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Weekly News Roundup (23 March 2008)

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

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.

Posted in Copyright, Gaming, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (23 March 2008)

Weekly News Roundup (16 March 2008)

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

What a week it has been. The server problem was finally fixed, although not without a lot of fixing and tweaking as you would expect when you do a major server move. Also received a bunch of cheap HD DVDs that I had ordered in previous weeks, pretty much all the titles I’ve ordered have now been received (I just need to find some time to watch them, that’s all). And I also celebrated my birthday during the week as well. So it’s been a busy week, and if there seems to be less news stories than normal, that’s probably why.

So let’s not waste any time and start with copyright news. The MPAA is at it again (I seem to use this phrase quite a lot. But blame the MPAA, not me). This time, they are against Net Neutrality, because it might hurt their plans to spy on everybody. Net Neutrality basically means leaving the Net alone and not placing restrictions on things like content types, connection modes and placing priority on certain types of content, while reducing priority on other “less desirable” content. Obviously, a restricted and regulated network will benefit the MPAA in their attempt to control how, when, where and what we download. Having big business tell us what we can and cannot do is, in my opinion, even worse than Big Brother type governments doing so … at least government are elected (in most countries).

On to HD. Now that people have finally gotten around to the idea that Blu-ray is *the* HD format for the future, questions are starting to be raised. Even staunch Blu-ray advocates such as Bill Hunt from The Digital Bits are starting to ask the BDA to make changes, the very changes that made people choose HD DVD like prices, profiles. We’ve been flooded with news of Blu-ray prices rises, both for hardware and movies, but I think it’s too soon to tell what the general direction Blu-ray will be heading to next. If the BDA is serious about replacing SD DVDs with Blu-ray, then prices will drop. If they see Blu-ray as a money maker that is needed to replaced flagging DVD sales, then prices may not drop as quickly as one would like. There is a very interesting read on Gizmondo that highlights some of the problems that Blu-ray will be facing in the short and long term. It certainly is a pretty pessimistic look at things, but you would have to agree with their key points, which are: the cost of the format war means prices drops will hurt manufacturers and studios, profile confusion, and productivity problems. On that last point, the article raises something quite interesting in that they speculate Universal studios might be having trouble releasing their titles on Blu-ray due to the entire 2008 production stock already being allocated to other studios. In other words, Universal can’t release movies on Blu-ray because they can’t get production time in the already over capacity production lines. New lines are being built, but they cannot come online quick enough. Of course, this might all be speculation, but one thing is for certain: HD DVD would not have experienced this problem as all recent DVD production lines are capable of producing HD DVDs. And speaking of former HD DVD studios releasing titles on Blu-ray, Paramount is apparently set to re-release their previous Blu-ray titles (before they went HD DVD exclusive) again next week. Seems that they kept their Blu-ray stock, as opposed to pulping them as some rumours had suggested. Unfortunately, Universal never got into Blu-ray production, so it will be some time before you see The Bourne Trilogy on Blu-ray. Another problem for Blu-ray is that upscaled DVD performance continues to improve. Oppo this week officially announced their new DVD upscaler, the DV-983H, which early testing has showed to be possibly the best performing on the market today. From my experience, a fairly average/poor HD encode is often the same or worse than a decent DVD encode upscaled (case in point, T2 Extreme Edition DVD vs T2 HD DVD Australian version). Such decent DVD encodes look very “HD” when upscaled, but the general rule is that real HD, when given a proper encoding, will always look better. But just because it is better, doesn’t mean people are prepared to pay extra for it … think DVD-Audio and SACD, although better video quality is easier to sell than better audio quality.

Meanwhile, HD DVD is selling quite well (the latest numbers showed a 10% market share jump for HD DVD in the US, even though the big sales haven’t really started, at least not at Australian “everything under $10” levels yet). For those that want to join in, keep an eye on this page and this page, as well as the blog. I wish somebody would release Australian sales numbers, because it must be at least 20:1 in HD DVD’s favour in the past few weeks. The Xbox 360 add-on drive is proving particularly popular due to its low price, but Microsoft this week denied again that they are working on a similar add-on for Blu-ray. 

Before I move on properly to gaming, DivX support is coming to a lot more Blu-ray players than just the PS3. In fact, their support will be even better than the PS3’s (which is a bit strange). Anyone who has used the PS3’s DivX/XviD playback function will know that it is somewhat limited, with no DivX Ultra support, no support for GMC/Q-Pel and has a few other problems as well. But when a file does work, it plays beautifully. And while the PS3 has had a firmware update (adds nothing of significance, other than some gaming compatibility fixes), the next big update will be interesting if they add enhanced DivX support, as well as perhaps DTS-HD MA decoding (the one essential Blu-ray feature that the PS3 sorely lacks) and even Profile 2.0, although I believe the latter two will be more likely to come only after standalones with similar features are available.

