DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Hello everybody on this beautiful Sunday. Actually it’s cloudy and cold here, but hopefully it will be nice wherever you are reading this from. Quite a bit of news to go through this week, so let’s not waste any time.

In Copyright news, apparently DVD piracy is so common amongst the South Australian Police force that it makes it impossible to prosecute. So basically if everybody does it then they can’t do anything about it? Or does having guns help? Or perhaps it’s more of a “one rule for them, and another for the rest of us”? It’s certainly seems that way since the President of the United States has now been caught with pirated music on his iPod. Only last week did the US Attorney General say that piracy leads to terrorism … so where does this act of piracy lead to then? New Zealand meanwhile has passed their new digital copyright laws. While new laws will always mean more, not less, restrictions – at least the New Zealand laws seem to have taken a more sensible approach in terms of fair use. The Europeans are taking a more sensible approach as well, rejecting the latest attempt by the RIAA/MPAA to have provisions to chuck users off the Net who are suspected of piracy. And if chucking you off the Net isn’t enough, you chucking a CD out might be construed as ‘unauthorised distribution’, and hence, piracy. And in a “well it was bound to happen eventually” type of story, hackers have broken the encryption on PlayStation Network games for the PSP, which will now allow piracy of these games to go ahead.

UK subscription television network Sky is phasing out component output on their HD set top boxes in an ‘anti-piracy’ drive. HDMI will be the sole video output supported since it includes HDCP copy protection. Speaking of copy protection, expect to see DisplayPort becoming the next big thing in PC-monitor connection. DisplayPort (DP) is not compatible directly with DVI or HDMI, although it can be made interchangeable through adapters – and yes, it includes HDCP. So that’s VGA/DVI/HDMI/DP – does the PC really need this many connection types? But to be fair, HDMI is not suited for PC connections, and DVI is starting to get a bit old.

Onto HD news. In a surprising turn of events, Microsoft released an update for the HD DVD add-on drive this week. The update is only needed for those that connect their add-on drive to the Xbox 360 for HD DVD playback. And for those that did purchase HD DVD players, including the add-on drive, from Amazon before Toshiba’s decision to pull out, Amazon will be giving them $50 credit that can be used on anything. A very nice move by Amazon, although how many HD DVD users will end up using the $50 credit on more HD DVD movies is hard to say (I know I will if I was eligible – with HD DVD movies so cheap, that’s maybe 3 to 6 movies that you can buy, compared to just two for Blu-ray, so why not?)

I’ve always been facinated with 3D movies, and Disney is about to release a 3D movie on Blu-ray. It’s only a Hanna Montana movie, but I wonder perhaps proper 3D support through electronic glasses could help Blu-ray achieve better sales through the “gimmick factor”? Meanwhile, those with iPhones might be able to interact it with their PS3 – I wonder if the iPod Touch might have been a better choice for the integration. The flurry of news in regards to Blu-ray price rises hasn’t dampened enthusiasm, with statistics (yeah, those damned things) showing people are actually willing to pay for higher prices. Not me though, even though I consider myself an early adopter and us early adopters are well known for wasting money on stuff that we know will be much cheaper in a few months time. The question remains about the general public, who are used to low low DVD prices, and whether they are willing to pay 10 times more for a Blu-ray player and twice as much for the Blu-ray movie? Sony seems to think so, and they are predicting that Blu-ray will hold 50% of the movie market compared to DVDs by the year’s end. Blu-ray actually only holds about 8% of the market at the moment, and there’s no sign that it will surge to much higher than that in the short term, so I don’t know what Sony are talking about. 50% of the movie market will need 50% of the hardware market as well, and I just don’t think Sony and co. can get a few hundred million machines into people’s home by the end of the year when they’ve barely sold over 1 million machines so far. But PR won them the war against HD DVD, so perhaps they’re hoping to do the same against DVDs. But you can’t really fight against low low prices (ie. “reality”) unless you fight fire with fire (or fire sales).

Before we move onto gaming proper, half-way in between is news that Sony will release the 2.30 firmware update for the PS3 that will finally include DTS-HD MA decoding (to LPCM). It is the one last major feature that the PS3 lacks in terms of Blu-ray playback, and I’m glad it has finally arrived since I’ve been telling people it will be here for ages now and have recommended the PS3 based on this assumption.

Onto gaming now. The Wii has scored a coup by signing up a deal with the BBC to add a iPlayer channel. Of course, it’s only for UK users only, but I’m sure Microsoft and Sony would have liked to have been part of the deal. Microsoft are rumoured to be developing a Wii like controller codenamed “Newton”. Not sure if trying to be more Wii-like than the Wii will help Microsoft’s cause, since I think they should concentrate on making a new version of the console that’s a bit more sexier and quieter to compete with the PS3.

And following last week’s news story about the censored Australian version of the GTA IV, the confirmation has come from Rockstar that the game is censored, although no details has been given as to what has been removed/changed. Well that’s it then, I will have to source the game from elsewhere. Expect Australian versions of GTA IV to sell extremely poorly then, which is a shame for Australian retailers.

Ok, that’s it for this week. Can’t believe this is the 29th issue of the Weekly News Roundup already. Will I do something special for the 30th issue? Wait and see (and don’t be too surprised if nothing happens …)

Hello everyone on this Easter Sunday. I’ve never really gotten the connection that easter has with bunnies. I understand that it presents birth and re-birth that comes during spring and what better represents reproduction than rabbits (although rats could also have been used, but who wants to eat rat eggs, chocolate or otherwise?). But why chocolate eggs? If I can remember correctly from biology class, rabbits don’t lay eggs, and certainly not chocolate ones. But I guess it would be more appropriate than eating a chocolate resurrected Jesus.

