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Weekly News Roundup (9 August 2009)

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

Another relatively quiet week. There are actually lots of news stories, but most of them say the same things, are followups to (or just really really late versions of) previous week’s news stories, and some are nothing more than PR fluff pieces. I try to filter out these kinds stories, and only report on the important, interesting ones. When I’m not busy playing games that is. Or rather than playing, let’s say “fixing” instead, because that’s what playing GTA IV feels like. Rockstar’s PC efforts have always been poorer cousins of the console versions, but GTA IV in its current state takes the bugginess to a whole new other level. Read my blog post to find out more about how to fix or work around some of the more annoying bugs, but nothing I wrote really helps to make the problems go away, only to make them slightly more manageable.

In Copyright news, the owner of Filesoup, one of the oldest torrent sites around, has been arrested. His home was raided, things left in a complete mess, he was denied a phone call or access to legal council for 7 hours, and the Filesoup website is still up and running.

The owner's may have been arrested, his home raided, but the Filesoup.com remains online

Since when did these sorts of copyright infringements, something that at worst only does monetary damage to billion dollar corporations, become such a serious offence that the police need to get involved? Are there no terrorist left to capture? No murderers to apprehend? The copyright lobby has been telling governments around the world scary bed time stories in an effort to scare them into doing things against the very principles of democracy, against the constitutions of their respective countries, and against normal legal procedure, and it’s all working. And that’s just the ones that get to court – governments at the behest of copyright agencies are still trying to bring in a 3 strike system where they can get rid of this little thing called due process entirely. But the ones that do get to court, are even more notorious, just like the recent two cases with the 6 and 7 figure damages being rewarded against defendants that probably don’t even have 6 or 7 thousand dollars in their names.

The rewards were so outrageous, that even copyright lawyers representing the content owners are not too happy at the damages being rewarded, fearing it may backfire. Content owners want to use these damage rewards to deter future infringements, but too much money and it may force the courts and the government to step in a put a limit on things, due to the public backlash. But does anyone really thing this will stop piracy? Every copyright warning message, yes including those annoying ones you can’t skip on DVDs, point out the possible consequences of piracy – a large fine and even prison time, but why do people still pirate stuff? Is it because they have no alternative, as they can’t afford it, like the cost of filling up your average iPod with purchased music? Is it because illegal downloads are easier and more user friendly, not having to go to shops to buy DVDs, and no DRM? Or as in some cases, you aren’t being allowed to purchase something until the content owners have maximised their profits through rental agreements, TV licensing, tiered releasing, and that the only alternative becomes downloads?

This is an example of an Xbox 360 mod kit. Some mod kits are the first step towards making Xbox 360's play backup games

But the law is on the side of content owners, ever since they pushed the DMCA through the US congress, on the back of fears that the digital revolution was going to bring about the end of capitalism as we know it. And the politicians believed them, even easier to do so when you have large contributions to smooth your doubts. The latest case is that of an Xbox 360 modder has been arrested and could face 10 years in prison, thanks to the DMCA. See under the DMCA, you don’t have to actually do damage to anyone to break this law. All you have to do is to circumvent copyright protection, regardless of how badly implemented the copy protection may be, or what you intend to do after copy protection has been broken. I could mod my Xbox 360, and then smash it up so that it won’t work anymore, and yet, I’ve still broken the DMCA (if I was an American, of course). Or take a more common situation, where I mod my Xbox 360 so I can play backups of my legally purchased games that the Xbox 360 keeps on scratching (through the well known design fault, or just through daily abuse). Now if I do this, then who am I hurting exactly? Not Microsoft or the game publishers, because I’m still buying games from them. In fact, the only one I may have hurt is myself as I might have just voided my warranty. And I’m actually helping Microsoft by not bringing in the console to repair the disc scratching problem. But I’ve still broken the DMCA and I could face big fines and time in prison. Some countries have laws where you’re guilty until proven innocent – the DMCA simply assumes you’re guilty in all situations.

