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Weekly News Roundup (28 October 2007)

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Woohoo! Another weekly roundup. More work on a Sunday when I didn’t get a good night’s sleep in my hot non air-conditioned office. I’m not bitter, really, I’m not.

Anyway, in copyright news the MPAA has apparently hired a hacker to find out confidential information about the bittorrent site, TorrentSpy. I’m pretty sure hacking is illegal in the US. It may in fact be considered an act of terrorism. All those MPAA “piracy equals terrorism” posters finally start to make some sense. The big news of the week was the closure of the popular music bittorrent site, OiNK. There is already news that The Pirate Bay may start something similar to replace it. It will probably end up being something better and harder to close down too. Meanwhile on the other end of the spectrum, Amazon says its DRM free music sales has been a great success. No surprise really, considering DRM is completely useless in preventing piracy and its only purpose is to annoy consumers (and make healthy royalties for the company who invented the DRM engine). Now only if there were something similar for movies …

On to gaming news, US September sales figures have been released and it’s another bad month for the PS3 (read my in depth analysis of the figures here). I think I’ve posted enough about the problems with the PS3 over this last few days, that I don’t think I need go into it any further (although since my blog post, another developer has come out to say it’s a pain to work on the PS3). But at least Activision is standing by the PS3, saying that it is the most advanced console and that in 4 or 5 years time, people will see the difference. I’m not sure Sony can wait that long though, considering their gaming division losses taking the shine off their otherwise impressive profit figures. This week has all been about how bad the PS3 is, and I guess Microsoft is happy to just sit and enjoy the afterglow of the Halo 3 effect. But they are not resting on their laurels, and rumour is that IPTV might be coming to the Xbox 360 in the fall update (and since it’s fall already in the US, the update might not be that far away). It will probably be an U.S only affair though. Shame.

HD news now, the Transformers on HD DVD has sold well, although not as well as first claimed by Paramount. Blu-ray still held the week 51% to 49%, but how quickly that their 2-to-1 advantage shrank due to one single movie, and also the puny amount of HD discs sold compared to DVDs, means that these “figure wars” are really quite pointless. I’ve always maintained that consumers should adopt a format neutral stance and support both formats to ensure they don’t lose out, and Samsung is helping the cause by announcing more details on their updated dual-format player (which will be Blu-ray Profile 1.1 compatible, one of the first on the market to be). But if you don’t mind having two separate players, then HD DVD players have finally fallen below the magic $US 200 threshold. Wal-Mart, and now Circuit City, will be selling the superseded Toshiba A2 for under $200. That’s quite a decent price for a HD DVD player that also doubles as a fairly decent DVD upscaler (not as good as the more expensive XA2 though, but the Reon VX chip in that player puts it into the high-end class of DVD players). While $200 is tempting, I think prices will drop further. In the meantime, check out Amazon’s Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive deal (if you have an Xbox 360 that is) – you get Heroes Season 1 on HD DVD of $69.95 value, plus 5 other free HD DVD movies by redemption and all for under $180. Assuming each HD DVD is worth $20, that’s $170 worth of movies for $180, so the drive only costs $10 (and it doubles as a HD DVD-ROM drive for your PC too!).

That’s all folks from my hot non air-conditioned office. See you next week.

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 (28 October 2007)

Weekly News Roundup (21 October 2007)

Sunday, October 21st, 2007

Time again for the weekly news roundup. Got a lot to talk about this week, so let’s begin.

In copyright related news, YouTube has launched its new anti-piracy blocker. So that’s 90% of its videos being blocked now, and the rest is made up of clips of Chocolate Rain Guy, crying Britney Spears fan “guy” and video blogs from people talking about things nobody cares about. Even the lovable dramatic chipmunk might have to be removed, since it comes from a Japanese TV show which is no doubt copyrighted. In news that I should have covered last week, a UK car repair firm has been sued for copyright infringment because their workers had a radio on while working on the cars in the background. Has the world gone mad? It’s like the story of the mother being sued because her home video of her baby, which she had uploaded onto YouTube and removed, because there was some copyrighted music in the background. I think copyright control lost all common sense. It’s suppose to protect artists from lost revenue, but how does a home video of a baby hurt anybody? Comcast has begun to block certain P2P traffic in a bid to stop piracy, and possibly (more importantly) curb network usage. ISPs sell you bandwidth when they do not have the network capacity to accommodate it if everyone was using the maximum. It has worked before because most people don’t use anywhere near their allocated limits. Unfortunately with the net becoming more and more popular, and downloads becoming larger and larger (watching 24 hours of legal YouTube videos can use up GBs of bandwidth), people are using more and getting closer to their limits than ever before. If the net is to continue to thrive, then somebody, either in the private sector or the government, need to step in and fund further network infrastructure, because there is only so much you can do to limit traffic flow before it starts to hurt the Internet. Went a little off topic here, sorry about that.

