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Weekly News Roundup (5 April 2009)

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

Sorry for this somewhat late edition of the WNR. This daylight savings thing has me all confused, and despite the clocks going forward, I end up doing things later than before. The “2008 Game of the Year Poll” has been closed, and the results are in. My game of the decade, Fallout 3, did not win, but still came third which is pretty good for a game that doesn’t appeal to everyone’s tastes. Call of Duty: World at War won, followed by GTA IV – looks more like “best sellers of 2008”, rather than “best games of 2008” to me. Also, April Fools occurred during the week so chances are, some of the news you read below will have been made up. That in itself is not strange, because there’s made up news pretty much every week, but the only difference is that the made up stories this week have been done in the name of comedy, rather than about getting hits to your website.

Let’s get on with the copyright news because it’s already 8 pm, or 6pm, or something in between, I don’t know anymore thanks to the daylight savings (which has either ended or started, I don’t know either).

Sweden has passed new Internet copyright laws and Internet traffic fell dramatically as a result. I’m surprised at the results to be honest, because this would suggest a huge majority of Swedish users are pirates, which goes against what I’ve read (and I think posted here) recently. However, there are already ways to ensure the authorities cannot track your usage, by using encryption, and so the more enterprising users are already downloading free games and movies without the eyes of the law prying into their activities. A new generation of smarter, faster, and more efficient pirates, is what this will breed.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is already available to download, but who is to blame?

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is already available to download illegally, but who is to blame?

And then we had the big news of the new X-Men movie being leaked online a whole month before the official release date. I’m sure the Internet and Internet users will get all the blame, but really, how would they get access to an early unfinished print of the movie without some insider doing all the hard work? The Internet is responsible to distributing this movie in a timely and efficient fashion, as that’s what it is designed for, but it is the people who leak the movie that are the very people the MPAA should be going after, not the people who put them online or download them. Before the Internet, the leaked print would have been distributed on bootlegged VHS or DVD, or even in the original film containers – less widespread, but still damaging. Don’t blame the Internet for being good at what it is designed for, is all I’m saying.

And it’s not only the Internet that’s getting blamed, but also legitimate Internet companies, such as Yahoo and Google. News Corp’s Murdoch, a kingpin of traditional media, is blaming Yahoo and Google for being thieves when it comes to copyright. New media, such as Google’s YouTube, are bringing information and content to people in new ways which are harder to control compared to traditional media, and so it’s only natural for TV networks or movie studios to be afraid. There is maybe less money to be made, but then again, the audience has increased too. But the writing is on the wall for traditional media, and this includes perhaps newspapers, radio, as well as TV, and they will not be able to compete against the “what you want, when you want it” way that the Internet works. But what the Internet has is quantity and not necessarily quality, and this is perhaps an area that traditional media can expand into – to provide quality Internet content that you would want to pay for (or put up with ads). A high quality version of YouTube with the same quality guidelines and editing as your average TV network, as opposed to one that allows any idiot to post their Rickroll’s. The same with newspapers, which needs to go back to offering quality that’s so good that people will want to subscribe and pay for it (along with the high quality services that you normally wouldn’t expect from a blog, for example). Still, it’s a challenge for the traditional media, and those unwiling or unable to change will be the losers.

High Definition

Onto high-def news, it’s a somewhat quiet week. The only major news, and it was a bit of a shock, so much so that I still think it’s an April Fools joke, was that Netflix will increase Blu-ray rental prices by as much as $8 per month.

NetFlix Blu-ray rental prices increased

Netflix has various subscription packages allowing you to have X number of discs rented at any one time. To upgrade one of these packages to include Blu-ray means you used to have to pay an extra $1 per month, regardless of what package you’ve chosen. But now, the extra Blu-ray surcharge is has been increased and it goes up depending on which package you’ve chosen. For their most expensive package, which allows 8 discs to be rented out at any time, you’ll need to pay an extra $8 to allow Blu-ray titles to be rented, which works out to be about an 16% increase to the monthly fee. That in itself is okay, except many of the Blu-ray discs you rent from Netflix will be so scratched, that they won’t be playable. Or you end up waiting months on end for a title to be sent out to you because so few of each title are available. Of course, the increase in fees will help in both regards, but other online rental firms aren’t charging more for Blu-ray, and I don’t think this will help Netflix (or Blu-ray).

