Electronics DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Archive for the ‘Electronics’ Category

Weekly News Roundup (2 August 2009)

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009

Another bad week health wise for me, as I think I’ve caught a cold or flu or whatever has been floating around recently. 2009 hasn’t been a good year for me so far in terms of my health, starting the year right away with shingles, possibly had the swine flu last month, and now a cold when the last time I was this sick was ages ago. I have back pain too, just to add to discomfort. But as they say, ‘the blog must go on’. Or something like that. Good thing this week’s a bit quiet in terms of news, although still a couple of big stories to go through. And oh, the winners of Digital Digest’s 10th Anniversary competition has been drawn, and if you’re a winner, you should have gotten an email already – the full list of winners will be published here.

Let’s start with the copyright news for the week. There seems to be a lot of confusion as to the status of The Pirate Bay. They have lost a lawsuit and the site has been sold, but nothing has changed on the site, and the status of the sale itself is now unclear.

Which direction is the Pirate Bay ship sailing in, and who's at the helm, nobody knows

The lack of response to losing the lawsuit has the MPAA angry, and they have asked the court to address this. It was the co-founders of The Pirate Bay that was sued and prison term handed out, but the co-founders deny that have involvement with the company that actually owns The Pirate Bay, Reservella, which operates out of the Seychelles. The MPAA claims that Reservella is operated by the co-founders, and I don’t know how the sale of the site fits into all this, or even if the sale is still on. The allegation is that GGF, the company that purchased TPB, doesn’t have the money ready, but other sources suggest the sale will go through on the 27th of August (thanks to Cynthia for the news). In any case, the Italians also want a piece of The Pirate Bay lawsuit pie, and Italian anti-piracy agency FPM are planning to launch a $1.4 million dollar lawsuit against TPB. FPM were mentioned in last week’s WNR as they claim to have forced Mininova to remove 10,000 torrents.

And the story that keeps on giving. Amazon’s 1984 Kindle screw-up is now going to the courts, as a student who wrote his book reports notes lost his work too when Amazon remotely erased all traces of the unauthorised ‘1984’ Kindle e-book. See, this is what happens when you remotely delete stuff without people’s permissions – had some warning been given, I’m sure the kid could have salvaged at least part of his notes.

And it’s almost as if the RIAA and MPAA saw DRM in trouble, and wanted to step in to help defend it. In any case, a lawyer representing both the RIAA and MPAA has said that DRM’d content was never meant to be forever usable, and that consumers shouldn’t expect to be able to use what they paid for. In other words, the content owners are happy to take your money for overpriced digital downloads, infested with layers upon layers of DRM that makes compatibility a nightmare, and then they tell you that you shouldn’t have any expectations on having any access to the files in say 10 years time. See in the world that the RIAA and MPAA inhabits, this makes total sense and it’s not unfair to anyone at all. In the real world, I can still play audio and video tapes I bought back in the 80’s, people are still playing records bought in the 50’s and all your DRM-free MP3 files will still work in 20 years time, I’m willing to bet. And they wonder why people choose to pirate music.

Downloading a song costs $22,500 according to the RIAA, so no wonder Joel Tenenbaum pirated them instead

Although some will end up paying a lot more than having to deal with a music library that won’t work in 10 years time. The RIAA’s second trial against a music file sharer has resulted in another win, after the Judge in the case threw out defendant Joel Tenenbaum’s only line of defence, that what he was engaged in should be considered fair use (read the link to see what the Judge thought fair use might be). That’s not a defence I would have gone with, not if the RIAA already has evidence of file sharing and that total denial has been ruled out as a defence. Instead, I would question just how much money was lost to the RIAA and ask them to prove so (x number of copies shared times the revenue lost for every Y copies as not all people who download would have otherwise purchased). This would at least avoid the totally disproportionate damages being rewarded, in this case $22,500 per song for 30 songs, or $675,000 in total. And this is actually the more reasonable judgement of the two recent cases, compared to the $1.92 million in damages rewarded against Jammie Thomas-Rasset for only 24 songs. Doing a little math in my head, $1.92 million for 24 songs work out to be $80,000 per song. Now assuming each song costs $1 to buy on iTunes or whatever, then that means the RIAA claims that 80,000 copies of each song has been shared illegally. Assuming on average each song is about 3 MB in size, that means 240 GB of uploads. Now on my upload link (30 KB/s), which is fairly standard here in Australia, this task would take 2276 hours, or 94 days of continuous uploads while not using my connection for anything else. Now times that by 24 songs, and it would take 6 years of continuous uploads for Jammie Thomas-Rasset to rack up the amount of awarded damages (assuming she has the same connection as I do, so it may be “only” 3 years, or up to 12 years for her to do the same), and that’s not even taking into account that the content owners do not make $1 per song, as that’s the retail price.

Well at least they didn’t end up at Gitmo (or wherever the suspected terrorists will be moved to when it closes). Apple says that breaking the iPhone’s Apps DRM, to jailbreak the phones, could lead to hackers attacking cellular networks. This could then lead to possible use by terrorist, and the end of civilization as we know it. Either that, or Apple could lose the monopoly it has on iPhone apps, which could be just as devastating.

