I'm HD-DVD only myself, and will stay that way until I can afford to put a PS3 alongside it. But most people I know with the format are already dual-format, because they're HT geeks. If they can still buy the Warner film, but just for the other format, the studio doesn't lose a sale to them.
But yes, Warner want the format war dead; it has started to cost them sales for SD discs from people who won't buy a player until the war is done, but won't buy DVDs that are obsolete. Going HD-DVD only wouldn't kill Blu now, but going Blu will kill HD-DVD. I doubt very much they care otherwise which format wins.
The thing is that since the run up to Christmas started, right up to this Warner switch announcement, the weekly ratio of Blu to HD-DVD sales has been static at around 61:39, despite individual big titles on both formats and a non-stop series of Buy 1 Get 1 Free offers on Amazon.com and in stores for Blu.
Far better for HD-DVD than the 2:1 to 3:1 we were seeing during most of the summer, and a hell of a lot better than the 8:1 or more that some Blu fanboys were suggesting we'd see by Christmas six months ago.
No, what really seems to have caused the announcement of the switch isn't the ratios at all, but that the raw numbers, and certainly raw profit numbers were far worse than expected. Loads of people sitting out the battle because they didn't want to back the loser, and loads of loss-leading promotion being run on both sides to ensure it wasn't them.
Warner want one side, any side to win, so the fence-sitters might dive in. They just jumped the way they thought might make the most difference.
[quote]But at least right now, I think there's a big window for someone who wants to "rent" DRM-free movies over the Internet. Make it cheap enough, and basically assume that a full-quality copy of it will take too much space for now, so people will only keep 5-10 movies around, if that.[/quote]
But that just can't happen. Firstly, because there really is no concept of "renting" DRM-free data files, because the customer never has to give it back at the end of the rental period. So you've got your assumption that people won't keep many files around.
Which kind of works on a locked-down system like the 360, where you've an artificially limited space that you can't archive data from. But a 500Gb external drive, big enough to store 10 packed-to-the-gills BluRay titles, 16 maxed out HD-DVDs, and at least 25 movies in 1080p if you start throwing extras away and still keep the bitrate at "acceptable" levels, in the UK costs around the same price as 3-4 BluRay films.
There's simply no way you can get Hollywood to sell people DRM-free movies for less than the price of the blank media to back them up, even if you could somehow afford the bandwidth costs on top of that.
When I bought my HD-DVD drive for the 360, the cheapest BluRay player in the UK was 4 times as much. You're right that there wasn't a lot of different on the software side, but I just didn't have the cash to buy a player.
Still don't, so no new movies for me for a while; I refuse to waste money on standard-def stuff that I'll end up replacing as soon as I can afford to buy another player.
I really, REALLY didn't get the point of those two lists in the original report, anyway.
Here is a list of the top 10 M-Rated games that aren't suitable for little kids
Here is a list of the top 9 E-Rated (and, curiously, 1 T-Rated) games that _are_, oddly enough, more suitable.
Well knock me sideways with a tickling stick, I didn't expect that to be the case.
I'm the same as you (except that I have a 3-year-old son, instead of a 10-week-old daughter) and will exercise personal judgement as to whether or not he will be ready to play games with violence, gore etc. in them when the time comes, just like I will with films. But the ESRB guidelines are a hell of a lot better than nothing.
The Vista limitation is synthetic for a LAN battle between a bunch of guys all set up with the patches.
What it's not synthetic for is tying into the Windows version of XBox Live, as all the crap to do that doesn't come with XP. Integrated play between 360 and PC owners was one of the big things that Microsoft was pushing with the game, and that meant Vista.
The XBox 360 will play Divx files if you either share them through Windows Media Player 11 or just put them on a storage device that your 360 can access directly (USB, DVD-R etc) and then find them through the "video" option of the Media tab. I've done it too, and it works just fine for me.
The XBox 360 Media Center Extender (the option just below "video" on the same tab), that provides a seperate shiny blue interface direct to your main XP MCE or Vista machine still doesn't work with them, because the expanded codec support in there needs to come to it via a Windows update.
The easiest way is to forget abuot Media Center for now. Because Windows Media Center Extender on the 360 is handled by the WMC team instead of the main 360 one, it won't play DivX files yet, anyway. There should be full instructions at www.xbox.com/en-US/pcsetup/xpsp2.htm I think, but the firewall here stops me from confirming.
The only gotcha I found is that while the 360 will play mp4-based.mov files, it will only handle stereo.AAC files. So you need to get Quicktime Pro (or something else) to re-encode the audio, which takes a few seconds.
