DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Regular readers will know I’m a big fan of MPEG-4 AVC/H.264. And it seems I’m not the only one, because pretty much every new device being released in supporting this new format. It would take too long to list them all, but the number of devices, websites and formats that are using H.264 is simply amazing. Just as a small sample of the widespread nature of H.264, you have devices like Apple iPod/iPhone/TV, Sony PSP, PS3, Xbox 360, Zune, and also websites such as YouTube, then you have to both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats – all rely on H.264.

I can’t recall a single video codec that has so much industry support in so little time. Perhaps DivX, but that was only because of pirated movie downloads all using it as the format of choice (now it’s XviD). And it’s only a matter of time before movie downloads are using H.264 too (some of the high quality HD TV episode downloads are already using it). The extensive support is mostly the world of Apple, which is a huge fan of the codec. Future applications for H.264 include HDTV broadcasts (imagine watching your favourite sports program in Blu-ray/HD DVD quality HDTV on your 1080p screen – wow!).  

If there was some kind of stock market for video codecs, then put your money on H.264 becoming the industry standard in the years to come.

If you want to find out more about H.264, have a look at this site I helped to set up. It’s got information and instructions on how to equip your computer with the right software to play H.264 movies, as well as some demo clips for you to download:

http://www.h264info.com

This is another regular feature that I might run on this blog. Every month, marketing research firm NPD releases sales figures for game consoles (including portables).

The figures for US sales in September has just been released, and here they are:

• Xbox 360: 527,800 (Total: 6.8 million)
• Wii: 501,000 (Total: 4.5 million)
• DS: 495,800 (Total: 13.2 million)
• PSP: 284,500 (Total: 8.6 million)
• PS2: 215,000 (Total: 39.3 million)
• PS3: 119,400 (Total: 1.87 million)

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that the PS3 isn’t doing too well at all. Some have claimed that the PS3 is selling at the same rate as the Xbox 360 when it first came out last year. But this isn’t 2006 anymore – back then, nobody cared about “next-gen” or HD gaming. And sales figures are only worthwhile when you compare them to that of your closest competitors. With that in mind, September saw the Xbox 360 grab  46% of the next-gen market share, the Wii was close at 44.6% and the PS3 way behind on 10.4%. Of course, September was an exceptionally good month for the Xbox 360 due to the release of Halo 3, so sales of the console will drop in the coming months. Looking at total sales figures, the Xbox 360 still leads with 51.6%, the Wii at 34% and the PS3 at 14.2%. Sony has gone from a 80+% domination of the previous-gen market with the PS2 (which is currently still doing very well) to a minuscule share of the next-gen market and this must be worrying for Sony. The only consolation is that since the PS2 is still doing well, when it is finally discontinued, there might be a large group of upgraders to the PS3. But this is still a long time away, and there is no guarantee that these PS2 users will all grab themselves a PS3, considering many of them might have already gone down the Xbox 360 route. Cheaper PS3’s will help, but when price is the only factor, the Xbox 360 and Wii are both still in a more advantageous position having been released for longer, selling in greater numbers and have the greater chance of discounting. And obviously, the number of quality games for the Xbox 360 is what is really driving sales, and with the highly rated Mass Effect Xbox 360 exclusive coming out in November, the holidays period looks like a good one for the Xbox 360.

In the portable market, the PSP continues to sell well, even though the Nintendo DS is still selling at a 3:2 ratio. I’m sure Sony would be much happier if the PSP and PS3 sales figures were reversed, but the PSP, Sony’s first portable game machine, is holding it’s own against portable heavyweights Nintendo. The reason why the PSP is doing so well might come down to the fact that the Nintendo DS isn’t really competing on all fronts with the PSP – the DS cannot match the PSP’s music and movie playback capabilities, for example, and if Nintendo’s “games first” philosophies stay true, it’s unlikely that their next portable will be able to compete in these areas either.

See you next month.

Time again for the weekly news roundup. Got a lot to talk about this week, so let’s begin.

