DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Another relatively quiet week, but we have a couple of quite interesting stories to go through, so let’s not waste any time on this very cold Sunday (brrr!).

Oh Bran, what have you done? Did you warg into an HBO intern’s mind to leak the new episode?

Starting with copyright news as always, HBO’s anti-piracy efforts took a step backwards this week with their Nordic branch decided that the world couldn’t wait another 24 hours (and a bit) to see the next episode of Game of Thrones. Someone at HBO Nordic decided to try their hand at pre-release leaking, and the new episode was put up online a day earlier than expected. To make matters worse, HBO Nordic has a 30 day trial for their online video services, meaning that anyone from around the world with a VPN were able to enjoy the episode titled “The Door”, and do it for many hours before HBO wised up, and more than a day before the official US premier.

It appears that despite all of HBO’s renewed anti-piracy efforts this season, this gaffe opened the door and held it open for pirates to take advantage – they promptly uploaded a (initially a poor quality version, and then a 1080p version) copy to all the usual piracy places, for all to enjoy. I’m sure HBO will be much more careful this week, when the sixth episode of the sixth season, “Blood of My Blood”, will be broadcast.

And yes, that was deliberate (don’t want to say too much than that – no spoilers from me, thank-you very much).

US Netflix subscribers will have some great movies to look forward to, when Netflix’s exclusive deal with Disney starts in September. Under the deal, Netflix will have exclusive pay-TV rights, in the US, to all of Disney’s films, starting from 2016 onwards (so The Force Awakens just miss out … boo!). This includes all Marvel, Pixar and Lucasfilm films, as well as films released under Disney’s banner, all available shortly on Netflix after their initial Blu-ray/DVD release (the same release time-frame that pay TV operators used to enjoy). The exclusivity part ensures Amazon, Hulu and cable operators won’t get these films during the pay TV release window, which is a much needed boost to Netflix’s flagging (non original) movie line-up.

Microsoft will be bringing out own super duper Xbox One to take on the Neo

The Xbox One is getting not one but two upgraded models, and one of which will directly take on the PS4 Neo. Dubbed the ‘Scorpio’, the super powerful Xbox One is rumored to be targeting 6 teraflops of peak power, which compares rather favourably with the Neo’s 4.14 teraflop target (and much better than the Xbox One’s current 1.32 teraflops). Both companies appears to have embraced the iterative upgrade model (think iPhone), and will be releasing upgraded consoles at shorter intervals. I’m not sure I like this to be honest, and I’m not sure if it will even work. It’s one thing to upgrade a phone every year, but a game consoles that has severely reduced resale value (and not as easily passed down to family members)? I just don’t know …

But if it does work, then the PS4 and Xbox One could be the last major console release as we know it. The Neo and Scorpio are basically just new consoles with a healthy dose of backwards compatibility – both Sony and Microsoft can actually keep this up indefinitely if they wanted to. Microsoft Xbox boss Phil Spencer’s remarks about turning to the PC’s model for upgrades, is now starting to make sense. He wasn’t talking about opening up the Xbox One and plugging in a new GPU, but rather on the architecture and design point of view of incremental updates, and in regards to backwards compatibility. So instead of a major new architecture that destroys compatibility, the upgrades will be more minor, but more numerous.

Let’s wait and see how gamers react to all of these changes, especially when it comes to forking over their hard earned cash.

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That’s all we have time for this week. Actually, we have plenty of time, but we’ve run out of news, so that’s that. See you next week.

Hello again! It has gotten unseasonably cold here in Melbourne, and it has given me just the motivation I need to make sure I write up this WNR as quickly as possible – so I can quickly finish, get under a blanket with a warm drink, and watch The Force Awakens again on Blu-ray. Oh yes!

But there’s just one obstacle to my nerdish plans – there’s actually quite a lot of news to go through this week. Oh no!

The Expendables 3 does badly at the box office. One ‘Expendables’ movie too many, too much competition due to other blockbusters, or pre-release piracy to blame?

Starting with the copyright news as we have always done, Hollywood mogul Avi Lerner, the producer behind The Expendables franchise, has come out firing on all cylinders on what he perceives to be the lack of action to tackle online piracy. The target of his tirade? President Obama and Congress, for being too scared to take on Google.

Lerner is particularly angry about online piracy because he believes a pre-release leak of The Expendables 3 may have taken as much as $250 million away from the film’s actual $209 million global box office take. This means that according to Lerner, The Expendables 3 would have made $459 million at the box office without the pre-release leak. But the thing is that the previous film in the series, which was better received by critics, only made a combined total of $312 million (without any piracy intervention). To me, the third film’s $209 million makes sense given the movie’s poor reception, which according to the film’s star, may have more to do with ratings than downloads.