Speaking of game consoles, Nintendo’s DS is one of the most pirate friendly consoles around, thanks to flash carts. Nintendo still makes big money from the DS though, and the DS’s popularity is probably directly linked to the ease in which you can play backup or pirated games on it. The DSi, Nintendo’s update for the DS, was supposed to address this by introducing frequently firmware updates that disables flash carts from being used. The latest version, 1.4, managed to do to almost all known flash carts, but it only took a week for the flash cart manufacturers to bring out their own firmware update that made piracy possible again. If you can play it, you can copy it (and play the copy) – that’s that conclusion I’ve come up with after many years of observing various copy protection methods. Again, it goes back to the point of how one stops piracy, and perhaps some of the things I listed above like looking at prices, release schedules, and making purchases easier, are way more effective than firmware updates. Or even putting your hands up and admitting, okay our system is pirate friendly, but that’s why it’s so popular and it’s something we have to live with.

The Australia ISP, iiNet, is still engaged in legal battle with Australia’s own MPAA/RIAA, the AFACT. iiNet is now seeking help from industry bodies to testify on its behalf that ISP in general are helpless to stop the torrent of copyright abuses that its customers are guilty of. If one takes a view that things like human rights, privacy, are important, then ISPs shouldn’t be spying on their customers on anyone’s behalf, just like phone companies shouldn’t be recording and listening in on your phone calls just to see if you’ve been saying naughty things. Now the police, through a court order, may be able to perform eavesdropping (and I see monitoring Internet usage the same as phone tapping, actually even more effective because you get a much more complete picture of a person’s activities) – private companies cannot, and no court would grant a private company the right to spy on an individual, no matter how serious the offence is (because if it is the private company petitioning the court, then it is only a civil matter, not a criminal one). So if McDonald’s can’t tap my phone to find out why I’ve stopped eating Big Macs, why should Warner Bros. get the right to monitor my downloads to see if I’ve stopped buying their movies?

High Definition

Copyright rant over (is it me, or is the Copyright section getting longer and longer, and rantier and rantier?). On to HD news. Not much this week, but just some continuing trends that may concern the Blu-ray people.

On the surface, Blu-ray has a great week thanks to Watchmen. According to the sales stats, Blu-ray has its best week since The Dark Knight, again thanks to a Warner release. Part of the reasons for the good numbers may be because the PS3 special edition of the Watchmen game, which came with the Blu-ray version of the movie – I have no idea if sales of these packs were included in the stats though (the game itself did rather average business, so it may not matter). There are a couple of even bigger releases this year, including Star Trek, Transformers 2, Terminator Salvation – movies that will definitely do well on Blu-ray, not only because they were big movies at the box office, but these are exactly the types of movies to attract early adopters, HT enthusiasts, and the PS3 demography.

The Panasonic DMP-BD80K is one of the Blu-ray players getting Amazon VOD streaming

So what’s the bad news? Panasonic is going to include Amazon video-on-demand in its Blu-ray players, as part of the VieraCast service which already streams YouTube videos. Why is that somehow bad news? Well, it’s not bad news. It’s news to be concerned about, because that’s the third major Blu-ray manufacturer to include video streaming, after LG and Samsung chose to support Netflix. It’s good news for Blu-ray because players are now more fully featured and attractive to buyers. It may be bad news in the future if this video streaming thing takes off and Blu-ray becomes nothing more than a sideshow in the home theater arena. I doubt this will happen because you’ll get tons of people like me who like discs. But I also like things on demand, and a subscription service for unlimited access to a huge movie library works out to be cheaper than buying each movie individually eventually. But that’s for something to worry about in the future, because Blu-ray quality HD streaming is years away from becoming available in every home. But the movement towards video streaming is gathering pace, you cannot deny this.

