The new GPU also supports PCIe 2.0, which doubles the available bandwidth. There are also lots of little changes associated with 3D performance, things like 112 SPs (compared to the GTX’s 128 SPs, and the GTS’s 96), core clock increase to 600 MHz (a 25 MHz increase on the GTX, but 12 less than the Ultra), shader clock at 1500 MHz (sames as the Ultra, and higher than the GTX), a 900 MHz memory clock (sames as the GTX, lower than the Ultra), 512 MB of RAM and a memory interface of only 256 bits (compared to the 384-bit of the Ultra/GTX, and 320-bit of the GTS). But forget all these specs, the important thing is that the GT plays the latest games and do it very well, basically on the same level as a 640 MB 8800 GTS, the card that I recommended only a month ago.

I have deliberately left out the best bit, and one bit that the 8800 GTS/GTX/Ultra was missing, which led me to be cautious in my previous recommendations. Where this feature is concerned, even the 8600 GTS was more preferable than the 8800. So what is it? Well, since this is a website/blog mainly about digital video, the feature I’m talking about is HD video acceleration, in particularly VC-1 and H.264 acceleration needed for HD DVD and Blu-ray playback. While the 8800 Ultra/GTX/GTS was super powerful for 3D gaming, it did not contribute much to video acceleration at all, and instead, sat idle while the CPU struggles to keep a steady framerate. With the 8500/8600 and now 8800 GT, the VP2 engine is used to provide full H.264 video decoding. Note that VP2 on the 8500/8600 only offers full H.264 acceleration - MPEG-2 acceleration (not really needed) and VC-1 acceleration is limited to only inverse transform, motion compensation and in-loop deblocking - I’m not sure if the situation has changed with the VP2 engine on the 8800 GT (unlikely), but H.264 is the most processor intensive codec of all three and the one that is most in need of acceleration. Full VC-1 acceleration would have been great, as most HD DVD movies and now even Blu-ray ones use VC-1, but I guess we will have to wait for the VP3 engine for that.

So my wish sort of came true. I wanted a graphics card with the 3D power of the 8800 GTS, and the HD video acceleration features of the 8600 GTS, and this is exactly what I’ve got in the 8800 GT. There’s even a passive cooled version of the 8800 GT, perfect for a HTPC setup that can even handle the latest games (a sort of ”build-your-own” Xbox 360/PS3). The price is right too, positioned as an even cheaper replacement for the 320 MB 8800 GTS. It will be interesting to see what ATI can come up with to compete with the 8800 GT. And Nvidia themselves will launch a new GTS in November, so it might be worth it to wait and see a bit longer. And if you want to be a perfectionist, you might wish for HDMI output as well. But for the present, the 8800 GT is the GPU that I recommend for gaming and video enthusiasts.

For a roundup of Nvidia’s range of GPUs, please refer to this forum thread. You can read a full review of the 8800 GT here.

Because I am such a nerd, and one that doesn’t have a lot of money, I like to from time to time dream about a new computer that I will buy, even though the chances of me buying one are remote (my next purchase is planned for January-March 2008 - this means my current computer would have lasted more than 4 years by that time). I’m so sad that I actually do research and price comparisons for this computer that I won’t be buying. This is even sadder considering that I share my gathered information with no one. Well, things are about to get a little less sadder - in what could become a regular feature on the blog, I will from time to time share my thoughts on a new computer purchase with the dozens of people that read my blog, the reasons why I pick these specs and perhaps it will inspire others to dream about their new computer (and not buy one).

Before I list my proposed specs for the computer, I should share my intended uses for the computer so you can get a better idea of what I am after. This computer will mainly be used for entertainment purposes. This includes 3D gaming, video playback and video encoding, but mostly for gaming. I connect my computer to my TV and sound system and use it to play DivX/XviD video files, and I plan on eventually adding a Blu-ray/HD DVD drive to it so that it becomes a dual-format HD player too. My budget is not that high, and my intention is not to get the best possible system, or do any overclocking - I’m looking to strike the right balance between price and performance, getting the parts that should provide the best price/performance ratio at the time of purchase (in Australia, of course, so the situation in the US might be completely different).

So here are the specs:

Now is probably not the best time to buy a computer, at least not for me (even if I had the money). The reason is that DDR3 memory has come out and it fits in nicely with the Core2 Duo 6750 processor’s 1333 MHz FSB.  But that would mean investing in a DDR3 motherboard, which is hard to come by here in Australia, and it would also mean buying much more expensive DDR3 memory, which is not worth the premium at the moment. The other reason is that out of all the available GPUs, there isn’t one that offers great 3D performance plus solid HD (H.264/VC-1) acceleration - both of the top of the range GPUs from NVIDIA and ATI (8800 and HD 2600) do not have the same high performance acceleration as their low/mid range GPUs (eg. 8600 and HD 2400 both accelerate HD better). Waiting 6 month will hopefully solve these two problems. You might think with a 6750, acceleration won’t matter - but if you want a quiet and cool system, having GPU HD acceleration is a must.

Now for my reasoning. I chose the 6750 as the CPU since it represents the best value for money right now. Gigabyte motherboards have been rated quite highly recently, and their price is good. The RAM I’ve gone with PC-6400 as opposed to PC-8500 to save a bit of money - as mentioned before, I would prefer DDR3 PC-10600 but for the price, so maybe cheaper RAM now, with a view to motherboard+RAM upgrade in 6 months time (still not as ideal as waiting 6 months to buy the computer).

Moving on to the HDD - 320 GB represents better value than 400 GB drives. I get 2 of them and use either RAID-0 or some kind of matrixed array where the system file/saves partition is mirrored, while the rest is striped.

The choice of video card, also mentioned before, is not my ideal choice, but it’s the best available now. I could save money by opting for the 320 MB version of the GeForce 8800 GTS too, but what I want is a card that combines the HD acceleration (PureVideo HD or AVIVO HD) of the 8600 GTS (or HD 2400 XT) with the 3D performance of the 8800 GTS. Again, waiting 6 months will probably make this possible.

I almost always buy a Creative sound card, but I might skip it for this computer and try out the in-build sound. I can always get a card later if needed. I also like Pioneer optical drives - this drive is really just a temporary measure until a Blu-ray/HD DVD read-only + DVD writer drive becomes available cheaply (I can always use my Xbox 360’s HD DVD add-on drive to play HD DVD movies for now on this computer).

I put the specs for the monitor and case in brackets because I haven’t researched these areas too much - I usually only research these when I do decide to spend the cash. For a monitor, I will look for a 20-22″ screen, with HDMI input (the Chimei I listed does not have HDMI). For the case, it will have to be a good looking one that matches the other A/V equipment near it, plus be quiet too (the Antec Sonata III is the one I’m looking at - I have the original Antec Sonata right now). Other things like keyboard and mouse I might not even upgrade, since I like my current (Logitech wireless) setup.

So that’s it for this edition of “If I were to buy a new computer today” … I might do one next month, or when some prices start dropping, and do a comparison with the one today. It should be interesting.