DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Sorry for this outrageously late WNR. Had a bit of a health situation that I needed to attend to. It’s a shame, since there’s lots of stuff to go through, so I will have to keep things short. And no, laziness is not the “health situation”. I wrote a mid-week blog about Nvidia’s Ion platform. An Ion is a charged atom, which makes the name so appropriate as that exactly what the platform does – it gives Intel Atom systems a much needed boost in the graphics department, particularly for HD video. It won’t be too long before you will see Blu-ray capable netbooks that can also double as a HTPC, I think.

Let’s start with copyright news. The MPAA admits it is losing the PR war, to what they have dubbed the enemy of copyright. There are a few people who don’t like any sort of copyright, but I think the majority of people do respect copyright, it’s just that they don’t like the way that it is being enforced.

Personally, I buy lots of DVDs. All legitimate. I don’t buy music much, mainly because I don’t listen to it much apart from Net radios (also legal). I do buy games, not a lot, but I don’t have a lot of time to play them anymore. But I am one of the people that the MPAA says is an enemy of copyright, simply because I refuse to support their methods. I respect that they want to keep piracy under control, but I don’t respect the way they have gone about things, which has made piracy an even easier choice for those that can’t stand DRM and the sometimes ridiculous prices for digital content that the MPAA members want to charge. I believe the best way to fight piracy is to make it unnecessary, and this means tackling the difficult issue of how to make money in a digital world, and how to make it harder for people to share content they don’t own, but at the same time not seriously affecting their user experience. I think this is all possible, and the music industry has been forced down this road already. It is just a shame that their business is a declining one, even without piracy, and so it makes for a bad example. But even they can turn things around if they price music aggressively, and take advantage of the digital medium’s low cost of distribution, replication. There will be losers in this revolution, as there will always be, but it’s a necessity and fighting against the tide will only make things more difficult. Embrace the change!

It’s unfortunate that the music industry’s changed tactics of pursuing legal avenues to stop piracy is just as clumsy and overreaching as their attempts with DRM. They are lobbying governments and telling them scary scenarios about the end of music and movies, in an effort to scare them into passing laws which have no place in societies based on the rule of law. The so called 3-strikes is so against the nature of the Internet, and justice and civil rights in general, that it’s hard to believe people are taking it seriously, the latest call for it are in the UK. Japan has just tightened their copyright laws as well. Apart from having no due process, the method will also mean a lot of false positives, as the most used identification method, which is based on using the IP address, is in most cases insufficient to identify people a court has ruled. And in the end, all it will do is to force people serious about pirating stuff to get more serious about hiding their activities, which is possible through encrypted VPNs and other technologies.

Jammie Thomas-Rasse: Sharing 24 songs will cost her $1.92 million

So the only people that will be caught are those that haven’t done much pirating and don’t know how to avoid capture. But these are the people that will be made examples of, much like the single mother that has been successfully sued for $1.92m, to scare people into behaving. But it won’t work, everyone knows it. And to go so overboard with the lawsuit to demand a multi-million dollar settlement will be a PR disaster for copyright groups, because it just reinforces how much out of touch they are with reality. $80,000 per song, for 24 songs, is a ridiculous number. There is no proof of the exact number of people that have been able to obtain songs from Thomas-Rasset, the sacrificial pawn in this game, so the figure is largely for punitive damages. Does sharing 24 songs seem like a $1.92m crime to you? Well it does to groups like the RIAA, and they’re not going to stop – the next on the hit list is AM/FM radio stations, which has just been labeled as “A form of piracy”. Let’s just stop people playing, sharing, listening to all songs – that will surely help save the business, not to mention the money they are paying to lawyers to fight these cases which might have been better used to find alternative strategies to operate in this new digital world.

The US had its digital transition, and for all purposes, it went off pretty smoothly. It is just as well that plans to do this were set in motion many years ago, before the crazies took control of the copyright debate, as otherwise digital TV would be saddled with DRM, most notably the Digital Flag. This would have prevented people recording any TV show that has this flag set, so no TiVo or delayed viewing, just to make sure that if you can’t catch something on TV live, or want to watch it again, you’ll have to fork out bucks to do it. If these crazies had been in control far earlier, the tape recorder, the VCR and even the PC might not have been allowed to exist, and is this really what we want, or what’s good for the industry and economy in general?

