Givent that last week's numbers in Famitsu show that the X-Box is being outsold by the PSOne of all things, I think we can safely say that its Dead In Japan. A disappointing start in Europe has been compounded with the insider news that total European sales so far don't even match what the Gamecube preorders have managed yet with a month to release, and Microsoft really were looking at struggling by just on their US sales. Bad news there surely means a desperate price drop must be on the way.
Its kind of a pity, actually - Halo really is very good indeed, and the launch titles generally are much better than what the PS2 saw in its first six months.
Sorry, I've got karma to use up here. It is true that this is an entire site for time wasting, so forcing your opinion of whats a worthwhile leisure activity on others is more than a bit off.
After all, its not like I've ever even played the game; maybe it really is this dull.
Its true that (partly thanks to the work of Criterion etc) its getting a lot easier to code the PS2, the main memory you'll stream those graphics out of is still a lot less than the PC title is using. I'm actually glad that they are optimising for the intended platform anyway, rather than trying to shoehorn the original into the PS2 architecture.
Not that I will play it anyway, as I don't have broadband...
Quite. An acoustic guitar and a digital video camera are a hell of a lot cheaper than genetically engineering dragons every time you feel like killing one.
I can pretty much guarantee you this will support a keyboard for chat; PSO on the Dreamcast did this fine, as did its sequel. As the PS2 supports standard USB keyboards and mice I can't see this being a difficult thing to implement at all.
"its very much a streamlined interface and to a degree streamlined game play"
Streamlined Gameplay says a different version to me. Apart from anything, the PS2 has a mere 4Mb of graphics memory (64Mb total if memory serves), so the 512Mb +32Mb graphics min-spec of Shadows of Luclin would send the poor thing crying home to the PSOne.
Thats because you have the US R1 disc (its overall better, however, due to superior picture and some good extras) rather than the Canadian disc, which does have its chapter stops in the correct places to do this with.
Robocop 3 was a film script before it was a game, its just that the film sucked so hard it got delayed, re-edited, re-shot and generally left down the back of the fridge until they snuck it out well over a year later than originally planned.
Of course, another issue for the 2008 turnoff is that ITV Digital have gone into adminstration and NTL (the largest cable company) is about a hair's breadth away from joining it there. So far, only the massive pockets of Rupert Murdoch have been able to make Digital TV stay afloat at all, and even before the financial collapse ITV Digital were having to race to replace their customers; 40% dropped the service each year.
Sorry, but if you really don't want to watch the film properly, then stick with VHS. You won't like DVD, with all its fancy correct presentation nonsense. DVD is meant to be for people who want to watch the film in the manner the artists made it - I don't want my experience ruined just because they are cheap and popular now.
With Pearl Harbor, at least, the warnings and animated menu intro on the second disc were basically there because they forgot to take them out; we made David aware of the problem and he is doing what he can to ensure that we can get back into the film as fast as possible by putting the FBI warning at the end and cutting the menu animation. If it weren't for DVD standards about never defaulting a disc to DTS (some decoders can pass that digital noise straight to the analogue section if they don't recognise it, unlike DD), the menus would go completely.
Having said all that, I don't know who is the DVD Producer for Fellowship, so I can't say what will happen there. As its has both DTS and commentaries planned (as with PH above), there will be some sort of menu to get through however.
Maybe, just maybe, you could hold this argument up for a 2.35:1 film in non-anamorphic NTSC VHS, but the picture quality of even a PAL VHS tape was enough to make me switch to watching the whole film, rather than the half of it some lackey sitting at the pan controls though I'd like to watch when I had a 14" TV.
If you seriously think that the director pays any attention to the pan and scan cut then you're usually mistaken. The only time they ever do is when someone like Ridley Scott has enough weight to insist that only the widescreen DVD gets released.
Fundamentally, DVD started as a medium for giving film geeks like me access to the best possible presentation of the film in, in a manner as close to that we would experience in a cinema. I'll be damned if I sit back and watch it get ruined in order to better suit people who want the whole of their 9" screen filled, just because they wouldn't know good composition if it beat their parents to death with a dead dog.
Thank God I'm not the only one here who doesn't want to junk half the film in the bin, just because it doesn't fill my TV screen. Oh for some mod points.
Mind you, the 4x3 version wouldn't either, thanks to the wonder of widescreen TVs...
Thats fair enough I suppose - it may well be that they took one look at the news about the 4-disc set of Pearl Harbor that Prior is prepping for Buena Vista and decided that they weren't going to be beaten.