Which is all reason why I still think it’s an April Fools joke. But then again, the Sony PlayStation price drop story also seemed like an April Fools, but it turned out to be sadly true, which brings us to …

Gaming news – There was rumour going around early last week that Sony was going to make a global announcement in regards to the PS3. Of course, Sony denied that such an announcement was going to occur, but that’s expected and it did not rule out a PS3 announcement. And of course, if it is a major PS3 announcement, then it has to be about a price drop, right?

Sony has dropped PS2 prices, but will this help it sell better against the Wii?

But then Sony scheduled a press conference and more reliable sources said that, yes, it would be about the PlayStation game console. Everybody got excited, waited for the announcement, and yes, it was a price drop. It was just for the wrong PlayStation game console. That’s right, Sony has dropped PS2 prices to $99 (although many retailers were already selling at or below this price). The reasoning behind this was that it would make the PS2 competitive with the Wii. The past NPD monthly game console sales reports show that the PS2 is on its last legs, and down 60% compared to the same time last year. Will this price drop help it out?

Maybe, but the real question is why would you want to help out the PS2 at this stage of its life cycle? Sony seems to think that the only reason the Wii is doing well is because it’s cheap. That’s not even remotely true. The Wii is now the second most expensive console on the market (the Xbox 360 Arcade is the cheapest), and it is on the only console not to have had a price drop or a hardware upgrade since release. People like the Wii because it’s fun and it has games that bring enjoyment to a wider range of people, not just hardcore gamers. The PS2 cannot offer this. Now Sony might introduce a Wii-mote like controller for the PS2, but if they can do this and not get sued by Nintendo, then why can’t they do it for the PS3, which already has a motion sensitive controller? And why bring attention to a dying platform, when you’ve got a new platform that could die if not given enough attention? The cost of dropping PS2 prices could have been used to give a small price drop to the PS3, in conjunction with offering a budget version of the PS3 with a smaller HDD or less non essential feature (no built-in wireless, for example). Or just bite the bullet and offer a big price drop to the PS3, take the temporary financial hit, but reap the rewards of better game sales in the future. But people, including myself, has said all this before time and time again and all we get is a PS2 price drop.

Which is why I still think it’s an April Fools joke, and a cruel one at that.

The only PS3 news was that firmware 2.7 being released. Sony is at least keeping its promise to add more and more features to the PS3 through software updates. This is a good idea, but it’s not unique since Nintendo and Microsoft, both to a lesser extent, have been doing the same through channel and dashboard updates. And it can’t last forever, because the hardware has limitations and if Microsoft releases the Xbox 720 with more powerful hardware, then Sony will have to abandon the PS3 and go make the PS4, because superior software can only do so much to catch up to superior hardware.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl on Wii, in 720p

Nintendo could very well release an HD version of the Wii too, let not forget. But somebody has beaten them to it, although it may rest in a legal gray area. There is a Wii emulator out now that can run games at 720p, and it doesn’t use upscaling, rather, it renders the game using the emulator’s 3D engine at this higher resolution. And it works well and can make existing Wii games look very good indeed (videos). The Wii controller can already be used on the PC if you have a Bluetooth adapter, and so this could mean a potential way to play Wii games without even having a Wii game console. Although at the moment, you need a monster PC just to get average framerates. In any case, I’m not sure Nintendo will be too happy about this development, but it may show that people do want Wii in HD and maybe Nintendo can come up with something official on this front.

Alright, that’s it for this week. It’s already either 11pm or 9pm or 10pm, so it’s late anyway. See you next week.

Posted in Computing, Copyright, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (5 April 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (29 March 2009)

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

Finally found a bit a free time to diagnose and fix my P4 system, which has graphics corruption problems. Changing the graphics card seemed to have solved it (was thinking it might have been a power supply problem, which it may still be). I also took the opportunity to upgrade the graphics card to a Blu-ray decoding capable one, just to see if the old dog can still learn a new trick or two. And it could! While if you do the maths, it’s probably not worth to spend too much money on an old P4, not when you can get a brand new system up for not much more, but there is an odd kind of attraction to see such an old system play Blu-ray movies perfectly.

Starting with Copyright news for the week, RealNetworks has stated that they never thought they would get sued for marketing a DVD copying software, not when it adds even more DRM I suppose.

