DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Once again, I’ll go through all the news items that have gone through the Digital Digest website and forum for the week (I’ve kept this up for a month, a new record for me in terms of keeping up with anything).

Starting with copyright related news as usual, slashdot has slashdotted an article about a website (which I will not link for legal and personal objections, but search for “tvboxset” on Google) that is selling DVDs for TV episodes. Not so strange, except that these aren’t original DVDs, rather DVD-Rs containing shows probably recorded off TV or downloaded. Now, why isn’t the MPAA going after sites like this and instead, going after regular viewers and even websites like Digital Digest? In fact, professional piracy outfits are making enormous profits using professional DVD replicators to mass produce pirated DVDs to sell for profit (usually to fund further illegal activities), yet it’s only Torrentspy that’s getting the MPAA’s attention. You’ve got to wonder sometimes. And speaking of targeting regular users rather than professional pirates, Ian Roger of Yahoo Music says that companies shouldn’t waste any more time and effort on DRM, which has obviously failed to stop music sharing and at the same time, piss off regular consumers. Damn right.

Now in gaming news, and as covered in my last blog entry, Greg Zeschuk of Bioware says that the Xbox 360 and PS3 are pretty much the same in terms of performance, and that Blu-ray storage won’t necessarily win the day for PS3. While I agree, having more time to think about it, there are certainly situations where more space is good. Things like if you want to package multiple language versions of the same game onto a single disc. Of course, this limitation can be overcome by distributing different language versions separately, and it’s not an issue of gameplay. There’s always the possibility of multi-DVD releases, and don’t rule out Xbox 360 one day using HD DVD as a gaming format if/when it becomes necessary. The Wii has a new firmware out that allows USB keyboards to be used. I would really like the Xbox 360 to support a keyboard/mouse combination for gaming, although it would give certain users an unfair advantage in online gaming. Meanwhile, Capcom has dropped PS3 support for its upcoming game Monster Hunter 3, and possibly other games too, due to “high development cost” on the PS3. Capcom seems to have a surprise though, with a countdown clock that is set to reach zero in two days time and the mysterious phrase “Prepare Yourself”. PS3 fans are thinking it will be a PS3 related surprise to make up for dropping Monster Hunter 3. The relatively poor PS3 sales is probably a contributing factor to developers switching their focus to the Xbox 360/PC/Wii platforms – the maths is simply, the more consoles out there, the more profitable a game will be. In an effort to boost PS3 sales before the important holiday season, Sony is set to release its 40 GB “PS3 Lite”, featuring less hardware feature (no emulation, less USB ports, no memory card ports and comes in a different color). I like this move, although I’m disturbed by news that the “full” version will be discontinued when stock sells out (in an effort to drive sales to the “full” version, I suppose). Sony should release 3 different PS3 packages, the PS3 Lite ($399), a PS3 Standard ($499) that adds PS2 software emulation and a 60 GB HDD to the PS3 Lite and a PS3 Pro ($599) with 80 GB HDD, full hardware emulation and all hardware features and. Simple!

And finally, to HD news. Toshiba says HD DVD player sales are back on top, but only if you do not include the PS3 (to be fair, the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive is not included either). But the sale numbers are so small, both for hardware and movies, that the release of Transformers on HD DVD might turn the whole sales numbers upside down (currently number 6 on the Amazon DVD/HD DVD/Blu-ray bestseller list, was as high as number 3). A quite different type of HD DVD promotion, to celebrate the release of Star Trek TOS on HD DVD, nearly 300 theatres in the US will screen the HD version of the episode “The Menagerie”. LG is set to release its second generation dual-format player, this time with full interactivity (minus BD-Live for Blu-ray) for both HD formats. If they can release it at $500 to $600, it will sell quite well I think (one/two hundred dollars more than a single format player is cheap insurance against not being able to play that movie you want because it was released in the “wrong” format). But it will probably sell for $999, which explains why dual-format players only have a 2% market in HD standalones at the moment. Shame. In the same article, the HD DVD people are already talking about private networked presentations. Don’t really know how it works, but at least they are talking about it while Blu-ray has yet to even announce a BD-Live network capable player (there’s no reason why the PS3 can’t be made to support it now, except for the lack of any software to take advantage of it due to no other BD-Live capable players being available, even from Sony). If HD DVD really wants to win the HD war, all they need to do is to perfect HD DVD/DVD combos (no more playback errors, and preferably do one of those single sided multi-layer combos where both the HD and DVD versions are on the same side), then for the studio (most likely HD DVD die-hard Universal) to release a single combo version for all their hit movies still at the same price as DVD releases. And at the same time, don’t release a DVD only version of the same movie to force even DVD users to buy the combo version (the “budget” DVD only version to come in a few months time). If HD DVD is really not that much more expensive than DVD to manufacture, then it costs the studio very little, and will boost HD DVD in a huge way (albeit artificially). It would make for a smooth transition from DVD to HD DVD as long as the pricing remains the same. And Blu-ray can’t even compete if they wanted to.  