While not HD specifically, Google has purchased On2, which makes several video codecs including the VP6, VP8. This is all part of the browser video wars that I brought up a few weeks ago. Nothing to concern your average net user, but developers and video enthusiasts will be interested to see if an open source video codec, like Ogg Theora, can take center stage, or will a commercially effort like H.264 win out. Google likes Ogg, and it can now use the expertise and technology purchased through the On2 deal to help out Ogg to improve quality, where H.264 is still a better choice than Ogg. I love open source, but I also like H.264 for its quality and wide acceptance, but I don’t see how the consumer can be hurt by having a couple of alternatives, including an open source one.

Not much happening in gaming. We’re still waiting for the Sony PS3 Slim announcement, and maybe something will happen next week, or the week after, in this front.

PS2 owned the original Xbox and it was expected that the PS3 would do the same to the Xbox 360 (stats from Wikipedia)

Now when fanboys argue, they use stats. One of the stats is that Sony’s PS3, while only doing half the sale of the Xbox 360 in the US, is actually only slightly behind the 360 in worldwide numbers, thanks to strong sales in Japan and stronger sales in Europe (compared to the US). And this is all despite the PS3 being released a year later than the 360. Now this seems to suggest that the PS3 isn’t doing as badly as the media portrays (including this blog, if you can call it part of the “media”), and it will lead fans of the PS3 to say that there’s a media bias in play here. The figures are not wrong, and neither is the conclusion that the PS3 is on level terms when it comes to worldwide sales, but for this to be “good news” for Sony, it assumes one thing: that the Xbox 360 was supposed to sell on even terms with the PS3. The actual fact was that the PS3 was expected to outsell the Xbox 360 handsomely, even with the delayed release – if the PS2 versus Xbox is any indication, an 8 to 1 sales ratio wouldn’t have been a surprise. The Wii kind of made a mess of the scene, since nobody figured Nintendo was going to be in it, let alone win it, but ignore the Wii and the PS3 was still supposed to sell a lot better than the Xbox 360, with US and worldwide numbers more in line with what we are currently seeing in Japan, where the Xbox 360 struggles badly.

But this hasn’t happened. And Microsoft’s gamble of launching a faulty, less sophisticated console a year earlier seems to have paid off. If at the end of this console generation, Microsoft can claim a 1 to 2 sales ratio (that’s one Xbox 360 for every PS3 sold), then they’ve done tremendously well and made huge strides into the gaming industry, of which Sony has much more experienced with. If the Xbox 360 can sell on level terms with the PS3, then that’s something even the most optimistic Microsoft projections wouldn’t have dared to proclaim just 3 years ago. But of course, the Wii will outsell both combined.

Okie dokie. That’s the news/rant for the week. More next week.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (9 August 2009)

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 (19 July 2009)

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

Welcome to another edition of the Weekly News Roundup. Come to think of it, I really should have numbered the WNR editions (for example, WNR #57), so I can easily refer to each. Yes, I could go and count each WNR and then start using edition numbers (there are 94 according to the WordPress category post count), but screw it.

A busy week this week, since I actually bothered to do some work. I started a new series called “The History of Digital Digest” to celebrate the 10th birthday of this website. Part 1 was posted this week, and it talks about how Digital Digest was launched, and some tidbits that have never been made public before. The June 2009 NPD figures came out and as usual, I have posted the full analysis. It marks another month in which the only happy party is Microsoft, as it was the only company yet again to have any sort of year-on-year growth. The Wii is still the best selling console (portables not included), but the PS3 is struggling, in hardware and software numbers. All could be fixed by the magical elixir known simply as “a price cut”, but it’s going to take a while for Sony to figure it out I suppose. Yes, they lose more money if they cut prices without cutting manufacturing cost, but how much money are they losing by being 3rd in the console race at the moment? And game sales, the stable of console manufacturer income, is very much dependant on hardware numbers – this is why most game console are sold at a loss. Just bite the damn bullet, Sony. Anyway, onto the WNR proper …

Starting with Copyright news, continuing with The Pirate Bay coverage, or perhaps better expressed as “The Death of The Pirate Bay” coverage, the company that has bought TPB has hired a new man to helm the (in)famous website – step up Wayne Rosso, who is now courting the RIAA and MPAA and trying to make nice.