Most controversially, Lerner says that not only should people who help to pirate movies go to jail, even those that aren’t actively helping to stop piracy (like Google, I presume) should be punished in some way. So I’m guessing that removing 91 million links monthly and demoting piracy sites is apparently not considered to be “helping” by Lerner.

The Force Awakens breaks more records, this time on Blu-ray

I’ve made it pretty clear I like The Force Awakens and enjoyed watching it on Blu-ray. It seems I wasn’t alone, as not content in breaking many box office records, the latest film in the Star Wars saga has also broken a few Blu-ray records. It helped Blu-ray sales better that of DVD’s for the first time ever (59% of disc sales belong to Blu-ray for the week in which The Force Awakens was released – the previous record was 48%), and an astonishing 82% of buyers chose to buy the Blu-ray edition of the film over the DVD-only edition (it’s normally under 70% for most new releases).

Some will note that the DVD-only edition was a bare bones edition without any special features, and that the Blu-ray edition does include the DVD edition of the film (in such a combo retail package, these sales count towards Blu-ray), but these records still took a long time to be broken. Note that the most successful Blu-ray of all time is another Disney title, ‘Frozen’ – could The Force Awakens break one more record?

Also interesting to note is that Disney chose not to release a 3D edition of the film, let alone a 4K Ultra HD version. This possibly hints at more double dipping later on, perhaps a new edition that includes more than just a couple of minutes of deleted scenes.

Disney has yet to really commit to Ultra HD Blu-ray, and only it and, surprisingly, Sony have yet to announce their release slate following Universal’s announcement this week. Universal’s first Ultra HD discs, to be released sometime in the U.S. summer, will be ‘Everest’, ‘Lucy’ and ‘Lone Survivor’, and the new releases to receive the 4K treatment will include ‘The Huntsman: Winter’s War’ and the as yet unreleased ‘Jason Bourne’ and ‘Warcraft’ movies. Perhaps not the most exciting line-up ever considering all the films that Universal have access to, and definitely not as exciting as The Force Awakens, which is the kind of title that benefits most from a 4K treatment and would boost the format to no end if it becomes available.

PS4.5, PS4K, or PS4 NEO – whatever you call it, the upgraded PS4 appears to be real

There’s something a lot more concrete to the rumors of a new “super” PS4, including a codename of the so far still unofficial console upgrade. The PS4 “NEO” will have a better CPU, GPU and faster RAM – not quite next-gen, but enough to make 4K gaming a reality.

As for how Sony will reconcile having two vastly different PS4 SKUs, the company has informed developers of several restrictions to how they can release games in the future. First of all, all games have to work on the older standard PS4s, but they are allowed to have a “NEO Mode” that includes support for better graphics. Games in “NEO Mode” have to have the same or better framerate than games in standard mode, even if the games are running at 4K (and games also have to be at least 1080p). Things like save games and online modes have to be shareable and compatible between the two modes.

What isn’t so clear right now is whether the included Blu-ray drive will be upgraded to one that can read Ultra HD Blu-ray discs. It seems like the perfect opportunity to add UHD Blu-ray playback to the PS4, but it all depends on how costly it would be to add the drive, and more importantly, how costly it will be to obtain the licensing needed to allow UHD Blu-ray playback.

The Xbox 360 wasn’t always a success …

Microsoft may be working on their own upgraded Xbox One too, which FCC filings (and the Brazilian equivalent) pointing to at least two more SKUs. Interestingly, there’s information to suggest that all will be revealed at E3, but whether these proves to be the elusive Xbox One.Point.Five, or just a minor SKU refresh, we’ll have to wait and see.

What we won’t wait to find out is the fate of the Xbox 360, which this week Microsoft announced the end of production for. It’s been an incredibly successful decade for the 360, which didn’t start well (remember the RRoD?), but ended very strongly. With the Xbox One now having backwards compatibility, I guess Microsoft has decided the time was right to send the old beige, and eventually black box into retirement.

Rest well, 360, you deserve it.

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So that’s it for the week. Not a minute too soon either, as I’m freezing my appendages off here. See you next week, when hopefully it’s a bit warmer.

Long time no see, hope you’ve been well. Sorry for the major gap between this and the last WNR, but a mini vacation and the vacation I needed afterwards to recover from the original vacation meant that there wasn’t much time to write anything. On the other than, it meant that we skip to my joint-favourite month of the year, March – my birth month!

I’m still digging myself out of the mountain of work sitting on my virtual desk, so I’ll try to keep this WNR brief and to the point, and cover all the stories since the last WNR (even if some of them are a bit too old – like I will be in a couple of days, *cries*).

Has Denuvo been cracked?