Now to change the topic entirely, in gaming news, the PS3 has seen a sale surge up nearly 180% in recent weeks in the UK. At first glance, it seems that the surge is due to the introduction of the cheaper 40 GB PS2-emulation-less version of the PS3, but sales figure show that people are actually buying the discontinued model (with PS2 emulation) for fear that they won’t be able to buy a PS2 compatible PS3 in the future. I share their fears, but I lack the money to do anything about it. This might have been Sony’s strategy all along, but it all depends on what happens after the PS2 compatible PS3 sells out – will they introduce another model that has PS2 compatibility, or do what they are threatening to do now, which is to stop PS2 emulation support altogether? If so, won’t that hurt PS3 sales even more? While the situation may be far from desperate for Sony, they are sure acting like it with the latest news that they’ve sold their PS3 cell chip production plant to bitter HD rivals Toshiba. In the short terms, this frees up money for Sony and allows them to concentrate on their core products. But in the long term, won’t this gives Toshiba control over the pricing of PS3 cell chips and so wouldn’t this mean less price cuts in the future? Certainly, it will improve Toshiba’s profile as a technology leader, and the cost of running such a production plant can be offset easily by their record earnings recently. Toshiba is also developing a close relationship with Microsoft? Will we see a cell chip in the Xbox 720 perhaps? Microsoft themselves are doing pretty well recently due to Halo 3. It has pushed Xbox 360 sales past the Wii, shipping double the normal monthly number of consoles and almost 5 times as many sales as the PS3 (which declined 8% in a month which saw gaming sales actually increase by 64%). It’s amazing to think that a single game, the third in the series in fact, managed to do all of this. Sony really needs a game like this to push the PS3 instead of relying on Blu-ray to sell consoles, but there appears to be nothing on the horizon just yet (as least no exclusives). It’s not all bad news for Sony though, – their their PSP is doing very well, not a Nintendo DS beater, but still enough of a market to sustain it for a few generations. Microsoft, meanwhile, is planning to sell a Xbox 360 that includes a built-in HD DVD drive. Personally, I think they should have done it with the Elite, but I also don’t think they will do it until HD DVD become a more established format.

On to HD news, this article goes behind the scenes to look at the development of the Transformers HD DVD and the advanced interactive/web enabled content for the disc. The Transformers HD DVD has been selling very well, in the top 5 of disc sales on Amazon (that includes all DVD sales) – it’s the kind of movie that will sell discs, not because it’s a brilliant movie (it’s not), but it’s the kind of movie to really show off HD systems. It’s also selling well because the disc is region free, and I know lots of people here in Australia that have purchased through Amazon, and with the exchange rate and the horrible pricing of both Blu-ray and HD DVD movies here in Australia (the price for the Transformers HD DVD here in Australia is $US 38, compared to only $28 from Amazon), no wonder people are sourcing their HD movies overseas. There is also the strange situation where some movies are released by different studios worldwide, and these studios differ in which HD format they support – a Blu-ray exclusive in the US might be a HD DVD exclusive in the UK. With HD DVD being region-free, HD DVD owners are at an advantage when it comes to buying overseas. Blu-ray owners, however, have to be vigilant when checking to see if movies are indeed region-free (a lot of them are), or risk buying a movie they can’t play. Region control sucks. In Australia, companies cannot enforce DVD region control due to our competition commission (ACCC) stating that forcing region control might be against the Trade Practices Act. This is why almost all our DVD players are region free, even from big brands like LG or Samsung (there is usually a code to unlock these players). I hope the situation continues with HD players, but so far, all HD players are region locked. Speaking of HD players, Toshiba has finally started selling HD DVD players here in Australia, and it looks like they’ve read my post about free movie offers and the lack of them here in Australia. Toshiba are now offering free movies too with their players in Australia, more details here. Hopefully, this will allow HD DVD to break into the Blu-ray dominated market here in Australia (it’s not hard to dominate our very small market, especially considering the competing format has zero standalone players for sale).

That’s it for this week. See you in a week’s time.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, 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 (21 October 2007)

Plasma TVs killing the planet? Excellent customer service. Xbox 360 vs PS3.

