DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

A very quiet news week again. Or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention again. You can’t blame me, because I’ve had to send my PS3 out for repairs again … the third time in less than 2 month. It’s a distraction that I don’t really need at the moment, but from a blogging perspective, it’s great as it gives me something to write/rant about. I did manage to get the September NPD analysis up, and it’s good reading for Microsoft, and not so much for Sony, but more on that later.

Starting with copyright news, the MPAA responds to claims by the EFF that their lawsuit against RealDVD is more about stiffling innovation, and less about actual copyright infringement. I’ve already talked about what I think of it all here.

The MPAA is also doing damage to the education of future generations. The MPAA’s demands for colleges to crackdown on copyright theft means costs of up to $500,000 for colleges, which will no doubt be passed onto students. The MPAA has no right to do this, to put at risk the next generation of students just because they want to be a bit more greedy. It’s as careless as the current US administration appointing a “Copyright Czar” when there are so many other more important problems at hand.

If Vista Ultimate was priced at $100 instead of $300, would piracy drop?

And the worst thing is that none of this actually stops piracy. In fact, it’s arguable whether piracy can be stopped at all. Even Microsoft, who this week implemented the Windows Genuine Advantage program in China and met with a huge wave of anger from Chinese computer users, admits that pirates cannot be stopped. There used to be a time when companies thought to be competitive and attractive to customers by producing good products/services at reasonable prices. These days, companies simply want to take the shortcut by shutting down alternatives. And yes, piracy is an alternative to paying, sometimes the only sensible alternative when goods are ridiculously priced. But I’m not condoning piracy, rather, I’m critisizing senseless greed. Would more or less people pirate a product if it were priced at $20 a pop, as opposed to $200? And if a company wants to charge $200, then it should be prepared to put up with the higher levels of piracy, as they are the ones that forced people to go down this road. If these companies spent less on lobbying governments to pass illogical and anti-consumer laws (the latest being Sweden), and more on product innovation or to reduce prices, won’t it be more effective in fighting piracy?

Let’s move onto HD before I start ranting too much again. Two piecs of news about the lower and upper range of Blu-ray hardware prices. The first is Best Buy’s $100 Blu-ray player offer – actually, it’s a $199 player (cheap already) plus a $100 voucher off selected Blu-ray movie purchases. It’s a good deal, although I would personally go with a Profile 2.0 player if your player has access to a ethernet connection.

Denon DVD-3800BD: This is what you get for $2,500 these days

On the other end of the scale is Denon’s new ultra-high-end Blu-ray player, at a staggering £1,600 ($USD 2,500+). There will be people willing to pay this much for a Blu-ray player, I’m sure, but probably not as many as there were about two months ago. The economic strife hitting almost every country in the world is also hurting Blu-ray sales. Analysts, who predicted only last week that Blu-ray would sell 5 million machines in 2008 (and to 40 million in 2012), have downgraded their prediction by 25%. Over the last week, Sony’s stock prices on Nikkei fell dramatically, by 14% in a single day at one point, as Sony revised their profit predictions downwards by an amazing 59%. Now is probably the worst possible time to be promoting a premium alternative to DVD, and promotions like Best Buy’s $100 Blu-ray player costs the BDA or studios a lot of money. But without promotions, then there’s the risk that Blu-ray will die a slow death, which is an even worse outcome.

Samsung released a new Blu-ray player that also supports Netflix video streaming. It makes sense as Blu-ray Profile 2.0 players are all capable of Internet connections and have the processing power necessary to handle video streaming. While I don’t think video streaming can replace a disc format just yet (and it’s debatable whether discs will go away completely or not, I mean in the age of MP3s, CDs still have a place right?), but it’s giving people an alternative to Blu-ray and DVD.

On the computer side of things, I found this interesting article that compared integrated GPU solutions to dedicated graphics cards as to which one is best for Blu-ray decoding. The conclusion seems to be that integrated GPUs are good enough, when paired with a decent CPU, but if you want practically non existent CPU usage (for noise/heat related reasons) during Blu-ray playback (to get the GPU, possibly on a passive cooled card, to do all the work), then a dedicated card is what you need.

And lastly, in gaming, there’s not much news at all. The reaction from last week’s NPD figures is the usual spin from all the camps. Nintendo were happy because they’re selling the most consoles and plenty of software to go with it (even though it’s always the trio Wii Play, Wii Fit and Mario Kart). Microsoft were happy because they beat Sony and sold the most software, although you wonder how many more price cuts they can manage before they’ll have to give away their consoles. Sony were happy because even though their console cost more than the 360 and Wii combines with a few games thrown in, they still sold a few even if software sales are not exactly what they are hoping for with only 9.8% of top 10 titles (but I’m sure LittleBigPlanet will do well for them, if it ever gets released). So everyone’s happy, and that makes me happy too, I suppose. I’m FIFA 09’ing on my 360 at the moment and it’s great. It would be greater if my PS3 isn’t at Sony’s repair center all the time though.

Wow, this has been a short WNR, hasn’t it? Less of my inane writings you’ll have to read, which is probably the best news of the week. I’ll try to act like I’m not hurt by that, truly, I will. See you next week.

My PS3 is on the way back to me. Again. Hopefully this one is fully working. The 2.50 firmware came out too, I don’t know if it fixes the disc read error problem that 2.43 seems to either create or make an existing problem come out. There are early reports that the 2.50 firmware is borked too, but more on that later.

I wrote a mid-week blog on the status of Blu-ray, so some of the news stories that I will cover in this WNR will have been covered by that blog entry already.

