DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

June 15th sounds like it should be exactly the middle of the year, but it’s not due to February being an idiot and not having enough days, and July and August conspiring together to win the “two consecutive months of the year with the most number of days” award. The news is a bit thin this week, so please bear or bare with me depending on your mood.

In copyright news, the MPAA recently said they plan to release on HD movies for public/paid broadcast before they are available to purchase on discs, but as part of this arrangement, they also want the ability to prevent recordings of these types of content. One senses that releasing movies early is almost just an excuse for the MPAA to ensure they can get this type of copy control rammed past the FCC regulators, who currently prohibits the use of such technology. Of course, even with the most sophisticated copy protection technology, as long as one can physically view the content, one will find a way to record it, even if through “lowly” analogue means. The FCC, like most people, are a bit wary of the MPAA’s intentions and have opened the petition to the public for comments. I suggest that if you have a couple of minutes to spare, you read the MPAA proposal and then complete the form to add your comments here. We must send a message to the MPAA that we can no longer tolerate their attack on our personal freedoms. The line must be drawn here! This far and no farther!

The Canadians are fighting a fight of their own as well, as new proposed copyright legislations, dubbed the “Northern DMCA”, will ensure police powers to fine copyright offenders. Of course, the police are not that happy, as they would prefer to be out there catching real criminals, not so called copyright abusers which even the likes of the MPAA and RIAA would have difficulty proving guilty/innocent in court (find out how the RIAA catches copyright offenders). As expected, the protest online is getting louder and louder, so hopefully the Canadian government will take their lips off the copyright lobby’s ass for a second and listen to the people who elected them to power.

And as if things can’t get any worse. Well, they can. New proposals doing the rounds and written up by the United States proposes draconian measures to stop digital copyright theft, including on the spot searches, seizures and destruction of digital devices suspected of carrying pirated content all without the right to ask for a lawyer or the right of appeal. It looks like the US has been talking to North Korean about more than just nuclear arms, they are getting a few pointers too on how on policing “inappropriate” content.

Onto HD news now, another week, another rumour of an Xbox 360 Blu-ray drive, and yet another rumour being shot down. Read what I posted in the link to see who I think is making up and spreading these rumours, and why. Meanwhile, the previous HD DVD studios move to Blu-ray is gaining momentum, as Paramount launches a Blu-ray support site. Despite what you’ve read in the news, Blu-ray sales are still pretty sluggish, even compared to the quickly declining DVD sales. With a possible US recession coming, the studios are extremely worried about what the future may bring and they are desperate for Blu-ray to succeed (and by success, I mean increase profits). But who knows, perhaps desperation is exactly what the format needs, as this could mean more movies released for less money per movie, with a slight premium over DVDs but nothing that would turn people off.

The other approach is to make the discs more feature packed. Something that Toshiba tried to do from day one with HD DVD, with very limited success. Disney wants to add a chat feature to its Blu-ray releases, made possible by Profile 2.0 hardware (more reasons to get one or wait to get one, as opposed to buying 1.1 players). HD DVDs have had this and similar features for ages, and it didn’t seem to help much, so I don’t know if this is the way to go. But expect more and more “Web 2.0” type features to be added to Blu-ray discs.

Porn, the great teat from which the DVD format has sucked from to gain strength, is another potential saviour of Blu-ray. But do people really want to see *that* and *those* in high def glory? And does it add, or detract from the experience? Or perhaps people won’t be able to tell much difference at all? With a limited production budget, porn films probably don’t benefit much from the increased resolution as say your typical Michael Bay effort, even if the former usually has a better script.

And finally in gaming, there’s not much going except for the NPD figures released, which I have already blogged on yesterday. The porn article link above says Blu-ray hardware sales are plummeting, which might explains the spate of Blu-ray sales that are going on at the moment. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but certainly, the PS3 hasn’t been selling in the numbers the “best Blu-ray player on the market” and the “most technically sophisticated game console” should expect. Even compared to the dodgy, somewhat ugly and noisy beast that is the Xbox 360, or the Gamecube with a new controller that is the Wii, it isn’t doing too well, not for a console that has never beaten both of its competitors since launch, and has only beaten the half-broken 360 twice or thrice monthly in a year and a half worth of results. But then again, it’s still quite expensive, so a price drop will do wonders for it. Although be on the look out for more and more stories regarding a potential design fault with the PS3 in relation to the Blu-ray drive, which has been known to crap out after about a year’s use. This one could rival the 360 RRoD as a source of headache for gamers and Blu-ray owners alike, with upwards of 10% to 15% of PS3s being affected. This number is a conservative estimate based on forum posts, first hand accounts of retailers and online poll results.

