Archive for November, 2007

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DivX on PS3, Free Xbox 360 Stuff and Fall Update

Friday, November 16th, 2007

PlayStation 3As you would have heard by now (or read, on our news front page), DivX is coming to the PS3. The precise details are unknown at the moment (for example, will DivX Ultra be supported? The PS3 is definitely powerful enough to play these advanced DivX with menu files). When this update is coming, again, is an unknown.

Following earlier statements from the CEO of DivX Inc, it appears DivX on the Xbox 360 is in the works too. Whether it will be included in the December 4th Fall Update, that’s unknown at the moment. Hmm … that’s a lot of unknowns.

What is known, however, is that the Fall Update for the Xbox 360 will include downloadable Xbox games for $15 a pop. Previously, the only way you could obtain Xbox games for the 360 is to buy used copies. Looking at how well the PS2 is still selling, perhaps Microsoft should have continued on the Xbox as a budget console for a bit longer (but then again, looking at how the PS3 is selling, perhaps the PS3 is competing not only against the 360, but also the PS2 as well).

CarcassonneIt’s also the five year anniversary of Xbox Live. There are a couple of free gamer pics and themes in the Marketplace for you to download. Also, for the 15th and 16th only (US EST), you can download the Live Arcade title Carcassonne for free. I’ve downloaded this puzzle game, and it’s quite fun and addictive. Users that have been with Live since 2002 will also get 500 free Marketplace points as a reward. I like free stuff.

Posted in PS3, PS4, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on DivX on PS3, Free Xbox 360 Stuff and Fall Update

Weekly News Roundup (11 November 2007)

Sunday, November 11th, 2007

Once again, it’s time for the weekly news roundup on Remembrance Day, a day where we not only remember those who sacrificed themselves to preserve our way of life, but also to remember the futility and wastefulness of war. War is something that should be avoided whenever possible because it comes with a price that is far too high.

Starting with copyright news. A lot of news items this week after a relatively quite last week. A study has found that not only does music piracy not hurt the music industry, it might actually help because illegal music sharing leads to higher music sales. Of course, record industry groups around the world has chosen to ignore or discredit the report. I’ve always believed that if you do not distribute content in a way people prefer, they will seek their own way of obtaining the content, legal or otherwise. And speaking of bad distribution methods, Macrovision’s DRM for games has been found to have a bug that allows computers to be exploited and hacked. It’s bad enough for DRM to make life harder for legitimate customers, but at the very least, people who make them should ensure it does no other damage. But as the case with Sony’s rootkit scandal, companies that deploy DRM have absolutely no regards for their customers anyway, and this is why things like this keep happening. These companies regard people who crack their DRMs as the most evilest of all people, because DRM licensing is big money and other companies are not going to pay if a lone hacker working in his bedroom can break their multi-million dollar encryption scheme. Sometimes it’s not just lone hackers though. Slysoft has announced that they have “by-passed” BD+ copy protection for Blu-ray discs, but it might only be a temporary solution until the loophole which allows this exploit is fixed. As Doom9 opinioned on his website in regards to this news:

Either way, at this point I wouldn’t bet much money on this workaround being permanent, so you should heed Slysoft’s advice about buying HD media and buy HD DVD over Blu-ray – it is the more consumer friendly format (not to be confused with a consumer friendly format) and the risk you incur of not being able to exercise your fair use rights in the future are greatly reduces if Blu-ray becomes the prevailing format.

And when DRM is not cracked, then consumers might be the one who suffers as in the case of US Major League Baseball selling DRM’d videos to people, then changing the DRM and making all those paid for videos unplayable. That’s the real danger of DRM though, because at any moment, the content owner could decide to do something like this and you end up having to buy the content all over again.

Prince is set to sue The Pirate Bay for copyright infringement. Not sure that’s a wise move though, as I’m sure the TBB has a lot more loyal fans now than Prince ever had in his entire career. And it appears Demonoid, the popular Bittorrent tracker, is down. Don’t know if it’s permanent or just a temporary thing, but you can definitely see a trend now what with the demise of OiNK still fresh in people’s memories.

On to HD news, I wrote a blog in mid-week about the effects of the $98 Toshiba HD DVD player, so I won’t go into it further except to say I’m extremely jealous and bitter at all the people who managed to get themselves one of these players. I checked my local electronics store yesterday and the Australian version of this super-cheap player was retailing for $AUD 596 (it does have a $100 cashback, which makes it $496 and comes with 3 free HD DVD movies) – that’s $USD 450, which is actually $150 more than the Toshiba retail pricing (which nobody sells them at), and comes with two less free movies as well. Cnet Asia wrote an article about Blu-ray 1.1. profile players and whether it makes you existing BD 1.0 players obsolete – it’s worth a read. It’s not just consumers that are a bit confused by all these profiles, even the Blu-ray manufacturers seems confused about what they should be doing. Sony’s CEO has conceded that the HD war is a stalemate at the moment – it’s certainly a change from the usual “we’ve won” messages that the Blu-ray group likes to send out. I’ve always thought that the eventual result of this stupid war was going to be a stalemate – even if one format has 80% of the market, 20% is still quite a lot to just “give up”, not when so much money has been invested already. But the first casualty of the HD war might not be Toshiba or Sony, but the AV Science forum, which has closed its Blu-ray/HD DVD section due to increasing hostility between forum members. My little rant about fanbois a couple of weeks ago might be relevant here, even though it was about those of the PS3/Xbox 360 variety.

