Rather interestingly, the 360 release of The Orange Box has no region 'protection', so UK people who don't want to pay £45 for a local copy can import a US or Asian one for less and play that without falling afoul of the problems that these PC owners are hitting.
This isn't even a general rule; many 360 games (Beautiful Katamari, which hasn't even had a UK release scheduled, is the one that's annoying me right now about it) do carry region locking.
There may be more different bundles out there than I care to keep track of, but at heart every 360 off the production line is (bar the case colour) much like every other one, now. The HDMI port is now standard across the range, and all buying a Premium or Elite gets you is a hard drive of some sort bolted on the side.
Changing the actual drive inside the case for one version makes dealing with returns more complex, reduces their argument that should HD-DVD go down the pan and the cost of external BD-ROM drives come down they can sell one of those instead.
But most of all, the HD-DVD drive they use in the add-on has lower performance for both seek speeds and transfer rates than the internal DVD drive, which is why they won't let you use it for games.
Put it this way: in their recent league table of electronics companies, they placed HP - the world's largest PC manufacturer and responsible for far more stuff being built than Apple - well below Jobs' company.
And yet they quite clearly focussed on Apple, in order to chase headlines. They're guilty as charged, even if you don't like the tone of the article.
1) If you've used Handbrake, the files are fine as long as you downmixed the audio to stereo. Otherwise you're completely shafted. Handbrake does indeed make 'real' mp4s.
2) Yes, lack of support in WMP for.mp4 files is really effing stupid.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not getting the analogy. You're saying (quite rightly) that they benefit from people experiencing a poor quality or excerpted version of their media online and then going out to get the proper one. But then you're pointing to Radiohead's recent experiment in online distribution.
Which was many wonderful things, and I was quite happy to purchase the £40 box; I'm enough of a 'Head geek to have the Drill e.p. so that was a foregone conclusion. But I did need to make my purchase 'blind' - apart from the odd YouTubed bit of concert footage, much of which ends up sounding quite different to the finished song, I was asked to decide how much an album was worth before hearing a note.
If you're not planning on using it to watch TV, then don't spend the extra money on the one with a TV Tuner. If you ARE planning on using it to watch TV, then you should be buying a TV license anyway.
When you say 'MP4' files, are they actually.mp4s, or.mkvs that contain H264 files? I know it's a slightly daft question, but I've seen a few people claim to be hosting mp4s when they're really mkvs.
Anyway, assuming they are genuine mp4 files, what audio/video format are they? I regularly use Quicktime Pro to convert 720p trailers to.mp4 files with a straight passthrough of the video, but you've got to downmix 5.1 audio to 2.0 AAC for the 360 to play them. Then, because WMP has the problem you've highlighted, dump them on a DVD+RW to put in the machine directly.
The codec stuff will then be fine; the H264 video codec was in the Spring update, and AAC is the download for iPods, and should be sorted automatically by the 360 when presented with the file anyway.
Part of me would like to stream, but because my PC is at the other end of the house from my router it's on wireless anyway, and that just doesn't have enough reliable bandwidth for 720p files. If you're wired, I can see why you'd like to stream, but the only way I've found is asking either Nero or TVersity to transcode on the fly, and that's both messy and a short route to poor image quality.
I'd also point out that Microsoft already give new Live accounts a free month of Gold; just say that you only want it to be a Silver one while signing up, and they throw it in there for you.
So if giving people a free taste is the aim, they're already there.
As for the 'one remote' thing, the full Media Remote that you can either buy seperately or get free with the HD-DVD drive is one of those learning ones, apparently. I've got one but I've never gone to the hassle of programming it, because my Amp's remote is already set up to do that.
It may have taken the release of Halo 3, but the 360 outselling the Wii for the first time is still a valid news item, I believe. Microsoft should have been pretty worried if it _hadn't_ happen, but plenty of people were curious to see if it would be the case.
Yes, but unlike the old Core model that this replaces, it comes with a memory stick to get you started.
If you don't care about backward-compatibility (I don't too much any more. I was all excited when they made OutRun 2 work and played it loads for a fortnight, but then I went back to Forza 2) don't plan on having loads of Live games all downloaded at once (at 50Mb each you can fit several on a memory stick, and re-download ones you've already paid for before if you want to go back) and don't care too much about game demos or movies, the memory stick is fine.
This new model also has the HDMI port and seems to have the new Falcon chipset, so the lack of bundled component leads isn't a problem for most and it's ideal for people who already have 360s but want to get HDMI working.