That’s the news for this week. More next week as usual. Hasta la vista.

May 2008’s NPD figures are out. While not entirely surprising, but it is still somewhat of a shock that GTA IV had absolutely no effect on console sales, and April wasn’t just a statistical anomaly. The Wii is on a wiinner and it’s outselling both the PS3 and the Xbox 360 left and right. The PS3, at least, can claim to have beaten the 360, but as you will read on, the signs are not all that great for both of these console heavy hitters, not when the featherweight is running away with it like that. My prediction from last month was not correct at all, as there wasn’t a bump in hardware sales due to GTA IV. The while I was right in that the 360’s lead would narrow, it has narrowed so much that it’s now a negative. But I least I got the bit about GTA IV selling well and the 360 version selling better right, although any idiot with a keyboard could have come up with that. You can read last month’s analysis here. The figures are from NPD, a marketing research firm that releases games console sale data every month.

The figures for US sales in May are below, ranked in order of number of sales:

As mentioned above, GTA IV had almost no effect on console sales. This is a bit odd, but if you think about it, perhaps makes sense. GTA IV is the game that everybody knew was coming, and it is very likely the people who wanted the game will have purchased consoles ahead of time. If GTA IV had been the first good game on either consoles, then perhaps this would lead to bigger hardware sales as people who waited now finally have a reason to go for it. But that’s not the case, since both the 360 and to a lesser degree, the PS3, already have a pretty good range of games to attract even sandbox style game fans like myself (Crackdown, Saints Row are two examples for the 360).

Sony will be the happier of the two companies. The PS3 outselling the 360 might be a fixture for the future, but I can’t help but feel that, at least when compared to the Wii, both consoles are plateauing or decline, with the 360 declining a bit faster than the PS3. The PS3 is also more than just a games console, it is (in my opinion anyway) the best Blu-ray player on the market for now, so even if it isn’t selling as a games console, it will sell as a Blu-ray player. I have a PS3 and I don’t play games on it, but it is probably the most used piece of equipment in my home theatre at the moment.

Both consoles will have to do several things before it can fully take on the Wii. Microsoft may look towards having a Wii style controller, which when added to its very good Xbox Live Arcade system, might mean cheap Wii style games in HD – quite attractive for those that like the Wii’s control system, but not the (sub) SD graphics. Making the “box” more attractive, at least more reliable and less noisy, should also be on the list of “todos” at Microsoft HQ. The PS3 will simply have to drop in price to make it competitive, plus time will give it a better games lineup as compared to the 360. So it’s not over for either consoles, but their current way of thinking does seem a bit outdated compared to what’s happening around them.

I won’t say too much about Nintendo and the Wii , except to say that they’ve been extremely clever in marketing games to non gamers. What was once considered a suicide mission by many in the industry now look like a stroke of genius (as often the case). Even the DS is marketed differently than say the PSP, which is still aimed at the traditional male demographic. When girls barely in primary school are playing DS, you know you’re onto something.

Let’s have a look at the software figures now. Again it highlights the problem for both Microsoft and Sony. While both had a top 10 title, with Microsoft occupying the top position, it is still a disappointing month for both console giants as Nintendo almost dominated every other position. The only good news for Microsoft this month was that GTA IV on the 360 outsold the PS3 again, this time by an even bigger margin to take it into an almost exactly 2:1 lead (66.3% versus 33.7%). The PS3 only had one game in the top 10 at 4th, which was GTA IV.

1. Grand Theft Auto IV (Xbox 360, Rockstar) – 871,000
2. Mario Kart w/ Wheel (Wii, Nintendo) – 784,700
3. Wii Fit w/Board (Wii, Nintendo) – 687,700 
4. Grand Theft Auto IV (PS3, Rockstar) – 442,900
5. Wii Play w/ Remote (Wii, Nintendo) – 294,600
6. Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii, Nintendo) – 171,100
7. Iron Man (PS2, Sega) – 130,600
8. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (Wii, Activision) – 116,800
9. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon:  Explorers of Darkness (DS, Nintendo) – 107,000
10. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon:  Explorers of Time (DS, Nintendo) – 102,000

So while Nintendo has dominated hardware sales for a long time now, that hardware dominance is finally translating into software sales. The Wii, out of the top 10 titles, held 55.4% of the market, with the Xbox 360 down to 23.5% and the PS3 at 12%. The only slight problem for Nintendo, and I mentioned it last month too, is that all of it’s top games are first party games, games that are made by Nintendo. It seems other software publishers either don’t want to, or don’t know how to yet make good games for the console, which is a tricky proposition compared to your standard video game (and standard control system). But as long as Nintendo can come out with innovations such as Wii Fit every year or so, the Wii looks set to dominate for a long time.