Wayne Rosso aims to destroy, I mean fix, The Pirate Bay by making it legal

In a stomach churning interview, Rosso calls his best buddies at the RIAA and MPAA “unbelievably supportive” and vows to “turn over a legitimate new leaf” to make TPB completely legal. Rosso plans to do this by introducing some kind of fee, which will be used to pay the content owners – the fee can be reduced if users contribute P2P resources. I don’t see how this can work, because you cannot still offer pirated material even if you charge a fee and pass that on to the content owners, so the content would have to be legal and so will become limited by the content that content owners are willing to provide (so expect lots of DRM), which defeats the whole purpose of the website because there are already tons of sites offering the purchase of legal (and DRM infested) downloads. So if it wasn’t clear as to what will become of the TPB, it’s now pretty clear that TPB, as we know it, will end. At least if the intentions of the new owners are met – the only glimmer of hope is that often intentions give way to financial reality, and keeping TPB as it is might be more profitable.

The original founders of TPB have moved on it seems, and they’ve mentioned some political ambitions. The Swedish Pirate Party’s recent successes will no doubt fuel the political movement, with the Swiss Pirate Party being launched this week. There is already an Australia Pirate Party, although what Australia needs is an Internet Party. An Australian Internet Party is very much needed at the moment to help guide and oversee the government’s efforts to complete the National Broadband Network, as well as to keep them in line in terms of issues such as the Internet Filter Scheme. And such a party is needed even more so now that the government here has suggested that they might want to implement a three-strike anti-piracy system. A political voice is very much needed in Australia to fight the government on this issue, and a sizable number of votes in the next election could force the government into acting sensibly when it comes to these issues. And yes, I’m pointing my accusing fingers at you, Senator Conroy, recent winner of the Internet Villain of the Year award.

Continuing with the theme of posting people's pictures for this WNR, here's Stephen Fry

From politics to celebrities, noted Internet addict and actor Stephen Fry has launched an attack on the anti-piracy industry, specifically in relation to them going after TPB. The usual thing to do when celebrities speak is to wince, but Mr. Fry makes a lot of sense in his interview with the BBC and he’s Internet and real life celebrit-ism would be a good way to promote the injustices that are occurring all around us. One of the things that can quickly solve the piracy problem, as well as make users happy, would be an all-you-can-eat type music (and eventually, movies or games) download service. Charge $20 per month, sign up a couple of hundred million users worldwide, and let them download all the music they want. Would anybody still bother to pirate stuff? And if they can sign up hundreds of millions of users, which I think is not totally impossible, then that’s billions worth of revenue per month. With these kind of services, the users that download absolutely everything will be subsidized by the users that don’t download much, and because it’s all digital anyway, there’s no limit as to how many copies you sell, as opposed to selling CDs and physical content.

The alternative is to continue this fight against users, websites, and ISPs. While none of the actions actually solve the problem of piracy. All these legal and technological (DRM) measures have done is to force the implementation of new technologies that makes pirating easier, more private and harder to stop. With the imminent demise of TPB, public torrent trackers are the next big thing and the more public trackers there are, the harder it will be to shut down piracy. Meanwhile, the MPAA has vowed to attack and keep on attacking torrent websites, and for example, has vowed to chase isoHunt founder Gary Fung for the rest of his life, to try and claim the damages rewarded to the MPAA. So if Mr. Fung starts a new business, then the MPAA won’t be too far behind. If Mr. Fung gets a new job, then the MPAA will want a share. And so on, and so on.

High Definition

In HD news, there’s no much on Blu-ray that I found interesting, although there’s a bit about it that’s more to do with gaming and so it covered later on. All I know is that Blu-ray sales figures, as covered in this thread, shows that Blu-ray sales are fluctuating wildly between being excellent, and like last week, not being much better than the same time last year.