Friday, October 12th, 2007

Panasonic TH103PF9 - World’s Largest Plasma TV (103″)A few days ago, I posted a link to a news story which said that Australia plans to ban the sale of plasma TVs because of their power usage requirements. As an owner of a plasma screen, this seemed a bit excessive to me and sounded more like what a supporter of LCD displays would list as one of the “crimes” of plasma. It is true that a 50″ plasma screen uses an enormous amount of energy, some 350+ W. More and more people have large screen plasma TVs in their homes, and this obviously causes problems in terms of energy conservation. However, I was sceptical that it was only plasma TVs causing the end of the world as we know it. I had a feeling that that similar sized LCDs aren’t much more energy efficient than plasmas.

Doing some research, I went to the Sony website to check our their Bravia range of LCDs. The Bravias are often used as an example of the demise of plasma TVs, about how great they look and how Sony pulled out of making plasma TVs because they were doomed (even though that had more to do with the fact that they were sourcing their panels from other manufacturers, and so, could not stay price competitive in the long run) . The Bravias do look good, and the price is reasonable for their 1080p panels. But looking at the power consumption, I found that their top of the line 52″ model is rated at a massive 320W, only 50W less than a plasma of equivalent size (the Pioneer 508 50″ is rated at 369W). Not much difference when the fate of the world is at stake.

Then I looked at some other forms of display technologies such as front and rear projection. To my surprise, a 1080p projector is rated at 300W, although it will project a much larger image than plasma. A 50″ rear projection TV is slightly less power consuming at around 250W, but that’s still quite a lot of power.

An interesting website I found while searching for power usage data is sust-it.net, where you can search for the power requirements and energy cost of consumer electronics in the hope to find a model that is more energy efficient (the 103″ plasma at 1500W costing £413.28, $US 840,  in energy costs per year is interesting).

Anyway, it does look like energy consumption will be an issue no matter which type of large screen TV you use – the only solution is to not use large screen TVs at all. But as with all technology, they evolve and the next generation of OLED TVs promises to use much less power to deliver an even better picture.

Nintendo: Excellent Customer Service

Wii Remote JacketNot content with having the most wanted and innovative console on the market, Nintendo is also doing the right thing when it comes to customer service. In a story I posted last week, Nintendo is set to offer up to four free Wiimote jackets to existing Wii owners to solve the sweat induced Wiimote slippage issue. To be honest, I’ve never had much of a problem with Wiimote slippage, mainly because I don’t play with my Wii in a very aggressive manner (this whole sentence sounds very dirty). But to prevent problems for those in the household that do suffer from slippage, I phoned up Nintendo customer service and ordered my two free jackets. The entire process was totally painless, I did not have to wait on hold at all, and it was all over within minutes. The lady on the phone was friendly, and I’m almost certain it was a local call center, not one in India or somewhere else. And best of all, it’s was all free (apart from the cost of a 20 cent local phone call), even the delivery. I don’t know when I will get my jackets, not that I’m in any hurry. I think it’s worthwhile to point out good customer service when you experience it, as most people only say anything about customer service when they’ve had a bad experience. To offer a free solution (not so free for Nintendo though, it will cost them over 20 million dollars) for a problem that really isn’t much of a problem anyway, and to not make you jump through hoops to take advantage of it … that’s excellent customer service.

Xbox 360 vs PS3

Xbox 360 vs PS3I know, not another one of these comparisons. Apple vs PC. Intel vs AMD. Star Wars vs Star Trek. All pointless comparisons. But I found an interesting (but somewhat dated) thread about the performance of the Xbox 360 vs the PS3, from a programmer’s point of view, and I thought it was interesting that the conclusion was that the differences are negligible. It seems common knowledge that the PS3 is much more powerful than the Xbox 360, how else would you explain the PS3’s one year release delay when compared to the Xbox 360 (just don’t mention “Blu-ray”) and the fact that it has more games in 1080p than the Xbox 360 (just don’t mention poorer framerates and visual quality of 1080p vs 720p games).

BioWare’s President, Greg Zeschuk, also says there’s not much difference between the two consoles in any case:

If everyone’s waiting for this huge gap, it’s just not going to happen. By the end of this generation both PS3 and Xbox 360 will look awesome. Maybe 1 per cent of the population might be able to tell the difference between the two.