So onto June next. I don’t think I will make a prediction, but things will probably look similar to this month. Maybe the 360/PS3 positions will be reversed, or the lead narrowed/deepened depending on what games are coming out, but it won’t really make much of a difference to the Wii’s lead anyway. And with GTA IV sales dropping back, total software sales will be down, and it will be interesting to see if Mario Kart and/or Wii Fit can even claim top spot for next month. Until then, have a good one!

Still a little bit late this week, but nowhere near as bad as last week. Just having an extremely slow day today for some reason, and weren’t able to get around to do this week’s WNR until just now. No exploding transformers to blame this week.

Let’s start with copyright news as per usual. In another case of copyright gone map, the MPAA has sued two printers. That’s right, two printers. What happened was that some researchers decided to spoof some IP addresses and see if the MPAA’s “piracy catcher” can be fooled into thinking some fake IPs (associated with the printers) are actually pirates. This proves that the MPAA’s piracy detection method is far from foolproof, and this should be interesting for future court cases. The music industry has finally gotten around to suing members of OiNK, the music sharing site that was closed some time ago. Six members have been sued, so I guess only a couple of hundred thousand more to go! And even the big boys aren’t safe, as I hinted at last week – Yahoo has been sued by an India music company. Search engines probably link to more illegal activity than any other site, but that’s the way search engines work – bots don’t care or know what is legal and what is illegal, so why should search engines be punished for something they did not create (and only link to, and not intentionally either)? But I’m sure the big boys can take care of themselves. It’s the little guys that we all need to worry about, because we could be next!

And Canada is going after the little guys by introducing a $500 fine for illegal downloads. Will the police enforce this? Do they have the technical ability to monitor, detect and not get fooled by IP spoofing? And just because I downloaded something illegal, how can you prove that I did it intentionally, or perhaps just followed the wrong link somewhere?

Onto HD news now, most of this week’s news has been computer related, which I guess will be one of the major markets that the Blu-ray people will go after. First up, LG announced a 6x Blu-ray burner drive, finally getting burn speeds that won’t make you wait an hour or more to burn an entire disc. What is also interesting, as I pointed out in the link, is that LG is heavily discounting their older Blu-ray burner drives, which also reads HD DVDs … I’ve seen them for less than $ 280, down from their original price of more than $500 here in Australia. Could be a good bargain to pick up, especially if you have some HD DVD discs (the fire sales are still going on, with most of the new ones happening in the UK). Of course, having a drive is probably not enough to play movies, if your computer is not up to scratch. Blu-ray playback is one of the more processor intensive activities you will do on your computer, not that much behind playing the latest games at the higher quality and resolutions. So if your computer is not up to it, you can buy a Blu-ray decoder card which takes most of the work away from your CPU/GPU to give you smooth Blu-ray playback. Those who are old enough will remember the Sigma RealMagic line of DVD decoder cards that were popular towards the end of the 90’s – this is basically the same thing for a new century.

For those that do have the power required, but still scratching their heads wondering how to get true high bitrate audio from the Blu-ray discs to your AV receiver, you can use Asus’ new HDMI sound card to transport the audio streams to your receiver to decode (or decode them in software/on the card and output up to 7.1 channels in PCM). It was always a matter of time before HDMI sound cards became available, although since HDMI is also used for video, there is some confusion as to who should be making these cards: the graphics card companies, or the audio card companies. I think you will see similar offerings from traditional graphics card manufacturers too (and since Asus makes both types of cards, they are the perfect candidate to be releasing something like this).

Before moving onto gaming, I must mention the PS3 again as a Blu-ray player. It still makes more sense now than building a dedicated computer based solution. Of course, as a Blu-ray player, the PS3 is hardly the most efficient power user – something like 10W for standalones compared to 160W for the PS3. But the PS3 has many uses, and you can now even turn one into a fully fleged computer running Linux (Ubuntu), and dual-boot into the normal PS3 operating system with ease (and hence, not ruining any of the PS3’s original functionalities). All you need is a bigger hard-drive, because 40/60/80 GB is not big enough. But the trend these days is on the small and efficient, not the big, powerful and versatile. Asus’ Eee PC is just the first in a line of new portable computer designed to not to do everything, but to do enough to warrant a place in your home.