Let’s start with copyright news. Actually, there weren’t that many, other than the fact that EA continues to disrespect their own customers by sayings that nobody gives a damn about DRM. Other than the thousands and thousands of people who have protested and many more that have deliberately pirates your software as a protest. The Pirate Bay copyright trial is set to start in February 2009, this one should be interesting.

Some of the licensing that Blu-ray hardware requires

I’ve talked about the cost of Blu-ray DRM licensing before, and it was interesting to hear Apple CEO Steve Jobs talk about it as one of the reasons why Macs don’t have Blu-ray support yet (more on the Blu-ray no-show in Mac later on). Could the BDA be digging their own grave with their greed over DRM (and other types of) licensing? AACS, BD+, BD-J, Dolby TrueHD, DD+, DTS-HD … the licensing costs do add up, and each disc, player or software sold has to pay licensing fees. Blu-ray hardware prices will come down if unlicensed players start to flood the market, which is what happened with DVDs when the Chinese manufacturers started doing their thing. The BDA has been working quite hard to prevent Chinese firms from making Blu-ray players probably for this very reason, but in these harsh economic times, the extra cost of Blu-ray manufacturing and production may be very hurtful for the fledgling format.

Onto HD news now, as mentioned earlier, the rumours of Blu-ray coming to the Apple Mac and giving Blu-ray a huge boost of confidence proved to be false. Not only that, Steve Jobs actually called it a ‘bag of hurt’. Ouch.

No Blu-ray on Apple Macs ... yet

Before people accuse Apple being anti Blu-ray, Apple is actually an important member of the BDA and sits on their board of directors. Of course, Apple have their own agenda in regards to iTunes and movie downloads, but Apple is said to have worked closely on the Blu-ray specs, and also had a hand in crafting the HD DVD specs through their involvement in the DVD Forum. But the fact remains that adding Blu-ray to Apple Macs is a costly proposition at the moment, possibly another $300 in hardware and licensing costs alone, not to mention the need to upgrade QuickTime to play Blu-ray movies. Steve Jobs also talked about waiting for Blu-ray to take off before burdening customers with the cost, and that’s true. How many people actually have Blu-ray movies right now? And how many want to watch them on Macs? How many people even watch DVDs on Macs?

And even though Apple’s can’t play Blu-rays, the new MacBooks will now feature accelerated decoding of H.264, one of the major video codecs used by Blu-ray. This should pave the way for eventual Blu-ray support.

DISH 1080p: competition to Blu-ray?

There’s a lot of competition for Blu-ray these days, despite HD DVD dying. Toshiba still wants to beat Blu-ray, but using upscaled DVD instead (which was their original plan before HD DVD). This article talks about it, but what I found most interesting in the article were the Blu-ray hardware figures for Australia. Apparently, in Australia, only 17% of HDTV owners have Blu-ray players. Out of these, only 7.5% are standalone players, the rest being PS3s (I don’t know if these figures count all PS3 owners as Blu-ray owners, or just the ones that use it to play Blu-ray movies). In other words, only 1.3% of HDTV owners in Australia have Blu-ray standalones. Then there’s DISH Network’s new 1080p service, which early reviews have suggested that it equals Blu-ray in terms of quality. You remember a couple of weeks ago that the BDA threatened to sue companies that used the term “Blu-ray quality” to describe their VOD and subscription services. Maybe those claims weren’t so exaggerated, because in the end, it’s just an issue over bandwidth – 40 Mbps will give you Blu-ray quality video and audio. 

Last week’s Iron Man led surge came to an end, nearly, this week. The Nielsen VideoScan stats for the week after Iron Man showed a 46% drop for Blu-ray sales due to Iron Man sales falling away (DVD sales recorded a smaller, but still significant 17% drop). Predictions are still saying that Blu-ray sales will significantly grow in the next four years, with annual hardware sales set to jump to 40 million if the predictions are true. This means Blu-ray hardware will have to sell 8 times the current figure for this prediction to come true. Easy!

And so we come to gaming. A new PS3 (and PSP) firmware was released during the week, version 2.50. When I first posted the news, I warned people to wait before updating as new firmware will usually introduce more problems than it fixes (wait for the eventual .01 incremental updates to fix these problems). I was right, as the 2.50 firmware introduced quiet a few serious problems, such as the B(lack)SOD problem after the firmware update, B/W video playback problem and a few other things. There are probably solutions or work-arounds for most of them, but it’s probably safer to wait for 2.51 which I’m sure will be released soon if the problem identified are serious enough. I must say that Sony’s handling of the PS3 firmware updates haven’t been exactly up to standards that people expect. It’s great that they’re updating the PS3 constantly to add more value, but it’s another if it breaks people’s PS3s because the firmware haven’t been properly tested (and they can’t possibly be, not in the relatively short time-spans between updates).

The new Xbox 360 Experience is coming in November ... if you've got enough space to install it

Speaking of updates, the Xbox 360 is about to have a major one next month, probably the largest since the Xbox 360 launched due to the launch of the new dashboard interface (to compete with PS3 Home, no doubt). The disk space requirements for the new update is quite big, 128 MB or more, and many people just don’t have that much space, especially if they have Core/Arcade versions that don’t come with HDDs. Spotting this potential problem, Microsoft has done the right thing and will give away free memory units and give heavy discounts for HDDs to people that don’t have them. This should help the Xbox 360 build up some momentum for the holiday season, and if the September NPD figures are anything to go by (huge jump in Xbox 360 sales, beating the PS3 quite handsomely), then it could be a good holiday period for the 360 in a year that hasn’t been that great. The full NPD analysis will be posted early next week as usual.

That’s it for this week I think. No, let me check again. Yep, that’s it. No more. All done. Were you expecting more? Were you disappointed? That’s a shame, and I am sorry about it all. Oh well, let’s hope next week’s a bit better.