Now onto gaming proper, February’s US NPD figures are out and I will provide a full analysis in the next few days. Once again, all three gaming companies are claiming victory. Nintendo’s Wii sold the most, so they’re claiming they’re the best (with justification, IMO – but if I’m a bit sick and tired of seeing another story about how the Wii is helping the elderly, the injured and basically curing all disease and bringing world peace). Sony’s PS3 sold more than the Xbox 360, so they’re claiming victory too (mainly thanks to Blu-ray’s victory, I think). While Microsoft is still saying Xbox 360 stock shortages are affecting sales figures, and that they sold the most software and made the most profit, which they think is the most important. If Microsoft is really having stock problems, then what they say makes sense, since people are still choosing the 360 over the PS3 when it comes to multi-platform releases (Call of Duty 4, for example). It will be interesting to see which consoles gains most from the release of GTA IV, but I believe with the 360 install base much greater than the PS3 in the US, the 360 version of GTA IV, with the exclusive content, will probably sell more copies. I’ve yet to decide which version I would get (PS3 or 360), although I’m leaning towards 360 due to not having to buy another controller just to get rumble capabilities (and the fact that the 360 version was produced first, meaning it might play a little bit better). Once I assume 360 stock become plentiful again, Microsoft will fight the PS3 with further price cuts which will put pressure on Sony to follow. Expect to see a 360 GTA IV pack for less cost than the basic PS3, and it will sell like hotcakes.

See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, PS3, PS4, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (16 March 2008)

Weekly News Roundup (9 March 2008)

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

Sorry for this slightly later than usual roundup. The server hosting most of Digital Digest’s websites started experiencing some problems, which were later traced to a bad hard-drive. To avoid any outages, I had to quickly source a new server and transfer the sites across, which was not easy at 3am in the morning. I ended up going to bed at 7am, and 6 hours of sleep later, I’m back again continuing with the transfer. Ah … the glamour of being a webmaster.

Let’s not waste any time, because I have none to spare. In copyright news, finally a content provider that has the right idea. Instead of pursuing layers of DRM, the band Nine Inch Nails will release their new album through P2P using a donation based system … you decide how much you want to pay for the music, and of course, no DRM. Doing it this way really “goes with the flow” of how content is distributed on the Internet, and bypassing the studio system has many advantages (least of which is getting 95% of your profit back, which otherwise would have belonged to the studio). Using a system normally used to distribute pirated content has many advantages, one of which is ease of use. Jumping through hoops just to buy some DRM infested crap just doesn’t work anymore. And to prove this point, a new study confirms that piracy is better than the real thing. Better content, easier delivery are all reasons why people are choosing the piracy route, rather than through official channels. Studios are obviously worried, but is it really hurting them? Movie ticket sales broke new records again in 2007, despite movie piracy at an all time high. Is piracy helping to sell movie tickets, as people watch a low quality version of a film, likes it, and then decide to watch it proper in the cinema or on legally purchased discs?

Moving quickly onto HD, BD-ROM is set to take off in 2008 following Blu-ray’s victory in the HD format war. The most interesting part of the story is a revealing quote which suggested that BD burner prices are high because of low yield issues. It seems low yield is a problem that Blu-ray suffers from a lot, with disc pressing a huge problem causing releases to be pushed back time and time again due to insufficient manufacturing capacity. To ensure capacity though, new factories will have to be built. And consumers will end up having to pay for them. Some reports suggest that both Blu-ray player and disc prices have gone up since the demise of HD DVD, and you can’t really blame the BDA, studios or CE manufacturers (and online rental stores) for doing so, because the format war has been costly on top of the cost of developing a new format. There is certainly less Blu-ray disc sales than before, and even the redemption offer for 5 free discs seems to be over now with no signs of it coming back. Competition is good for the consumer. But there is no competition to Blu-ray now, apart from competition from within (which will be somewhat limited, as everyone involved do not want a price war to drive down profit margins just yet). Further evidence comes straight from Sony, who says that they do not want to license Blu-ray technology to Chinese firms in order to lower prices (their stated reason is “piracy”). Sony has ruled out $200 Blu-ray players coming this year, and they hinted that you might have to wait until the end of 2009 to see Blu-ray players match the 2007 price of HD DVD players, and even then, it’s probably just a basic Profile 1.1 player that won’t play a lot of the special feature content on the majority of discs released at that time. One way for player prices to drop is for HD DVD firms to get involved, and Microsoft is the first to suggest they may join the Blu-ray bandwagon and release an add-on drive for the Xbox 360. Nothing more specific than that, unfortunately. Microsoft has also released the HD DVD emulator for the Xbox 360 for free (used to cost a few thousand dollars) – with this software, you can test your HD DVD projects and HDi content without having more specialised equipment than a Xbox 360.