Beyond that, are you using wireless connections? The bandwidth for streaming HD content via a wireless router just isn't there under 802.11g reliably, I find.
Except that even the summary makes it clear we're talking about Atlantic v. Howell, the case we're they've supposedly made this claim.
And what they've actually claimed is that they don't authorize transferring a copy onto your computer hard drive when the directory you place it in is under your Kazaa Shared Folders.
Which matches what you've posted. After all, they're not psychic; it's only by sharing the rip on Kazaa that they knew it had been made.
Technically, if you want to get all fiddly about it, an SPDIF cable won't take the bandwidth that HD audio requires anyway; it would need to be downconverted to either 16/44.1 PCM stereo or some lossy format from the likes of Dolby or DTS.
Otherwise you can pass it via HDMI (which has all the DRM handshaking that lets the **AA calm down a bit) or 6-channel analogue.
If it were a brand new standard I'd ask why they don't mandate a mere downconversion to standard bitrate PCM instead of full-on silence, but I suspect at the time that option was considered more effort than they thought they could be bothered with. Oh well.
I'm constantly being told of the wonders of XBMC over my current Windows Box plus XBox 360 setup. But the last time I looked, the Celeron 700 in the original XBox can't handle 720p or 1080p media decoding (it will, however, play back a standard-def Xvid file with 720p upscaling).
Have the clever guys behind it managed to get around that problem now? Because while I'm happy that my setup does everything I need it to after they added support for most Xvid encodes in the fall update, I do have friends without 360s.
Did you leave a game in the main DVD drive? There's some really stupid code in the HD-DVD player that causes the DVD to spin up if there's a disc left in there, and it's this that causes most of the noise on my system. As long as I take any disc out then playing a HD-DVD from the other drive is fine on mine. It's still a louder than an A2, mind you, so you're still a bit better off with your new setup.
Except that many 70mm releases (I'm particularly thinking of 2001's release in 1969 or thereabouts) had 5-channel surround mixes, so yes - the tracks are there for some.
Casablanca on HD-DVD looks like it was shot yesterday, the print is so detailed and crisp. So I can't see why that's impossible for The Longest Day, which already looks pretty good on standard-def.
Besides, Letters From Iwo Jima looks drop-dead-gorgeous in washed-out greys and blues. You don't _have_ to stick to the old classics for your war movies.
They've not had _that_ massive an increase in subscriptions, surely? Not when you look percentage-wise, anyway. And yet this is the first time I've seen it so flaky, ever, after years as a subscriber. Outright down we've had, yes, but this is like it's straining under some DDOS or something; everything is there, but slow as molasses and times out a lot.
They _have_ changed the encoding formats, however. Both AVC and VC-1 do an excellent job of removing macroblocking artifacts, and the space means that other compression artifacts are usually absent.
In fact, contrary to the grandparent, it's older movies I found the most pleasantly surprising upon the upgrade to HD-DVD. The likes of Blade Runner and Casablanca might make you go "wow" at the image quality for about 30 seconds, but then you just settle down and watch a film that actually _looks_ like a film rather than all those compression artifact compromises you're used to from DVD. It's not very "in your face", but it's instantly noticeable when you go back to watching standard-def again. By all accounts the same goes for BluRay as well, so as not to be format-biased about it.
Do you have a PS3, XBox 360 or PC you could hook up to your telly? Connecting my PC to play back 1080p trailers from the Quicktime site was one of the first things I did with my HDTV, and quickly convinced me there was plenty of quality over and above upscaled DVD to be had.
"You could buy this PC to use for a hardware project, such as for installing Windows Home Server or another flavor of Linux. For those purposes, however, I would recommend you just use that old Pentium III box in your closet,... "
all he means is that if your intention of buying the cheap box is as a spare for tinkering around with, the thing is so very slow that you should tinker with an old one you just so happen to already own.
Assuming you already own one. Which is a bit of a leap to make.
I don't know about "most" people, but I've got well over 1000 CDs sitting on my shelf, yes. And a perfectly good record deck that I was using only yesterday to listen to the new Radiohead album on vinyl - I got the huge £40 book version for Christmas, and it's a joy to behold, and craps all over the pay-what-you-will download copy for sound quality.
So yes, I've got an iPod's worth of legally obtained music. But I could just as easily fill it with rips from a fairly small part of my DVD collection. A backup of my home photos library could fill a Nano. Filling an iPod without resorting to installing Bittorrent (which I did once, to try Mandriva, but it killed my router so I gave up) is a really easy thing to do. Hell, there's probably the best part of a Gb in my Podcast directory, and they're free.
iPods do lossless just fine. They won't play FLAC, but Apple have their own Lossless codec.
