Sony to MS: We'll gut you like we did the Dreamcast

Jack Straw · Post by **Jack Straw** » Sat Jun 03, 2006 8:10 am

They released a whole bunch of crap on those little pieces of shit you can only play on a PSP, too.

Means nothing except they eat, and shit, cold hard cash.

Lysander · Post by **Lysander** » Sat Jun 03, 2006 12:10 pm

They are, indeed, pushing very, very hard even though it's doomed to failure due to Sony's (insane) contractual obligation that forbids anyone who has access to the BlueRay spec from making duel-format players. I don't see the public paying 500 dollars to watch a collection of movies that only look really good on a TV that costs several thousands of dollars to begin with, only to turn around and pay another 500 dollars to do the same thing just because Sony is insistent on pushing this (technically "better") format as much as possible. Just like they did the UMD media, even though it backfired--I dont' have the article now, but I remember reading somewhere (TM) that absolutely nobody was making any money on the movie formats for the PSP. Lightning-fast subject change! Jeff, does your white-hot, burning hatred of the DS change any now that the DSLite is out? I mean, if I recall the only reason you didn't like it was because it looked fugly, which is hilarious but I guess I should expect that kind of attitude by now.

Draal · Post by **Draal** » Sat Jun 03, 2006 4:11 pm

[quote="Lysander"]if I recall the only reason you didn't like it was because it looked fugly, which is hilarious but I guess I should expect that kind of attitude by now.[/quote]

Have you checked out Japan? Because Japan is all like "Give me a PRETTY and DAINTY DS with SPARKLES and smaller plastic lines because on the inside, I'm dainty like that!" As I understand it, its a fashion symbol with colored skins and pretty stones adorned on the lil'fuckers.

So ya... You should expect this attitude, especially when an ENTIRE COUNTRY IS IN ITS GRASP.

JQW · Post by **JQW** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 12:12 pm

Lysander wrote:Lightning-fast subject change! Jeff, does your white-hot, burning hatred of the DS change any now that the DSLite is out? I mean, if I recall the only reason you didn't like it was because it looked fugly, which is hilarious but I guess I should expect that kind of attitude by now.

??? Are you speaking to me?

I don't have seething red hatred of the DS. I do think that it's pretty stupid because the whole "touch" thing is a moronic gimmick (notice most games ignoring the second screen and of those that use it, most use it poorly) and that the games barely look more advanced than the GBA games. (OK, the new Metroid one looks impressive, but only because everything else has looked like crap.) The "Nintendogs" debacle certainly doesn't help them in my eyes, either.

It is ugly, but making it smaller doesn't make it less ugly. I despise all gleaming white electronics.

As for HD, one can purchase a HD TV for well under a grand now (probably for $500 or even cheaper), and a really nice setup for under two grand. (Including a projector.) And you can babble all you want about DVD being good 'nuff, but on a proper display, you can very clearly see a significant jump in quality going from DVD to HD. And that's just on my 720p projector - when 1080p projectors get affordable I'll probably upgrade and get that much better quality. It is enough that even my wife was commenting, when we watched a recently authored commercial DVD with top-notch video quality, that it looked quite blurry and fuzzy compared to the HD stuff we watch. (This is coming off a PC with extremely high-quality scaling and playback, better than the vast, vast majority of standalone DVD players.) And that HD content is 99% stuff recorded from cable and satellite HD broadcasts, which will have probably 50-75% of the bandwidth of a HD-DVD or BluRay disc, and none of the special attention paid to the compression that they'll get.

Remember, people used to happily watch VHS movies, too. I don't think HD will destroy DVD the way DVD destroyed VHS - DVD is very nice on a regular TV and certainly very watchable on a large display - but high def is unquestionably NOT just hype. When people's eyes get used to HD, they won't want to go back. The fact that the movies are, so far, costing about the same as DVDs means that it should do very well, especially once players get cheaper. And I dunno what you're talking about with licensing, but I know that a few companies have been working on players that can play both formats.

Worm · Post by **Worm** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 12:59 pm

JQW

Despises the gleaming white techonology and embraces the way too expensive! Can't see the difference? Well, your eyes haven't adjusted to the new options in consumption!