Properly onto gaming now, the PS3 wants to be a Wii. The Wii-envy by Microsoft and Sony is beginning to become quite obvious. PS3 games can also now using in game advertising to generate income. Perhaps this will lead to cheaper game prices. Nielsen, the well known research agency, has come up with figures showing that the Xbox 360 dominates the console usage charts, with both young and older users preferring it over the Wii (second place) and the PS3 (third place). If a serious problem like the RRoD haven’t killed off the Xbox 360, then there’s a good reason and it is because it’s a great games console, despite all the problems. The Wii might be innovative and fun to use, but I haven’t used mine for weeks now, and I still haven’t used the PS3 for gaming yet. Bad news for 360 owners though is that the exclusive downloads for GTA IV is being delayed to early 2009, as opposed to late 2008. Not a huge problem of course as there’s just so much stuff to do in GTA IV that I don’t think people will be finished with the main game by then (well, not me anyway, but I’m the type to stretch out a game over a really really long time – I still haven’t finished Twilight Princess!).

That’s the news for this week. The website (and myself) is still recovering from the great datacenter disaster of 2008. Next week should see slowly come back to normal. Can’t say that for me personally though, since I haven’t been normal since I was a little kid (and I wasn’t that normal back then either).

“Better late than never” is probably the best phrase to use right now. As you may have read about elsewhere, the server in which this site/blog was hosted went down around Saturday evening (US central time) and did not come back up until late Sunday evening, a downtime of about 30 hours. You can read the details of this incident here.

Anyway, the show must go on and I bring you this late edition of the WNR. The last few days haven’t been very pleasant, and I’m sure it was more unpleasant for the people who worked hard to restore services.

In copyright news, in a reverse of what normally happens, someone working for a bittorrent tracker has managed to infiltrate into an anti-piracy lobby. I’m sure very useful information was obtained which would help protect trackers from further assaults in the future. And these assaults are gathering pace too, with Usenet indexers the next target. These lobby groups and organisations, such as the MPAA, are very powerful indeed and somewhat shady in their dealings with various government bodies around the world (but then again, which lobby group isn’t?). Even the big boys, this time Google, is struggling to deal with the assuault by anti-piracy groups which could threaten the very foundations of the modern Internet. I know Google have their own self interests to take care of, but when they say the situation is this serious, I tend to believe them. There will be a day when lawmakers and judges make a new law or ruling that will threaten the very existence of the Internet, because if linking to (but not hosting) questionable content is illegal, then the Internet itself is under thread. The nature of the Internet is a web of links, so every site can be linked eventually to any other site. Google’s search engine links to probably every site in the world … some of them are indeed questionable, but does that make Google liable for these bad links, or the people who actually created and host the bad content?

And what about when people download something illegal. Is it the fault of the person who did it, or the fault of the ISP who allowed the person to do it? Groups like the RIAA or MPAA seem to want ISPs to take action and filter out “bad” content, as it’s much easier to control (and sue) ISPs than it is to tackle individuals. When big businesses force other businesses such as ISPs to determine what you can and cannot do with services you’ve paid for, then we’re in real trouble folks!

Onto HD news, good news for Michael Bay’s Transformers fans, the Blu-ray version of Transformers is coming to a store near you in September. Michael Bay has been a proponent of Blu-ray for quite a while, even though Transformers up until now has only been available in HD exclusively on the HD DVD format. It will be interesting to see if Blu-ray technology can turn a bad piece of filmmaking and scripting into a good movie. More good news, but this time for a good Director’s good movies, is that Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy is being worked on for Blu-ray as I type, with a tentative release date of 2009. I already have 2 copies of each movie (standard and the collector’s edition), but I think I might want this third copy too.