I do know that with the film eating up most of the first two discs (and minimal menus on the second so you can get back into the film asap) the decision to squeeze all the extras onto discs three and four was taken, which seems reasonable to me. Apparently there are well past 6 hours of extras to get on those two discs, so they don't fit on one - he has already stated that he is dropping things to avoid it being FIVE!!!
If you've heard about the legendary four hour documentary Jackson did for The Frightners, then him providing the DVD team with enough stuff to fill these discs seems reasonable.
1) most DVD players do a frankly shitty job of actually performing 'an & Sc' on the fly
2) it is a HELL of a lot more work to encode than to just encode the other master you've already made for TV use
3) you only get rid of the bars completely when dealing with 1.77:1 films (which LotR:tFotR isn't)
but most of all (in my eyes)
4) Anyone who is dumb enough to buy Panned and Scanned DVDs deserves to be ripped off for every penny they have, the f*cking morons.
sorry, I got carried away there. However, if you don't respect the director's decision for what shape the film should be then I'm not going to respect your existence, actually.
Firstly, forget the 'dual layer, double sided' discs - every piece of research has shown that most people would rather have two single sided disc than one double sided one. Nice disc artwork rather than tiny, hard to read writing to check where side one is, the selling point of a two-disc set and the fact that plenty of people have multi-disc changers but no-one has a player that reads both sides are the main reasons.
Secondly, no offense to you personally but I trust the likes of David Prior and Charlie De Lauzirika to choose the optimum bitrate and encoding settings for the absolute best in picture quality than I do anyone on Slashdot. Most people here seem to think that MP4 is watchable. I've seen the original and Superbit releases of Fifth Element, and I can see the improvement. Mind you, I think that someone seriously dropped the ball at Lucasfilm over the Pile-O-Cack Episode 1 transfer, so you can tell I'm a picky git.
On an unrelated note, I only need to know one thing: is the Theatrical Cut going in the four disc set as well, or is there value in buying both (not that I won't probably get both anyway).
Really? I didn't know this. Does anyone know if this has been used to build an emulator of some kind? I've never seen a Jag emu, and while the basic Jag hardware is easy to find, I've never found a CD unit to get the VLM working.
Unfortunately, the actual answer is basically DVD, Sort of DVD and Even Less Like DVD.
PS2 is DVD with a couple of intentionally mangled sectors for copy protection reasons, just like the PSOne uses a mangled CD for its data.
X-Box is DVD with the boot sector at the start of the second layer, so its on the outside and early data will be faster. Also, current home DVD writers only do single layer discs, so copy protection is added as well.
Gamecube is a DVD-Mini (8cm DVD) with the boot data in the second layer again, but for added fun the layers are upside down (second layer is now the first layer and vice versa). This way a normal DVD drive can't even focus on the data as the spiral for the layer its looking at goes in the opposite direction to what its expecting.
So you really can't have a data disc read by all three at all.
"You need to re-install Windows from scratch, but you can't find your Half-Life CD key! What will you do!?"
Swear profusely and fail to do the install at all, of course. As with every CD key I've ever seen, its on the frickin' CD case. What, exactly, are the chances that I can find the CD but not the case that it lives in.
If thats how they worked here, then surely any half-decent late-model player (say, my Pioneer CLD-925) that has a decent picture and an optical out (normally used for streaming out DTS) could be persuaded to extract the raw data. You can't get more than about an hour per side, so thats ~1.2 Gb of digital data and however much you want to store the images at. I'd guess this could be converted to a single DVD pretty easily if someone had documented the storage format of that digital segment.
GTA 1/London soundtracks may not be available online, but since the game has the music in uncompressed CDDA audio tracks, you can just slap the thing in the CD player and carry on regardless (don't play track 1, as its the data).
Its been said above to some extent, but the problem isn't just that people can run their own servers (FPS games get their own servers all the time), but that bnetd is open. Once you've got source, you can edit out the license check fairly trivially - no license check, no need for a license. Replacing the check with a handy steal of the person's key may also be simple, depending on the exact method of checking used.
D'oh! The link wasn't given in the main text of that story, but in this highly informative comment that was linked to during it. I knew I'd seen it before from that thread, just forgot where.
Slashdot Mirror
Givent that last week's numbers in Famitsu show that the X-Box is being outsold by the PSOne of all things, I think we can safely say that its Dead In Japan. A disappointing start in Europe has been compounded with the insider news that total European sales so far don't even match what the Gamecube preorders have managed yet with a month to release, and Microsoft really were looking at struggling by just on their US sales. Bad news there surely means a desperate price drop must be on the way.