PC piracy is a serious problem. So is DS piracy. Game publisher Ubisoft says both are so serious that they have hatched plans to tackle both. What’s interesting is the two different approaches they have taken to tackle what appears to be the same problem. They are trying the carrot approach on the DS, by offering figurines and exclusive content on the DS versions of games. On the PC, while they haven’t spelled out their plans exactly, but it looks like they’re going to go with some kind of DRM system. Now why can’t they do the same on the PC as they are trying to do on the DS? I’m not talking about figurines, but add in some collectibles, some exclusive online content (even if it means online authentication), and make better use of the PC’s multi-purpose nature, by offering online community involvement, multimedia content and all sorts of goodies to make the stripped down pirated version seem inadequate (or so bloated in size when all the extras are included that it’s not worth downloading). In other words, make a better product or package. Making the games better themselves might also help.

High Definition

On to HD news, Paramount is trying a new thing that many studios in the past have tried and found little success: tiered releasing.

Rental version DVDs died around 2003 here in Australia, but Paramount wants to bring it back

What this means is that instead of releasing all home video versions of the movie at the same time, they’re going to release only the rental DVD and for sale Blu-ray version of the movies first, with the for sale DVD version coming at up to 8 weeks later. Now the theory behind this is to promote both video rental and Blu-ray, both of which are growing markets for the studios, as opposed to DVD which is quickly dropping in sales. Studios have tried this in the past, with rental versions of DVDs that contained no extra features, followed by retail versions with the lot (usually a second disc). This kind of thing died quickly here in Australia, as people wanted to rent the retail version with all the special features and were willing to wait. Having the Blu-ray version in stores will help Blu-ray certainly, but it will also task the sales people with explaining to customers why they can’t buy the DVD version until 8 weeks later, which I’m sure will please the retailers who rely on DVD for 90% of their home video revenue. And with people unable to buy the version they want, how many will seek alternative sources, such as pirated versions (of the rental only DVD), and feel justified in doing so because they have been denied the opportunity to purchase the content. Guilt is probably the most effective deterrent to piracy, and Paramount’s move might effectively destroy this last barrier. It’s good thing then that Paramount aren’t doing this with all releases, possibly just the lower profile titles that people will only ever want to rent, not buy.

LG HDTVs will now support the VUDU digital rental system. Not a very important piece of news, but one that continues the trend of integrating home electronics with digital distribution services.

And in gaming, the smoke intensifies around the possible PS3 Slim fire. The latest news is that Sony has ordered so many PS3 parts that it seems they are anticipating a huge surge in demand for the PS3, which might mean the PS3 Slim. There was also some news about an Amazon Germany listing for the PS3 Slim.

My thoughts are that Sony might have announced this at E3 if this was real, and that the additional parts orders may be because prices have dropped recently as demand drops due to the economy. But as I said last week, there’s too much smoke without fire, although it is a well known fact that video gaming fanboys, source of many of the rumours, are quite capable of producing mass amounts of smoke out of their a..

On that refreshing note, thus ends this week’s WNR. Congrats to those who won in our 10th anniversary competition, and better luck next time to those who didn’t. Don’t worry, there’s only 9 years and 336 days to go until the next decennial. See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4 | 1 Comment »

Weekly News Roundup (26 July 2009)

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

Didn’t have anything interesting to write about, so no mid-week blog. But I did go back to an old article I wrote for DVD Flick and updated it for the latest version, which now supports menus and stuff. It’s now a great little tool for AVI to DVD (or any video format to DVD, really), as long as you’re not too fussed about making the menu look really customized. And best of all, it’s all free and really really simple to use. Maybe it’s just me, but more and more of the best software around are actually the free (or open source) ones. Anyway, lots to get through in the news roundup so let’s go.

In Copyright news, the week’s major talking point has been about Amazon’s SNAFU and the implications it has regarding DRM. As you may have heard, some third party reseller on Amazon sold several Orwell e-books for Kindle, but it turned out they did not have permission to do so. So what did Amazon do? They used a not so well known DRM feature of Kindle to, without the permission of the user, erase all copies of the unauthorised books off people’s Kindle devices. Without permission. Without warning. This, my friend, is DRM at its worst.

Amazon's 1984-esque screw-up means Big Brother is not only watching, it's also erasing your books

Sure, in this particular situation, the erasure was probably justified, although ironic in the extreme considering the titles that were erased (‘1984’, in particular – Big Brother must be so proud). But that’s not the point. The point is that Amazon at a moment’s notice can erase all of your purchases. Now why would they do that? They wouldn’t, not unless they want to be hit with hundreds of thousands of lawsuits all at once. But the point is that they could, and they have proved that they can this time, and there will be many similar future situation which will force Amazon or publishers to do this again. They wouldn’t be able to do the same with hard copies, and so it would be the seller or Amazon that will have to pay damages, rather than the customer who bought the item in good faith. The truth is that with these kinds of DRM, you’re not buying, you’re only renting or licensing, as you are bound by the license agreement which you agreed to when purchasing the books. Anyway, the whole thing caused quite a stir, even though this isn’t the first time Amazon has done this, but the media just loved the ‘1984’ references. Amazon’s boss had to issue a public apology. DRM again shows it’s true evilness.

DRM may still be alive on e-books and other media, but it’s pretty much dead on music. There is watermarking, which is a form of DRM, but it’s something people are willing to live with (at least those that do use the content lawfully, and not hold intentions to distribute illegally). But generally speaking, the kind of DRM that is on Kindle is dead for music, so much so that the RIAA has came out and declared DRM dead. Or did they? It made good copy so all the news agencies (and websites) ran with the story, but the actual quote was not as harsh as the headlines, but the RIAA did still admit the fact that DRM was largely gone from download services. So basically it’s dead, right?