The big difference is storage, in that the PS3 has Blu-ray, while the Xbox 360 is stuck with DVD (for now). But Greg Zeschuk mentions that the best game of the year, Bioshock, is a DVD only affair, as is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and as is the soon to be released Mass Effect (which looks great). These are all huge games with huge worlds and they don’t need to be on Blu-ray. And with hardware performance between the two not light-years apart (both only have 512 MB of memory anyway), it’s unlikely extra storage will make games look or play better (not without excessive loading times – trying to fit 25 GB of data into 512 MB of RAM is not going to be a smooth experience). What Blu-ray can do is to incorporate HD full motion video into games, but we’ve already seen that tried and failed when CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs first came out … FMV is nice, but it doesn’t determine whether the game is good or not, and with graphics improving monthly, FMV seems out of place as compared to integrated 3D cut-scenes.

Posted in Electronics, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | 3 Comments »

Where are my free movies? More BD+ nonsense. Is your TV HD?

Thursday, October 4th, 2007

2 more free movies, in addition to the other 7 other free moviesIf you’re not all that concerned about who will win the HD war, or don’t mind having two separate players to play your HD movies, as opposed to a combo player, now is a great time to buy a HD DVD or Blu-ray player (at least in the US). Due to the increased competition between the two HD camps, you will more than likely get a bunch of free movies whenever you purchase one of these players. For HD DVD, you get 2 movies in the box (300 and The Bourne Identity) with the new Toshiba HD-A30 player, a form to fill out to get another 5 from a list of 15, and then another 2 free movies if you by from Best Buy – that’s 9 free HD DVD movies for the $399 player – more details here. For Blu-ray, the five free movie campaign has been extended and you get to choose 5 free movies from 18 titles if you buy certain Blu-ray players, including the PS3 – more details here.

Now for those that don’t live in the US or Canada, these offers are not available. Nor are they available to those early adopters who have already made their purchase, which I think is a real shame. Yes, it’s true that there is nothing to gain from Sony or Toshiba offering free movies to existing owners (other than customer satisfaction, but how much is that worth these days), but you have to feel for those that purchased players at twice the cost, with no movies, maybe only less than a year ago. I don’t think I can be considered an early adopter, although I did buy the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive within a week or two of it being released here in Australia – I did get the King Kong HD DVD movie for free, but had I purchased the drive from Amazon, I would have gotten a lot more free stuff (for cheaper as well). I’m not saying give all early adopters 9 free movies, but perhaps as a gesture of goodwill and thanks, maybe some kind of exclusive two for one deals or giveaways for these (relatively) long time supporters. At the very least, extend these free movie offers to other countries.

More BD+ Nonsense

BD+ Error ScreenEngadget HD has a story about Fox’s new BD+ Blu-ray movies, and how they won’t work in players that have not had their firmware updated. The screenshot, curtesy of Engadget HD, shows the error message shown when a non BD+ capable player tries to play a BD+ protected disc. A link, which redirects to the Blu-ray Disc Association’s updates page (with links to different manufacturer’s firmware update pages), is shown. A firmware update can be quite risky, especially if you don’t know what you are doing. For example, if the power goes out during a firmware update, the player’s software might get scrambled and only a visit to a repair center might be needed (I’m not even sure firmware updates are even covered under warranty). And for those players without Internet connection, you will have to download the firmware, burn to a CD or DVD, insert it into the player and pray that the power doesn’t cut out.  

A quick primer on BD+ (for more, read my High Definition DVD FAQ), it is yet another layer of copy protection that executes code stored on the disc to prevent playback – it might be more effective than AACS because BD+ is title specific, meaning each BD title will have it’s own copy protection logic, and a hack to get rid of it will have to be made per movie, rather than having a single key that works on a whole lot of movies in the case of AACS. Of course, professional pirate groups won’t be too bothered, and remember, only one “ripped” copy of the disc is needed to enable pirated copies to be distributed. In other words, it’s yet another layer of DRM to annoy legitimate consumer, and at the same time, do nothing to stop actual piracy. And as Engadget HD wisely recommends at the end of their article:

We’d tell you to avoid titles with BD+ for now, but there’s no way to know just from looking at the package, so just avoid just avoid these two Fox titles for now (The Day After Tomorrow and Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer).

Is Your TV HD?

The results from our last non scientific poll has revealed that 47.6% of voters said that their TV only did SD resolutions, while 30% said it had a native resolution of 720p, and only 22.4% said that it was capable of 1080p. To be honest, that’s not too bad – a majority of people with HD capable TVs, although the type of visitors that visit Digital Digest will almost certainly be more likely to have HD already than not. If you fast forward another two years, I think the percentage of 1080p owners will be a lot higher, and I don’t think you will be able to buy a new TV that is not 1080p.