With blasphemy out of the way, let get to the copyright news. An anti-piracy company in Italy has been found guilty of illegally spying on P2P users. Is it me or is piracy and privacy becoming more and more related, and not just because they share 85.7% of their letters. On the other end of the spectrum, Verizon in the US is helping P2P users who share legitimate files by making downloads faster. As someone who has some experience in file serving, P2P is extremely useful in the way that it can deal with increased capacity – in fact, the more users that download, the faster it becomes is ideal for sharing popular files (and it saves a bunch in bandwidth hosting costs as well). And even for illegal files, the reality isn’t as bad as the content holders want to portray. An Oxford economist has claimed that piracy actually helps to promote products, and may benefit the very companies that want it stopped. I often read posts where people say they pirated something, found it to be great, and then bought the product, usually something they would never have bought otherwise. Unfortunately, Australian ISPs might not think so and one ISP is already starting to crackdown on illegal downloads, threatening to cut off Internet connections for people who download pirated content excessively. This means the ISP will have to monitor people’s usages, which goes back to the 85.7% similar word “privacy”. But as usual, the media tend to take a sensationalist view of things, and the ISP in question has been doing this for over two years now without people noticing, but it’s still something people don’t want an ISP to be in charge of (and I think most ISPs don’t want to be in charge of monitoring usage either). Before moving onto HD, the news this week is that Slysoft has broken BD+ copy protection for Blu-ray. At least for the time being. In their press release, they are still (somewhat optimistically) hoping that this will help to bring HD DVD back from the dead, as they’ve always preferred HD DVD’s easier to break AACS copy protection to Blu-ray’s harder to break AACS & BD+ combination. And of course, they also stated that BD+ is still in its infancy, and that over time, it will be harder and harder to break.

Onto HD, finally some more movement in the area of PC Blu-ray/HD DVD playback. Corel (who purchased Intervideo) has just released the first version of WinDVD that supports Blu-ray and HD DVD playback. Dubbed WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-ray (despite the fact it plays HD DVDs too, but I guess that’s just the result of the format war ending), it also has build in video/DVD upscaling and all the usual features you would expect. I will be reviewing WinDVD 9 over the next week (thanks again to Corel for providing a reviewer copy), but from first impressions, I’m quite impressed. WinDVD 8, to put it mildly, was somewhat crap. It didn’t even install on my main work machine, and it was sluggish. The new WinDVD is definitely much more responsive. The best thing about it so far is that it supports older video cards for Blu-ray and HD DVD playback, something that PowerDVD Ultra failed to do on my ATi Radeon 9800 XT. Obviously, performance wasn’t great on my old computer, but it at least started playback as opposed to just giving me an error message about insufficient hardware. So even on a P4 3.2 GHz (not even Pentium D) with the mentioned 9800 XT, HD DVD playback (via the Xbox 360 add-on drive) worked without any tweaking (but choppy playback, of course), including all the interactive features. HDCP requirements for both Blu-ray and HD DVD states that VGA output is supported, if only at a lower resolution, so PowerDVD Ultra not starting playback is the software’s problem, not to do with copy protection. Hopefully PowerDVD 8, to be launched sometime next month I think, will fix these issues. WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-ray supports Profile 1.1 Blu-ray playback, but there’s a good chance a patch will be released soon to support Profile 2.0 (that’s the great thing about software based playback solutions – upgrading is easy). I’m predicting this because the PS3 is about to get its own software update to make it into (the first?) Profile 2.0 Blu-ray player. That’s good news to those who purchased the PS3 wanting it to be future proof (and to those, like me, that has been recommending it for the same reason). Of course, the one feature Blu-ray owners really want is DTS-HD MA decoding for the PS3, but I hear that it’s only a matter of time before it is available. I’ve also just published the Nero Vision 5 AVCHD authoring guide. AVCHD is basically like a mini Blu-ray, allowing you to encode 1080p content (with up to 7.1 Linear PCM audio) onto a DVD recordable (although you won’t be able to store too much content on a standard single layer DVD).

In gaming, the expected hoopla surrounding the release of GTA IV next month will no doubt intensify. I’ve just read some previews on IGN, and I can’t be anything but excited at the new version of my favourite gaming franchise. Microsoft Australia (and New Zealand) is giving people who pre-order GTA IV a special exclusive deal in which we get 500 Microsoft points to use on Xbox Live plus four exclusive GTA Gamerpics. I still haven’t decided whether I will get the 360 version or the PS3 version, but I’m leaning towards the 360 version due to the better controller and because Rockstar seems to suggest that the 360 version had been finished earlier (and hence, should be a bit better). I’ve seen Microsoft’s new Arcade bundle that includes both GTA IV and Halo 3 that will retail for $200 less than the cheapest PS3, and I think this bundle will sell extremely well (let’s just hope that MS finally has the 360 stock issue sorted out, because it was a pain trying to source a 360 during the holiday period). I put up the February US NDP game sales figure analysis a few days ago, so have a look if you’re interested in these kind of things.

And last but not least, the Roxio competition to win yourself an iPod Nano plus other cool Roxio prizes is still up and running, until the end of this month. I will have some reviews and guides up for some of the Roxio software on the site shortly as well.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.