The HD DVD fire sale continues, although I have a feeling the best is yet to come. Prices continue to drop, now to as low as $8.50 for selected titles. I’ve written a bunch of blog entries on this already, so I won’t waste too much time on it again. Suffice to say that I’m still pretty mad about JB Hi-Fi Online and their Planet Earth ordering fiasco – read more about it here. And I guess it sort of belongs in the HD section – Pioneer has responded to rumours that it will cease development of plasma screens and move onto LCD (the plasma vs LCD battle is just as fierce as the Blu-ray/HD DVD one, along with the numerous unfounded rumours being reported by allegedly reputed news sites). Pioneer will continue to release plasma TVs, except that the panel these TVs used will now be outsourced, instead of being manufactured by Pioneer. The rumour (I know, I know) is that Panasonic will take over, and Pioneer will share their design secrets with them. If true, this is good news because Panasonic’s Viera range is already pretty good, and with some infusion of Pioneer technology, both Pioneer and Panasonic plasmas will continue to be at the top of the pile in terms of picture quality. The best plasma screens will always look better than the best LCDs, and will remain so until new TV technology becomes available (I’m putting my money on OLED, but not before 2010). 

And finally in gaming, PS3 firmware 2.4 will be released in the US summer, and will feature in game XMB for messaging. There is no word that it will feature Blu-ray Profile 2.0 support, or DTS-HD MA decoding – the only two features lacking from the PS3’s otherwise excellent Blu-ray capabilities (but to be fair, no Profile 2.0 player will be available anytime soon, although DTS-HD MA decoding would be nice to have since many titles now use this new audio format and it sucks to be limited to plain old DTS 1.5 Mbps). A new Xbox 360 SKU may also be on the way, perhaps featuring a 60 GB hard-disk. I think getting rid of stability issues and lowering the noise level should be Microsoft’s main priority, because a quiet, non RRoD’ing Xbox 360, with a large hard-drive, will be a must-have even for existing 360 owners, let alone new users.

Okay, so that’s it for this week. I have to get back to fixing the new server. I’ll see you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4 | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (9 March 2008)

Weekly News Roundup (2 March 2008)

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

The month that can never make up its mind as to how many days it should have is finally over. Down with February. Long live March. I love March, not just because it’s the month that contains my birthday, but this is usually the time that I start to feel like the new year is officially here, and now in transition mode as per January, or the confused-as-to-how-many-days-it-has mode that is February.

The fallout from HD DVD’s death continues. Analysts have finally caught onto what I’ve been saying for months now, that Blu-ray’s victory owes much to the BDA’s love for copy protection, as it does to any other factors like the PS3. With DRM being public enemy number one these days, it’s funny to see DRM winning a major format war. I think Toshiba should have promoted the more consumer friendly nature of HD DVD more to the public, in terms of both region coding and less DRM, but I do understand why they didn’t. To do so would have opened another battlefront with DRM and region coding loving studios like Fox. It seems Toshiba really did not like the studio’s way of doing things, and they have now officially released DVD region-free firmware for several of their HD DVD players (or the XE1 at least, install 2.5 first and test to make sure, since once you go to 2.8, getting back to 2.5 is hard and only 2.5 has the region free patch) on their website (at least their Australian website). Unfortunately, it was this pro-consumer, anti-studio attitude that eventually lost the war for them. While as a HD DVD supporter, Warner was not our best friend in the format war, but at least you have to commend them for not supporting region control. Universal and Paramount too. F*ck Fox and their region coded and BD+ discs. Speaking of region control, there is now a new software for the Nintendo Wii that breaks region control (PAL and NTSC) games to work on your Wii. Simply insert the disc, it does its work, eject the disc and insert your game disc. Not sure if Nintendo intend to close this loophole with a firmware patch, or whether they even care about enforcing region control or not.