Well, as one of our forum members pointed out, it’s not entirely dead. There are still music download services that employ DRM, but nobody really uses them, not when they can get DRM-free tracks. One new service which just launched and still uses DRM is Kazaa, the notorious file sharing service now gone legit. You can all you can eat music, but the DRM restricts playback to PCs (and a limited number of them as well), so it’s virtually useless before it is even launched. All you can eat music is good, but not if it’s limited to PCs, and as this requires DRM, it also means you’re effectively subscribing or renting the music, not purchasing. An all you can eat purchase account for DRM-free music is what the industry needs to really grow the download business. Prevent illegal sharing with watermarking and other methods, sure, but don’t make people jump through hoops just to buy something that’s less entertaining and value than many other forms of entertainment (this is why video gaming is growing at the expense of music, for example).

Pirating MP3s may not lead to communism, but DRM certainly takes a page out of the little red book

I guess you can see the theme of the week so far has been the difference between buying something and owning it, with all the rights associated with it, like the ability to actually not get it taken away from you without your permission, and the ability to re-sell it. That’s owning property. What DRM introduces is licensing, which is nothing new, but DRM allows licenses to be enforced strictly, such as remote erasure of the content. So the question is, is copyright anti-property? I think it is, and I think that’s been the core of the issues which people are against. Starting with DRM on DVDs, which prevented people from making backups of their DVDs, something they could do with CDs and all other media before that. And bit by bit, people’s rights are being taken away from them, and as Kindle-gate shows, companies now have the right to come into your home (in a way) and take away your purchases without your permission. People bleat on all the time about the evils of Communism in regards to the lack of personal ownership, but is this any better (or any different)?

Back to the lawsuits. The co-founders and the (ex) spokesman of The Pirate Bay have filed a lawsuit against Dutch anti-piracy agency BREIN, in response to a lawsuit filed by BREIN in which the only communication was through a Twitter tweet. BREIN apparently also accused the former TPB guys of launching denial of services attacks against their websites, which the TPB guys are counter-suing on the basis that this isn’t true and may constitute slander. They also claim that the original BREIN lawsuit continued numerous errors and should never have been filed in the first place. An agency having a better time is the Italian FPM group (where have all these groups come from, all of a sudden), which claims they have forced Mininova to remove 20,000 torrent links and many other sites to do the same. Mininova is fighting a legal battle themselves of course, and they have been hinting at trials of a system to allow torrent removals by content owners, I guess trying to prove that there is a system in place to handle piracy, and it should be up to content owners to police their own content (as otherwise, how would anyone know what belongs to whom)?

High Definition

Moving on to HD news, the big rumour of the week (and as of right now, still unconfirmed), is that Toshiba is joining the Blu-ray bandwagon, which in many fanboy’s eyes will signal final and irrefutable victory over HD DVD.

64GB USB drives are already here, bigger than the biggest Blu-ray disc, and is rewritable without special hardware - could it be used for movie distribution?

I must make clear that Toshiba have not confirmed any of this, issuing a no comment which may be suggestive of some smoke, if not the fire. The question is, does this story make sense? In my opinion, yes it does. Toshiba was always unlikely to skip Blu-ray entirely, unless Blu-ray died a quick death. They make TVs and DVD players, and so Blu-ray is the natural next step for them. However, this does not mean that their focus on the post-Blu-ray technologies, such as downloads, streaming or flash memory distribution, have been abandoned. I for one feel that Toshiba getting back into the game at this time may in fact be due to the fact that these new technologies are finally mature enough for the marketplace, as seen with LG and Samsung’s Netflix integration. USB drive capacity has already exceeded that of Blu-ray, and offer better value than Blu-ray recordables even at this nacent stage. And with more and more companies launching USB thumb drive movie distribution services, this may be the right time for Toshiba to embrace Blu-ray, but also sneakily introduce these post-Blu-ray technologies through the back door and use Blu-ray to launch their own ideas about what the future of movie distribution will look like. Is it also a coincidence that the companies mentioned so far, LG, Samsung and Toshiba, as well as Microsoft with its Netflix Xbox 360 strategy, are all HD DVD proponents? And with Netflix in 9% of US homes already, thanks largely to the expansion of their online streaming service through game consoles and Blu-ray players, it shows people may be ready to start embracing online video streaming. Sure, Blu-ray quality HD streaming and downloads will have to wait another generation, waiting for the Internet infrastructure to catch up, but Blu-ray quality (and even better than Blu-ray quality) movie distribution via flash memory is already possible now.

For the short term though, 3D TV and movies are also seen as the next big thing. James Cameron’s new movie ‘Avatar’ aims to bring new 3D filming techniques and the concept of a 3D movie to mainstream audiences, to make 3D less of an optional experience, and make it *the* experience at the cinema. ‘Avatar’ is definitely the most expensive 3D movie produced thus far, there is no doubt about that. Along with the Blu-ray group trying to establish a standard for 3D Blu-ray movies, and with Nvidia joining the “game” with its GeForce 3D Vision kit, to bring 3D to the home computer, there is certainly a movement towards making 3D mainstream. But my view is that while 3D can be popular, it cannot be mainstream until one invents a technology that doesn’t require glasses. It’s just too much trouble, regardless of the payoff.