Starting with copyright news as usual, the saviour of the PC gaming industry may not be the panacea first thought, as the Denuvo anti-tampering technology may have been cracked. Chinese cracking group 3DM has claimed responsibility, only weeks after the group announced a hiatus from cracking activities, to allow the PC gaming market to recover. Most didn’t believe the group’s reason for the hiatus, and instead, many thought the group had given up only because Denuvo had proven too hard to crack. To quiet the raucous crowd, and to disprove this theory, 3DM instead announced a temporary return to cracking, to crack the Denuvo protection on popular games including ‘Tomb Raider: The Rise’.

But since that announcement, no concrete crack has actually emerged, so take that announcement with a pinch of salt if you must (I guess this is one of advantages of addressing a news story with an added delay).

Another story from a couple of weeks ago, Kodi announced a crackdown on piracy related add-ons in a bid to distance the open source software home theater from all things illegal. It’s kind of what BitTorrent Inc has been trying to do, with limited success, but it’s always hard to separate the technology from how people choose to use it (remember that once upon a time Usenet had nothing to with piracy, while FTP was synonymous with it at one point). But what Kodi hates the most are those piracy media box sellers that somehow tries to present their products as something officially to do with Kodi, usually the same sellers that offer no support when these boxes eventually fail to work.

Slysoft is dead, but RedFox lives on …

Cut to more recent times, the future of Blu-ray ripping may be in doubt, as new legal pressures, and new technology advances means two of the top ripping tool makers have called it quits. Well to be precise, one has called it quits, while the other has given up on ripping Ultra HD Blu-ray before they’ve even started trying. Slysoft suddenly closed shop, shut down their site with only a short statement citing recent “regulatory requirements” as the reason for the closure. Those that purchased AnyDVD can still use it to rip older Blu-rays and DVDs, but new discs that require access to the updated online database to be ripped will no longer be supported. Since the original story was published, a new company called RedFox based in Belize has taken over the development of AnyDVD, and the official Slysoft forum, suggesting that AnyDVD may be resurrected (assuming the new company doesn’t get sued into submission before then).

In a separate piece of news, DVDFab, who have suffered their own legal troubles recently, announced they will not be working on ways to rip Ultra HD Blu-ray. DVDFab’s announcement seems to indicate legal pressure, rather than technical issues, as the cause for the lack of support for the new disc format. That’s not to say there aren’t technical difficulties related to ripping the new ultra HD discs, which use the updated 2.0 version of AACS. As part of the new protection, some discs will need to download the decryption key from the Internet, making it a bit harder (but probably not impossible) for software like DVDFab to find a way in.

3DTVs may be a dying breed, as Samsung announces their new 2016 TVs won’t support it

Speaking of futures in doubt, the future of 3D is also under a cloud, and not one of those 3D clouds that you can fly through in one of those over the top out of place “made for 3D” scenes you find in all movies these days. While 3D movies will still be a big thing at movie theaters, in the home, it may be a different matter as Samsung (and Philips) will be removing 3D support from their 2016 TVs, while LG is rumoured to be cutting back on the number of models that support 3D.

Samsung and Philips cite the lack of consumer interest in the technology, and the ever dwindling number of must-have 3D titles, while Samsung says they want to concentrate on new technologies such as Ultra HD.

Those following our weekly Blu-ray sales analysis shouldn’t be too surprised by this, as there can be weeks at a time that goes by without single noteworthy Blu-ray 3D release (by noteworthy, I mean one that gets in the top 20 in terms of sales). With the Ultra HD Blu-ray specs not even including 3D support for UHD content, it definitely doesn’t look good for 3D in the home.

With the Xbox One failing to beat the PS4, Microsoft thinks their next winning strategy would be to fuse their Windows and Xbox gaming platforms, thus increasing market share without having to unseat Sony. Part of this plan involves Universal Windows Platform, which allows developers to make games using a single platform that can be easily ported to Windows and the Xbox One. There was some initial backlash from developers fearing Microsoft was trying to monopolise the PC gaming market, and forcing PC game developers to work within Microsoft’s framework, even if they don’t want to publish games on Xbox. Some also fear that Microsoft will force developers to use their games store to publish games,. Microsoft has since allayed their fears by saying the platform will be fully open, and won’t be tied to a particular store.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer also hinted that a souped up Xbox One may be available at some time, echoing Sony’s earlier calls for a “Super PS4”. Spencer says consoles are at a disadvantage compared to PCs, whose hardware are constantly being upgraded, while the console upgrade cycle can mean seven years between any meaningful upgrades. So a Xbox One.5 might give players better graphics, while the same game would still work on older Xbox One’s (but with downgraded graphics, I assume). This would also give Microsoft an extra chance to bring out a console that’s better than the PS4 (or the Super PS4), instead of having to wait another four and a half years for the chance.

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You definitely won’t have to wait four and a half years for the next edition of the WNR though, since things are finally back to normal around here (well, it will be once I climb to the top of the pile of work I’m buried under). See you next week.