Its kind of a pity, actually - Halo really is very good indeed, and the launch titles generally are much better than what the PS2 saw in its first six months.
Sorry, I've got karma to use up here. It is true that this is an entire site for time wasting, so forcing your opinion of whats a worthwhile leisure activity on others is more than a bit off.
After all, its not like I've ever even played the game; maybe it really is this dull.
Its true that (partly thanks to the work of Criterion etc) its getting a lot easier to code the PS2, the main memory you'll stream those graphics out of is still a lot less than the PC title is using. I'm actually glad that they are optimising for the intended platform anyway, rather than trying to shoehorn the original into the PS2 architecture.
Not that I will play it anyway, as I don't have broadband...
Quite. An acoustic guitar and a digital video camera are a hell of a lot cheaper than genetically engineering dragons every time you feel like killing one.
I can pretty much guarantee you this will support a keyboard for chat; PSO on the Dreamcast did this fine, as did its sequel. As the PS2 supports standard USB keyboards and mice I can't see this being a difficult thing to implement at all.
"I ain't 'happy' about people pissing their lives away sat in their underpants online, no"
Care to explain exactly what productive life you want them to lead, rather than do what they enjoy without hurting you in any way whatsoever?
Or perhaps you should shut the fuck up before coming to SLASHDOT of all places and start spouting off about people wasting their time.
"its very much a streamlined interface and to a degree streamlined game play"
Streamlined Gameplay says a different version to me. Apart from anything, the PS2 has a mere 4Mb of graphics memory (64Mb total if memory serves), so the 512Mb +32Mb graphics min-spec of Shadows of Luclin would send the poor thing crying home to the PSOne.
Thats because you have the US R1 disc (its overall better, however, due to superior picture and some good extras) rather than the Canadian disc, which does have its chapter stops in the correct places to do this with.
Robocop 3 was a film script before it was a game, its just that the film sucked so hard it got delayed, re-edited, re-shot and generally left down the back of the fridge until they snuck it out well over a year later than originally planned.
Of course, another issue for the 2008 turnoff is that ITV Digital have gone into adminstration and NTL (the largest cable company) is about a hair's breadth away from joining it there. So far, only the massive pockets of Rupert Murdoch have been able to make Digital TV stay afloat at all, and even before the financial collapse ITV Digital were having to race to replace their customers; 40% dropped the service each year.
What about 9" TVs?
Sorry, but if you really don't want to watch the film properly, then stick with VHS. You won't like DVD, with all its fancy correct presentation nonsense. DVD is meant to be for people who want to watch the film in the manner the artists made it - I don't want my experience ruined just because they are cheap and popular now.
With Pearl Harbor, at least, the warnings and animated menu intro on the second disc were basically there because they forgot to take them out; we made David aware of the problem and he is doing what he can to ensure that we can get back into the film as fast as possible by putting the FBI warning at the end and cutting the menu animation. If it weren't for DVD standards about never defaulting a disc to DTS (some decoders can pass that digital noise straight to the analogue section if they don't recognise it, unlike DD), the menus would go completely.
Having said all that, I don't know who is the DVD Producer for Fellowship, so I can't say what will happen there. As its has both DTS and commentaries planned (as with PH above), there will be some sort of menu to get through however.
Maybe, just maybe, you could hold this argument up for a 2.35:1 film in non-anamorphic NTSC VHS, but the picture quality of even a PAL VHS tape was enough to make me switch to watching the whole film, rather than the half of it some lackey sitting at the pan controls though I'd like to watch when I had a 14" TV.
If you seriously think that the director pays any attention to the pan and scan cut then you're usually mistaken. The only time they ever do is when someone like Ridley Scott has enough weight to insist that only the widescreen DVD gets released.
Fundamentally, DVD started as a medium for giving film geeks like me access to the best possible presentation of the film in, in a manner as close to that we would experience in a cinema. I'll be damned if I sit back and watch it get ruined in order to better suit people who want the whole of their 9" screen filled, just because they wouldn't know good composition if it beat their parents to death with a dead dog.
Thank God I'm not the only one here who doesn't want to junk half the film in the bin, just because it doesn't fill my TV screen. Oh for some mod points.
Mind you, the 4x3 version wouldn't either, thanks to the wonder of widescreen TVs...
Thats fair enough I suppose - it may well be that they took one look at the news about the 4-disc set of Pearl Harbor that Prior is prepping for Buena Vista and decided that they weren't going to be beaten.