Onto HD news now. Another report which seem to indicate that while Blu-ray sales are up, DVD sales are down by much more. It’s going to be a while before Blu-ray can gain enough of a market share to really make a difference, but the decline in DVD sales probably has as much to do with the increase in gaming purchases as with anything seriously wrong with the industry it self.

The other piece of news is a poll which showed that Blu-ray standalone uptake is not quite increasing fast enough, and was even outpaced by the dead HD DVD format in the last year. Polls are interesting, but figures for uptake shouldn’t need to rely on polls, as there are real figures to be found.

And finally in gaming, Activision’s CEO has joined the chorus of people to call for a PS3 price cut. There is a veiled threat in there about pulling support for the PS3 (and PSP) if action isn’t taken, but I wouldn’t take it all that seriously. Do game publishers want cheap consoles? Yes. Will they pull support for the PlayStation family? No. But hopefully, this will give Sony extra incentive to even just consider a price cut.

That’s it for this week. Short and sweet. Long and boring coming up next week.

HTPC in a tiny tiny box, made possible by Nvidia Ion and the 9400M GPU

You will soon be hearing a lot about Nvidia’s new Ion platform. There will be a whole bunch of hype, superlatives and marketing jargon to go along with it, but if you boil it all down, Nvidia Ion’s main purpose will be to give HD where HD wasn’t possible before.

Intel’s Atom processor has been a huge success in the netbook market. Netbooks are a needed stepping stone between the ever more powerful smartphone, and the laptop. Netbooks are perfect for basic office work, Internet and will give you some multimedia potentials. They usually employ an Intel GMA 950 GPU, which will allow you to do all the basic stuff, but try to do anything more taxing like playing back a 720p H.264 video, and you’ll find it struggling, along with the Atom processor, in trying to deal with it. So while netbooks and other similar mini computers are great for most tasks, today’s multimedia demands mean that they won’t have a place in your home theater as a media player.

Nvidia’s Ion platform seeks to change this notion.

By including a Nvidia GeForce 9400M into the package, as opposed to using the Intel GMA GPU. Apart from being an tiny GPU that fits well into devices normally powered bt the Atom, the 9400M also features Nvidia’s 3rd generation PureVideo HD (or VP3) acceleration engine designed specifically for enhanced HD playback, including full hardware decoding for all the Blu-ray video codecs. The 3rd gen VP3 is only seen on some of the more recent GeForce GPUs, and not even the GTX 2xx range have them (they are still using the 2nd gen., which cannot do full VC-1 hardware decoding, only full H.264 decoding). What this means is that the GPU will handle most of the load for playing back HD movies and this now allows Atom based systems to play back 1080p HD movies.

Good things come in small packages - Ion can make netbooks play Blu-ray

This then allows Atom based systems to have a genuine place inside your home theater. The small form factor and lack of heat (and therefore, noise) will be perfect in the home theater, and with 1080p HD H.264 or VC-1 playback, it will handle all of your multimedia needs without having a dedicated PC hooked up to your system. Increase the form factor a bit and add in a Blu-ray drive, and you’ve got yourself a full HTPC system for maybe only half the cost, half the space, and half the noise. And unplug all the cables, and it’s portable too. The 9400M will support Nvidia’s CUDA platform, which means GPU will be able to assist the CPU in many other tasks.

What Ion, and the 9400M, won’t offer you is gaming potential, because in order to reduce the heat output and power requirements to fit into Atom systems, a few corners had to be cut – the 9400M only features 16 stream processors, compared to the 480 you get with Nvidia’s top of the range GPU. 2D graphics won’t be much better than Intel GMA based systems either. But video, and HD video at that, has always been the main draw here.

Intel will fight the Ion platform by introducing new CPUs that can handle 720p video using less power and at less cost than Ion, but 1080p video is where things are heading at the moment and there appears to be a bright future for Ion as long as system builders, like Asus, take full advantage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The May 2009 NPD figures are out for video game hardware and software sales in the US. Following a pretty disastrous April, all hope was on a recovery in May. With the critically acclaimed PS3 exclusive inFAMOUS being launched in the last week of May, it will also be interesting to see if it can help lead the recover, at least on the PS3 front, or was it yet again released too late in the month to make a huge dent (much like Killzone 2)? Read on the find out. The figures are from NPD, a marketing research firm that releases games console sale data every month.