And on that note, we move onto gaming. Yet another developer has come out to say what everyone seems to know already, that the PS3 is not a million times more powerful that the year older Xbox 360, at least not according to developers. The general feeling seems to indicate that while the PS3 has a more powerful processor, it’s memory handling is not as good as the Xbox 360 and is harder to programme for, so in the end, it all evens out. The long awaited PS3 2.00 firmware has been released and it adds a couple of interesting features, but for Blu-ray fans waiting for Profile 1.1. compatibility, it was a bit of a disappointment. Not that there are any movies to take advantage of Profile 1.1 anyway. Is your PS3 sitting in a place where it gathers a lot of dust? If so, you might want to move it somewhere else because apparently someone was told by PS3 customer support the excessive dust voids the warranty. Depends upon what “excessive” means though, I guess. And to end on a more positive note, the changes in the PS3 2.00 firmware and comments from the DivX Inc CEO seem to suggest that DivX playback might be coming to a PS3/Xbox 360 near you. I certainly hope it happens because my Xbox 360 is already quite a nice media extender devices, and if DivX/XviD support is added, then it makes playing back these files on my TV a lot easier.

And so this concludes another episode of Weekly News Roundup. What zany adventures will the MPAA/RIAA get up to next week? Just how many more forums will be closed “When Fanbois Attack”? And will scientist finally figure out just how many shades of awesomeness the PS3 is compared to the Xbox 360? Tune in next week to find out!

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (11 November 2007)

Sub $100 HD DVD Players – what is Toshiba’s plan?

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

The news last week was all about Wal-Mart offering the Toshiba HD-A2 player for only $98 on their “secret” sale. Reports suggested that these super cheap HD DVD players were quickly sold out, some as soon as half an hour after they went on sale (thanks for the Internet for spreading news of this “secret” sale). Other retailers soon followed, including web stores like Amazon, and eventually even the newer model HD-A3 started to drop in price.

There’s a couple of things that need to be taken into account. First of all, the HD-A2 (the low end model from Toshiba, with only 1080i output, although it makes no difference to most people with 1080p TVs – see why) may very well turn into a superseded model. The “2” represents the second generation of HD DVD players, the current generation’s low end model is the HD-A3. Toshiba have yet to announced the discontinuation of the A2 though, and some of the players sold in the $98 sale have very recent manufacturing dates. Second, the sale was only for one day, it is not the new permanent retail price for low end HD DVD players, although it has helped to lower the price of the A3 as well (retail price of $299, now available for $199 at many places).

Toshiba HD-A2

With that out of the way, the $98 price for the HD-A2 is really nothing short of amazing. Remember that you get 5 free HD DVD movies by redemption with it too, and so, the player is practically free. The A2 also includes DVD upscaling, and while the upscaling quality is not as good as the much more expensive high end HD-XA2, it is on par with most DVD upscalers that you find for this price. I would say that even at $200, the HD-A2/A3 still represents good value if you are in the market for a DVD upscaler too.

It seems consumers agree, and that possibly 100,000 or more HD-A2’s were sold in the last week alone, nearly matching the total sales figure for the most popular Blu-ray player, the Sony’s BDP-S300.

So the question is how did Toshiba manage to get prices so low when Blu-ray players are still so expensive in comparison? How much money is Toshiba losing per player sold, or are the retailers selling below cost? And what does this mean for the HD format war?

Without one of the retailers coming clean, I don’t think we will ever find out just what went on behind the scenes to get prices so low. I think Toshiba would have wanted to get rid of old superseded stock, and this might have convinced them to lower prices per unit, perhaps at cost or lower. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, might have wanted to spur HD sales for the holiday season and so might have sold these players at cost too. All the other retailers probably followed suit because they don’t want to be left out. I don’t agree with some assertions out there that Toshiba is losing $500 per player. The cost established for the HD-A1 back in 2006 was over $600, but costs will have dropped considerably by now – one, because the HD-A2 is built entirely differently to the A1 (the A1 was built more like a computer, whereas the A2 is built as a standalone with the associated cost advantages – the A3’s build costs are even lower), and two, that while some of the $98 stock were made in Japan (where the A1/A2 was initially made I believe), these are now mainly Chinese made. Chinese made DVD players can be made for as little as $USD 10 (a few dollars more if you include licensing fees), and this was a couple of years ago. I’m not saying that HD DVD players can be made for $10, but $90 is certainly within reason. HD DVD standalones have sold way more units than Blu-ray standalones around the world (Blu-ray has a overall lead in sales due to the heavily subsidized PS3), and so it is safe to assume that HD DVD player pricing will be lower than Blu-ray player pricing, which itself is coming down fast too. There is also the factor of the Chinese CH DVD players, which I will talk about in detail in a later blog, but this new format uses many of the same components as HD DVD and by selling large quantities to the Chinese market, it will in turn help to lower production costs for HD DVD players too.

As to the HD format war, I don’t think this will have much of an impact in the grander scheme of things. 100,000 players is nothing compared to the number of DVD players sold every day. But what Toshiba had managed to do was to promote HD DVD and get people excited about it just in time for the holiday shopping season. For every person that picked up a $98 player, they are likely to buy a new more HD DVD movies in addition to the free movies they get (the Transformers HD DVD probably on top of their list) and that’s what Toshiba is counting on. The attachment rate (the number of movies sold to each player) of standalones is much higher than compared to consoles based HD players like the PS3 or the Xbox 360 (this is something I’ll also be talking about in another blog entry), and while Blu-ray has concentrated their efforts on the PS3, HD DVD has been hammering away at the standalone market. The momentum is certainly with HD DVD, and Blu-ray’s minor price cuts will look futile in comparison. At this early stage in the war, momentum is all you can ask for, really.

Posted in High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K) | 5 Comments »

Weekly News Roundup (4 November 2007)

Sunday, November 4th, 2007

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.

Posted in Computing, Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (4 November 2007)

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