You will of course read more stories on how Blu-ray has grown a million percent in 2009 or something and compares that to drop in DVD sales and the come up with the conclusion that Blu-ray has won. But the fact is that Blu-ray has nowhere to go but up, and 2008 was a poor year for Blu-ray until the very end. DVD sales have nowhere to go but down, thanks largely not to Blu-ray but to increased spending on video games. And the increases in Blu-ray sales, as I’ve mentioned numerous times before, are nowhere near sufficient to make up for the loss in DVD income. Blu-ray wins when it reaches 51% market share compared to DVDs, and not a day sooner, in my books.

In slightly related news, Microsoft’s new version of the Silverlight platform now supports H.264 (and AAC), bringing it in line with the rest of the industry. There is no doubt now that H.264 is now the industry standard codec for video compression. Or is it? HTML 5 was supposed to anoint an official video codec, but due to pressure from various sides, it has backed down from naming such a format. Wikipedia wants to use Ogg Theora, Apple wants H.264, some of the browser makes prefer Ogg as well, but Google likes H.264 too and supports both in Chrome. Ogg Theora is open source and so it should be supported, but H.264 has so much industry support and it can’t be ignored. And I know what you’re going to say and “who cares” is not an acceptable solution to this puzzle.

And finally in gaming, and yes we have some notable gaming news this week finally, of course it’s time and an appropriate place to plug my June 2009 NPD analysis again. Really, it’s good reading especially if you like graphs and stuff.

Microsoft guy Aaron Greenberg says Sony distracted by Blu-ray

Responding to the positive news from the June 2009 NPD figures, Microsoft is claiming all sorts of victories, while saying that the reason the PS3 is behind at the moment is largely due to Blu-ray. Can’t really argue with that, because Sony turned one of the most successful gaming platforms (PS2), that also came with a DVD player, into one of the most successful Blu-ray players, that also came with gaming capabilities. The change in focus is what did them. Now this isn’t to say that there’s no way back for Sony, far from it. A temporary, and largely avoidable setback aside, the solution to the problem is very simple. And they could do it through the PS3 slim, if it is real. This video seem to suggest that it is. A PS3 Slim that costs less might be just what the doctor ordered for Sony.

In any case, Microsoft will try to ride on this wave of success for as long as possible, and with the much more welcomed Windows 7 coming soon, this could prove a strong period for Microsoft. And perhaps to tie together the two potential successes, Project Natal may make an appearance on the PC as well. Games for Windows Live has tried to tie together the Xbox 360 with the PC, and something like Natal would definitely help. And not all applications for Natal will be for gaming, as even on the Xbox 360, Natal is being used for everything from video chatting to media navigation.

Okay, that’s all for this week. More “History of Digital Digest” next week, some kind of mid-week rant I suppose, and another issue of the WNR same time next week. See you then.

Posted in Computing, Copyright, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (19 July 2009)

The History of Digital Digest Part 1: DVD Digest

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

While we’re celebrating the 10th Anniversary of Digital Digest, I thought it would be interesting if I wrote a brief history of the site. Some of what I will post will be common knowledge, some will be revealed for the first time.

The very first version of Digital Digest, note the Asus V3400 reference

It is worth noting again that Digital Digest is really a collection of many different websites that I have developed over the last 10 years. The very first of these websites was a Geocities (and Tripod) hosted website called DVDigest. It was still relatively early days for the Internet, and the boom was underway. Free web hosting was all the rage, and Geocities and Tripod were amongst the leaders. You get something like 15 MB of space and some unspecified bandwidth limit, for hosting static HTML pages and images, which was plentiful back then. And when you do go over the bandwidth limit, you can always open another free account – to solve the problem of ever changing URLs, you used redirect services like cjb.net (so you would have something like dvdigest.cjb.net, which would direct to whichever free account that was still active back then). Now, this was a time of venture capitalists going crazy and IPOs popping up all over the place, so in comparison, DVDigest was pretty amateur. Even for the amateurs.