That’s all for this week. Join me, the same time, same blog, next week for more WEEKLY ROUNDUP ADVENTURES!!

A few days ago, I posted a link to a news story which said that Australia plans to ban the sale of plasma TVs because of their power usage requirements. As an owner of a plasma screen, this seemed a bit excessive to me and sounded more like what a supporter of LCD displays would list as one of the “crimes” of plasma. It is true that a 50″ plasma screen uses an enormous amount of energy, some 350+ W. More and more people have large screen plasma TVs in their homes, and this obviously causes problems in terms of energy conservation. However, I was sceptical that it was only plasma TVs causing the end of the world as we know it. I had a feeling that that similar sized LCDs aren’t much more energy efficient than plasmas.

Doing some research, I went to the Sony website to check our their Bravia range of LCDs. The Bravias are often used as an example of the demise of plasma TVs, about how great they look and how Sony pulled out of making plasma TVs because they were doomed (even though that had more to do with the fact that they were sourcing their panels from other manufacturers, and so, could not stay price competitive in the long run) . The Bravias do look good, and the price is reasonable for their 1080p panels. But looking at the power consumption, I found that their top of the line 52″ model is rated at a massive 320W, only 50W less than a plasma of equivalent size (the Pioneer 508 50″ is rated at 369W). Not much difference when the fate of the world is at stake.

Then I looked at some other forms of display technologies such as front and rear projection. To my surprise, a 1080p projector is rated at 300W, although it will project a much larger image than plasma. A 50″ rear projection TV is slightly less power consuming at around 250W, but that’s still quite a lot of power.

An interesting website I found while searching for power usage data is sust-it.net, where you can search for the power requirements and energy cost of consumer electronics in the hope to find a model that is more energy efficient (the 103″ plasma at 1500W costing £413.28, $US 840,  in energy costs per year is interesting).

Anyway, it does look like energy consumption will be an issue no matter which type of large screen TV you use – the only solution is to not use large screen TVs at all. But as with all technology, they evolve and the next generation of OLED TVs promises to use much less power to deliver an even better picture.

Nintendo: Excellent Customer Service

Not content with having the most wanted and innovative console on the market, Nintendo is also doing the right thing when it comes to customer service. In a story I posted last week, Nintendo is set to offer up to four free Wiimote jackets to existing Wii owners to solve the sweat induced Wiimote slippage issue. To be honest, I’ve never had much of a problem with Wiimote slippage, mainly because I don’t play with my Wii in a very aggressive manner (this whole sentence sounds very dirty). But to prevent problems for those in the household that do suffer from slippage, I phoned up Nintendo customer service and ordered my two free jackets. The entire process was totally painless, I did not have to wait on hold at all, and it was all over within minutes. The lady on the phone was friendly, and I’m almost certain it was a local call center, not one in India or somewhere else. And best of all, it’s was all free (apart from the cost of a 20 cent local phone call), even the delivery. I don’t know when I will get my jackets, not that I’m in any hurry. I think it’s worthwhile to point out good customer service when you experience it, as most people only say anything about customer service when they’ve had a bad experience. To offer a free solution (not so free for Nintendo though, it will cost them over 20 million dollars) for a problem that really isn’t much of a problem anyway, and to not make you jump through hoops to take advantage of it … that’s excellent customer service.

Xbox 360 vs PS3

I know, not another one of these comparisons. Apple vs PC. Intel vs AMD. Star Wars vs Star Trek. All pointless comparisons. But I found an interesting (but somewhat dated) thread about the performance of the Xbox 360 vs the PS3, from a programmer’s point of view, and I thought it was interesting that the conclusion was that the differences are negligible. It seems common knowledge that the PS3 is much more powerful than the Xbox 360, how else would you explain the PS3’s one year release delay when compared to the Xbox 360 (just don’t mention “Blu-ray”) and the fact that it has more games in 1080p than the Xbox 360 (just don’t mention poorer framerates and visual quality of 1080p vs 720p games).