Re: the Grandparent question, I've got a record deck too, and got my most recent slabs of vinyl (the big box set version of Radiohead's In Rainbows) for Christmas.
But that's rather academic; I've not done a huge amount of vinyl ripping because my library is north of 60Gb using legal rips from my CDs already, and I've not finished doing those (in lossy, I might add).
The thing with the Radiohead album, though, is that even if you could choose to legally download it for £0.00 the EMI contract they were previously on meant that they made more money off the people who were prepared to hand over some cash than they did off download sales of everything they had released through EMI. Put together.
Add in all us fanboy nerds who laid out the £40 for the deluxe book edition (which is worth every penny, if you ask me; it's just gorgeous, and cost me no more than I spent buying multiple formats of their last release anyway) and it's proved a very profitable experiment, even before we see what sales of the 'normal' CD are to people who helped themselves to a free download and liked it enough to get a 'proper' version next week.
Forza 2 is comfortably my Game Of The Year, and I think it's easily superior to the Gran Turismo series after many a year playing those. So I'd agree with much of what you said, particularly about the handling on controllers - it's just so much more natural to deal with a car too far past the limit in FM2 than it is GT4, because it reacts just like I expect it to.
To the point where I have an old Jaguar E-Type set up with a big engine and practically no grip, that stays within the class limit giving me insane straight-line speed at the expense of four-wheel drifting every other corner. Doing the same in GT4 feels either comedically poor or just undriveable. The points system is also amazing online, because I can take that thing out and have a tough but fair race against the VWs and the like that most drive at that class, instead of there being one 'best' car like many games suffer from (hello PGR3!)
However, I'm up to around Level 30 in the game without once coming close to running out of cash or ever repeating a race for a reason other than failing to win it the first time. So I've yet to see any sign of the grinding that others are complaining about - there are absolutely tonnes of different races to work through without doing the same one twice, and the game hands out free cars like candy that are perfectly fine for most situations.
Except that the whole "nuclear winter" thing works by increasing the albedo of the planet. Venus is under constant, DEEP (the tropopause is at around 65km up) cloud cover already. Greenhouse effects massively outweigh the cooling from cloud cover.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm HD-DVD only myself, and will stay that way until I can afford to put a PS3 alongside it. But most people I know with the format are already dual-format, because they're HT geeks. If they can still buy the Warner film, but just for the other format, the studio doesn't lose a sale to them.
But yes, Warner want the format war dead; it has started to cost them sales for SD discs from people who won't buy a player until the war is done, but won't buy DVDs that are obsolete. Going HD-DVD only wouldn't kill Blu now, but going Blu will kill HD-DVD. I doubt very much they care otherwise which format wins.
The thing is that since the run up to Christmas started, right up to this Warner switch announcement, the weekly ratio of Blu to HD-DVD sales has been static at around 61:39, despite individual big titles on both formats and a non-stop series of Buy 1 Get 1 Free offers on Amazon.com and in stores for Blu.
Far better for HD-DVD than the 2:1 to 3:1 we were seeing during most of the summer, and a hell of a lot better than the 8:1 or more that some Blu fanboys were suggesting we'd see by Christmas six months ago.
No, what really seems to have caused the announcement of the switch isn't the ratios at all, but that the raw numbers, and certainly raw profit numbers were far worse than expected. Loads of people sitting out the battle because they didn't want to back the loser, and loads of loss-leading promotion being run on both sides to ensure it wasn't them.
Warner want one side, any side to win, so the fence-sitters might dive in. They just jumped the way they thought might make the most difference.
[quote]But at least right now, I think there's a big window for someone who wants to "rent" DRM-free movies over the Internet. Make it cheap enough, and basically assume that a full-quality copy of it will take too much space for now, so people will only keep 5-10 movies around, if that.[/quote]
But that just can't happen. Firstly, because there really is no concept of "renting" DRM-free data files, because the customer never has to give it back at the end of the rental period. So you've got your assumption that people won't keep many files around.
Which kind of works on a locked-down system like the 360, where you've an artificially limited space that you can't archive data from. But a 500Gb external drive, big enough to store 10 packed-to-the-gills BluRay titles, 16 maxed out HD-DVDs, and at least 25 movies in 1080p if you start throwing extras away and still keep the bitrate at "acceptable" levels, in the UK costs around the same price as 3-4 BluRay films.
There's simply no way you can get Hollywood to sell people DRM-free movies for less than the price of the blank media to back them up, even if you could somehow afford the bandwidth costs on top of that.