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

Weekly News Roundup (30 September 2007)

Sunday, September 30th, 2007

Once again, I’ll go through all the news items that have gone through the Digital Digest website and forum for this week.

Starting with copyright related news again, some DRM advocates are worried that there might be a consumer backlash towards DRM (you don’t say!). I mean it’s not like there was a DRM related revolt on Digg earlier this year or anything, and I’m sure Apple/EMI and Amazon launching DRM-free music was just a coincidence, and in no way related to a consumer backlash. Torrent site Demonoid has been shut down by the Canadian RIA. Torrent sites usually only link to torrent files, and not the actual copyrighted content, but in the greater scheme of things, providing any assistance to copyright infringement is going to be risky, whether they host the actual file or not. I would like to see some separation between torrent sites and legitimate sites like Google Video, who are under renewed pressure this week over users uploaded pirated content – the main aim of torrent sites is to offer pirated content, whereas Google Video and other video sharing sites have pirated content because they cannot control their numerous users. Then again, there are video sharing sites that advertise free movies and encourage users to upload them, so they again should be treated differently. And then there is “Movie Night” on school campuses. Showing movies in common rooms or public areas is technically “broadcasting” and is against the terms of the copyright agreement, but how much does that really hurt the movie studios, so much so that lawsuits need to be launched? What’s next, not being showing to watch movies with people other than your immediate family?

Onto gaming news. Sony says that it can catch up to the Xbox 360 by March next year. I would say that if they don’t at least achieve this, then the PS3 is in serious trouble. The PS3 is the cheapest Blu-ray player around, and actually represents good value if you want next-gen gaming + HD movie playback, but it still hasn’t been able to beat the Xbox 360 + HD DVD add-on drive in sales since launch. Add to that the Xbox 360’s better range of games and exclusives, it’s not looking great for the PS3 compared to how well the PS2 did at this stage of its release. Can Sony claim a huge market share like it did with the PS2? I don’t think so and not being able to hold on to the market the PS2 created means a defeat for Sony no matter which way you look at it. Sony will hope that’s it’s new slim PSP bundle will at least claim a bigger market share in the handheld gaming market, a market dominated by Nintendo for some time now. But the big news of the week has been the launch of Halo 3. Even the news of scratched discs didn’t slow down sales, with Halo 3 breaking all gaming and even movie box office records on the first day. When video games start making more money than big Hollywood blockbusters like Spider-Man 3, something has changed in the way entertainment is delivered. It’s no wonder then that there has been more and more games to movie conversion, rather than the reverse, lately (Hitman the movie is that one I’m waiting for).

In HD news, it seems site like us are either not doing our jobs, or people are not visiting our sites (the most likely explanation, and I’m sure that the 10 people that read this blog will agree with me here). Consumers just don’t seem to understand HD with only 11% feeling they understand HD completely, and even HDTV owners don’t seem to understand. The situation is not just limited to the US either, with Australian consumers faring even worse. It’s a shame, because HD really is quite wonderful … people who have enjoyed proper HD will never want to go back to standard definition. And if you’ve already jumped on the HD movie bandwagon (in particularly, the HD DVD one), then you can enjoy state of the art interactive features from future titles such as Shrek the Third, in addition to the superb video and audio quality. But speaking of interactive features, Blu-ray is still playing a game of catch-up, and consumers will be the victim once again (no wonder they are confused about HD). As I’ve blogged previously, Blu-ray has really screwed the pooch on the issue of hardware standards, and now Blu-ray owners may need to replace their less than a year old Blu-ray player because it doesn’t have all the required features for future Blu-ray movies. Us HD DVD owners are feeling pretty smug about it all because the HD DVD standard has been finalized from day one and includes all the advanced interactive features that Blu-ray owners might not be seeing until next year. And did I mention that HD DVD is region-free? I know I shouldn’t go on and on about region-free, but it really is wonderful to have it. There’s not a lot of HD DVD movies on sale in Australia (and the ones on sale are too expensive), but because of the region-free status, I can import movies from the US or UK, usually at a lower price and faster release date. Unlike DVDs, with the NTSC/PAL difference, HD DVDs don’t have this difference so the US version is either likely to be identical, or in most cases, superior to the local release. Studios and local distributors may not like it, but it’s partly their fault isn’t it for not releasing identical versions in a timely manner. My US import to my local purchase ratio is at 3:1 at the moment.

And that’s all folks for this week. See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, Gaming, General, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (30 September 2007)

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