And finally in gaming, Microsoft has announced the next Dashboard update will be on August 11th, bringing a bunch of new features including better movie streaming, more avatar related content (achievements which give clothing and props sounds very interesting to me), and even games on demand. It’s not just movies that are moving to a media-less distribution method, it seems.

Sony’s PS3 Slim is rumoured to be unveiled soon as well, if the rumours are true that is. Sony will be making announcements in August, which should see either the rumours confirmed or denied. Again, there is a bit too much smoke without even a small fire at this stage. The big question will be how much cheaper will this new PS3 be? Because if it’s just the same price, then I don’t see the point.

I think that’s all the news for this week. More DRM bashing, digital distribution championing and PS3 price cut pining next week. 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 (26 July 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (5 July 2009)

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

Digital Digest is 10 Years Old!

Digital Digest is 10 years old! The actual birthday was yesterday, and I know it was 4th of July and that’s because I deliberately chose an easy to remember date to make public the very first version of Digital Digest (then known as DVDigest – you can see a screenshot of it here). My original thinking behind Digital Digest was that, as I was very active on newsgroups and forums back then answering people’s questions in regards to DVD playback (mainly focused on the Asus v3400 graphics card), that having a website where I can post all my answers and people can read that would save me time. After 10 years and countless hours of work later, I think my plan might have backfired just a little. Still, it’s been mostly enjoyable and I don’t think I would rather be doing anything else.

Anyway, to celebrate the 10th anniversary, I thought I would set up a competition where you can win some Amazon.com Gift Cards. There are 10 prizes in total (you know, for the 10 years and all), and entry is as simple as giving me your name and email address. No super easy or super hard questions to answer, or secret codes to hunt for on the website. I’ll randomly draw the winners at the end of the month, good luck to all those who enter.

Anyway, onto the news for the week, there’s a bit to cover.

Let’s start with the copyright news. The Pirate Bay is still dominating the copyright news this week. There was a big announcement that caused a lot of stir, but it was preceded by some interesting news in regards to a new site that TPB wants to launch.

The new site in question is a YouTube style video sharing site, except there won’t be any copyright filters to contend with. It won’t make big media happy, but YouTube is only YouTube because people share copyright stuff, not in the sense of piracy, but using clips and music in their own videos. If you can really make YouTube 100% copyright compliant, then there won’t be many videos left at all.

The Pirate Bay changes owners: is this the end?

So good news in that TPB is undeterred by the lawsuits and will continue with their crusade to “free” the Internet of the shackles of excessive copyright control. Then the news broke that The Pirate Bay has been sold to a new company, and that new company wants to focus on legalizing TPB. Confusion reigned, and we still don’t know what’s going on. On one hand, the statements made by the new owners seem to indicate that TPB would go legit, which basically means it’s going to turn into a completely different site, other than the domain name. On the other hand, there were statements made later on that suggested this won’t make much of a difference at all. The backlash was immediate, and not too dissimilar to the one after the Mininova content filter blog post made a couple of months ago. It does seem a bit ungrateful that this tremendously useful resource that people have been using, for free, for so many years and then the minute something changes (and we’re not even sure what the changes mean yet), it becomes torch and pitchfork time. But I guess that’s the nature of the business, in that people expect free stuff and they won’t like it when it’s taken away. Keep a close eye on this story and let’s give the benefit of the doubt to the TPB founders for the time being.

And let’s not forget that the bad guys in all of this is the RIAA, MPAA and all these other copyright groups that refuses to embrace the Internet for what it is, and accept that piracy is part of their business model now, and without it (and without the Internet “hype” effect, they’d be making much less money than they are right now). But it’s yet another victory for the RIAA in their lawsuit against Usenet.com. Well, at least the lawyers are happy, and people who pirate stuff are still pirating stuff, possibly more easily than before. But at least they’re not going after individuals in lawsuits anymore, although the three-strikes rubbish is not that much better. And if more proof was needed that going after individuals doesn’t work, then have a look at a new study by Which? computer magazine in the UK, which managed to easily find 20 users accused of piracy that are apparently innocent. There’s been lots of these kind of falsely accused stories in the past, and because IP addresses are not the best way to track down individuals. IP addresses can be easily faked, and even if they are genuine, it only proves that someone using a particular connection at that time was possibly downloading pirated material, it does not prove that which person did it or whether it was done with permission of the owners of the connection.

But this all assumes that illegal downloads are a bad bad thing, but the reality is that many people have no other alternative than to download, such as downloading TV shows. EngadgetHD looks at the top 10 reasons people download illegal TV shows. From my experience, especially here in Australia, people are almost forced to download because the traditional outlets such as TV stations or DVD are just too slow – some shows are shown years after they were originally broadcast in the US, and some (like The Sopranos) never shown properly at all. And because DVD releases have to be months after TV broadcasts, the shows that are purchased by the TV station but never shown might never make it onto DVD. The situation is a lot better now these days than just a few years ago, and I think online piracy is the reason for this improvement. So piracy is not always a bad thing, if it gives the right people a kick up the butt, for the right reasons. The simplest way to fight against piracy is to make legal alternatives available, that are better and not a total ripoff. Do this, and piracy will slow down. Don’t do it, and people will flock to what’s the best and fastest, which right now is clearly piracy.