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 6:06 pm

I am interested in Jeff's take on the GP2X.

Worm · Post by **Worm** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 11:39 pm

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:I am interested in Jeff's take on the GP2X.

I don't get it. It's basically a 2.5 PSP, if you want to get insane into fucking with your PSP you can have commercial games (Gamepark has few of these) and emulated shit. I'm stuck at 2.6, but I can play MGS Ac!d and Monster Hunter, so I'm thinking of picking those up.

Draal · Post by **Draal** » Wed Jun 14, 2006 12:45 am

[quote="Worm"] I don't get it. It's basically a 2.5 PSP, if you want to get insane into fucking with your PSP you can have commercial games (Gamepark has few of these) and emulated shit. I'm stuck at 2.6, but I can play MGS Ac!d and Monster Hunter, so I'm thinking of picking those up. [/quote]

Be a nerd all your life and buy GTA to "exploit a bug that allows a firmware switch" while pushing money up the ass of Sony while they fuck over your ability to actually make use of what you bought the PSP for (and that ain't commercial games).

Regardless, I know too much about either system. Hell, I use wget to download porn. Oh well...

Worm · Post by **Worm** » Wed Jun 14, 2006 1:05 am

Uh, then you'll know that the prefered method of warezing on the PSP is to stick with 1.5 and emulate higher firmware and use a UMD image. Games are hit or miss, but the majority do work. This may have been a little more visible if I typed 1.5 in my original post.

Anyway, I don't think it's too insane to actually go ahead and keep my firmware up to date just to play games I pay for (OH NO COMPANIES EARNING MONEY) which is where I plan to go in the future. I mean catching up on a NES backlog in my spare time is work, and getting to the end of Altered Beast is work. I've heard that Monster Hunter is fun.

JQW · Post by **JQW** » Wed Jun 14, 2006 9:26 am

Worm wrote:JQW

Despises the gleaming white techonology and embraces the way too expensive! Can't see the difference? Well, your eyes haven't adjusted to the new options in consumption!

Remind me again exactly what "way too expensive" technology that I'm embracing.

Anyway, I said that my big problem with the DS is that it's underpowered and gimmicky.

ICJ, I believe I gave my take on the GP2X over on Groucho, in fact I brought it up there. It sounds nice - but who has the time to play handheld games? Not me, at this point in my life. If I did, I'd either borrow the wife's GBA or dust off the ol' Lynx, which has great games the way the PSP has crappy ones.

Worm · Post by **Worm** » Wed Jun 14, 2006 10:20 am

As for HD, one can purchase a HD TV for well under a grand now (probably for $500 or even cheaper), and a really nice setup for under two grand. (Including a projector.)

Maybe it's how I was raised, but you can find perfectly good TVs at the Salvation Army.

Lysander · Post by **Lysander** » Wed Jun 14, 2006 2:01 pm

Wee!

JQW wrote:As for HD, one can purchase a HD TV for well under a grand now (probably for $500 or even cheaper),

ure... one that suuuuuuuuucks. I mean, maybe most peopel just won't care, but personally, I wouldn't want to cheap out and buy a bad TV because i know i'd get sick of hte quality and buy a better one anyway, and then I'll have a $500 TV laying around that I'll want to get rid of. Er, pretend like I"m not blind and I actually give a crap about picture quality for a moment THX, 'tis all hypothetical. Maybe I'd do it if the cheap TVs were like, really cheap, but once you break the $200 barrier it can be $500 or $2000 and at that point all i'll care about is quality for the price.

JQW wrote:and a really nice setup for under two grand. (Including a projector.)

See, that's the thing--it's 2 grand for the TV, at lesat $500 for an HDDVD player, and then another 500 for a Blue Ray player. ANd that's including all of the crazy hastles of HDCP and setting up Hthe HDMI inputs to get the best quality video and--I dunno if you've actually used the HDDVD player that's out now, but it's basically jsut a Linux box. So booting up takes like half a minute. Which is unacceptable. Maybe it'll get better, sure, and maybe HDTVs will get better and go down in price so that'll make it a better buy, but now it's just crazy to do it in my opinion.

