DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

A very very quiet week again. There really just wasn’t any “new” news to report, just the same old stuff from previous weeks being recycled. I guess some people have already gone on vacation, if not in body, than in spirit. Either that or I was too lazy to find any stories. I’ll have to do my best with what I did manage to find, so please bare with me. Or you can wear clothes while reading if you have to.

Let’s start with copyright news, there was a good rumour flying around that Apple will drop DRM on iTunes. And like any good rumour, nothing came of it. Now the word is that it will happen before the end of the year. Let’s hope it happens, because DRM is totally against Apple’s philosophies, at least the philosophies that they try to make us think they have, if that makes any sense.

The RIAA, MPAA's less glamorous cousin, wants a piracy tax imposed on Net users

A piracy tax being imposed on ISPs is just one of those ideas that refuses to go away. Some countries already have piracy tax on blank media and such, and it’s yet another example of the industry’s “guilty until proven innocent” attitude towards people who actually pay their salaries: consumers. This is an industry that instead of looking at the piles of money they’re currently making, chooses to look at the theoretical piles of money that they are potentially missing out on due to piracy – money that by simple logic suggests would never actually materialize. The just outcome in all of this would be the industry losing existing customers and revenue due to the greed in pursuing imaginary profits, the ultimate bird in hand situation, and I think in small ways, it’s already happening. Greed should not be awarded.

The MPAA is making a push on President-Elect Obama to get him to approve an ISP filtering system that filters out pirated content, and no doubt all sorts of legal content that the MPAA don’t like you looking at. Fortunately, President-Elect Obama is far too busy at the moment trying to distance himself from a bunch of people who have disgraced themselves due to their greed to associated with another bunch of people who have disgraced themselves due to their greed. Thanks goodness for small mercies. The whole idea of ISP filtering is just stupid, not to mention technically expensive, harmful to Internet speed and usage, not fool proof to say the least, violates the privacy of so many, and opens the door to something that’s very dangerous to the fundamentals of democracy. So to find the MPAA behind it all, it’s not a big surprise at all, is it?

Let’s move onto happier grounds, well relatively anyway. In Blu-ray news, Black Friday was kind to Blu-ray accoring to reports.

Despite the lousy effort Amazon pitched in (although they now have a massive 3 for 2 sale, which is the sort of massive sale they should have had on Black Friday/Cyber Monday, although we could have done without the price raising just prior to the sale and the luckluster titles … sort it out, Amazon!), Blu-ray sales were excellent during Black Friday, at least compared to last year anyway. Sales quadrupled, although it wasn’t very hard considering that at the same time last year, less than 40,000 players were sold. So 147,000 standalone players is a good start, but anyone want to guess how many DVD players or even Wiis were sold in the same period?  

The Batman is turning the whole town Blu, thanks to strong sales

Luckily for Blu-ray, this holiday season just happens to be one where one of the biggest movies of the new century so far is being released. Early reports suggest that The Dark Knight sold over 600,000 copies on Blu-ray, after selling more than 3 million in the first day. To compare, this year’s previous best seller, Iron Man, “only” sold 260,000 on Blu-ray! A bit unlucky is the current economic situation though. 

Now, I don’t agree for one second with those that say Blu-ray is doomed and that it will all fold sometime in the next year. Neither do I agree with those that say that Blu-ray is doing as well as expected. It is clearly not, and it has enemies everywhere in the form of other distribution technologies, and existing franchises that are rock solid in their adoption. So Blu-ray is very much a format that should have done better having had no equal competition, is still not doing too badly considering, but time is surely not on their side. Forget the 5 year strategy, and get a strong foothold now, before some more convenience Internet/purely digital based service comes in and steals their thunder. The people behind Blu-ray also has to make up their minds as to whether to market Blu-ray as an evolutionary replacement for DVD, or just a premium alternative.

This little baby holds more data than a Blu-ray disc (single layer), and is more portable and rewritable

As for the other distribution methods, imagine a set top box that accepts Blu-ray discs, as well as high capacity flash drives and comes with a broadband connection and perhaps some HDD storage. Some Blu-ray players/recorders already have these features, by the way. Now imagine being able to go to stores and download Blu-ray quality movies from a kiosk to your 32 GB flash drive, take it home to your media server or your HDD equipped standalone, upload the movie to it, and add it to your digital library. You can achieve the same by ordering movies from online stores (through the player) and have the movie delivered on Blu-ray discs, also ready to be uploaded to your media storage device. And of course, you can download movies straight from the net, or stream them live as you watch and have thousands of movies accessible at the press of a few buttons. In this quite plausible scenario (in my opinion, anyway), Blu-ray is reduced to just one of many content transfer options, and with faster Internet and higher capacity flash drives, it really doesn’t have much of a future. 

In the PC arena, ATI has followed Nvidia’s example and have opened up the possibility of using the powerful GPU as an extra CPU for certain tasks that the GPU excels at. One such activity already accelerated is of course Blu-ray playback and video decoding, but ATI Stream (or Nvidia’s CUDA) can now also do the reverse and allow for accelerated video encoding. It’s not a bad idea, but most of the major video software companies are still playing catch up. My early tests with ATI’s own video encoder app showed only minimal improvements. When they do add support, this will come in very handy for making home made Blu-ray movies as well as transcoding Blu-ray to another format. 

And finally onto gaming, what’s the most influential games ever in the history of gaming? Are they these ones? I think this is the sort of question that will have many answers, and most of them will be correct. I have to say that the Dune II/Command & Conquer has to be up there, but I would say that being a big fan of RTS. Wolfenstein 3D is another one. Street Fighter II/Mortal Kombat did amazing things for the video gaming/arcade industry. Super Mario Bros. on the NES and Super Mario World for the SNES. And Fallout 3 (not really though, but I had to get this one in).

But onto the current generation. The PS3 is being handled much in the same way by the media as Blu-ray. It’s either doomed one minute, and then the saviour of this holiday season the next, but the truth is always somewhere in between.

The 160 GB PS3: was bringing out an even more expensive PS3 SKU the right thing to do this holiday period?

There is certainly a line of thought, and this is from PS3 fans as well, that Sony aren’t doing a very well job of promoting the PS3, almost to the point of sabotage. I think Sony are doing as much as they can, but they are limited by the high cost of the console (cheap when you consider what it can do, but too expensive for “just” a game console, which is what a lot of people simply want). Like Blu-ray, the PS3 also has enemies around it, like the fun Wii or the cheap Xbox 360, which can play almost any game the PS3 can at similar qualities at least until programmers can unlock more of the PS3’s supposed hidden powers. And bringing out an even more expensive version of the PS3 for this holiday period? Who care? Or more precisely, who can afford it? Fun or cheap. Or fun and cheap. Feature packed but expensive (even if it is worth the price) isn’t going to sell this holiday period, I’m afraid. And also like Blu-ray, time is running out as you cannot let the Xbox 360 continue to gain in sales, build up a formidable user base in the US at least, and not worry just a little bit. I saw the most recent episode of ER where a sick kid asked for a PS3 as a Christmas present, which is the sort of thing Sony likes, but look at most movies and TV shows, and the majority of them show people playing the Xbox 360, and this is the kind of thing that makes Microsoft execs happy as a happy person who knows their product placements are working well.

Who says you can’t write 1500+ words based on only 6 news links? Not me. Hopefully, I won’t have to use my brain as much next week and other smarter people will make up some news stories that I can just copy and paste. See you then.