DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Not too long to go until 2008. For some reason, I keep on thinking it’s already 2008. Whenever a new year is reached, I usually feel quite strange writing out the new year in dates, but for some reason, I just don’t feel that way with 2008. Strange.

I’ve previously blogged about the GeForce 8800 GT, calling it the card that everyone has been waiting for (a bit of an exaggeration, I know). In the last month, both ATI and NVIDIA have released new/updated cards that I think is worth blogging about, because these cards now give serious competition to he 8800 GT.

First from ATI is the Radeon HD 3870 (3850 also available). I remember a time when ATI meant the fastest GPU that you can buy. But recently, NVIDIA has managed to keep ATI at arm’s length when it comes to performance, with the Radeon HD 2xxx series being rather disappointing. The 3870 aims to correct this. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really come close, and the low recommended price of the unit suggests even ATI knows this. 3D performance wise, you will be better off with any of the 8800 series - the performance of the 3870 is certainly better than that of the 2xxx series, but that’s not really saying much. But in video performance, especially HD acceleration, the 3870 is probably the best card available on the market, as it features ATI’s AVIVO HD and UVD acceleration. Both H.264, and possibly more importantly, VC-1, receive full hardware accleration, which will be much appreciated when people start to watch Blu-ray or HD DVD movies on your computer. You certainly can’t beat the price, so it would be a good card to built a home theatre PC around, a system that will give you excellent HD playback, as well as fairly decent gaming (which past HTPCs were mostly incapable of). The card comes with HDMI output, so ATI’s thinking behind the card is also HTPC oriented. You can read a full review of the 3870 and 3850 here.

The other new GPU is actually just a refresh of an existing range, the 8800 GTS. The original 8800 GTS came in 320 and 640 MB varieties. Some will remember that I recommended this GPU for the first “If I were to buy a computer today” feature back in September. It now uses a version of the G92 chip first introduced in the 8800 GT, and scales back the RAM from 640 MB to 512 MB. The new chip uses the 65 nm process, as compared to the 90 nm process in previous chips, so clock speed can now be ramped up to levels exceeding the GTX version and closer to the Ultra. In other words, it’s just a more efficient chip and the reason why the 8800 GT performs so well. The reduced process means more power efficiency and a cooler chip, which allowed the 8800 GT to be a single height card (but the 8800 GTS is a double height card like the Radeon HD 3870). But what does this all mean? Well, it simply means the 8800 GTS 512 MB is a kick-ass card 3D wise that will often outperform the more expensive 8800 GTX. In video/HD wise, it gives you the same acceleration as the 8800 GT, which in itself was a big improvement over the acceleration offered by all the other 8800 GPUs. Pricing wise, it should be closer to the 320 MB version of the GTS, rather than the 640 MB version - it’s about $100 more than the 3870, and about $50 more than the GT. You can read a full review of the 8800 GTS 512 MB here.

So how does the new 8800 GTS compare to the Radeon HD 3870? NVIDIA’s PureVideo HD does not support full VC-1 hardware accleration (it only supports partial acceleration), so the video performance is not as good as the 3870. So instead of close to zero percent CPU utilization, you might be seeing something like 10 to 15% on say mid-range Intel CPU. For those with slower CPUs, the 3870 might be a good choice to prevent CPU spikes that cause break-ups in playback. Otherwise, the 8800 GT/GTS will offer more than enough acceleration power to give you smooth playback.

But if gaming is a concern, than both the 8800 GT and GTS 512 MB are simply better choices. The latest games, like Crysis or Call of Duty 4, all require massive amounts of power and the 3870 is just not able to give you that. You feel that the 3870, had it been released about a year ago, would have been the card to have, but it really feels like too little too late from ATI at this time. For about $50 or $100 more, you can get the GT or GTS which will provide 15 to 25% better performance - the GT is even more suitable for a HTPC environment since it is a single height card and even a passive cooling version is available. The inferior HD acceleration found on the NVIDIA range is something I hope NVIDIA will address soon, but it’s not a huge deal considering the low price of mid to high range CPUs these days.

As for whether you should get the GT or GTS, it really depends on how much you are willing to pay for the extra 3D performance. For $50 more, it’s probably not a huge risk to go with the GTS.

Welcome to the penultimate WNR of 2007. I love the word penultimate, I once thought that it was just a short way of saying the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword”. I think I know what the word means now. It’s been a relatively quiet week, mainly because I haven’t been paying much attention as I’ve been writing my penultimate buyer’s guide for Blu-ray and HD DVD.