BioWare’s President, Greg Zeschuk, also says there’s not much difference between the two consoles in any case:

If everyone’s waiting for this huge gap, it’s just not going to happen. By the end of this generation both PS3 and Xbox 360 will look awesome. Maybe 1 per cent of the population might be able to tell the difference between the two.

The big difference is storage, in that the PS3 has Blu-ray, while the Xbox 360 is stuck with DVD (for now). But Greg Zeschuk mentions that the best game of the year, Bioshock, is a DVD only affair, as is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and as is the soon to be released Mass Effect (which looks great). These are all huge games with huge worlds and they don’t need to be on Blu-ray. And with hardware performance between the two not light-years apart (both only have 512 MB of memory anyway), it’s unlikely extra storage will make games look or play better (not without excessive loading times – trying to fit 25 GB of data into 512 MB of RAM is not going to be a smooth experience). What Blu-ray can do is to incorporate HD full motion video into games, but we’ve already seen that tried and failed when CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs first came out … FMV is nice, but it doesn’t determine whether the game is good or not, and with graphics improving monthly, FMV seems out of place as compared to integrated 3D cut-scenes.

I’ve just finished updating the Nero Vision 4 DVD authoring guide for Nero Vision 5. Large parts of the guide remain unchanged, which says a lot about how much has really changed in Nero Vision 5. The section that is changed the most is the menu creation section, which to be honest, seems a bit more complicated than before, although perhaps a little bit more powerful with the “Advanced Editing” mode.

The new 2D, animated and 3D templates are nice, and should be enough for most common usages and can be customized effectively. Otherwise, it’s pretty much the same old Nero Vision with the same old problems as before (read our DVD authoring tool roundup for the pros and cons).

Read the Nero Vision 5 DVD Authoring Guide.

Once again, I’ll go through all the news items that have gone through the Digital Digest website and forum for the week.

Starting with copyright related news, Sony is once again in the headlines with Sony’s chief lawyer person saying that copying songs that you have already purchased, such as from the CD to your computer, is considered stealing. This betrays the intention of content owners such as Sony, who want you to buy a copy of the movie for every single device that you want to use it on. So if you have a PS3, a PSP, a Walkman video player and a Sony Vaio laptop, then you’re screwed. And just in case you are wondering what could happen to you if content owners find you guilty of copyright infringement, a woman found guilty of sharing 24 songs has been ordered to pay $US 220,000 to the RIAA. Although I’m still not sure whether it’s a copy protection related problem or not, but Fox’s new Blu-ray movies featuring BD+ copy protection has been found to cause problems in certain players, and requiring firmware updates to fix the problem (and if you’re lucky, the required firmware might just be available). Later reports suggested that it was the BD-J usage in these discs causing the problem, rather than BD+, since a disc without BD+ from Fox also suffers from similar problems. I don’t know what’s worse, playback failure due to BD+ or playback failure due to a basic standard feature like BD-J when all the DRM layers appear to be working. It seem the priority of the Blu-ray engineers might have been to get the DRM working first, and then worry about the other small features like playback.

Onto gaming news. The Halo 3 version of the Xbox 360 hardware appear to be using a new 65 nm CPU, which is probably Microsoft’s solution to the overheating problem the console suffers, which is indicated by red rings showing up on the 360’s power switch indicator. While Microsoft has been generous in extending the warranty from the initial 90 days, to a year and now 3 years, perhaps they can learn something from Nintendo when it comes to dealing with design faults. The Wiimote strap was notorious for breaking and usually smashing into people (if you’re lucky) or expensive electronics (not so lucky). A better strap was introduced, and Nintendo offered to replace all older straps with the new ones without cost, and this seem to solve most problems. Now, Nintendo has gone a step further by giving all existing Wii owners up to four non-slip jackets for Wiimotes free of charge – all you need to do is to give them a call with your details, and they will send them out to you. All new Wiimotes will ship with the jacket from now on. Now this is what I call commitment to service. They admitted the problem, found a solution and offered to fix everything for free even though it will cost them more than 17 million dollars – if only all companies were like this (but I guess the 360’s problem was more serious, and they have already committed a billion dollars to fix the problem). The big PS3 news of the week has been the announcement of a €400 40 GB PS3 for the EU market, set to sell for €400. The catch is that it has no backwards compatibility with PS2 titles at all, limited to only 2 USB ports and no Compact Flash/Memory Stick and SD slots. I think the console will have a matte finish too, as opposed to the glossy finish of the other versions. The bad news is that once the fully featured models sell out, this cut down version will be the only one available in Europe (and I assume, in Australia too). This is the 5th version of the console to have been released as Sony tries to make the package more attractive price wise.