RealDVD: The "Real" crime is not the copying, but the new playback mode

What RealNetworks didn’t get is that it’s not about the copying at all. Controlling how the user interacts with the material, whether it leads to piracy or not, is the best way to protect your income stream. If there exist a system where the user has to pay for each use of the content, where they don’t own anything, but rather, only rents the content, then that would mean a steady and continuing income stream. The content owners will never get such a system, not when people are already used to “owning” content, but they can at least try to limit what you can do with the content. What RealDVD did was to allow the content to be used in a manner in which the content owners did not approve of – it will lead to no more piracy than the current DRM scheme (because DVD CSS doesn’t work) – and that’s their biggest “crime” here. The question is, once you’ve purchased the DVD, and you’re not allowing piracy to occur, do the content owners even have a say in what you can and cannot do from this point onwards? This again goes back to the point of fair use, of whether backups are allowed to be made, and all the same arguments have been going on since the turn of the century.

With three other major Bittorrent lawsuits going on, or about to start, at the moment, TorrentFreak catches up with the owner of TorrentSpy, one of the first torrent sites to go down in the courts, to see what’s happened in the year since. TorrentSpy are still appealing a massive $110m ruling against them, and it’s an interesting read on just how the legal system works and how perhaps all the cards are stacked in favour of content owners, because that’s where the money is. This is especially true in the US, where $47 million dollars were given to politicians by the entertainment lobby – you can just imagine the amount of influence this buys, from both side of politics. We can only hope that because the other torrent cases are outside of the US, that their legal systems will produce a fairer judgement.

A big week for the RIAA, as its threats against ISPs worked

It’s a bad news week for Internet users as several large US ISPs have agreed to work with the RIAA. There is still a lot of confusion as to what this actually means, but Comcast and a few others have denied that this means the introduction of the three-strikes system. What is clear is that they will be spying on their paying customers for the benefit of large corporations. There’s simply no other way to put what is happening, and I hope it frightens you as much as it does me. But monitoring can only go so far. The Pirate Bay is trialing a new secure system where it would be impossible to track usage. This is nothing new, because today’s torrent network is much harder to track down and stop than yesterday’s simple P2P services. If stopping piracy is the goal here, then the ever increasing monitoring and lawsuits will only lead to systems where it would then be impossible to track or stop. The ironic thing is that if the government was doing this spying, instead of anonymous multinational corporations, there would be a huge outcry. And there may still be, but so far, the ISPs have caved in rather quickly.

The developers of World of Goo, a popular puzzle game, has said that DRM is essentially a waste of time. If anti-piracy technology does not stop piracy at all, then this is the only conclusion one can come up with. Valve’s Steam game download service, always critical of DRM, will also come up with a new distribution system that will make DRM obsolete. It works by generating unique versions of the game for each users, so in essence, it is still a form of digital rights management. But it won’t have the usual trademark of DRM, which is the inconvenience it causes to legitimate users. You can’t blame publishers from wanting to stop people copying their games illegally, but you can blame them if they inconvenience legitimate users, and so if DRM exists where it’s transparent to users (and doesn’t impede on their privacy), then any argument you make against it would then be an argument for piracy, which is not what anti-DRM people are trying to do. In more bad news for DRM, the FTC has come out to warn content owners to restrain themselves when it comes to DRM usage, and not let it get out of control like the whole Sony rootkit incident, or the recent EA Spore disaster. It looks like EA is finally listening though, because Sim 3, their next big PC hit, will only come with standard disc/serial based DRM that has existed since the days of CD-ROMs. So overall, a good week for the anti-DRM movement, but unfortunately, content owners are already moving quickly to find another way to infringe on our rights with the Big Brother ISP monitoring programme being implemented.

High Definition

Onto high-def news. Disney did something interesting during last week, where it released the Blu-ray version of Bolt two days earlier than the DVD version, in a move to help out the HD format.

Bolt: Early release on Blu-ray caused confusion

Unfortunately, it seems to have backfired with many stores having to break the release date of the DVD version as confused customers turned up to buy the movie, only to be told that the Blu-ray version is the only version available. Blu-ray supporters will see this as a good move to promote Blu-ray, but anything that prevents people getting what they want when they want it will almost always backfire. This is something that might work when BD has 50% market share and it only needs a small push to get over the line, but when it has at best only 10% market share, you are effectively denying 90% of buyers from buying, all in the attempt to push a format that they are not ready to buy into. More evidence that is has backfired because Bolt barely made it into the weekly Blu-ray top 10, outsold 4-to-1 by Disney’s simultaneous Blu-ray/DVD release of Pinocchio. Of course as it was released rather late in the data period so it may do better next week, although it’s market share of 19% compared to the DVD version is a bit confusing, as the DVD version wasn’t supposed to have been released until the next reporting week.