High Definition

Let’s move on to HD news now. Oppo has released its new Blu-ray player. It features high-end features such as SACD and DVD-Audio playback, plus the superior video processing for both Blu-ray and DVD upscaling that Oppo is famous for.

Oppo BDP-83: The most fully featured Blu-ray player so far?

Plus, there is the possibility of a region-free firmware (for both Blu-ray and DVD), and it could be the must-have Blu-ray player for the year. Elsewhere, it has all the features most Blu-ray players have, including Profile 2.0 compatibility – there’s not Netflix streaming though. And it’s not that expensive either, not for the amount of features you get. Those with huge DVD collections should really consider getting this player as it will seriously improve the longevity of your DVD collection with the superior upscaling capabilities, while allowing you to sample what Blu-ray can offer. It’s available for under $500 from Amazon right now.

Speaking of Netflix streaming on Blu-ray players, the Examiner looks at whether on demand content is going to replace physical media. I don’t see why both can’t co-exist together, like on the aforementioned Blu-ray player, but certainly on demand content is going to eat into the profit streams of physical media. I think physical media still has a place, for backup, and for those like me that still prefer something solid to represent my movie collection. The situation may be analogous to the one between snail mail and emails. There was always the talk that email will replace traditional mail, but while the good old letter has suffered, it still has an important place in our new digital world. Just like physical media will have in the world of tomorrow.

And finally in gaming, lots of rumours as usual. For the Xbox 360, the latest rumours suggest that the Pro pack is being phased out, and the Elite will become the new “pro”, with a Natal bundle being the new Elite. More rumours of PS3 price cuts, and the rumours regarding the PS3 slim still won’t go away. You can read about all of these rumours here.

Is PS2 compatibility coming to the PS3? Is this the end for the PS2?

The second rumour is about PS2 compatibility coming back to the PS3, either to all existing consoles, or to the PS3 slim. If Sony plans to phase out the PS2, and it’s about time they did, then this makes perfect sense. With software emulation more of a possibility than when the PS3 first launched (where PS2 compatibility required extra, and expensive, hardware), it won’t add to the cost of the PS3, while Sony can even sell the emulation software in the PS Store. Plus, they can then start selling PS2 games in digital form for PS3 owners, just like on the Xbox 360 or Wii. So this is one rumour that might be true, and if Sony isn’t even considering this option, then somebody should smack them in the back of the head.

And is Project Natal racist? The news broke that people with darker skin tones might have trouble playing Natal due to one person’s experience at the E3 demo. It’s an interesting headline, but I don’t think there’s an issue, because surely darker clothing would affect the accuracy of Natal much more than darker skin. A calibration tool might be what Natal needs, and users might have to calibrate the cameras (due to change in lighting) before usage to ensure accuracy is improved.

So that’s it for the week. Ten years, it’s gone by rather quickly I must say. Even this feature, the Weekly News Roundup, is nearly 2 years old (in September), even though it feels like I only started doing this last month. Or maybe it feels this way because I really don’t know what I’m doing, which is probably true. Anyway, see you next week as I incompetently try to produce another edition of the WNR. See you then.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (5 July 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (14 June 2009)

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Time for another Weekly News Roundup, because, funnily enough, it’s been another week since the last one. Since then, the NPD US video games sales figures for May 2009 came out, and as usual, I have posted my analysis. More bad news for the video gaming industry basically, but a slight improvement since April. And there’s yet another hyped up PS3 exclusive (inFAMOUS) that has failed to really grab a huge chunk of sales, adding to the list including LittleBigPlanet and Killzone 2, to name a few. Sure, they do sell in good numbers eventually, but so do a lot of other quite mediocre titles, including ones that aren’t even exclusive and so by common sense should be selling less on one particular console than exclusives. I do wonder how many people are like me and don’t use their PS3 for games, only for Blu-ray or media playback. I’m sure the percentage of this type of users is much higher than on the Xbox 360, while a competent media hub, is no patch on the PS3 (no Blu-ray, noisy …). Anyway, onto the news.

In copyright news, a couple of developments this week, mostly in Europe. That’s understandable, due to the attention the Pirate Bay trial has attracted, and what appears to be several European government’s obsession in pleasing their American overlords to pass strong anti-piracy legislation.

The Swedish Pirate Party now has a seat in the EU parliament

First up is good news, which is rare for this section of the WNR. The Pirate Bay may have lost a trial, but it has gained status as a political party by winning a seat in the European parliament. They won 7.1% of the vote in Sweden, which may not sound quite as impressive to people living in countries with two major parties, but considering that the largest party in Sweden got 24.6%, and that their Prime Minister’s own party only got 18.8%, the Pirate Party’s 7.1% suddenly looks a lot more significant. The traditional third party in many countries is the Green party, and they only got 3.6% more. The Pirate Party is a single issue protest party, and it’s really unheard of for such a party to receive so many votes. But that’s not to say that the one issue they represent is not an important one, or one worth fighting. Far from it. One can only hope The Pirate Party extends their reach to around the world and they can become a political force that will force some positive change for the lobbyist controlled copyright issue.