When I bought my HD-DVD drive for the 360, the cheapest BluRay player in the UK was 4 times as much. You're right that there wasn't a lot of different on the software side, but I just didn't have the cash to buy a player.
Still don't, so no new movies for me for a while; I refuse to waste money on standard-def stuff that I'll end up replacing as soon as I can afford to buy another player.
Really? In which case I apologise; I'd swallowed MS's FUD that GFW has Vista hooks for security reasons.
I really, REALLY didn't get the point of those two lists in the original report, anyway.
Here is a list of the top 10 M-Rated games that aren't suitable for little kids
Here is a list of the top 9 E-Rated (and, curiously, 1 T-Rated) games that _are_, oddly enough, more suitable.
Well knock me sideways with a tickling stick, I didn't expect that to be the case.
I'm the same as you (except that I have a 3-year-old son, instead of a 10-week-old daughter) and will exercise personal judgement as to whether or not he will be ready to play games with violence, gore etc. in them when the time comes, just like I will with films. But the ESRB guidelines are a hell of a lot better than nothing.
The Vista limitation is synthetic for a LAN battle between a bunch of guys all set up with the patches.
What it's not synthetic for is tying into the Windows version of XBox Live, as all the crap to do that doesn't come with XP. Integrated play between 360 and PC owners was one of the big things that Microsoft was pushing with the game, and that meant Vista.
True. But PGR4 and Forza 2 are both immensely superior games, so the advice still stands.
Sorry if I was unclear:
The XBox 360 will play Divx files if you either share them through Windows Media Player 11 or just put them on a storage device that your 360 can access directly (USB, DVD-R etc) and then find them through the "video" option of the Media tab. I've done it too, and it works just fine for me.
The XBox 360 Media Center Extender (the option just below "video" on the same tab), that provides a seperate shiny blue interface direct to your main XP MCE or Vista machine still doesn't work with them, because the expanded codec support in there needs to come to it via a Windows update.
The easiest way is to forget abuot Media Center for now. Because Windows Media Center Extender on the 360 is handled by the WMC team instead of the main 360 one, it won't play DivX files yet, anyway. There should be full instructions at www.xbox.com/en-US/pcsetup/xpsp2.htm I think, but the firewall here stops me from confirming.
.mov files, it will only handle stereo .AAC files. So you need to get Quicktime Pro (or something else) to re-encode the audio, which takes a few seconds.
The only gotcha I found is that while the 360 will play mp4-based
Beyond that, are you using wireless connections? The bandwidth for streaming HD content via a wireless router just isn't there under 802.11g reliably, I find.
Except that even the summary makes it clear we're talking about Atlantic v. Howell, the case we're they've supposedly made this claim.
And what they've actually claimed is that they don't authorize transferring a copy onto your computer hard drive when the directory you place it in is under your Kazaa Shared Folders.
Which matches what you've posted. After all, they're not psychic; it's only by sharing the rip on Kazaa that they knew it had been made.
Technically, if you want to get all fiddly about it, an SPDIF cable won't take the bandwidth that HD audio requires anyway; it would need to be downconverted to either 16/44.1 PCM stereo or some lossy format from the likes of Dolby or DTS.
Otherwise you can pass it via HDMI (which has all the DRM handshaking that lets the **AA calm down a bit) or 6-channel analogue.
If it were a brand new standard I'd ask why they don't mandate a mere downconversion to standard bitrate PCM instead of full-on silence, but I suspect at the time that option was considered more effort than they thought they could be bothered with. Oh well.
I'm constantly being told of the wonders of XBMC over my current Windows Box plus XBox 360 setup. But the last time I looked, the Celeron 700 in the original XBox can't handle 720p or 1080p media decoding (it will, however, play back a standard-def Xvid file with 720p upscaling).
Have the clever guys behind it managed to get around that problem now? Because while I'm happy that my setup does everything I need it to after they added support for most Xvid encodes in the fall update, I do have friends without 360s.
Did you leave a game in the main DVD drive? There's some really stupid code in the HD-DVD player that causes the DVD to spin up if there's a disc left in there, and it's this that causes most of the noise on my system. As long as I take any disc out then playing a HD-DVD from the other drive is fine on mine. It's still a louder than an A2, mind you, so you're still a bit better off with your new setup.
Except that many 70mm releases (I'm particularly thinking of 2001's release in 1969 or thereabouts) had 5-channel surround mixes, so yes - the tracks are there for some.
Casablanca on HD-DVD looks like it was shot yesterday, the print is so detailed and crisp. So I can't see why that's impossible for The Longest Day, which already looks pretty good on standard-def.
Besides, Letters From Iwo Jima looks drop-dead-gorgeous in washed-out greys and blues. You don't _have_ to stick to the old classics for your war movies.