Warner Bros. is opening a DVD-on-demand service, for rare films that are not worth publishing through normal channels, but still may have some demand. The “what you want, when you want it” principles behind this is very sound, and just imagine how easy and cheaper this system would be if instead of on demand DVD pressing, that digital distribution was used. Criterion already has such a digital system operating, called Criterion Online Cinematheque. An on-demand pressing service may very well be the only future optical discs have, if digital gets its way.

And finally in gaming, Sony has finally cut price to something PS3 related. Unfortunately, it won’t affect consumers (directly), as it is only a price cut to the development kit. Still no sign of an official price drop for the PS3, despite every sign showing that it needs one badly.

And that’s all we have for this week. Thank-you for reading. Hope I didn’t waste too much of your time by ranting on about this and that, which is very easy to do when you’re sitting in front of a keyboard sometimes. See you next week.

Posted in Computing, Copyright, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4 | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (29 March 2009)

How to play Blu-ray on your old computer

Friday, March 27th, 2009

A couple of months ago, my 5 year old P4 system started to suffer from graphics corruption problems. As a webmaster of a successful (haha) website, it was not until last week that I had time to properly diagnose the computer and see what was wrong with it. This is the system in question:

P4 3.2 GHz (Northwood)
1 GB DDR-400 RAM
2 x 125 GB SATA HDD (RAID-1)
ATI Radeon 9800 XT
BenQ 17″ (no HDCP, connected via VGA)
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro
Antec 380W PSU (18A on +12V)
Windows XP Pro SP3

As you can see, what was a top system 5 years ago, is now decidedly old and slow.

Having suspected the power supply may be at fault, I pulled out all the power connections except to the basic component (no HDD, drives, and even case fans) and then booted into the BIOS. Unfortunately the graphics corruption continued, and so I decided that perhaps the graphics card is to blame after all. It could still have been the power supply, but buying a new graphics card is much more exciting than buying a new power supply, and so I was certain it was the graphics card that needed replacing. This PC was no longer going to be used for games, so if I was to find an use for it, then it would be media related work. And so, it made sense to grab a new graphics card that would offer accelerated HD video decoding, so I can turn this 5 year old piece of junk into a Blu-ray player of sorts.

ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro - fast enough for Blu-ray

Unfortunately, trying to find an AGP card for the ageing system was difficult. There were PCIe cards everywhere, but AGP cards numbered less than a dozen, and out of those, only a few were in stock. This is the situation here in Melbourne, Australia, anyway. NVIDIA has firmly given up on AGP cards, and so the ATI cards were the only sensible options. The most popular option right now is the Radeon 3850, which is expensive compared to PCIe equivalents. And I wasn’t sure my PSU was up to the task. There were also a few Radeon 9250/9550”s, but I was not going to downgrade my 9800 XT. Neither the 9250’s, 9550’s nor the X1650 Pro were up to the task of Blu-ray decoding anyway, since they did not support ATI’s UVD feature found in the Radeon HD range. So I wasn’t left with much of an option, and so in the end, I decided on an Sapphire Radeon HD 2400 Pro. It’s not much of a game card, but it’s the cheapest I could find with UVD. Again, this is my local situation, but if you’re in the US, you’ll most likely be able to find a cheap HD 3650 or maybe even a passive cooling card for less than what I paid for.

Anyhoo, installed the card. Was a pain to get rid of the old card, as the AGP latch on motherboard was inaccessible due to the length of my 9800 XT. A very sore and squished thumb later, I got the card out and it was amazing to feel the weight difference between the 9800 XT and the 2400 Pro – the 9800 XT weighed at least 3 times as much! Installed the new card, booted, and graphics corruption problems gone. Installed new drivers, and now comes the fun part: playing HD movies.