Meanwhile, the New York Times posted what appeared to be very bad news for The Pirate Bay in terms of their trial, which the headline that states that their appeal has been denied. This was sourced from an article by the Hollywood Reporter. However, both are wrong in this case, according to our forum’s resident Swedish expert, Cynthia (and a couple of other news sources). The Pirate Bay defence had claimed that the judge ruling the case was biased. The court which will see to the appeal has asked for opinions from the original court that ruled the case in regards to this claim, and the original court has denied any evidence of bias and has submitted this. This is where the confusion comes from, perhaps, because no judgement on the appeal has been made yet, and I doubt this is the only avenue of appeal anyway. Thanks again Cynthia for the update, and no thanks to the NY Times for their lack of research on the issue (even if they don’t consider it “important”).

A couple of weeks ago I posted a news item about France passing a new controversial law, dubbed the “three-strikes” law, which aims to cut off Internet usage for people found to be “guilty” of downloading pirated material three times. Of course, there is no court, no appeal of decisions, and the copyright groups can basically silence anyone it wants to without any hint of a fair process. It is no surprise then the country’s constitutional council has declared this law to be, well, un-constitutional because a system where one is assumed to be guilty and the charged needs to prove their innocence is not one that should belong in a Democratic society. The council basically says that the court has to be involved somehow, so people can prove their innocence. The French government are undeterred and plan to go ahead with the now modified law, which will now require “special judges” to rule on each and every case. But the whole point of the three strikes system is so that it doesn’t go through the criminal justice system to save time and money, but the newly modified law won’t achieve this point and one can see the court system being overwhelmed instantly. Maybe then, it will convince the French government to drop it completely.

All this emphasis on downloads seem to suggest that downloading pirated material has led to a collapse in revenue for industries such as the music industry. While the music industry has suffered from lost of revenue, there is no doubt of this (well, maybe a little), perhaps the reason is not piracy at all. The Guardian, spending a little more time doing research than the NY Times, has came up with a very interesting graph in regards to people’s spending habits. And yes, it does show music spending way down compared to just a few years ago. But the overall spending seems to have increased, to almost double of what it was in 1999. And looking at the graph in more details, it’s easy to see why this is the case. DVD sales went up quickly, but has stayed pretty flat since 2003. Music down as mentioned previously, and so is DVD rental. But people’s spendings on gaming quadrupled in the same period. So instead of piracy getting people’s money, it’s actually gaming, taking money away from music and rentals, and to be lesser degree, gaming. In the intro of this week’s WNR I talked about the NPD analysis, and one of the reasons that I have been doing the analysis posts for over a year now is because gaming is huge business and it needs to be made known that, yes, it is taking money away from the other home entertainment industries. But the point is overall spending increased, and this is despite piracy on the rise, so perhaps piracy isn’t a problem at all – it’s how the music and DVD industry, the passive entertainment industry if you will, can compete with the high level of interactivity that’s offered by video games. And while games are more expensive, say 3 times the cost of a DVD movie, but they also offer at least 3 times the entertainment, sometimes hundreds of hours of interactive entertainment, compared to only 2 or 3 hours for a typical movie (and 72 minutes for a CD). Research shows that piracy actually help to promote content, and thus promote purchases, while people who pirate are not the types to have spent money on it even if there was no pirated alternative. But let’s blame it on the pirates anyway, because that’s easy than confronting the harsher reality that music and movies aren’t as fun for the whole family as video games anymore, especially now with family oriented game consoles like the Wii.

High Definition

While this is probably still Copyright news, but I’ll talk about it in the HD section since the Copyright section above was getting a bit long. The big news this week is that the AACS licensing authority, the people behind copy protection on Blu-ray, has revealed the final specifications for the AACS system. There are a couple of controversial items in the announcement, which is not surprising given the whole attitude of the DRM industry.

Say goodbye to the analog video outputs on your Blu-ray player

The big first controversial item is that analog video output is set to be banned from Blu-ray players. That’s right, after 2014, no Blu-ray player will be allowed to have component, S-Video, SCART or composite video output or they face not getting the AACS license and therefore, will be unable to play all commercial Blu-ray movies. Starting in 2011, analog output will be limited to SD resolutions only, to set the analog sunset in motion. The argument that analog is useless in the world of HDMI and DisplayPort is a perfectly valid one, and that’s reason enough for manufacturers to stop including them in their players. But to place a ban on it due to copyright reasons is just stupid. If people aren’t smart enough to just download pirated movies online, then I don’t think they’re smart enough to hook up their Blu-ray players to their DVD recorders through analog output, and then somehow find a way to by-pass the Macrovision copy protection present on all analog outputs (for DVD and Blu-ray). It’s certainly not easier than downloading. And if this measure is to stop pirates from making copies, then since existing players support analog output, don’t you think that the pirates, if they needed to pirate through analog (which they don’t), would just keep a few old players lying around to bypass this measure completely. And real pirates work at the Blu-ray disc pressing plants, and have access to the masters, which is why they can bring out a pirated version even before the official release, and this doesn’t stop them. The only thing it stops is Macrovision from getting royalties from Blu-ray (which is not a bad thing, really), and it stops people using Blu-ray on older equipment. I don’t think this will really affect that many people, since I don’t think most people will even remember what analog is in 2014, but it’s the principle of the thing, and it just shows how paranoid the content owners are (possibly thanks to scary propaganda from the DRM industry).