JQW wrote:And you can babble all you want about DVD being good 'nuff, but on a proper display, you can very clearly see a significant jump in quality going from
DVD to HD.

Sure oyu can--but is that the HD-DVD talking or the HDTV talking? Anything will look sharp on an HD display, and comparing a DVD to an HDDVD isn't completely fair by itself--what you should make sure you're comparing is an HDDVD and a DVD that's been upscaled.

JQW wrote:And that's just on my 720p projector - when 1080p projectors get affordable I'll probably upgrade and get that much better quality.

As a matter of fact, you won't. At the moment, teh only HDDVD player out on the market only supports up to 1080I. Oh sure that will change in the future--maybe. And maybe the MPAA will decide to flip "the bit" and make the DVDs unwatchable over component video. Anyway, while we're on that subject, I don't really see the point of buying a 720P screen, the future is 1080P so why not just wait until those get good and affordable and then buy one of those? That way you know you won't be being left behind.

JQW wrote:And that HD content is 99% stuff recorded from cable and satellite HD broadcasts, which will have probably 50-75% of the bandwidth of a HD-DVD
or BluRay disc, and none of the special attention paid to the compression that they'll get.

Yes, I'm sure you've seen the compression you get over digital cable. Hah hah hah hah hah! Hah hah hah hah hah, eh? Hah hah hah hah hah!

JQW wrote: Remember, people used to happily watch VHS movies, too. I
don't think HD will destroy DVD the way DVD destroyed VHS - DVD is very nice on a regular TV and certainly very watchable on a large display - but high
def is unquestionably NOT just hype.

Oh trust me--I believe you and everyone when you say that HD-DVD is significantly better looking than regular DVDs. I just think that there are enough hastles in the way to make that differernce not worth the time of a standard consumer, and I don't like sinking money into things that I can do just fine without when they didn't go about it right.

JQW wrote:When people's eyes get used to HD, they won't want to go back. The fact that the movies are, so far, costing about the same as DVDs means that it should do very well, especially once players get cheaper.

See, here's the thing. I'm not badmouthing the content, or even the HD format. Hell, i'm not even badmouthing the cost of HDTVs. My issue is with the actual mediums of HDDVD and BlueRay themselves. I don't see why they exist. IMHO, it's mostly just an excuse for the major hollywood movie studios to push a kind of format that's far friendlier to their insane copy protection measures. What they could do and do very easilly if it was all about hte content is just make two different versions of hte DVD; a "movie" version and a "delux" version or something like that, where the delux version is the regular DVD with all the features and whatnot, and the "movie" version is jsut hte movie, maybe with alternate audio tracks or what have you, but that DVD is encoded with the HD codecs that are being placed onto the HD-DVD and Blue Ray discs. There are DVD players that will play H.264 content burned form a user's PC onto a DVD; if the commercial studios put HD content onto standard DVD discs, i think that it would achieve much, much more wide-spread market acceptance than what they're doing trying to shoe-horn it onto an awkward content vehicle with awkward, prehibative restrictions and awkward, prehibative pricing.

JQW wrote:aAnd I dunno what you're talking about with licensing, but I know that a few companies have been working on players that can play both formats.

Really/ Coudl you link me/ I'm not saying this to call you a liar, i'm saying this because i just don't believe that they can. I was under the impression that the terms of the blue ray specification included locking hardware manufacturerers out from creating a duel-format player.

ICJ · Post by **ICJ** » Fri Jun 16, 2006 9:31 am

Test post!

Jethro Q. Walrustitty · Mon Jun 19, 2006 11:22 am

(apparently ICJ can't even delete his own messages, or is desperate to push the post count higher.)

sure... one that suuuuuuuuucks. I mean, maybe most peopel just won't care, but personally, I wouldn't want to cheap out and buy a bad TV because i know i'd get sick of hte quality and buy a better one anyway, and then I'll have a $500 TV laying around that I'll want to get rid of.

Are you really so convinced that the cheap ones suck? I haven't gone TV by TV, but I'm quite sure that you can get a very nice HD picture for well under a grand nowadays. You won't get a 65" RPTV or wall-hanging plasma or LCD, but you can do well. Theoretically anyway, a CRT one will give the best picture and color.