Not supporting AAC, and indeed not supporting standard Direct Media codecs seems an odd choice for Rane, though I imagine they have their reasons not to go plugging into the normal DirectX calls. AAC does cost money, but it's a standard just like mp3, there for anyone who wants to license it.
For your second point about different formats, I understand Apple wanting to keep to AAC rather than mp3, but I do agree that a lossless format (Apple Lossless makes the most sense, as iPods don't do FLAC and WAV is a waste of bandwidth) without DRM so you can convert if necessary would make more sense than 256kbps AAC, which is a silly value to dial such an efficient lossy codec up to.
As I understand it, they're 256kbps AAC files. Which is good, because it's a much better codec than mp3. It's also something of a myth that only iPods play them; lots of other machines, from PSPs via Zunes and Zens to Nokia mobile phones can handle the format.
The BBFC have short guideline info on cinema releases, and a longer list on home release DVDs. There is a searchable database on the bbfc.co.uk website if you want info on any film, and they also run http://www.parentsbbfc.co.uk/ which as the name implies gives extended advice for parents.
Really? I saw a lovely restored 70mm print 2001 in, well, 2001. It was absolutely amazing, and a far superior experience to watching it at home on DVD for me. Some of the mattes were showing their age, sure, but the sheer screen-filling majesty of it was phenomenal.
There are plenty of things that really annoy me about my Vista install, but the main one is that at times it feels like Microsoft snuck in and replaced my machine with a 386. Or worse.
One big one is that it can look inside zip files tolerably well, just like XP, but when trying to extract stuff from them to another drive, I get a throughput of around 100 BYTES per second. Asking Winzip or Winrar to do the job properly works just fine, so it's obviously not something fundamentally wrong with my box.
Similarly, the inbuilt DVD-writing stuff is painfully slow, and then half the time fails. So I had to reinstall Nero, which I'd previously gone to some lengths removing due to problems with their crappy media codecs that they insist on placing on there even when you don't want their media player.
There's just something totally screwed with the OS file copying routines, it seems.
Something that isn't being streamed with 90% of the optical disc's bandwidth, would be a good idea. A lot of those unskippable logos aren't really covering anything.
The way the saves are set up in Dead Rising, though, they allow for those of us who can't sit down and spend 6 hours playing one game. But you still have to decide whether the situation you're in is so bad that you're going to restart and 'lose' a couple of hours' gameplay. Although it's not really losing, because you're still levelled up, and the feeling of playing through those first few hours again with a powerful character is completely different.
Zombie movies are all about the desperation of the situation, making choices about saving others versus your own survival risks, and I felt the save system did a fairly good job of reflecting that.
Unless of course, they're like me and value the price difference and some white plastic higher than backward compatibility. I need to keep my PS2 around anyway, as it's modded and I have games from all three regions. Plus there's the question of Guitar Hero.
Mainly, though, I like my consoles in white, which is one reason I don't have an Elite.
Quoteth the AC: "You can't so much as browse their catalog without giving up your name, address, and credit card information."
I thought that when I went to the site, too. But a quick Google for "emusic " takes you straight to the list of what they have for that band, and from there you can continue to browse.
e.g. www.emusic.com/artist/11592/11592805.html - their page of Underworld stuff.
I'm not entirely convinced emusic wanted their site to work that way, but seeing they had the stuff I was after is persuading me to sign up, so they probably won't complain too loudly.
George VI died and made Elizabeth II Queen. The BBFC is a part of the British State. It's also a far, far superior organisation than the "violence fine, as long as it's from a major studio" MPAA.
7) "4: Rise Of The Silver Surfer" comes out on HD-DVD in Europe, and we all know that AACS has been broken there. Once it's been recoded and uploaded to a torrent, it's not necessarily easy to tell which format the rip was from.
And if you're not a "serious" FPS fan with a painfully expensive graphics card, or just like playing on a 42" screen rather than a 17" one, then the console versions will do just fine, thanks.
I'm perfectly prepared to admit I'm not a serious FPS fan, which is why I bought a 360 instead of a whole new PC (my CPU isn't up to much either) when I wanted to play Oblivion; I wanted to play PGR3 and Dead Rising as well. That doesn't mean I wouldn't like to play UT3 when it comes out for my platform.
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Rather interestingly, the 360 release of The Orange Box has no region 'protection', so UK people who don't want to pay £45 for a local copy can import a US or Asian one for less and play that without falling afoul of the problems that these PC owners are hitting.