They've not had _that_ massive an increase in subscriptions, surely? Not when you look percentage-wise, anyway. And yet this is the first time I've seen it so flaky, ever, after years as a subscriber. Outright down we've had, yes, but this is like it's straining under some DDOS or something; everything is there, but slow as molasses and times out a lot.
They _have_ changed the encoding formats, however. Both AVC and VC-1 do an excellent job of removing macroblocking artifacts, and the space means that other compression artifacts are usually absent.
In fact, contrary to the grandparent, it's older movies I found the most pleasantly surprising upon the upgrade to HD-DVD. The likes of Blade Runner and Casablanca might make you go "wow" at the image quality for about 30 seconds, but then you just settle down and watch a film that actually _looks_ like a film rather than all those compression artifact compromises you're used to from DVD. It's not very "in your face", but it's instantly noticeable when you go back to watching standard-def again. By all accounts the same goes for BluRay as well, so as not to be format-biased about it.
Do you have a PS3, XBox 360 or PC you could hook up to your telly? Connecting my PC to play back 1080p trailers from the Quicktime site was one of the first things I did with my HDTV, and quickly convinced me there was plenty of quality over and above upscaled DVD to be had.
When he says
"You could buy this PC to use for a hardware project, such as for installing Windows Home Server or another flavor of Linux. For those purposes, however, I would recommend you just use that old Pentium III box in your closet,... "
all he means is that if your intention of buying the cheap box is as a spare for tinkering around with, the thing is so very slow that you should tinker with an old one you just so happen to already own.
Assuming you already own one. Which is a bit of a leap to make.
I don't know about "most" people, but I've got well over 1000 CDs sitting on my shelf, yes. And a perfectly good record deck that I was using only yesterday to listen to the new Radiohead album on vinyl - I got the huge £40 book version for Christmas, and it's a joy to behold, and craps all over the pay-what-you-will download copy for sound quality.
So yes, I've got an iPod's worth of legally obtained music. But I could just as easily fill it with rips from a fairly small part of my DVD collection. A backup of my home photos library could fill a Nano. Filling an iPod without resorting to installing Bittorrent (which I did once, to try Mandriva, but it killed my router so I gave up) is a really easy thing to do. Hell, there's probably the best part of a Gb in my Podcast directory, and they're free.
iPods do lossless just fine. They won't play FLAC, but Apple have their own Lossless codec.
Re: the Grandparent question, I've got a record deck too, and got my most recent slabs of vinyl (the big box set version of Radiohead's In Rainbows) for Christmas.
But that's rather academic; I've not done a huge amount of vinyl ripping because my library is north of 60Gb using legal rips from my CDs already, and I've not finished doing those (in lossy, I might add).
The thing with the Radiohead album, though, is that even if you could choose to legally download it for £0.00 the EMI contract they were previously on meant that they made more money off the people who were prepared to hand over some cash than they did off download sales of everything they had released through EMI. Put together.
Add in all us fanboy nerds who laid out the £40 for the deluxe book edition (which is worth every penny, if you ask me; it's just gorgeous, and cost me no more than I spent buying multiple formats of their last release anyway) and it's proved a very profitable experiment, even before we see what sales of the 'normal' CD are to people who helped themselves to a free download and liked it enough to get a 'proper' version next week.
Forza 2 is comfortably my Game Of The Year, and I think it's easily superior to the Gran Turismo series after many a year playing those. So I'd agree with much of what you said, particularly about the handling on controllers - it's just so much more natural to deal with a car too far past the limit in FM2 than it is GT4, because it reacts just like I expect it to.
To the point where I have an old Jaguar E-Type set up with a big engine and practically no grip, that stays within the class limit giving me insane straight-line speed at the expense of four-wheel drifting every other corner. Doing the same in GT4 feels either comedically poor or just undriveable. The points system is also amazing online, because I can take that thing out and have a tough but fair race against the VWs and the like that most drive at that class, instead of there being one 'best' car like many games suffer from (hello PGR3!)
However, I'm up to around Level 30 in the game without once coming close to running out of cash or ever repeating a race for a reason other than failing to win it the first time. So I've yet to see any sign of the grinding that others are complaining about - there are absolutely tonnes of different races to work through without doing the same one twice, and the game hands out free cars like candy that are perfectly fine for most situations.
You don't find those long, long legs attractive?
Except that the whole "nuclear winter" thing works by increasing the albedo of the planet. Venus is under constant, DEEP (the tropopause is at around 65km up) cloud cover already. Greenhouse effects massively outweigh the cooling from cloud cover.