The old computer obviously didn’t have a Blu-ray drive built in. I also don’t have a portable Blu-ray drive that I can connect up to the PC, so I used my Xbox 360 HD DVD drive to do the tests, which will work fine as HD DVDs use the same set of video codecs (and sometimes the exact same transfer) as Blu-ray movies. I started up WinDVD 9 and started playing a HD DVD disc (Top Gun). To my horror, the FPS wasn’t much better than before, 10 frames per second at best. This wasn’t right. Further research found me this link to a set of ATI HD Registry Tweaks. Ran the file and rebooted, and started WinDVD 9 again, and finally, smooth HD video started to play. Audio was set to SPDIF output, connected to my receiver for 5.1 audio. Looking at the CPU usage, less than 60% was utilized, with 15% of the GPU being used according to GPU-Z. This was quite acceptable to me. The next thing I did was to install PowerDVD 8 with the HD DVD patch. CPU usage fell to 40%, even in a dual screen setup where the video was being played back at 1920×1080 to my HDTV (connected via DVI -> HDMI). Picture quality was superb!

So a fairly useless 5 year old computer has now been turned into a perfectly capable Blu-ray (and HD DVD) player. So okay, the system is still a bit too noisy to become my primary Blu-ray or HD DVD player, but it’s good to know that I have options (especially on the HD DVD part). So this is what I’ve learnt while doing research on how to turn your old computer into a Blu-ray playing one:

My P4 3.2 GHz can almost be considered overkill for Blu-ray playback with a Radeon HD card. The minimum you can get away with, with the occasional frame drop, may be an AMD AthlonXP 2400+ – anything faster should work fine.
Your PSU will determine what kind of graphics card you can have. The ampage rating on your +12V is even more important than the total wattage. Look for 18A or better, otherwise you may need to get a new PSU
Assuming you have an AGP slot (most likely, with an old computer like mine), get an ATI Radeon HD card, which will do most of the decoding on the card. For gamers, the best you can find is probably the HD 3850. For non gamers, anything carrying the Radeon HD brand will do, or you might even go with a silent option. Most likely, you’ll settle between either the Radeon HD 3450 for non gamers, or the HD 3850 if you want gaming. If you have a PCIe slot, then your options are much more open, although you’ll still want a Radeon HD.
If you can’t see acceleration happening, then don’t forget to run the ATI HD Registry Tweaks.
It would obviously be nice to have a 1080p capable monitor, but that’s unlikely to be the case with an older computer. However, consider in investing in a new monitor if you have an Xbox 360 that you can hook up to it.
1 GB or more of RAM is recommended. Windows XP is also recommended.

Posted in Computing, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K) | 3 Comments »

Weekly News Roundup (22 March 2009)

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

Twice this week I wrote “2008” as the date. It’s funny because I was pretty clear that it was 2009 back in January and February, but I seemed to have forgotten that fact now we’re in March. March Madness, as they say. I did the NPD analysis for February 2009 yesterday, pretty much the same old story with a bit more positive spin for the PS3, but not enough to make it outsell the same period in 2008 (looks like I’m not the only one pining for 2008). There’s more bad news coming the PS3’s way, as you’ll find out later on.

But before we get to that, let’s go through the copyright news first. The story of the week (well earlier on anyway) was Apple’s new iPod Shuffle that seems to have a DRM chip on it.

This caused a bit of a stir as expected, but Apple later came out and denied that the chip would be used for anti-piracy measures. Instead, the chip is used to authenticate third party accessory licensing, making sure third party products go through Apple’s licensing scheme. Not really sure if this is any better than anti-piracy DRM, to be honest.

When I made a list of all the major copyright trials going on at the moment, I forgot about Mininova’s trial which will start in two month’s time. So that’s IsoHunt (Canada), iiNet (Australia), The Pirate Bay (Sweden) and Mininova (Netherlands). Looks like a very international operation is happening to rid the world of nasty pirates, except in Australia’s case, it’s actually an ISP (and one that responds to infringement notices like most other ISPs around the world). But iiNet apart, it looks like all the major torrent sites are being hit in a co-ordinated effort by various agencies, but of course illegal torrents are now even more popular than before, and still being offered on the above sites. And if they fall, others will take their place.