In copyright related news, YouTube has launched its new anti-piracy blocker. So that’s 90% of its videos being blocked now, and the rest is made up of clips of Chocolate Rain Guy, crying Britney Spears fan “guy” and video blogs from people talking about things nobody cares about. Even the lovable dramatic chipmunk might have to be removed, since it comes from a Japanese TV show which is no doubt copyrighted. In news that I should have covered last week, a UK car repair firm has been sued for copyright infringment because their workers had a radio on while working on the cars in the background. Has the world gone mad? It’s like the story of the mother being sued because her home video of her baby, which she had uploaded onto YouTube and removed, because there was some copyrighted music in the background. I think copyright control lost all common sense. It’s suppose to protect artists from lost revenue, but how does a home video of a baby hurt anybody? Comcast has begun to block certain P2P traffic in a bid to stop piracy, and possibly (more importantly) curb network usage. ISPs sell you bandwidth when they do not have the network capacity to accommodate it if everyone was using the maximum. It has worked before because most people don’t use anywhere near their allocated limits. Unfortunately with the net becoming more and more popular, and downloads becoming larger and larger (watching 24 hours of legal YouTube videos can use up GBs of bandwidth), people are using more and getting closer to their limits than ever before. If the net is to continue to thrive, then somebody, either in the private sector or the government, need to step in and fund further network infrastructure, because there is only so much you can do to limit traffic flow before it starts to hurt the Internet. Went a little off topic here, sorry about that.

Now to change the topic entirely, in gaming news, the PS3 has seen a sale surge up nearly 180% in recent weeks in the UK. At first glance, it seems that the surge is due to the introduction of the cheaper 40 GB PS2-emulation-less version of the PS3, but sales figure show that people are actually buying the discontinued model (with PS2 emulation) for fear that they won’t be able to buy a PS2 compatible PS3 in the future. I share their fears, but I lack the money to do anything about it. This might have been Sony’s strategy all along, but it all depends on what happens after the PS2 compatible PS3 sells out – will they introduce another model that has PS2 compatibility, or do what they are threatening to do now, which is to stop PS2 emulation support altogether? If so, won’t that hurt PS3 sales even more? While the situation may be far from desperate for Sony, they are sure acting like it with the latest news that they’ve sold their PS3 cell chip production plant to bitter HD rivals Toshiba. In the short terms, this frees up money for Sony and allows them to concentrate on their core products. But in the long term, won’t this gives Toshiba control over the pricing of PS3 cell chips and so wouldn’t this mean less price cuts in the future? Certainly, it will improve Toshiba’s profile as a technology leader, and the cost of running such a production plant can be offset easily by their record earnings recently. Toshiba is also developing a close relationship with Microsoft? Will we see a cell chip in the Xbox 720 perhaps? Microsoft themselves are doing pretty well recently due to Halo 3. It has pushed Xbox 360 sales past the Wii, shipping double the normal monthly number of consoles and almost 5 times as many sales as the PS3 (which declined 8% in a month which saw gaming sales actually increase by 64%). It’s amazing to think that a single game, the third in the series in fact, managed to do all of this. Sony really needs a game like this to push the PS3 instead of relying on Blu-ray to sell consoles, but there appears to be nothing on the horizon just yet (as least no exclusives). It’s not all bad news for Sony though, – their their PSP is doing very well, not a Nintendo DS beater, but still enough of a market to sustain it for a few generations. Microsoft, meanwhile, is planning to sell a Xbox 360 that includes a built-in HD DVD drive. Personally, I think they should have done it with the Elite, but I also don’t think they will do it until HD DVD become a more established format.

On to HD news, this article goes behind the scenes to look at the development of the Transformers HD DVD and the advanced interactive/web enabled content for the disc. The Transformers HD DVD has been selling very well, in the top 5 of disc sales on Amazon (that includes all DVD sales) – it’s the kind of movie that will sell discs, not because it’s a brilliant movie (it’s not), but it’s the kind of movie to really show off HD systems. It’s also selling well because the disc is region free, and I know lots of people here in Australia that have purchased through Amazon, and with the exchange rate and the horrible pricing of both Blu-ray and HD DVD movies here in Australia (the price for the Transformers HD DVD here in Australia is $US 38, compared to only $28 from Amazon), no wonder people are sourcing their HD movies overseas. There is also the strange situation where some movies are released by different studios worldwide, and these studios differ in which HD format they support – a Blu-ray exclusive in the US might be a HD DVD exclusive in the UK. With HD DVD being region-free, HD DVD owners are at an advantage when it comes to buying overseas. Blu-ray owners, however, have to be vigilant when checking to see if movies are indeed region-free (a lot of them are), or risk buying a movie they can’t play. Region control sucks. In Australia, companies cannot enforce DVD region control due to our competition commission (ACCC) stating that forcing region control might be against the Trade Practices Act. This is why almost all our DVD players are region free, even from big brands like LG or Samsung (there is usually a code to unlock these players). I hope the situation continues with HD players, but so far, all HD players are region locked. Speaking of HD players, Toshiba has finally started selling HD DVD players here in Australia, and it looks like they’ve read my post about free movie offers and the lack of them here in Australia. Toshiba are now offering free movies too with their players in Australia, more details here. Hopefully, this will allow HD DVD to break into the Blu-ray dominated market here in Australia (it’s not hard to dominate our very small market, especially considering the competing format has zero standalone players for sale).