In HD news, the fallout from HD DVD’s death … wait, I’ve already used this line. Anyway, the big news for HD DVD supporters mourners this week has been Paramount’s (and Dreamwork’s) rather harsh decision to pull all their upcoming HD DVD releases. Just like what they did when they pulled Blu-ray support, with total disregard for consumers. If it wasn’t for their region-free stance, they have done nothing to help either HD format with both low quantity and quality releases. In my last blog entry, I talked about fire sales, and with Paramount stopping HD DVD releases, I think their fire sale will be coming shortly. I’ve started a thread in the forum to talk about HD DVD fire sales, and I will be posting news of any new fire sales there, and in the usual places. The fire sales here in Australia have attracted a lot of buyers (some genuine, while the people who bought 350 discs and 5 copies of each movie trying to take advantage of genuine buyers are scum of the Earth), me included. It’s surprising, but I feel lucky that I’ve bought into HD DVD, as the cheap $8 discs is something so rare, it hasn’t even happened regularly to DVDs yet (at least no in Australia). For the HD DVD movies I’ve bought to be released on to Blu-ray would take months, if not years, and it would still probably be the exact same content, but at 5 times the price. The only risk now is having discs, but not being able to source a player if people’s current players die. But that may not be a problem for long, as HD DVD might live on partly in another format. The DVD Forum (the official body that controls the DVD format) is continuing its support for the China-only CH DVD format, which is basically HD DVD with a different set of software. If CH DVD is a success, then chances are, one will be able to source a HD DVD player without too much problem in the future, which bodes well for those that have dipped their feet into the HD DVD fire sales.

Moving onto Blu-ray now, those worried about price rises now that Blu-ray has no competition will be startled to see a new Blu-ray player being priced at nearly $17,000! Obviously this is not a sign of things to come, but it’s still funny the price some people are willing to pay. I bet it’s not even Profile 1.1. Better news for those of us who don’t earn 7 figure incomes, Sony has announced two new Blu-ray players to be released in the latter part of the year. Both might eventually be BD-Live (Profile 2.0) compatible, although the cheaper of the two players, the BDP-S35,  might not have enough persistent storage to quality as a BD-Live compatible player, without you adding external storage through a USB thumb key. Not the most elegant solution, so I think the more expensive BDP-S550 is the way to go. It even has 7.1 analogue audio output, plus on-board decoding of all the major HD audio formats, so it looks like a good one. The more cynical side of me thinks Sony held back the news of these players until the format war looks to have ended, as it did not want to upset fellow CE manufacturers in the BDA. Now that Sony owns the one and only HD format, it looks like they won’t just sit back and let the other companies take advantage. Monopoly time …

Netflix is also set to take advantage of the conclusion of the format war. They will quadruple the number of Blu-ray titles available to rent, but may raise monthly subscription prices as a result. They’ve been harping on about raising prices for ages now, so don’t be too surprised when it happens. And while not strictly HD news, the people over at Secrets of Home Theater and Hi Fi have released an updated review for the PS3’s video playback performance. The previous review was criticized for only testing the then most updated firmware, which did not even include DVD upscaling. But unfortunately, the new result based on the latest firmware did not improve the scores by much. I’ve tried to explain the situation in the link above, and I think most people feel the same way: The PS3 is an excellent Blu-ray player, a more than adequate DVD upscaling player, but don’t expect it to compete with top of the line dedicated upscaling players as that’s not what it is designed to do.

To segue effortlessly from HD/video to gaming, this middle of the road story about the PS3’s new PlayTV (turns the PS3 into a DVR) feature will be DRM free. Good for Sony for taking a sensible approach to DRM for once. Let’s just hope people don’t take advantage of Sony’s lapse and turn the PS3 into the mother of all video piracy machines.

Segueing now to gaming completely, LucasArts will now produce games on the PS3 and then port it over to the 360, as opposed to doing it the other way. I don’t think this is because they luuurve the PS3 more than the 360, it just make more sense from the developer’s point of view to do this as it will mean better games for both platforms. Developers have often complained about porting 360 games to the PS3, since the PS3 has several design bottlenecks that is not easily solve when doing ports. It’s much better to design the game for a system that is more restrictive, and then port it over to the less restrictive/easier environment. And finally, Dead Rising, the game I’m still playing at the moment and the game that I played so much that caused my 360 to RRoD, has been sued for infringing the copyrights of the Dawn of the Dead franchise. So let’s see, Dead Rising is a game about a zombie outbreak and survivors holding up in a shopping mall. Dawn of the Dead (both movies) is about a zombie outbreak and survivors holding up in a shopping mall. Sorry, but I just don’t see the connection.