Google: Most DMCA complains are illegitimate

So while going after the distributors of torrents, the powers that be will also go after individuals (through threatening ISPs), with the so called “three strikes” rule being their current modus operandi. Basically this means that if they detect infringement activity, they will pass it on to the ISP which will then warn the user for three times before automatic disconnection occurs. The ISPs are supposed to absorb the cost of doing this, which only means they’ll pass it on to users. Google has also spoken out against this method, calling it disproportionate. In many cases (far too many cases), the infringement may not even have occured, or was done by someone who did not own the Internet connection (Wi-Fi stealing neighbour, for example). And without an appeals system, many legitimate users and businesses will be disconnected and there’s nothing they can do about it, other than to sue for damages. And of course, they’ll be up against teams of lawyers with unlimited funds if they do go to court. Imagine a court where the prosecutor is also the judge, and you do not get to defend yourself and you have to pay for everything, and this is pretty much what the industry want . Google has a lot of experience with how such a system would not work, as it handles DMCA complains regarding its own listings. The DMCA allows for content owners to send “takedown” notices to sites like Google, asking them to take down infringing content, which in Google’s case is usually just links to piracy websites. Google has to process each request, and they have come out with the unbelievable statement that most DMCA takedown notices are in fact illegitimate. 57% of these notices were done to get rid of competitors, while 37% were not valid copyright notices at all.

Back to Australia, where the government is on a crusade to censor the Internet worse than the worst of Internet censoring countries. They even produced a blacklist of all the sites that would be banned, which included quite a few legitimate ones as they always do, and also blacklisted sites that have published the blacklist. And linking to any of these sites, including the legitimate dentist’s website, or the tour operator, or the sites that have published the blacklist, could cost the website operator a $11,000 per day per link penalty. This is because in Australia, linking is considered as bad as hosting the content, whereas other countries do make the distinction. Technically, this could apply to Google, which in their huge database probably links to all the sites on the blacklist, and so in the face of the severe penalty, may have to withdraw from the Australian market if indeed the government gets its wish of a national filter scheme. If this scheme became a reality, you can just imagine the 57% of complains to get competitors added to the blacklist, can’t you?

High Definition

Onto happier HD news. Is DVD better than Blu-ray? IGN seem to think so, and they’ve published an entire article going through the various reasons.

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

I don’t think it’s a case that DVD is better than Blu-ray, but more that DVD is a *better option* than Blu-ray *at the moment*. Much in the same way that a Core 2 Duo is “better” than an Core i7. Nobody is saying that Blu-ray isn’t superior to DVDs, it’s just that perhaps it has some ways to go before it really is the must have, economical, option to home videos. For one, the current range of Blu-ray hardware has a lot of room for improvement, and prices can still come down even more.

But the hardware situation may change soon with Oppo now getting into the Blu-ray game. The Oppo BDP-83 may be the first universal Blu-ray players with excellent DVD upscaling, and comes at a price that won’t require starvation at some point in the near future. It supports BD-Live, decodes all the HD audio formats, plays back all the audio DVD formats, and will almost certainly feature the DVD upscaling engine that made Oppo famous. All they need to do is to make it region-free, and it will become a must-have.

Apple will start to offer HD movies on iTunes, which is yet another step towards movie downloads taking over from the humble optical disc. It won’t happen overnight, but it’s gonna happen.

And in gaming, developers, like gamers, bloggers, forumers, and basically anyone knows what a PS3 is, wants Sony to cut PS3 prices.

Sony may start to charge developers for hosting content on PSN

But instead of agreeing, Sony has responded by mocking developers for asking the world. when all they have asked is for the best solution to save the PS3. Not satisfied with the mocking, they proceeded to make it even more costly for developers to publish games on the PS3 by introducing bandwidth fees for downloadable content. This could mean an extra quarter or half million for your typical 1 GB demo. Xbox Live has no such fee for developers. Sony claims this is needed because they don’t charge users for PSN, which is fair enough, except demos on the 360 are free to download for non paying users (Xbox Live Silver accounts), after the usual first few days of exclusivity on Xbox Live Gold. Expect more and more developers refusing to release demos on the PS3, which will then mean less games sales for all concerned and make the PS3 even less popular. Is this what Sony wants? I think it is, because everything they do seems to be to try and kill the PlayStation brand. Of course, the other explanation is that they’re still acting as if they’re the kings of video gaming, when in fact, they’re now in a distant third place.

The other bit of news was Sony wanting to bring Wii like controls, but not to the PS3. Instead, they want to do it for the PS2. It makes sense, since the Wii’s graphics isn’t that much better than the PS2’s, but as you’ll see from my NPD analysis, the PS2 is on its last legs and it doesn’t really make sense to try to prolong its life, when you’ve got a new console to try and save.