In HD news, Acer is to launch what it claims to be the first PC with a combo drive, capable of playing both Blu-ray and HD DVD movies. As a supporter for format neutrality, I hope it turns out to be the first of many. Back to the Fox Blu-ray playback problems mentioned earlier – it turns out that the problem was related to the BD-Java usage of these discs, rather than a BD+ issue, at least with the “Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer” disc. This once again highlights how Blu-ray is playing the catch up game when it comes to interactivity, with HD DVD’s equivalent HDi being used from day one to great effect (albeit not without it’s own compatibility problems at the start). When HD DVD are already starting to toy around with interactive online shopping via HD DVD movies, Blu-ray is still struggling with basic interactive content like Picture-in-Picture. And when Blu-ray profile 1.1, 2.0 are rolled out, expect more problems as discs requiring 1.1 or 2.0 players might simply fail on 1.0 players (most of which lack the secondary video/audio decode and persistent storage required to upgrade to 1.1). But the good news for Blu-ray is that the new layer of DRM, BD+, appears to be working. Meanwhile, a Japanese HD DVD presentation appear to show several Spielberg directed or produced films that will be released on HD DVD, at least in Japan. Films like Jaws, E.T, Back to the Future and Jurassic Park were shown. Spielberg has been quoted to be a Blu-ray supporter (I suspect he has been fed some non truths by Blu-ray supporter friends of his, such as how Blu-ray has better quality or how HD DVD is doomed). His movies were left out of Paramount’s HD DVD exclusive deal, for example, so it suggests that at the very least, he doesn’t want HD DVD exclusivity for his movies. The only one of his films scheduled to be released on HD has been Close Encounters on Blu-ray. But with many of his films “belonging” to HD DVD friendly studios, namely Paramount and Universal, it all depends on who has control over the release of his movies. Spielberg has always been slow to get on the next-gen video train, if you can recall how long it took his movies to come out on DVD.

See you next week.

I just posted a link to this slashdot story in our latest news forum, following up yesterday’s blog about BD+. The effect of BD+ was worse than first though …

Samsung’s BDP-1000 can reportely play the disc, but not without error messages and stutter. Samsung’s BDP-1200 and LG’s BH100 won’t even load the discs. While almost all players will experience increased load time (an additional 2 minute wait on the PS3, for example).

The worse news is that Samsung is not planning on releasing a firmware update to fix this issue for another ‘couple’ of weeks, while LG is quicker off the line with a firmware update being planned for 3 to 4 days. Of course, when manufacturers say they will do something within a timeframe, it will usually take a bit longer.

Artist’s impression of the BD+ logo – nobody knows what the real logo looks like because studios want to hide the fact that discs have them, so you could not avoid them even if you wanted to

If I was a owner of one of these players and a BD+ disc, I would be absolutely incensed. Having paid for a player that is twice as much as HD DVD, for a discs that support less features than HD DVD (unless you count BD+ as a “feature”), and I still have a wait a couple of weeks just so the damn thing will play? No thanks.

Coming after days when Sony BMG’s chief lawyer said that copying a song you already own for yourself (eg. from the CD to your PC, or to your iPod) is considered stealing, I guess this means that even playing the movie you purchased can be considered stealing too. At least you are still able to copy a song to your iPod, even though you will have to live in fear of Sony’s legal department. Maybe this is the whole point of BD+,  to make sure nobody can play it so nobody would know whether it’s worth copying or not.

In a related news, Kazuhiro Tsuga, who runs Panasonic’s (Matsushita) home electronics unit said that Blu-ray could defeat HD DVD by the end of the year. If victory means not letting your own customers play movies that they have purchased legally, then I think Blu-ray has already won!

Meanwhile us HD DVD losers will just have to cry ourselves to sleep after we watch Shrek The Third, Transformers, Star Trek: TOS, Battlestar Galactica: Season One, Anchorman, Evan Almighty, Old School, The Bourne Ultimatum and various other HD DVD exclusives to be released before the end of the year. Sniffs.

Update: I’ve read somewhere that the Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer problem is not related to BD+, and it might indeed be a BD-J (Blu-ray Disc Java) update related problem. The Day After Tomorrow disc may suffer from the same incompatibility. If so, then my Blu-ray: Buyer Beware rant last week might be more relevant than my BD+ rant this week. And even if it turns out to be a BD+ problem, then again this goes back to Blu-ray specifications and how they weren’t finalized at the time of release. Imagine what kind of problem people will be having when discs supporting Blu-ray profile 2.0 come out …