DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Happy Belated Valentine’s Day. Hope you and your loved one had a nice, sweet and romantic day, full or roses and chocolates and other nice things. If you’re single, then don’t be too sad and just think of all the money you’ve saved!

No time to waste, so let’s get started on this slightly shorter than usual WNR.

RapidShare to cease operations by the end of March, falling popularity due to tough anti-piracy measures may be to blame

RapidShare is no more, or rather, it will be no more very soon. The cyberlocker firm, once the darling of pirates due to how easy it was to upload, and download pirated content from the site, then turned copyright reformer (complete with manifesto) and vowed to walk the straight and narrow. But perhaps too straight, and too narrow, so much so that traffic to the site dropped so rapidly (a-pun-logies) that I guess it no longer made sense for the site to keep running.

Which is a shame, because the site did provide a valuable service. That the service was abused by pirates, and also that monetization for the site comes largely via these pirated downloads, is just unfortunate. Services like Dropbox perhaps just had a better balance between private file sharing (useless for pirating), and public sharing, and so are able to survive, not just financially, but also legally.

The irony of RapidShare’s detour via the moral high ground is that it was added back to the piracy black list last year – so much for trying to do the right thing!

The PS4 and Xbox One already support 4K, although Netflix believes new versions with enhanced 4K support could come later this year

The first hardware revision for the PS4 and Xbox One may bring more than just a smaller footprint – Netflix believes (and perhaps knows) that the update, which could come before Christmas 2015, could also add 4K video streaming support.

If history is correct, both consoles will receive a hardware upgrade by the end of the year, probably “slim” versions that may also be accompanied by a price cut. It is during this update that Netflix’s Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt thinks enhanced 4K support will be added.

Both current-gen consoles actually already support 4K, but only 24/30 FPS playback, a limitation of the HDMI 1.4 port used by both consoles. But Hunt believes that the next hardware revision for the consoles will add in HDMI 2.0 support, which then enables 50/60 FPS 4K playback, something that Netflix does not yet use, but could by the end of the year. Other features, like HDR (high dynamic range) support, could also be added via an upgraded HDMI port.

One country that won’t be needing 4K Netflix any time soon would be Cuba. You might think this is a strange segue, but it’s actually not that strange. You see, thanks to President Obama’s initiative to reopen diplomatic ties with Cuba, Netflix has taken the opportunity to become one of the first American companies to officially do business with the island nation. Cubans can now sign up to Netflix and access the complete Netflix library, TV shows and movies that are the products of capitalist excess. Of course, the number of Cubans who have Internet access, a connection that’s fast enough, and also have enough money to pay for the monthly subscription (and an international credit or debit card), might not be a big enough market for Netflix to earn anything. Not to get too political here, but I suspect this is exactly what the Obama administration had hoped would happen, to not only allow Americans to (legally) visit the country, but to also allow Cubans a view and a taste of American life.

There is now a way to use PS4 Remote Play on non Sony devices

Those lucky enough to have a Xperia Z2 or Z3 device, and a PS4, should be well aware of the PS4 Remote Play feature, where you can use your phone or tablet to stream and play PS4 games on the go. But it’s a no go for non Sony Android users, as while there doesn’t appear to be any technical reason why Remote Play shouldn’t work on these device, Sony obviously don’t want it to happen. Until now.

Developers led by a coder known only as ‘TheScriptKitty’ had released a port of the official Remote Play app that makes it work on almost all Android devices. All users need to know is how to sideload the APK (basically upload the APK to the device, run the APK, after enabling installs from “unknown sources”), and it works surprisingly well with a good number of devices. You can even hook up a DualShock 3 or DualShock 4 controller to your phone, as you could with the compatible Xperia smartphones, but you’ll need a rooted Android phone in order to run the app for this.

So you no longer need a Sony phone to get Remote Play, although with that said, there are some seriously good phones as part of the Z2 and Z3 range, so they’re definitely worth considering even if Remote Play is no longer as exclusive as it once was.

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The NPD stats for January just came out while I was finishing off this WNR, so I’ll leave it for next week. Spoiler alert: the PS4 did really well.

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That’s all we have for this week, hope you enjoyed reading. See you next week!

With The Pirate Bay being resurrected this week, I wonder what rights holders must be thinking right now. So much effort, money used to take down a site that was only down for less than two months, and piracy probably didn’t even drop during the downtime. The words ‘trying’, ‘stop’, ‘flood’ and ‘sponge’ comes to mind.

Let’s get started with this week’s stories.

It’s back! Maybe not the same as before, but just as “piratey”

The Pirate Bay is back. Or is it? The death and resurrection of the world’s most popular piracy website has been shrouded in a cloak of secrecy ever since the site went down in early December. The site is now fully back, and with content prior to the raid all being mostly restored, and so it seems like another victory for the pirates against authorities who have tried time and time again to bring down the notorious site.

Following a mysterious raid, cryptic messages, hidden codes, a countdown timer, you can forgive most users for being a bit wary of the whole situation. Conspiracy theories, therefore, are rife now that TPB has also made some controversial changes following its restoration. Gone are admins and moderators, whom the operators of TPB says are responsible for “severe security issues”. Users can now self-moderate by reporting fake and misleading torrents, which will get dealt with. And with the site being so busy again, the use of an US based cloud hosting solution (one that is under US jurisdiction, and therefore, open to surveillance by the authorities) have led some to worry over the site’s privacy, although TPB says the use of an US service is, at this time, only a temporary measure to deal with the huge traffic flows.

The situation is made worse by the fact that, during the site’s hiatus, mirrors, some legit, many not, sprang up all trying to be the “new” Pirate Bay. With the resurrected site using the original domain names (the .se and .org ones), it seems fairly certain this newly returned site is the real deal. But It looks like it will take some time for TPB to earn back the trust of its users.

You can now use your HBO Blu-ray discs to stream HBO content. The “HBO Sampler” feature, which uses the BD Live feature on connected Blu-ray players, will allow owners of selected HBO box sets to sample complete episodes of shows like ‘Girls’ and (at some time in the future) ‘True Detectives’. Because the content is streamed via the Internet, the sample episodes available will also be updated, quarterly, to promote different shows.

I guess it’s a lot better than being forced to watch streaming trailers without any way to skip them, which is what BD Live streaming has been most frequently used for so far.

Despite the Xbox One’s strong performance in November and December in the United States (it was the top selling console during these two months, which are traditionally the best selling months of the year), the PS4, or rather the PlayStation brand, outsold the Xbox brand quite comfortably in the fourth quarter, and in 2014 overall.

PS4 beats Xbox One in 2014, although the Xbox One did really well during the holiday sales in the US

PlayStation consoles recorded 7.7 million units sold in the fourth quarter, compared to 6.6 million for Xbox consoles – most of these, one would guess, would be PS4 and Xbox Ones. For the whole year, PlayStation’s lead extend to more than 6 million, which goes to show just how well the PS4 is doing everywhere. But even with the last-gen, the PS3 always did better outside of the US than the Xbox 360, so these current-gen global numbers are easy to understand.

The Xbox One got two (well, one and a half) price cuts in 2014 (the half a price cut belongs to removing Kinect 2.0 from the package, and lowering the price accordingly), and it’s only this that has allowed it to win the US holidays. In the long term though, the Xbox One’s strategy, much like that of the Xbox 360, must be one that focuses on being cheaper than the PS4, because right now, the PS4 is perceived to be the better, more powerful machine.

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That’s all we have for this week, see you again next time!