The figures for US sales in May 2009 are below, ranked in order of number of sales (May 2008 figures also shown, including percentage change):

• DS: 633,500 (Total: 31.4 million; May 2008: 452,600 – up 40%)
• Wii: 289,500 (Total: 20.2 million; May 2008: 675,100 – down 57%)
• Xbox 360: 175,000 (Total: 15.2 million; May 2008: 186,600 – down 6%)
• PS3: 131,000 (Total: 7.7 million; May 2008: 208,700 – down 37%)
• PS2: 117,000 (Total: 44.1 million; May 2008: 132,700 – down 12%)
• PSP: 100,400 (Total: 15.2 million; May 2008: 182,300 – down 45%)

NPD May 2009 Game Console US Sales Figures

NPD Game Console Total US Sales Figures (as of May 2009)

My prediction from last month was:

Can a recovery take place in May? Looking at the Amazon top 10 charts now, it doesn’t look like a great month for games. PS3’s exclusive Infamous might make a dent, but it may come too late in May to make a huge difference to May’s figures. I’m going to predict a slight recovery for the PS3, as PS2 sales will start to drop again following the price cut, and PS3 has nowhere to go but up, especially if Infamous can help to lift sales up. Everything else the same as it was this month, I suppose.

I’m not often right. In fact, it almost never happens. But I think I was pretty spot on with my prediction. The PS3 did lift in sales, whether that’s down to inFAMOUS or not is hard to say but inFAMOUS did make the top 10. The PS2 did drop in sales as the expected boost given by the price drop deteriorated rather quickly. Everything else remains in a similar situation, with the DS down but still top, as the fever over the new DSi fades.

Having a look at the year on year comparison figures above (mostly in red), it was again a “bad” month if you do a straight comparison with the same time last year. But this is extremely misleading because May 2008 was a very good month for video games, despite May being a traditionally poor month for sales – GTA IV was still a hot item back then for one. So forgetting about the year to year figures, May 2009 was still a relatively poor month. DS sales remain strong thanks to the DSi, but having dropped by almost half compared to last month, sales will be back to “normal” in no time. Wii sales have started to behave much more like the other consoles, dropping with them and rising with them – the Wii had up until now performed miracles in sales that seemed to have made it immune to economic pressures and the fact that it’s not a new console anymore. But Nintendo will be happy with the software figures, as you’ll see later on.

Another very ‘meh’ month for Sony. PS3 sales improved, but it was still behind the Xbox 360 despite the PS3 getting the highly rated exclusive inFAMOUS. The software figures for inFAMOUS may have been affected by the limited release time it had in May, but hardware sale increases usually precede a popular title as people anticipate the release, and this could explain partly why the PS3 did increase in sales from the previous month – the only console to do so this month. But the amount of increase was not big enough, neither were the sales numbers for inFAMOUS. The PS2 got a reprieve last month thanks to price drops, but it continues on its road to oblivion this month. Sony should really just give up on this console already. Sony announced a new PSP console at E3, and this will drive up sales when it is released later in the year, but for now, the PSP has nowhere to go really as people wait for the new version (although price drops for the older model may help to spur sales in the coming months).

And finally onto Microsoft, who had a good E3 thanks to Project Natal (and the subsequent press coverage, including the live demo on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon).  But there were no exclusives, or price drops, and so nothing much changed for this month. In fact, sales were exactly the same as last month. But out of all the consoles that experienced year to year drops (that is, all except for the DS, but it doesn’t count because of the DSi), it experienced the least amount of decrease.

Let’s get to software. As mentioned earlier, Nintendo had reason to not be so worried about Wii hardware sales, because Wii software sales are still strong. Half of the top 10 were Wii games, with another DS game thrown in for good measure. And the better news is that two of the top selling Wii games were new to the list, EA Sports Active and Punch Out! – this is one area Nintendo wanted improvement on, as opposed to relying on the trifecta of Wii Play, Mario Kart and Wii Fit all the time. Microsoft should be fairly pleased as well, taking the number one spot for the second time this year, with the multi-platform UFC 2009. Sony would have wanted inFAMOUS to be higher up than 5th and selling only a third of the number one game of the month (which wasn’t even an exclusive). I will again point out that it was released too late in the months to make huge dent (why does Sony always do this?), but most sales happen in the first week and 175,900 is disappointing considering Killzone 2 got almost double this and the fact that it was an exclusive. I find it hard to believe that out of the nearly 8 million PS3 owners in the US, only such a small percentage decided to buy this highly rated and hyped game at release. And it’s not just the price though, because so many more wanted to by UFC 2009 on the PS3. Overall, the Wii had 43.2% of the top 10, the Xbox 360 had 30.8% and the PS3 had 19.6%. Here’s the complete list of the top 10 software sales:

1. UFC 2009 Undisputed (Xbox 360, THQ) – 679,600
2. Wii Fit w/Board (Wii, Nintendo) – 352,800
3. EA Sports Active (Wii, EA) – 345,800
4. UFC 2009 Undisputed (PS3, THQ) – 334,400
5. inFAMOUS (PS3, Sony) – 175,900
6. Pokemon Platinum (DS, Nintendo) – 168,900
7. Mario Kart w/ Wheel (Wii, Nintendo) – 158,300
8. Punch Out! (Wii, Nintendo) – 156,900
9. X-Men Origins: Wolverine Uncaged (Xbox 360, Activision) – 120,700
10. Wii Play w/ Remote (Wii, Nintendo) – 109,800

June is hard to predict. There should be an increase in sales from a seasonal point of view. Plus, there is also the release of Prototyped (think inFAMOUS but multi-platform, and much more exaggerated) and the Ghostbusters video game, and with inFAMOUS continue to be the top PS3 seller, it should all point to a better month. I don’t know if the E3 announcements will have any effect on sales, but most of the announcements aren’t for immediate product releases (apart from Nintendo’s Wii Motion Plus, but the Wii Sports Resort game which takes advantage of it doesn’t come out until July), so I don’t think there will be a huge effect, if any. So the prediction is the same as this month, with the PS3 numbers slightly higher still but maybe not high enough to beat the Xbox 360. I can see Prototype (the Xbox 360 version) being the top seller for the month, and it will be interesting to see how it stacks up against inFAMOUS which has received better review ratings (although the “100” ratings given out by a few places are a bit over the top).

See you next month.

Another pretty quiet week. Well, not so quiet with the E3 going on, but the major stories out of that were gaming which I will cover later on in this WNR. I did manage to write a mid-week blog this week, so no Fallout 3 jokes this time. The blog was about solid state drives and about how awesome I think they are. It’s well worth a read because you will be using one sooner rather than later. If they do manage to replace HDDs, then that’s the second last major mechanical device out of your average PC. What’s the last mechanical device? That’s your optical drive, of course. No wonder Sony says that Blu-ray may be the last optical format around, not so much because it’s so good that you won’t need another one, but rather because once HDDs are gone, the optical drive is going to seem quite quaint as the last mechanical device sitting in your PC (fans and switches excepted, although with cooler components and alternative cooling methods, fans are on their way out as well).

Starting with the copyright news, there isn’t much going on actually. I don’t know if this is good news or not.  The MPAA is pretty busy these days with their (and their affiliates’) lawsuits all around the world, so I guess it’s understandable that they don’t have as much time to come out with the usual propaganda.

In the RealDVD case, the MPAA has made a claim that will not surprise anyone, but does give insight into what they perceive to be fair use. They have made the case to the judge that even making one backup copy of a legally purchase DVD for personal use is illegal, as it circumvents the DMCA. There are fair use provisions in the DMCA in relation to archiving, but the MPAA lawyers claim that’s for actual archives (like the National Archive) and does not apply to mere mortals. They even got the Copyright Alliance to claim that if they wanted to give people their rights back, they would have charged more per DVD, and not the current amount, which is too low to allow them to be able to make backups and stuff. Basically they’ve admitted that DRM is used to provide price control on digital content that’s normally (in its DRM-free form) hard to control. So it’s not about piracy at all, and never has been.

Windows 7's codec support may bring more anti-trust lawsuits

While it’s not a copyright issue, but it is still a legal one and that’s the slightly controversial approach that Microsoft has taken with audio/video codec support in the new Windows 7 operating system, which will be released in October. What they have done is locked Windows Media Player so that it won’t work with third party codecs. And the Microsoft codecs will override your third party ones unless unlocked or using a player that will ignore the way Microsoft has done things like Media Player Classic. It’s good news for end users I suppose, in that Microsoft is providing a bunch of codecs with the default OS installation so that you don’t need to go codec hunting just to play a XviD file. What’s not so good is for codec publishers that will lose customers, despite offering a superior product to the one that comes with Windows. Sound familiar? Didn’t Microsoft try to do this when they integrated Internet Explorer into Windows, and had to pay out huge amounts in anti-trust cases brought against them. Microsoft argued then that it was good for their customers, but offering something that come as standard is one thing, but preventing competitors from offering alternatives is another. We’ll have to wait until the release version to see if installing and using third party codecs has been made intentionally hard, or it’s just something that can be bypassed easily.