Okay, that’s it for this week. Sorry about the lateness of this post, as it’s been a busy (and very unproductive) day for me. See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (22 March 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (15 March 2009)

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

Yesterday was my birthday, and I enjoyed it very much. So much so that I didn’t even want to write a WNR today, but as they say, we’ve all got to work harder for less money in these economic times, so I can’t afford to take a day of. I finished the PowerDVD 9 review during the week as well. To sum up, the new version is very nice and features some useful new features in particular DVD upscaling and the media center mode. Is it worth the upgrade from version 8? That really depends on your needs, and if you need DVD upscaling to your 50″ HDTV, or if you want better Windows Media Center integration, then version 9 is for you. And despite Windows 7 offering lots of video support, it won’t support Blu-ray, so you will have to come back to one of PowerDVD, WinDVD or ArcSoft TotalMedia.

Starting with copyright news, a new MPAA study says that America needs a Patriot Act like bill for dealing with piracy.

Once again, the MPAA is comparing movie piracy to terrorism, and to refer to such a controversial bill as a model is just plain bad taste and shows how out of sync the MPAA is with the general public. If most people in the world believes that the Patriot Act is inappropriate even for dealing with something serious as terrorism, why should they think that it would appropriate for dealing with kids downloads movies at home? And do we need a “Gitmo” type insitution for dealing with pirates, although instead of physical imprisonment and torture, perhaps ban them from signing up to ISPs and using the Internet which for some people, is considered a form of torture.

IsoHunt’s P2P trial will continue after IsoHunt’s lawyers failed to get a summary ruling that it did not infringe copyright. it was always going to trial anyway, so this is not a huge surprise. There are certainly lots of important trials going on at the moment or awaiting judgement, IsoHunt’s trial in Canada, iiNet’s trial in Australia and of course The Pirate Bay trial in Sweden. But the more the industry fight against piracy, it seems the public is less and less enthusiastic about the crusade to rid the Internet of it. A new study shows that more than half of Internet users in Canada and Spain pirate music, films and software, while only 5% believe that piracy is criminal behaviour. Either people are becoming more and more unethical, or that they are so used to how the Internet works, where many things are free or at least made available for low cost, that they see P2P as just another way to get what you want when you want it. If the success of digital game delivery services such as Steam tells us anything, is that people are willing to pay for content as long as it’s delivered in the way they want it. The low prices do help, of course.

Steam shows that better delivery and pricing, not more DRM and lawsuits, is the way to go towards fighting piracy

So instead of fighting piracy with lawsuits and DRM, perhaps they should take a look at Steam and see how it became a successful delivery platform (even if it has DRM), and why people are willing to pay for games this way, but not the boxed version at stores. Of course, some people will never learn. Steam and Valve’s Gabe Newell recently delivered a verbal attack on DRM, but Aladdin’s John Gunn disagrees and has published a rebuttal. Aladdin provides DRM services (of course they do). The main points of attacks seems to be that there are stats showing DRM helps drive sales, which I find hard to believe not because these stats do not exist, but because they are incredibly hard to obtain (how much growth is related directly to having DRM, and how much is it related to other things like better products and services, or just natural growth). Mr. Gunn also goes to say that “good DRM is proven to reduce piracy”, which again depends on what the definition of “good DRM”. Theoretically, a DRM that cannot be broken should help sales as if you can’t pirate it, and you really want it, then you’ll have to buy it. Mr. Gunn points this out in his article as well. But the problem is that such DRM does not exists, because I have yet to see a popular commercial game or application with DRM that hasn’t been cracked, usually within hours of release. Note that I used the term “popular”, as there are apps that don’t get cracked simply because nobody cares enough to do it, and most likely, nobody cares enough to even pirate it anyway. The fact is that the majority of DRM schemes do nothing except annoy legitimate customers. They are about as effective as those unskippable copyright warnings at the start DVDs (funnily enough, only present on legal versions, and removed for the consumer’s convenience on pirated ones). Piracy rates have not dropped since the introduction of tougher and tougher DRM, this is a fact that cannot be disputed. So what exactly does DRM do anyway, other than to provide revenue streams to companies like Aladdin?

In the end, it’s all about convenience to consumers, and reasonable pricing. Both of these will fight piracy much more effectively than the world’s best DRM scheme. When The Pirate Bay is providing downloads that are faster, less intrusive, less restrictive, then you know you’re going in the wrong direction.

