HomeWeekly News Roundup (6 January 2008)
Welcome to this slightly later than usual weekly news roundup, the first for 2008. I actually nearly forgot today was roundup day, as the whole week has been a bit like the weekend.
Starting with copyright news, as reported a bit earlier, the RIAA is still trying to ban CD ripping, completely ignoring fair use. CDs do not have copy protection mechanisms, so it’s not against the DMCA since nothing has been hacked or bypassed. And unless someone rips and upload the music online, nobody’s copyright has been violated either. Content owners have really lost sight of what copyright enforcement is about, and the constant targetting of their customers has had the unintended effect of making DRM public enemy number one. Keep it up guys, you’re doing a heck of a job destroying the reputation of DRM. Speaking of reputations, here’s another story of DRM gone mad, as changing your monitor might mean you lose access to your paid content. No wonder people prefer pirated stuff. And sort of in between copyright and HD, PowerDVD Ultra has been updated to be Blu-ray Profile 1.1 compatible, and it now supports BD+. Good news, on the surface. But to ensure BD+ cannot be bypassed, Cyberlink has now made it impossible to playback BD+ titles that do not have AACS (eg. if you were somehow able to bypass AACS through third party software, which I will not mention by name here), and also to playback any HD content (including both Blu-ray and HD DVDs) from your hard-drive. If you want to keep these functionalities then you can skip the upgrade, but you will lose Profile 1.1 compatibility. So Blu-ray profiles have some use after all, to force people to accept harsher DRM or risk not getting to play advanced interactive content.
And now moving onto HD, and this has been a huge week for HD news. Well just like the story of the boy who cried wolf, the wolf finally came. Warner Brothers has finally gone down the anti-consumer street and abandoned support for HD DVD, becoming Blu-ray exclusive after May 2008. I’ve already said what I feel about this change of stance in the previous blog, suffice to say, the reaction on some of the forums have been quite hostile. Blu-ray fanboys gloating, HD DVD fans fighting back, and others selling their HD DVD players on eBay. I feel the people selling their HD DVD gear is a bit premature, there are still going to be some twists and turns before the war is over. It all depends on what the DVD Forum, Toshiba, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Universal and Paramount decide to do about it – as you can see, this is a list of some of the biggest companies in the world (Universal and Paramount added together is bigger than the entire Blu-ray studio camp, minus Warner), I don’t think they got to where they are by just giving up at the first sign of trouble. And your HD DVD gear won’t suddenly stop working just because Warner has gone blu – there are still tons of movies you cannot get on Blu-ray, even some Warner ones. A good time to pick up cheap HD DVD hardware and movies though. More good news for Blu-ray though, as the first Blu-ray enabled Mac might premier at Mac World later this month. For PC users, there is a look at the various HD acceleration performances of the latest NVIDIA and ATI GPUs, which is worth a look if you are looking to upgrade or build a new computer for HD playback.
And on that note, we move to gaming. Xbox Live users would have encountered some problems during the holiday period, as the Xbox Live servers were bogged down due to the ever increasing number of users (the holiday sales figures should be good for the Xbox 360 – several stores I went to just before Christmas were completely sold out of 360’s and Wii’s, with only some PS3s left). Microsoft has issued a “mea culpa” to Live users, and to make it up, will be offering a free Live Arcade game to all users (details to be made available soon). That’s nice of them, although it would be nicer if they had anticipated the increase in Xbox Live demand, especially so soon after it’s five year anniversary promotions.
So that’s it for this week. Keep your eyes peeled to this blog for more fall out from Warner’s bombshell, to see how the HD DVD camp reacts. See you next week.