In HD news, it’s all pretty quiet on the Blu-ray front. Most HD news these days is about yet another HD streaming service, or another hardware platform that now streams an existing service.

One of Microsoft’s big E3 announcements (you’ll read more about them in the gaming section), is that 1080p HD video streaming is coming to the Xbox 360. Bandwidth issues mean that none of the 1080p streaming services will come close to matching Blu-ray’s quality, and you can’t argue with the convenience of not having to step outside you home to watch a movie from a catalogue of thousands, more than what your typical store will hold. The best news is that, unlike previous offerings, this one is worldwide. And not only that, the services that Xboxers in the lucky countries have been enjoying will now come to 10 more countries, including Australia. Last week it was the news about UK and Irish Xboxers getting Sky TV channels through the Xbox 360. So one of Microsoft’s major themes for this E3 has been trying to turn the Xbox 360 into a fully fledged media streamer. And unlike Sony, they don’t have to worry about streaming taking customers away from their disc format, because they don’t have a disc format to support (anymore).  

And so onto gaming, and most of the news this week has been the various announcements from the gaming companies. Nintendo was relatively quiet this E3, and it’s all been about Sony and Microsoft catching up.

And the best way to do that of course would be to copy Nintendo’s lead and offer motion controlled gaming. But both have decided to go in a slightly different direction to what Nintendo is offering.

Full body motion controls comes to the Xbox 360 through Project Natal

Microsoft was up first, and they demonstrated their Project Natal, a full body motion gaming system without the need for a controller (click on link to see video of Project Natal, as well as Milo). Well, you can’t accuse them for coming out with a Wii clone, that’s for sure. If the thing works, then it will open up a whole new level of gaming, because gamers don’t want an abstract representation of real world activities, as the gamepad provides. Even the Wii-mote is limited in providing a representation of real world activities, as it only works for one arm (and even with the Wii Fit board, it’s still limited – to go that one step further, then we’ll have to end up looking like the Borg just play Mario).  So a motion and depth sensing camera seems to be the way to go, and Microsoft has also added facial and voice recognition. The criticism of Natal is that without an actual controller with buttons, then the whole system may not work with proper games that require the gamer to do super-human things that only controllers and buttons can simulate. But what’s to say that Natal won’t have controller add-ons in the future? Another problem is accuracy, and I don’t know if the camera can pick up and interpret all the nuances that would be required to have a full gaming experience. But certainly this seems to be the next logical development in gaming, and it was what I thought the Wii-2 would be like. Microsoft also showed a demo featuring a virtual boy called Milo (see video from link above), which combined showed the future potential of Natal by allowing you to interact with your game console/virtual friend in unbelievable ways. 

PlayStation Motion Controller - like the Wii-mote, but in 3D and more accurate

Sony went with the more traditional approach, but added some innovation as well (click on link to see video). A controller wand very much like the Wii is present, but there is a big glowing light that, when combined with the PlayStation Eye, will allow depth to be tracked (based on how “big” the glowing balls are, as seen from the PS Eye) and will also improve accuracy. It’s basically motion capture technology used in 3D effects. And compared to the Wii, it basically means 3D motion controller that’s ultra accurate – and as many have said, basically what the Wii would look like if it was perfect. So it’s not as revolutionary as Natal, but it will be available for public consumption earlier by all estimates, and it is more “gaming”, compared to Microsoft’s more “virtual” approach. And there’s no reason why Sony can’t add some of Natal’s features through the use of the PlayStation Eye (some of which are already present). And yes, it looks like a dildo, but so what? And of course,  no price cut for the PS3.

So two companies and two different approaches. Which one will come out on top? Hard to say at the moment. If Natal works, then that’s the type of gaming I see myself playing in 5 years time. If the PlayStation Motion Controller works, then that’s the one I see myself playing next year instead of the Wii. And in the end, it’s all about the games that will support either system, and that will determine who wins. And don’t forget Nintendo, the masters of this type of thing, has yet to come out with the full response to these two interesting challenges.

On that positive note, here ends this week’s WNR. See you next week.