First up in copyright news is a legal analysis of the Sony BMG rootkit scandal, a look at why a company would try and do something so stupid and harmful to themselves. Speaking of doing harm to yourselves, TorrentSpy has lost their case against the MPAA because they were found to have destroyed evidence. If only they had been upfront about it, it might have made a more interesting and penultimately more successful legal battle. As someone who has personally being involved in a legal battle, I can honestly say that being truthful is your best weapon, especially if you truly believe you were correct in doing whatever you did to get you into trouble. Once you start destroying evidence and being evasive, it becomes a reflection of your guilt and the lawyers on the other side, as well as judges, can see it as clear as day.

Next up is HD  news. Digital Playground is releasing their first ever Blu-ray adult title after having released about a dozen ones on HD DVD. Ironically (or not), the movie “Pirates” is a spoof the popular Blu-ray hit “Pirates of the Caribbean”. Digital Playground was initial format neutral before giving up Blu-ray due to resistance within the US to adult Blu-ray disc pressing. They have now gone back to Blu-ray due to user demand, and Sony’s less harsh views towards pornography. The PS3 has been upgraded to Profile 1.1 as expected (so all those who took my advice about buying the PS3 for profile upgradability will be happy to read this news). The same update, also as I had predicted (in a forum post somewhere), also included DivX/XviD support, although initial tests show that it’s a bit disappointing compared to the 360’s support (no GMC/QPel support, which makes it equivalent to a standalone player from about 2 years ago). Meanwhile, hackers have redirected the Blu-ray website to point to the HD DVD one. Will Blu-ray supporting hackers retaliate? Are there any Blu-ray supporting hackers? I would think not many due to Blu-ray’s love for DRM, but you never know. And it’s been a bad week or two for Warner Brothers, as no less than three of their new Blu-ray releases contain glitches that will require disc replacement. I wonder how they managed to produce Blu-ray discs that were actually HD DVDs (don’t they use different manufacturing presses?), and how duplicated discs managed to get past quality assurance. Putting my Michael Bay Tin Foil Hat® on for a second, could this be a signal of Warner’s decision to go format exclusive early in the new year? Perhaps they just don’t care for Blu-ray as much as they do for HD DVD. Maybe the extra manufacturing cost and lower yields for Blu-ray discs means less money and time for QA? Or perhaps the Blu-ray manufacturing plant has had one hell of a Christmas party a few weeks ago that people are still being affected by it. Who knows. It is curious that they have not managed to stuff up any HD DVD discs, which have had the same number of releases as Blu-ray ones from Warner. HD DVD had glitches with the first batch of combo discs, but that was understandable since it was a new type of disc. Blu-ray’s recent glitches also include Disney’s “Pirates: Curse of the Black Pearl”, which had framing problems, and a replacement program is available for the disc.

In gaming news, most gaming sites now have results up for their “games of the year”. Halo 3 is on almost everybody’s list, as is Bioshock. Super Mario Galaxy is a sure thing as well. Mass Effect has received lots of awards and critical acclaim, and I’m not surprised at all after discovering the developer’s previous effort, Knights of the Old Republic II, a year or two ago. You can submit your vote for the game of the year on Digital Digest here. And having just tried the Call of Duty 4 demo on my 3 year old PC, I was surprised to find that it ran quite smoothly even though I was barely able to get Call of Duty 2 running in 640×480 on the same computer a year ago. And it looked quite good too, unlike most new games that I play on my aging system. And in something I will talk about more next week, there are a few new GPUs from ATI and NVIDIA that improves 3D performance and HD video acceleration - will they take the crown away from the 8800 GT, my currently recommended GPU? Find out next week.

See you next week.

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.

I can’t believe we’re in December already for 2007. Where has it all gone? I mean it seemed like it was only yesterday when I was going around from shop to shop after the Christmas rush to buy myself a Wii console, and now it’s nearly a year on (and people are still going from shop to shop trying to buy a Wii console). It’s quieter week, mainly because my mind has been elsewhere (writing the PS3 H.264 Conversion Guide), so I might have missed or not cared about a few news stories here and there. Sorry about that.

In copyright news, Canada’s movie studio friendly government is seeking to implement even tougher copyright laws that will make the US DMCA look weak by comparison. Well that’s what happens when you elect right leaning governments - just look at what’s happening in France too with their newly elected US-loving President.