There are also some good news in hardware too, with Wal-Mart introducing $298 Blu-ray players. The players, under the Magnavox brand and manufactured by Funai (as reported in the WNR two editions ago), are only Profile 1.1 though, which lacks support for Internet connected features (Profile 2.0) found in quite a few new movie releases. And for $50 more, you can pick up a Samsung Blu-ray player that does support Profile 2.0 and more audio decoding features, so perhaps it isn’t a bargain after all. Once players reach down to $198, then we might see a surge in sales. At the other end of the hardware pricing scale, is this new Blu-ray/HDD (500 GB) recorder by Panasonic. Retailing for more than $2,000, it is strictly in the realm of early adopters, and with news of a new 1 TB (that’s 1,000 GB) disc format that is backwards compatible with Blu-ray, perhaps Blu-ray as a recording format won’t even get off the ground. Even Sony is moving away from Blu-ray based camcorders to use solid state storage, which is cheaper, faster and comes in larger capacities (and less prone to damage too). And what about Blu-ray audio-only discs? One is available already, and there’s no technical reason why they cannot be produced en mass since it’s basically just a normal Blu-ray movie with a static video track.

Toshiba (haven’t mentioned them in a while) is trying to get back into the digital video scene by releasing updated specs for the DVD format, which allows HD content to be stored on regular DVDs and played back on enhanced DVD players. Toshiba is a major player in the DVD industry, having received most of the royalties from the format, so is Blu-ray fails, then enhanced DVD+HD might be more attractive to consumers. I doubt it though, because I think the boat has been missed in regards to upgrading the DVD format, which was Toshiba first suggestion when Sony came up with Blu-ray. But there is no reason why you cannot store 720p content onto a dual layer DVD and still get excellent quality. But it will mean an upgrade to the hardware anyway to add new video decoding suppoirt, even though the disc format hasn’t changed.

In gaming news, the Xbox 360 has basically won the GTA IV war as more and mores stats indicate it has benefited more than the PS3. One will have to wait to see if this is a long term victory, or just the last hurrah before the PS3 takes over as the dominant console of this generation, but only if you completely ignore that little white box with the blue glowing lights and funny controllers. Microsoft and Sony likes to dismiss it as a fad, even though both are working on similar style controllers for their own systems.

And how everything could have been so different, with Sony finally admitting that the PS3 was on life support during it’s very much trouble launch. Had the PS3 failed then, albeit very unlikely to happen in any case due to the PS2’s dominance, Blu-ray would have lost too and who knows what other changes there might have been. A HD DVD based Toshiba GameStation? A Sony PS4 that is basically a clone of the Wii? An Xbox 720 that still RRoDs within the first three months? Actually that last part might not be too far off from the truth …

Okay, that’s it for “this” week. More WNR in 5 days time, hopefully the server will still be online at that time.

Just before Toshiba threw in the towel, I ran a poll on Digital Digest asking our visitors when they were planning on getting into high def (either Blu-ray or HD DVD). Shortly after Toshiba had broken the hearts of HD DVD supporters worldwide, I ran another very similar poll, this time asking people with the knowledge that Blu-ray has won the format war when they were going to get into Blu-ray. The two polls, when you analyse the results, paints what I thought was a very interesting picture. Then there’s the poll that I’m currently running, which is about Blu-ray hardware pricing.

Just a note to say that none of these polls are scientific in nature. They are more just a general indication of the feelings of people who have found this website.

Let look at the first poll, results below:

It’s interesting to note that a large percentage of people who voted had already gotten into Blu-ray or HD DVD, which I guess for a website of this nature, it isn’t too surprising. What wasn’t too surprising back then was the fact that an equally large number of people were waiting for the format war to end before jumping into either format. The rest of the people were split between waiting a certain time prior or not wanting to get into HD at all. Remember that this poll was taken just before HD DVD folded, but it was at a time when the writing was already on the wall.

Now let’s look at the second poll:

Now the above two polls couldn’t have been more than a month apart, but the results are somewhat different. Around 10% of the people polled still didn’t want anything to do with HD. Another 10% in both polls signalled that they wanted to wait another 6 months. But it seem the people who said they were waiting for the format war to end basically switched to the “when DVDs are no longer available” camp, and a bunch of former HD DVD supporters probably went with them.

While again stressing that these polls are nowhere near scientific enough to tell us much, but I thought it was interesting to see that the poll did manage to predict that there wasn’t going to be this surge of Blu-ray buying by curious by-standers (those waiting for the format war to end) and former HD DVD users. It seems when the format war was raging, people used it as an excuse not to get into HD, and when the format war ended, they found another excuse to use.

And then you look at the current poll I’m running (still not fully finished), and you begin to see perhaps just why people are staying away from Blu-ray:

Obviously, people are always likely to say prices are too high, but the lopsided nature of the result shouldn’t be ignored. I will run a similar poll about movie prices next, and it will be interesting to see whether the results are as one sided.