But it was noob time for most people back then, before the word “noob” was even invented. My interests back then, being the nerd that I am, was to go to newsgroups and help people with their DVD playback problems. I was one of the few that jumped on to the doomed VCD bandwagon (having purchased a hardware MPEG-1 decoder card at great cost), and my interests naturally flowed onto this new format called DVD. Playing DVDs on your PC back then is like trying to play games at 2560×1600 resolution today. With 8xAA and 16x AF. In other words, stutter city was the name of the game. That is unless you had some sort of graphics card that could accelerate DVD playback (or a dedicated hardware MPEG-2 decoder card). The graphics card I had back then was the Asus V3400, part of Nvidia’s Riva TNT family. Despite the marketing, it did not have DVD acceleration and playback was, well, awful. Software based DVD decoders were still in their early days back then, and it took a great deal of tweaking before you could get acceptable framerates on an Intel Celeron 333a. The experience I gained from helping people play DVDs is what led me to write up a few webpages and open a site called DVDigest, which quickly became DVD Digest because people were a bit confused at the name (and they still are – “Digest” reads as in Reader’s Digest, and not as in “digest food”, BTW).

This went on, and more content was added. There were a few new things coming out back then that were quite exciting (for a nerd like me). Talks of doing the impossible and somehow copying the copy protected DVD to your hard-drive, that is if you had a hard-drive big enough. The very first “ripper”, if I can remember, was all about using PowerDVD’s screen capture facility and capturing everything frame by frame. People might as well have pointed a video camera at their TV for all the good that it did (no sound until further processing!) , but at least the process path was all digital. There as also this thing called DivX ; -) – which allowed you to make high quality videos (even better than VCD!) at maybe only a tenth of the space. It was an exciting time.

DeCSS: Who knew such a small program could cause so much trouble ...

It was still late 1999 when I was approached by a company, which shall remain nameless (and actually I can’t remember their name anyway), that offered to help me host my fledgling website, which had already grown too p0pular to be hosted on a 15 MB free webspace deal (shocking, I know). I was to get a part of the advertising money, and they would do all the hosting. They even kindly purchased the domain name dvd-digest.com (don’t bother hurrying over to whois the name, it’s owned by different people now, I think), which was perhaps not as kind as I had believed, naive as I was. All went pretty smoothly until the said company received legal documents which suggested that the rippers I was hosting was not entirely legal. The infamous DVD CCA vs DeCSS case had started. It doesn’t really matter now that the court eventually ruled in favour of the defendants, but I’m sure it was scary for the company that hosted DVD Digest (and owned the domain name to boot). And they took what was in their eyes not only the right action, but the only action, which was to “Shut It Down!”. I was on vacation and away from the Internet at that time (hard to believe that being away from the Internet is actually possible these days, I know) and I did not find out until a week or two after the fact. It wasn’t good news for DVD Digest.

So I had to start from scratch again in the fake new millennium (2000), this time with the domain name digital-digest.com, even though the site was still called DVD Digest back then. And start again I did. The year 2000 was a great one for DVD Digest, despite the soon bursting of the Internet bubble. It was then that I turned what was really a hobby into a business of sorts, and of course, the DVD industry made huge strides in those few years which was helpful for a website that relied on more and more people wondering why they’re only getting 15 FPS from the DVDs on their PCs.

The DVD Digest name continued to be used for many years, with Digital Digest eventually taking over as the official name of the website, but by then there were other sites part of the Digital Digest network called DivX Digest and DVD±R Digest, but that’s a story for part 2 and 3 of The History of Digital Digest.

To be continued in part 2 …

Posted in Computing, Copyright, DVD, General, Video Technology | 1 Comment »

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The History of Digital Digest Part 1: DVD Digest

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