The other big news is that Blu-ray Mandatory Copy will begin to rollout next year. What it is, and it’s already present but not in a standardised form, is that it will allow you to make limited copies of your Blu-ray movies through the Blu-ray player itself. The copies can be on Blu-ray, DVD or even for your portable players (although no Apple based players have signed up for this yet). Blu-ray movies with MC will have an extra menu option to make copies. Each Blu-ray disc with this feature will also have an unique serial number, which is used in an online authentication system to record and place limits on your copying activities (as well as to track if the copied content eventually ends up online or not). That’s pretty much what you would expect from such a system. The problem is that current Blu-ray players do not support MC, and so if you want it, you’ll have to buy yet another Blu-ray player (Blu-ray Profile 4.0?). The PS3 may be able to accommodate this through software updates, and your PC may be updated through software as well to conform to MC standards. And despite the phrase “mandatory” in Mandatory Copy, it isn’t mandatory and is purely optional for both movie studios and hardware manufacturers. And Blu-ray movies with MC enabled will cost more. So MC may be dead before it even starts, but it does add value to be able to make portable versions of movies straight from your Blu-ray player, and it might still end up cheaper than the studio’s preferred method of you purchasing the same content many times over in each different format. I’m going to call this positive progress, because at the very least, it acknowledges the need for people to make legal copies of their movies.

Wal-Mart will be offering cheap Blu-ray players for Father’s Day, at $128 each. But take the advice from our forum members and avoid the ultra cheapo players, because they lack many of the features that the slightly more expensive players have, such as Internet connectivity.

Apple’s upcoming Snow Leopard Mac OS X revision will feature GPU assisted acceleration, including H.264 acceleration, but you will need a Mac with at least the Nvidia 9400M GPU, or you’ll miss out. The $99 iPhone should also entice more people to buy it, and it’s a nice little media player even if you don’t need all the other fancier features. And for $99, you can’t really go wrong, especially if you limit Internet usage to your home WiFi network, as opposed to spending too much on data (more of an issue here in Australia and other countries with rip-off data charges). And no, still no Blu-ray on Apple systems. And speaking of data charges, Microsoft’s HD streaming services will require a 8 to 10 Mbps connection for full quality streaming (quality will drop if connection is slower). That’s out of reach of most Australians at the very least, but maybe you lucky folks in the UK, Asia or US may get to enjoy full quality HD streaming. From a technical point of view, 8 Mbps should give you excellent 720p quality video, while 10 Mbps is probably still too low to offer Blu-ray quality 1080p video (you need at least 15 Mbps to even come close). HD video streaming is still very much bottlenecked at the bandwidth level, I’m afraid.

And in gaming, Microsoft’s Natal motion gaming system continues the media promotional blitz by appearing on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (video in link), in a live demo that was played by Fallon. It’s certainly easier to see the potential of Natal, but until I buy it and test it out in my own home, I’m going to remain skeptical.

Can Natal really work, or will it be too inaccurate to be of any use?

But Engadget and IGN has both had plays with Natal, and they’ve said some pretty impressive things about it, including the fact that it’s surprisingly accurate. The accuracy thing is the one I’m most worried about. And the live demos showed a modified version of Burnout Paradise that works with Natal, which might mean that lots of existing games can be updated to work with it. I’m really looking forward to playing Crackdown by jumping up and down in my living room like a crazy person.

For those that want to make the comparisons between the Wii, PS3 motion controller (PMC) and Natal, I think Natal is something a bit different to what the Wii and PMC offers. The PMC is a basically a super accurate Wii-mote, and add in the PS3’s HD graphics, it could offer the Wii some real competition. Natal, on the other hand, doesn’t even require a controller, which won’t please the hardcore gamers, but might entice even more of those who don’t consider themselves gamers, much like what the Wii has done. Some people just don’t like having to learn how to use a controller, or are unable to, but being able to use your body to do something is natural to all humans and much easier to learn. Plus Natal offers voice and facial recognition as well. But don’t forget that the PS3 has the PS3 has the EyeToy camera thing, which can be adapted to function in a similar way to Natal, so don’t be surprised if Sony offers body motion controls as well.

My WordPress word counter meter tells me I’ve type 2327 words already, so I’m ready to take a break now. More words coming at you next week.

Posted in Computing, Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, PS3, PS4, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | 2 Comments »

Weekly News Roundup (24 May 2009)

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

The April 2009 NPD game console figures are out. Pretty bad news for all concerned really, except for Nintendo, but only due to the new DSi. The economy is struggling, and regardless of the (in my opinion, unwarranted) optimism regarding an economic recovery, the sad fact is that things are not doing well and going well in reality. I would not be surprised to see the recent gains on the stock markets wiped out sometime in the next few month, because if you talk to people on the ground, there is no recovery and things are only getting worse. Sorry to start the WNR on such a depressing note, but I think it had to be addressed before people go overboard with the optimism and we blow up yet another bubble that will cause a lot of damage when it bursts. Everyone thought the video game industry would be recession proof, and up until February, they were right. And now they are wrong.

I hate to go from one depressing area to another, but it is traditional to have the copyright news first so here we go. The RealDVD case continues in court. The MPAA has won a small victory in getting the public kicked out of the courtroom. They say it’s because sensitive trade secrets might come out, as if nobody knows how to rip a DVD or to break the less than weak CSS copy protection system. I think they’re just afraid of the public backing that Real Networks will receive in the courtroom, which might influence the Judge in his decision making (so they pre-empted this by influencing the Judge right away).