That’s it for this week. See you in a week’s time.

I mentioned in the last news roundup that Capcom had set up a countdown clock to reveal something. “Prepare Yourself” was the only clue as to what was set to be announced. PS3 owners, who were in quite a state after Capcom had dropped PS3 support for Monster Hunter 3, were eagerly awaiting this announcement to be a PS3 related surprise/apology from Capcom. Well, the countdown has reached zero, and the big surprise is Street Fighter IV, but no platform release information as yet (most likely cross platform). Around the same time, it was also announced that Lost Planet would make its way to the PS3, but this was met with a collective “meh” from the PS3 crowd – a year old Xbox 360 game is not what they were waiting for. You can read all the posts from PS3 fans on the Capcom forum on this apparent betrayal (the thread titles “I am _so_ done with you Capcom…”, “So disappointed at you Capcom…” and “Why Lost Planet?” sums things up). Then rumour circulated that there was to be a further annoucement on Friday – whether this is genuine or just some confusion in regards to the date of the countdown, we’ll find out soon enough (tomorrow).

Anyway, what I wanted to talk about wasn’t Capcom or PS3, but rather, this culture of fanboism (or the political correct version, fanpersonism). This Capcom “saga” is just one example, and it goes beyond simply gaming, to everything from Mac or PC to Blu-ray or HD DVD. I can sort of understand people supporting Star Wars over Star Trek, but to support and, dare I say it, *love* a corporate produced royalty generating brand name like Blu-ray or HD DVD? Have people gone mad?

I guess some feel the need to actively support something simply because they’ve paid good money and want some reassurance that their choice was the right one. But for a true fanboi, this is not enough. They must actively oppose the competitor with such enthusiasm that borders on fanaticism. People feel personally insulted if the product they purchased has been rubbished in any way, even when secretly they know the criticism is probably justified. Have we become such slaves to consumer culture that we must submit our loyalty towards brand names in the same way we devote ourselves to our religion, or heavens forbid, our sports teams?

Now before I go any further, I must admit that I too have been caught up in fanboism. As an owner of a Xbox 360 and HD DVD supporter, I can easily choose a corner to stand in, since the “enemy” for both the Xbox 360 and HD DVD is Sony. And I must admit, I have often posted here and in the forum a very clear bias towards the PS3 and Blu-ray, not that I don’t have good reason to do so (and also personal reasons that I cannot go into further). But sometimes even I am amazed at my emotional state when important news breaks, such as Paramount’s decision to go HD DVD exclusive, and news of Blu-ray’s further dominance of the HD market. I too, feel joy and anger as if my personal honor has just been lauded or insulted. Even with the Capcom story, I felt a degree of (I don’t know how to put it in more formal language) “wanting-to-rub-it-in-to-the-face-of-PS3-fans-ness”, even though the news means nothing to me on a personal level.

It is not enough that a new game is announced for the PS3 – it *has* to be an exclusive to make the news give you joy. It’s not good enough that PS3 owners get to enjoy Street Fighter IV, the first Street Fighter game in a decade, on the console of their choice. But the feeling that the same game will end up on the Xbox 360, well, feels more like a slap in the face than anything else.

Luckily, I have not fallen that far yet. I can still enjoy the fact that I will be able to play GTA IV on my Xbox 360 without the knowledge that it’s also available on the PS3 getting me down. Exclusive GTA IV content on the Xbox 360? Well, that’s just icing on an already delicious cake, nothing more and nothing to gloat about.

Okay, maybe just a little gloating …

I received my pair of free Wii remote jackets today in the mail. I phoned Nintendo up on the 11th and I was told there was a backlog that need to be processed before mine was sent out. I thought, okay, maybe a 2 or 3 week wait might be in order … not a problem I thought. I certainly didn’t expect to get them within only 3 business days.

I’ve purchased stuff online using expensive “overnight” express mail before, and even that has taken more than 3 days to arrive if you include processing, so to get something processed and delivered so quickly, all without cost, is quite amazing. Good work Nintendo!