See, that's the thing--it's 2 grand for the TV, at lesat $500 for an HDDVD player, and then another 500 for a Blue Ray player.
Give it SOME time! HD just came out a few weeks ago and BR is coming out in the next couple weeks! The prices will drop. I paid $300 for my first DVD player, and that was a great deal at the time. By the time Christmas rolls around, you'll probably be able to get one of the players for $400 or less. By next Christmas, probably $250 or less. BluRay is more now but will achieve parity very soon. (Or buy a PS3 for slightly more.) So far, movies are about the same price - that's what I'm really impressed by.

Sure oyu can--but is that the HD-DVD talking or the HDTV talking? Anything will look sharp on an HD display, and comparing a DVD to an HDDVD isn't completely fair by itself--what you should make sure you're comparing is an HDDVD and a DVD that's been upscaled.
Sorry to say, but that's one of the most ignorant statements that Joe Consumer can make, and one of the most shameless "screw you"s sold by the electronics companies.

Guess what - if you're watching a DVD on an HD screen - it's been upscaled! Hook up a seven-year-old DVD player to a brand-new HD television - and you'll get upscaled DVD. Hook up that old Beta player that's collecting dust in the basement and you'll get upscaled Beta, too.

The ISSUE is the quality of the upscaling. If you hook up an old DVD player, then the HD TV will upscale it, just like it upscales standard-def TV, VHS, game consoles (except X360), etc. If your TV has a nice scaler, it's a waste of money to buy an "upscaling" DVD player which may have a worse upscaler, just because it outputs a 720p image instead of a 480p image. (You should have a progressive-scan DVD player, though.)

My projector is 1280x720. Every single thing it displays, no matter what the input is, is projected at 1280x720. The upscaling is done by the PC, which does an extremely nice job, better than the upscalers in most TVs and upscaling DVD players. I use the same software player for DVD content and HD content. And there is a clear difference between DVD content and HD content. To be fair, we're talking about a 102" screen. But the difference is definitely there.

But even on a smaller screen, the idea that "anything will look sharp on a HD screen" is bullshit. I had DirecTV hooked in for a while and I eventually turned off that receiver as it was nearly unwatchable on the big screen, even going through DScaler, which has incredible quality. VHS is still crap. Laserdiscs are mediocre. DVDs - very nice, but HD is way better. Look at it this way - if you load up Doom, set for 320x200 (or 640x480), are you going to expect it to look like Far Cry just because you're playing it on a 19" LCD with 1280x1024 resolution? Your LCD is showing Doom at that resolution...

As a matter of fact, you won't. At the moment, teh only HDDVD player out on the market only supports up to 1080I.
What does that have to do with anything?

1080p is getting more common on "regular" TVs, and no doubt 1080p projectors will become affordable in a few years. Currently, they're something like $30,000+.

Movies encoded on HD-DVD and BluRay are stored in 1080p format, and apparently even at 24fps if they're film-sourced. So 1080p is the ideal display format for them.

Anyway, while we're on that subject, I don't really see the point of buying a 720P screen, the future is 1080P so why not just wait until those get good and affordable and then buy one of those? That way you know you won't be being left behind.
Why buy a Playstation 3? You know that the Playstation 4 will be coming and will blow it away. Maybe PS2 owners should have not bought it and just waited for the PS3.

The reason is that I've been watching 720p content on a huge screen for nearly two years now. If I waited for 1080p, I'd be sitting around for many years waiting, watching nothing in the meantime, or crappy 480p.

Yes, I'm sure you've seen the compression you get over digital cable. Hah hah hah hah hah! Hah hah hah hah hah, eh? Hah hah hah hah hah!
Are you being sarcastic?

Hell yes, I can see the compression. That's one of the reasons I dumped digital cable and went to DirecTV. (That and my very hacked DirecTV Tivo.) I can see the compression on DirecTV, too, but it's not as bad as I got with cable. I can also see different compression being used on different channels.