Moving quickly onto HD news, it’s been a week of where both HD format groups are throwing stats at each other. First, the HD DVD people say that HD DVD player sales have topped 750,000 - impressive. But maybe not as impressive as Blu-ray’s claim that they rule in Europe and during the Black Friday sales in the US. I really need to write a summary of what’s going on in the HD wars, but from the current data, it seems:

• HD DVD sells more standalones
• Blu-ray sells more players overall if you include the PS3
• More HD DVD movies are sold per player
• But Blu-ray has more movie sales overall because it has more players, even though it sells much less movies per player
• Movie sales are generally influenced by big releases, title such as 300, Transformers, Spider-Man 3 and Ratatouille, and the more releases a side has for that week, the more sales it generates (well, duh). It does seem that Blu-ray has more “hit” releases than HD DVD at the moment

There is finally a non-Toshiba cheap HD DVD player out on the market, not that there’s anything wrong with Toshiba players. Venturer has put out a HD DVD player based on the Toshiba A-3 for $199 - not very competitive when you look at the prices the Toshibas are selling at. I’m sure the actual store pricing will be a lot lower. While prices might not be quite competitive in the US, I’m hoping that the Venturer might come to Australia and bring prices here lower - Toshiba player prices are high here due to various reasons such as our prices being matched to European prices due to Toshiba’s corporate structure, but many of these reasons don’t apply to Venturer and Asian made players. And while not HD news strictly, many reviewers are hailing the new Pioneer “Kuro” plasma as the best TV out on the market. As an owner of a 4th generation model (the Kuro is the 8th generation model), I only have good things to say about the Pioneer plasma range. While I’m not sure about the “best in the world” rating, it’s certainly up there, although other brands such as Panasonic are not far behind. The Kuro is available in 50″ 720p, 1080p and 60″ 1080p models - if I had the money now, I would upgrade my panel to the 50″ 1080p model, 60″ if I win the lottery.

Gaming next, and as mentioned in the intro to this piece, the Wii is the thing everybody wants this Christmas, which is funny, because it’s in the same position as last Christmas. Not wanting to sound smug or anything, but if you really wanted a Wii, why wait until the Holiday gift season to get one? I’m sure there were a few available back in June if you really wanted to get one. Wii stocks are so low that even the PS3 has managed to outsell it in Japan. It is very impressive figures for the PS3, don’t get me wrong, but if the Wii’s stock in Japan wasn’t limited to 160,000 or so, it would have killed the PS3’s 180,000 sales and probably beat every other console combined. The PS3 is doing very well due to the 40 GB lower priced model (how can I argue against that when I’m one of the people who joined in with the buying) and could top the Xbox 360, but not according to Microsoft, which Sony has come out and criticized. I will have to wait and see for the final figures before choosing to believe either side. The PS3 is also a hacker’s dream because its processor is optimized for hacking like activities. I just hope the console is locked down tight security wise, because I don’t want my PS3 to help some hacker’s attempt to hack into the Pentagon or something. And the official list of updates for the Xbox 360 “Fall” update has been released by Microsoft,  and it’s a huge list. I won’t go through everything, except to say that it looks like Microsoft have beaten Sony to the punch by getting DivX and XviD support into the console first, unless Sony releases a surprise firmware update in the next two days that is. The DivX support is quite extensive, covering all the advanced encoding features like GMC, Q-Pel and B-Frames (read our DivX Setup Guide to find out what these mean), and up to 720p resolution at 5 Mbps. And AC3 5.1 audio support, as well as MP3 support, is included too. So it looks like pretty much every DivX/XviD file out there will be supported. Will this make the 360 the most popular hardware device for viewing pirated TV show episodes? That is if we still end up having any episodes to download due to the writer strike.

Until next week …

As promised, this blog post will talk a little about my experience with buying the PS3, setting it all up, and the experience of my first week of using it. Regular readers will know that I already own a Wii and a 360, so gaming wise, I’m pretty covered already. Therefore, my main purpose for the PS3 remain video playback, in particular, Blu-ray playback. Before this, I was format neutral in spirit, but HD DVD only in practice. Getting a Blu-ray player, and the PS3 being one of the cheaper ones (despite being one of the best players, certainly the most upgradable and future proof), was therefore the next logical step.

I live in Australia. Melbourne to be exact. And even though the Australian dollar is at an all time high (or thereabouts), our PS3s are still overpriced - we pay dearly to subsidized people in the US, it seems. Before I buy anything, I always do a quick search online to see if there are any bargains to pick up. I stumbled upon DTV Forum Australia, a forum I have visited on and off in the past. There was a thread in there about PS3 bargains, and from the thread I found an offer for a standard PS3 40 GB with wireless controller, plus the Sony Blu-ray remote and a redemption offer for 3 Blu-ray movies (Casino Royale, Ghost Rider and Spider-Man 3), all for $11 less then the recommended retail price (RRP is $699, or $USD 620 - I told you our PS3 was overpriced). This was the best deal I could find, and so I decided to go shopping.