I do know that with the film eating up most of the first two discs (and minimal menus on the second so you can get back into the film asap) the decision to squeeze all the extras onto discs three and four was taken, which seems reasonable to me. Apparently there are well past 6 hours of extras to get on those two discs, so they don't fit on one - he has already stated that he is dropping things to avoid it being FIVE!!!
If you've heard about the legendary four hour documentary Jackson did for The Frightners, then him providing the DVD team with enough stuff to fill these discs seems reasonable.
It doesn't happen, because
1) most DVD players do a frankly shitty job of actually performing 'an & Sc' on the fly
2) it is a HELL of a lot more work to encode than to just encode the other master you've already made for TV use
3) you only get rid of the bars completely when dealing with 1.77:1 films (which LotR:tFotR isn't)
but most of all (in my eyes)
4) Anyone who is dumb enough to buy Panned and Scanned DVDs deserves to be ripped off for every penny they have, the f*cking morons.
sorry, I got carried away there. However, if you don't respect the director's decision for what shape the film should be then I'm not going to respect your existence, actually.
This DVD is an illegal pirate of the Oscar screener, in case you're wondering. As such, you can forget any idea of proper chaptering.
/. I don't really like the idea of importing illegal pirate copies myself.
Also, while there are plenty of 'f*ck tha MPAA' types on
Oh no, not again.
Firstly, forget the 'dual layer, double sided' discs - every piece of research has shown that most people would rather have two single sided disc than one double sided one. Nice disc artwork rather than tiny, hard to read writing to check where side one is, the selling point of a two-disc set and the fact that plenty of people have multi-disc changers but no-one has a player that reads both sides are the main reasons.
Secondly, no offense to you personally but I trust the likes of David Prior and Charlie De Lauzirika to choose the optimum bitrate and encoding settings for the absolute best in picture quality than I do anyone on Slashdot. Most people here seem to think that MP4 is watchable. I've seen the original and Superbit releases of Fifth Element, and I can see the improvement. Mind you, I think that someone seriously dropped the ball at Lucasfilm over the Pile-O-Cack Episode 1 transfer, so you can tell I'm a picky git.
On an unrelated note, I only need to know one thing: is the Theatrical Cut going in the four disc set as well, or is there value in buying both (not that I won't probably get both anyway).
Really? I didn't know this. Does anyone know if this has been used to build an emulator of some kind? I've never seen a Jag emu, and while the basic Jag hardware is easy to find, I've never found a CD unit to get the VLM working.
Unfortunately, the actual answer is basically DVD, Sort of DVD and Even Less Like DVD.
PS2 is DVD with a couple of intentionally mangled sectors for copy protection reasons, just like the PSOne uses a mangled CD for its data.
X-Box is DVD with the boot sector at the start of the second layer, so its on the outside and early data will be faster. Also, current home DVD writers only do single layer discs, so copy protection is added as well.
Gamecube is a DVD-Mini (8cm DVD) with the boot data in the second layer again, but for added fun the layers are upside down (second layer is now the first layer and vice versa). This way a normal DVD drive can't even focus on the data as the spiral for the layer its looking at goes in the opposite direction to what its expecting.
So you really can't have a data disc read by all three at all.
Hang on a moment. I missed this part:
"You need to re-install Windows from scratch, but you can't find your Half-Life CD key! What will you do!?"
Swear profusely and fail to do the install at all, of course. As with every CD key I've ever seen, its on the frickin' CD case. What, exactly, are the chances that I can find the CD but not the case that it lives in.
If thats how they worked here, then surely any half-decent late-model player (say, my Pioneer CLD-925) that has a decent picture and an optical out (normally used for streaming out DTS) could be persuaded to extract the raw data. You can't get more than about an hour per side, so thats ~1.2 Gb of digital data and however much you want to store the images at. I'd guess this could be converted to a single DVD pretty easily if someone had documented the storage format of that digital segment.
GTA 1/London soundtracks may not be available online, but since the game has the music in uncompressed CDDA audio tracks, you can just slap the thing in the CD player and carry on regardless (don't play track 1, as its the data).
Its been said above to some extent, but the problem isn't just that people can run their own servers (FPS games get their own servers all the time), but that bnetd is open. Once you've got source, you can edit out the license check fairly trivially - no license check, no need for a license. Replacing the check with a handy steal of the person's key may also be simple, depending on the exact method of checking used.
D'oh! The link wasn't given in the main text of that story, but in this highly informative comment that was linked to during it. I knew I'd seen it before from that thread, just forgot where.