In the other major trial at the moment, here in Australia, the AFACT (Australia’s own MPAA) has asked ISP iiNet to stop wasting the court’s time and basically admit all their customers are pirates. That doesn’t sound arrogant at all. The AFACT should stop wasting the court’s time and stop trying to insinuate that all web users are pirates, and that somehow their ISP is responsible for everything. Are phone companies responsible for people making prank phone calls? Exactly.

From the same people that brought you the Scouts Respect Copyright Badge (no joke), classroom propaganda is next

Two school related copyright news as well. First up is the good news. A Harvard professor had told the RIAA that P2P is fair use, because unless it can be proven that the user has caused actual losses for the studios, they should not be liable. That sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Stealing music is not like stealing a car, regardless of what those copyright ads tell you. If you steal a car, then the owner of the car has lost money because a car is a physical entity and it has a value. A digital file has not value, regardless of what’s contained in it, simply because it can be duplicated an infinite number of times. Anything that can be duplicated an infinite number of times is not worth anything. So when you steal a copy of a file, which has no value, then the only loss would be the result if you had originally intended to purchase the file, and then was tempted by the free illegal version instead. If the “illegal” music downloaders never originally intended to pay for the content, then nothing has been lost by anyone. The content owners are still trying to treat digital content as if it were the same content or products that come in physical form, and they just do not get it. They also don’t get how great digital can be, because (bandwidth costs excepted), digital means infinite duplication which means you can afford to sell each copy at a much lower premium and still end up making more money. That’s the magic of digital, and they just don’t get it. And they are trying to make sure the next generation don’t get it either, and they’re now trying to get their pro-copyright propaganda into US classrooms. Just like all their anti-copying attempts, this one won’t work either because the next generation are even more savvy than than current one, and they will understand the exact nature of digital more so than anybody else.

NDS flash carts are the new enemy of Nintendo, eBay and Amazon

I mentioned earlier that Nintendo had a relatively good April thanks to the new Nintendo DSi. I also mentioned last week that the DSi had some new features that prevent the use of flash carts and downloaded games, although it was cracked as soon as it was implemented. The next step for Nintendo is to team up with Amazon and eBay to stop the sale of flash carts. Fair enough, but it wont’ stop the sale of flash carts though because they will still be available for sale from a wide variety of online stores. And flash carts are quite useful even if you buy games, because you can put all your favourite games on one card and make the DS/DSi truly portable, and there’s also the more advanced media player functions which has been a weak point of the DS (compared to the PSP, at least). If Nintendo made a similar cart that allowed only the legally purchased games to be copied onto a single cart, as well as having an advanced media player, then they would have more grounds to argue that the current flash carts are nothing but piracy tools. If you do not service a segment of your user base, then they’ll find ways to service themselves.

High Definition

Onto HD news now. A new Nielsen survey has produced an interesting set of results in regards to HD usage. It seems that nearly one third of US homes now have HDTVs, which is good to hear.

14% of people with HDTVs don't watch HD content

However, it seems that out of the HDTV owners, only some of them are using it for HD content. So some people are not watching HD content on HDTVs, although not a huge percentage (14%). Still, you wonder why they bought the HDTV in the first place, or is it a case of HD content not being available widely/cheaply enough and there’s some future-proofing going on. I think more education might be needed in order to convince people HD, whether true or upscaled, is the future, because the 14% of HDTV owners who don’t watch HD suggests there is a huge percentage of non HDTV owners who don’t know or don’t care about HD. The responsible parties, and that’s the content owners, need to step up to the plate and start advertising the benefits of HD (they can start by buying some ads on this website, for one).

Blu-ray’s 50 GB not big enough? How about being able to store all your movies onto a single disc? A disc with 5 dimensions, able to store 80 TBs of data, was unveiled by Australian scientists. Not that it would help much because studios would never let you be able to copy any of your movies onto a single disc, let alone all your movies (think about the pirating potential!).

Netflix is yet again expanding it’s reach by teaming up with Microsoft to deliver Netflix content to Windows Media Center enabled PCs. Netflix now has a huge reach for its digital distribution network, and it’s amazing to see how quickly something like this can be set up thanks to existing hardware, some of them many years old, all being capable of being adapted into the network through software. Pretty soon (if not already), every A/V device will have audio outputs, video outputs, storage and networking built right in, and that’s all you need really to make it capable of receiving digital distribution. Think of all the devices you already have that fit this description, and if they don’t have Netflix or something similar on it already, then you won’t have to wait too long. This is another aspect of the magic of digital.

And finally in gaming. The PS2 did outsell the PS3 in April sales, all thanks to a price drop. But is Sony going to drop the price of the PS3? Well, maybe instead of dropping prices on *existing* PS3s, they can produce a new cheaper one that will do the same job. That’s the rumour going around at the moment anyway, a new PS3 slim that will be cheaper to produce and will sell for cheaper. Maybe it will have less connectors, maybe it won’t have built-in Wi-Fi and maybe the HDD will be smaller, but the lower price is what people want and Sony should try and deliver. But I always thought that slimmer meant more expensive, certainly from the Apple school of thinking at least.

Alrighty then (Copyright, Warner Bros. studio 1994), that’s the week that was (Copyright, somebody). More bad news in the world of copyright, more denials from Sony regarding a price drop, and more unsubstantiated rumours coming right here next week. See you then.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (24 May 2009)

DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Archive for the ‘Electronics’ Category

Weekly News Roundup (2 August 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (26 July 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (5 July 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (14 June 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (24 May 2009)

Pages

Links

Categories