High Definition

Onto HD news. Toshiba has launched another attack on Blu-ray, which suggests that the rumours of them accepting cash from Sony to quit the HD game and to shut up about it, might not be entirely accurate.

TiVo Australia - no download quotas for Internode customers

This time, Toshiba says that downloads will replace Blu-ray. Sounds like sour grapes of course, but this statement is true in the long run. Music downloads have already replaced CDs, and with increasing and cheaper bandwidth, it’s only a matter of time before downloads replace movie discs too. If there is a trend in 2009, it’s the ever increasing move towards media-less distribution. Here in Australia, TiVo has launched a download service that operates through their set top boxes and with an active Internet connection. Internode, one of the largest ISPs here in Australia and my current ISP, has now teamed up with TiVo to offer unlimited downloads through TiVo’s download service – downloads that won’t eat up your monthly quota. While this does not solve the speed problem, it solves the bandwidth cost problem and we’ll most likely see more and more of these types of ISP/content provider deals in the short term. Then there’s the story of a Lionsgate executive predicting streaming movies on the Wii will be available soon. Again, this isn’t some wild prediction, because the PS3 and Xbox 360 already have it and so the Wii, or the next Nintendo console, will certainly offer some kind of movie service. With HDTVs, TiVo, game consoles, Blu-ray players, smart phones, portable media players and almost every other device (including in-car devices) offering movie streaming and downloads, that’s a lot of devices offering movie downloads, a lot more than say the number of standalone Blu-ray players. So maybe Toshiba does have a point, and what are the odds that all Toshiba’s HDTVs will start offering movie streaming capabilities in the near future?

Blu-ray sales are doing alright, although definitely down compared to the highs of the holiday period. Blu-ray sales stats show that Blu-ray sales have dropped to levels of around the middle of last year, the market share is down a third (5%) compared to the holiday period. Both Blu-ray and DVD sales have slowed down, but if anything, DVD is holding up a bit better than Blu-ray. With many people still undecided over whether to get 720p or 1080p, it just shows that extra resolution isn’t really the most important factor when it comes to movie buying, not when upscaling quality is improving all the time. However, as a rule of thumb, 1080p is the way to go from now on (and has been for a while).

Another story about expensive HDMI cables being a rip-off, this time with actual studies providing the fact. Still, it’s hard to get over the feeling that the salesman may be right when he says that your brand new $1000+ purchase “demands” that you pay a proportionate amount for cabling as well. But have you ever asked a computer salesman for a high quality professional grade USB cable, if there’s even such a thing. Both USB and HDMI are digital cables, so if you’re happy to use the one that came free with your printer, than you should be happy with paying the least amount of money for the other. I would still go with a recognized brand though, to avoid buying a dud or one that breaks because of poor workmanship. But if build quality is not a problem, then the only criteria should be pricing.

And in gaming, Sony has shut down the rumours of a Blu-ray-less PS3. Not much of a surprise really, because it was never going to happen as long as PS3 games used Blu-ray media. Nothing much happening here, although I find it increasingly hard to listen to PS3 fans talk about how the “PS3 experience” is better than anything out there at the moment. It’s a freaking game console, not a journey to the center of your soul for crying out loud. It reeks of marketing speak that’s been eaten up by PS3 fans seeking to prove their consoles is the best when nobody even cares, and this is coming from someone who makes money from telling people which console is the best. You know how you can tell nobody cares? Because if a barely working, badly designed console like the Xbox 360 can sell so many boxes, you know people just don’t really care about the “experience”, only games and how many and how cheap they are. And Microsoft aren’t immune from this either, what with their “New Xbox Experience” – PowerDVD 9’s “FancyView” is a much more appropriate term to describe the new Xbox 360 UI, in my opinion. And all the Nintendo Wii stories about how it’s helping injured people, blah blah blah … who cares?

Boil down to it, all the consoles have their good and bad points, and if you have the money, you should buy them all, if not, then buy the ones that have the games you want on it. It’s really that simple.

The February NPD figures should be out next week, and we’ll then see what kind of impact Killzone 2 has made. My predictions is probably not a lot, because I haven’t heard Sony scream about it from the top of every roof. We’ll find out soon enough.

That’s that for this week. Have a good one.

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 (15 March 2009)

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