This isn't even a general rule; many 360 games (Beautiful Katamari, which hasn't even had a UK release scheduled, is the one that's annoying me right now about it) do carry region locking.
There may be more different bundles out there than I care to keep track of, but at heart every 360 off the production line is (bar the case colour) much like every other one, now. The HDMI port is now standard across the range, and all buying a Premium or Elite gets you is a hard drive of some sort bolted on the side.
Changing the actual drive inside the case for one version makes dealing with returns more complex, reduces their argument that should HD-DVD go down the pan and the cost of external BD-ROM drives come down they can sell one of those instead.
But most of all, the HD-DVD drive they use in the add-on has lower performance for both seek speeds and transfer rates than the internal DVD drive, which is why they won't let you use it for games.
Put it this way: in their recent league table of electronics companies, they placed HP - the world's largest PC manufacturer and responsible for far more stuff being built than Apple - well below Jobs' company.
And yet they quite clearly focussed on Apple, in order to chase headlines. They're guilty as charged, even if you don't like the tone of the article.
Short answers, then:
.mp4 files is really effing stupid.
1) If you've used Handbrake, the files are fine as long as you downmixed the audio to stereo. Otherwise you're completely shafted. Handbrake does indeed make 'real' mp4s.
2) Yes, lack of support in WMP for
Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not getting the analogy. You're saying (quite rightly) that they benefit from people experiencing a poor quality or excerpted version of their media online and then going out to get the proper one. But then you're pointing to Radiohead's recent experiment in online distribution.
Which was many wonderful things, and I was quite happy to purchase the £40 box; I'm enough of a 'Head geek to have the Drill e.p. so that was a foregone conclusion. But I did need to make my purchase 'blind' - apart from the odd YouTubed bit of concert footage, much of which ends up sounding quite different to the finished song, I was asked to decide how much an album was worth before hearing a note.
If you're not planning on using it to watch TV, then don't spend the extra money on the one with a TV Tuner. If you ARE planning on using it to watch TV, then you should be buying a TV license anyway.
When you say 'MP4' files, are they actually .mp4s, or .mkvs that contain H264 files? I know it's a slightly daft question, but I've seen a few people claim to be hosting mp4s when they're really mkvs.
.mp4 files with a straight passthrough of the video, but you've got to downmix 5.1 audio to 2.0 AAC for the 360 to play them. Then, because WMP has the problem you've highlighted, dump them on a DVD+RW to put in the machine directly.
Anyway, assuming they are genuine mp4 files, what audio/video format are they? I regularly use Quicktime Pro to convert 720p trailers to
The codec stuff will then be fine; the H264 video codec was in the Spring update, and AAC is the download for iPods, and should be sorted automatically by the 360 when presented with the file anyway.
Part of me would like to stream, but because my PC is at the other end of the house from my router it's on wireless anyway, and that just doesn't have enough reliable bandwidth for 720p files. If you're wired, I can see why you'd like to stream, but the only way I've found is asking either Nero or TVersity to transcode on the fly, and that's both messy and a short route to poor image quality.
I'd also point out that Microsoft already give new Live accounts a free month of Gold; just say that you only want it to be a Silver one while signing up, and they throw it in there for you.
So if giving people a free taste is the aim, they're already there.
As for the 'one remote' thing, the full Media Remote that you can either buy seperately or get free with the HD-DVD drive is one of those learning ones, apparently. I've got one but I've never gone to the hassle of programming it, because my Amp's remote is already set up to do that.
Not only that, but a very quiet external add-on. I can't hear my HD-DVD drive over the main machine's fan noise.
It may have taken the release of Halo 3, but the 360 outselling the Wii for the first time is still a valid news item, I believe. Microsoft should have been pretty worried if it _hadn't_ happen, but plenty of people were curious to see if it would be the case.
Yes, but unlike the old Core model that this replaces, it comes with a memory stick to get you started.
If you don't care about backward-compatibility (I don't too much any more. I was all excited when they made OutRun 2 work and played it loads for a fortnight, but then I went back to Forza 2) don't plan on having loads of Live games all downloaded at once (at 50Mb each you can fit several on a memory stick, and re-download ones you've already paid for before if you want to go back) and don't care too much about game demos or movies, the memory stick is fine.
This new model also has the HDMI port and seems to have the new Falcon chipset, so the lack of bundled component leads isn't a problem for most and it's ideal for people who already have 360s but want to get HDMI working.