But before I went, I decided to make a list of the things I will need to get the PS3 Blu-ray up and running (I don’t like pen and paper, so a mental list it was). The first is an HDMI cable, which the PS3 package does not include unfortunately - even the component cable is sold separately, which is a bit cheap on Sony’s part I might say, especially when we’re paying $220 more than our US counterparts). But since the single HDMI connector on my TV was already being used, and my AV receiver does not support HDMI, the only solution is to get a HDMI switch. I decided on the Joytech HDMI TriLink. And this of course meant getting a second HDMI cable. And unlike the US package, our PS3 package does not include a movie in the box, so I will have to get a Blu-ray movie to test the damn thing, since I did not want to wait 6 to 8 weeks for my free movies to arrive. And I almost forgot that I also needed an Ethernet cable, since the PS3 doesn’t include one of these either (but to be fair, it does include wireless network support). And I really did forget that I also needed an optical audio cable, but luckily I added it to my mental list before I set off to do the shopping. The PS3 might be a cheap-ish Blu-ray player (by our standards), but the needed accessories makes it not so cheap after all.

Buying the PS3 went somewhat smoothly. The hardest part was getting the huge box to the car, which was parked some distance away. The Xbox 360 box was large, but manageable. This PS3 box was much bigger than I had expected, and much heavier too. While the salesman was himself struggling to get the box from the back of the store to me, I had a look at the “Buy 2 get 1 free” offer they had for Blu-ray movies. In Australia, our Blu-ray and HD DVD movie prices are outrageous as well - usually $USD 35 per movie ($30 if you’re lucky). The movies in the B2G1F stand was even more outrageously priced, at $USD 45 per movie. No thanks. I will have to go to another store to get my Blu-ray movie, which I had to go to anyway for the other accessories.

So to the other store I went, and my credit card was taking a pounding by this point. And remembering a mental list when you’re carrying 5 KG boxes the size of a small car is not recommended - at one point, I had to go back to the same store twice because I had forgotten to get a few things, the second time I almost forgot another item (the optical cable again). For the record, I purchased Rocky Balboa on Blu-ray because I was interested in its AVC H.264 encoding, and also because I haven’t seen the movie before. Here’s the list of damages at the end of the day (in Australian dollars):

PS3 - $688
Rocky Balboa Blu-ray: $40
Joytech TriLink: $60
2 x HDMI cables: $60
1 x Ethernet cable: $10
1 x Toslink cable: $20

So all together, that’s $878, which translates to nearly $USD 780. If I was in the US, the whole package probably won’t cost me more than $500, $550 at most. Oh well.

The wallet bashing was over, time to get home and set it up. It wasn’t too hard, to be honest, other than the fact that I have far too many cables already going everywhere, and having more cables did not help. The PS3 setup was pretty easy, setup the HDMI output, set up the optical audio and that’s it. What took a long time was inputting the usernames, sign up details and downloading the updates, but all the consoles are like that these days.

For the past week, I’ve been testing the PS3’s video playback functions, mainly to help me write the PS3 H.264 Conversion Guide (which I’ve updated today to add instructions on how to get AC3 5.1 audio tracks, with some trickery involving MKV to VOB conversion). I’m very impressed with both Blu-ray and the upscaled DVD playback, and if not for the fact that the PS3 is not region free for either of these formats (DVD in particular), I would make it my primary disc player. But as such, my existing region-free upscaling DVD player will still have to occupy a space on the home theatre rack. In between video tests, I’ve been running the Folding@Home software to help contribute some work units to our team.

My TV (Pioneer PDP-504) has what Pioneer calls PureCinema Advanced, which is just 3:3 pulldown (24 FPS -> 72 Hz) for smooth film playback. For whatever reason, I can’t get it to work over component without glitches, but over HDMI, it works a treat. Watching a Blu-ray movie with this option turned on is really fantastic - smooth pans that you don’t see with 3:2 pulldown. I know some people hate PAL speedup, but I find it much more acceptable than 3:2 judder. Now I’ll have to go about upgrading my Xbox 360 to a HDMI capable (and quieter) model, to make HD DVD viewing just as nice.

The next thing I want to try is to make my own AVCHD disc to play on the PS3. AVCHD is basically a mini-Blu-ray, supporting H.264 video and AC3 audio. Nero Vision supports making these types of discs, but there’s still a couple of things I need to figure out. If/When I do, I’ll write a guide for it.

So that’s my first week with the PS3. I’ve done some work, enjoyed some movies and helped out a good cause by donating the free processing power, so all in all, it’s been a good week. PS3 for upscaled DVD and Blu-ray playback is highly recommended.