As for HD, yes, you can definitely find HD broadcasts with pixelation problems. I've got many that have certain scenes that have clear pixelation when there's extremely fast action and lots of picture changes. Spraying water, fog, etc are the usual culprits. This was a problem in the early days of DVD until they got better than authoring - they manually go through and find those scenes and up the bitrate to compensate. Wth the extra care that'll go into the factory HDDVDs/BRs plus the extra bitrate overall, there will be even better quality... and the existing stuff is already amazing. Especially stuff authored for HD, like the Pixar movies. Or Star Wars Ep3 - just nabbed that in HD, and wow is it pretty.

Oh trust me--I believe you and everyone when you say that HD-DVD is significantly better looking than regular DVDs. I just think that there are enough hastles in the way to make that differernce not worth the time of a standard consumer, and I don't like sinking money into things that I can do just fine without when they didn't go about it right.
So don't buy right away. I'm not planning on it. But the only real problem here is the dueling formats. I am assuming (and hoping, due to more storage) that BR will win the war and this will all fade into memory... like Divx. (Remember Divx? Not the video codec, but Divx players, which competed with DVD players... there was similar hand-wringing about competing standards, etc.)

What they could do and do very easilly if it was all about hte content is just make two different versions of hte DVD; a "movie" version and a "delux" version or something like that, where the delux version is the regular DVD with all the features and whatnot, and the "movie" version is jsut hte movie, maybe with alternate audio tracks or what have you, but that DVD is encoded with the HD codecs that are being placed onto the HD-DVD and Blue Ray discs.
You overestimate the power of compression. You can't fit a quality HD movie onto a single DVD. Hell, you can't fit Godfather 2 in regular DVD format on a single DVD with good quality! OK, you'll save room going to WMV9 or H264 or Mpeg4 instead of Mpeg2, but you'll still not have enough room to do the format proud.

Most of the stuff I have is in Transport Stream format, which is basically mpeg2. Most movies take 3-4 DVDs to store them. The biggest is one of the Lord of the Rings movies - that's about 6.5 DVDs. And that's not the extended cut. That's with only a single 5.1 Dolby audio track. That's at cable/satellite bitrate (relatively high, but still less than you'd want on a storebought movie.) Now, you're expecting them to fit that movie, plus multiple audio tracks (including higher-quality ones - HDDVD and BR are having new, better Dolby and DTS formats), menus, and extras, onto a single DVD? No way. Can't be done, with good quality.

There are efforts to do that - I think China's homegrown HD format uses regular DVDs. But the 30g of BR or 25g of HDDVD mean far more quality for the movie itself than the 8.5g of a dual-layer DVD.

Plus, much of the cost of the players is in the processing power - it takes a huge amount of CPU to decode HD at full speed. Example, they used to recommend 300mHz on your PC for watching DVDs... for HD, you better have at least 3gHz (or comparable AMD "plus" speed) if you want smooth playback. I have an Athlon 2500+ o/ced to 3200+, and I get the occasional stutter still.

Really/ Coudl you link me/ I'm not saying this to call you a liar, i'm saying this because i just don't believe that they can. I was under the impression that the terms of the blue ray specification included locking hardware manufacturerers out from creating a duel-format player.
No time at the moment, but I believe it was Samsung who was working on it. I know at least one of them was. update...Sanyo apparently is, maybe in addition.

Also, geez, work on the typos and misspellings. It's ridiculous. Especially in one's tagline.

Jethro Q. Walrustitty · Mon Jun 19, 2006 11:26 am

Motherfucking POS. Turn on post editing, dammit.

That'll teach me not to "preview". I'm USED to be able to edit and correct if a quote gets mangled. Now there's a messy post that could be easily corrected to its intended format. But NO. No post editing under HERR RobB!!!

BTW, what was killing it, after some experimenting, was that I originally wrote "plasma/LCD" (three periods after the D) which it didn't like.

I tried "plasma or LCD" (still the three periods) and it still didn't like it.

Changing it to "LCD, ", it finally accepted.

So apparently it thinks that LCD with three periods afterwards is a security risk. Yeesh.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 5:26 pm

I was testing the theory that post editing had something to do with the spam. Man, FUCK this spam. I really do not care for it. I will turn post editing back on in a bit.