Plan B: Don't let the arsehole get out of the car before you crush it.
Job done.
Not supporting AAC, and indeed not supporting standard Direct Media codecs seems an odd choice for Rane, though I imagine they have their reasons not to go plugging into the normal DirectX calls. AAC does cost money, but it's a standard just like mp3, there for anyone who wants to license it.
For your second point about different formats, I understand Apple wanting to keep to AAC rather than mp3, but I do agree that a lossless format (Apple Lossless makes the most sense, as iPods don't do FLAC and WAV is a waste of bandwidth) without DRM so you can convert if necessary would make more sense than 256kbps AAC, which is a silly value to dial such an efficient lossy codec up to.
My Radeon 9550 lets me down, so I don't even meet the minimum.
But that's my fault, for buying an XBox 360 instead of a new PC.
As I understand it, they're 256kbps AAC files. Which is good, because it's a much better codec than mp3. It's also something of a myth that only iPods play them; lots of other machines, from PSPs via Zunes and Zens to Nokia mobile phones can handle the format.
The BBFC have short guideline info on cinema releases, and a longer list on home release DVDs. There is a searchable database on the bbfc.co.uk website if you want info on any film, and they also run http://www.parentsbbfc.co.uk/ which as the name implies gives extended advice for parents.
All in all, I think they do a brilliant job.
Really? I saw a lovely restored 70mm print 2001 in, well, 2001. It was absolutely amazing, and a far superior experience to watching it at home on DVD for me. Some of the mattes were showing their age, sure, but the sheer screen-filling majesty of it was phenomenal.
There are plenty of things that really annoy me about my Vista install, but the main one is that at times it feels like Microsoft snuck in and replaced my machine with a 386. Or worse.
One big one is that it can look inside zip files tolerably well, just like XP, but when trying to extract stuff from them to another drive, I get a throughput of around 100 BYTES per second. Asking Winzip or Winrar to do the job properly works just fine, so it's obviously not something fundamentally wrong with my box.
Similarly, the inbuilt DVD-writing stuff is painfully slow, and then half the time fails. So I had to reinstall Nero, which I'd previously gone to some lengths removing due to problems with their crappy media codecs that they insist on placing on there even when you don't want their media player.
There's just something totally screwed with the OS file copying routines, it seems.
Something that isn't being streamed with 90% of the optical disc's bandwidth, would be a good idea. A lot of those unskippable logos aren't really covering anything.
The way the saves are set up in Dead Rising, though, they allow for those of us who can't sit down and spend 6 hours playing one game. But you still have to decide whether the situation you're in is so bad that you're going to restart and 'lose' a couple of hours' gameplay. Although it's not really losing, because you're still levelled up, and the feeling of playing through those first few hours again with a powerful character is completely different.
Zombie movies are all about the desperation of the situation, making choices about saving others versus your own survival risks, and I felt the save system did a fairly good job of reflecting that.
Unless of course, they're like me and value the price difference and some white plastic higher than backward compatibility. I need to keep my PS2 around anyway, as it's modded and I have games from all three regions. Plus there's the question of Guitar Hero.
Mainly, though, I like my consoles in white, which is one reason I don't have an Elite.
Quoteth the AC: "You can't so much as browse their catalog without giving up your name, address, and credit card information."
I thought that when I went to the site, too. But a quick Google for "emusic " takes you straight to the list of what they have for that band, and from there you can continue to browse.
e.g. www.emusic.com/artist/11592/11592805.html - their page of Underworld stuff.
I'm not entirely convinced emusic wanted their site to work that way, but seeing they had the stuff I was after is persuading me to sign up, so they probably won't complain too loudly.
George VI died and made Elizabeth II Queen. The BBFC is a part of the British State. It's also a far, far superior organisation than the "violence fine, as long as it's from a major studio" MPAA.
7) "4: Rise Of The Silver Surfer" comes out on HD-DVD in Europe, and we all know that AACS has been broken there. Once it's been recoded and uploaded to a torrent, it's not necessarily easy to tell which format the rip was from.
And if you're not a "serious" FPS fan with a painfully expensive graphics card, or just like playing on a 42" screen rather than a 17" one, then the console versions will do just fine, thanks.
I'm perfectly prepared to admit I'm not a serious FPS fan, which is why I bought a 360 instead of a whole new PC (my CPU isn't up to much either) when I wanted to play Oblivion; I wanted to play PGR3 and Dead Rising as well. That doesn't mean I wouldn't like to play UT3 when it comes out for my platform.