Over the next week, I will be bringing you details of a new competition that I will run on Digital Digest, prizes courtesy of Roxio, the makers of the famous Popcorn and MyDVD series. The prize includes copies of their latest DVD production, copying and conversion software, as well as a grand prize of an iPod. More details when they are available.

Okay, that’s it from me for this week – I’m going back to look for more HD DVD fire sale details, credit card in hand …

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 (2 March 2008)

Weekly News Roundup (17 February 2008)

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

I’ve never completely trusted February. How can you trust a month that isn’t 30 or 31 days, and not only that, seems to change length every couple of years as well. February is well shifty, I wouldn’t trust it to give me the time of the day, let alone the day of the month. This issue of the roundup is a bit short of news, just like February is short of days. Don’t blame me, blame February (hey, that’s not a bad slogan).

In copyright news, the “War on Torrents” has been declared a success by the outgoing Bush administration. In a time when terrorism, the economy, the environment and many other issues are causing concern, it’s nice to see where the White House’s priorities are. The “War on Canada” continues, with a US Group calling Canada a top copyright violator. Canada is still deciding on whether to adopt tougher copyright laws, so the scare campaign is not surprising. After all, the same tactic has been applied time and time again in other countries, including Australia. Here, we’ve been forced to adopt the same harsh laws as part of our free trade agreement with the US – no DMCA, no trade, is apparently the message the Bush administration is sending out on behalf of the MPAA.

But this week really has been about HD news, and actually, mainly bad news for HD DVD. As I type this, the vulture and their fanboy riders are circling, as rumours suggest Toshiba will call it quits. It’s probably the right decision *if* Toshiba believes they can’t win or sustain the format war, and I hope they bring their expertise in producing the XA2/XE1 to bring a cheaper, new Blu-ray/dual format Profile 2.0 player, that’s also region-free. One can still dream, right? As someone who is format neutral, it’s sad to see HD DVD go along with cheap hardware prices and region-free discs, if the rumours are true. But on the other hand, being neutral was all about avoiding and mitigating the potential risks of a format dying, while being able to enjoy all available HD movies from the get go. I have a Toshiba HD-XE1 player, the best DVD upscaler you can buy for under $1,200 (and I got it for $500) and will be my main DVD player and HD DVD player to service the 30 HD DVD movies that I currently own (and I will add more titles to my collection if there are clearance sales and such). My Xbox 360 add-on drive will now become an external drive for my (as yet un-purchased) new computer for testing HD stuff. My PS3 remains my main Blu-ray player until something better comes along (Profile 2.0, bitstreaming/decoding for all audio formats, fast loading and response like the PS3). All bases covered, as they say. Anyway, the whole week started on a sour note for HD DVD when Netflix decided to go Blu-ray exclusive. This was followed by Best Buy deciding to recommend Blu-ray over HD DVD, while still stocking both types of players and movies. The biggest blow came when, previously HD DVD exclusive Wal-Mart, went Blu-ray exclusive as well. Then the rumour surfaced that Toshiba was going to drop HD DVD, and this rumour, plus possibly some fact behind it, is now what’s causing the media circus. Monday is supposed to be the day Toshiba officially announces their decision, and the official end of the format war, and I will cover whatever happens in more detail in a blog entry. In between all of this HD DVD bad news, there was one bit of “good” news for HD DVD in that Warner has not ruled out still providing movies on HD DVD after the end of May. Probably a bit pointless now.

In gaming news, I’ve not yet had the time to go over the January NPD figures for game sales (next week, I promise). Apparently, the PS3 beat the Xbox 360 for the first time in monthly sales figures, although it was largely a quiet month in terms of game console sales compared to the feverish December period. Both the Wii and 360 sold considerably less units as compared previously, and both Nintendo and Microsoft has blamed it on stock shortages after unexpected demand in December forced them to sell January stock ahead of time. This corresponds with my experiences during December, when store after store I visit would not have any Wii or 360 stock, while the only game console available was the PS3. But hardware stock issues should not affect software sales, and the 360 has another good month with 4 titles in the top 10, including the number one item (Call of Duty 4). The Wii also did well 3 titles, while the PS3 only had 1 item (Call of Duty 4 again) at 8th, the remaining two spots belonging to the Nintendo DS. More details in a blog entry next week.

And so that’s it for this week. The next few days will prove interesting for HD enthusiasts. And by HD, I mean both Blu-ray and HD DVD. People often forget that Blu-ray is HD (High Definition) as well. HD DVD is a brand just like Blu-ray, while HD is just a description of a certain type of video, like SD being used to describe DVDs.

Posted in Copyright, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (17 February 2008)

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