Posts by Iain

PS3 firmware adds HD audio

@Jan Buys

Nice game, thanks for playing, but no. Not a single one of the PC-based Blu-ray players currently on the market correctly passes DTS-HDMA audio streams to an outside amplifier, nor do they correctly decode it in order to pass PCM. Sure, they'll figure this out eventually, along with removing the need to have multiple players installed, because each one has bugs with a different set of discs (for instance, the latest PowerDVD Ultra 8.0 removes all HD-DVD support from version 7, but still can't play Across The Universe.) However, right now the PC is a pretty poor Blu-ray player.

The previous posters are all correct that 96/48 output is overkill from a technical standpoint. But since there are discs out there that contain it, people would still like to be able to listen to them, thanks.

Toshiba samples Cell-based HD GPU

Cell bandwidth?

Methinks Michael Sanders is confused over the legendarily slow read speed the Cell has on the RSX's memory pool.

Not that it matters anyway, as the RSX itself has really fast write speed to the Cell's main memory pool, where it can obviously read at the 23GB/s mentioned by others.

This strikes me as very handy for media PC boxes, but then if a 1080p Cell-based media player is what you want, a PS3 is pretty reasonable already.

Sony bullish on Blu-ray dominance

Shurely Shome Mishkate?

Sony have 20% of the Blu-ray hardware market from a combined effort of their standalone players (the BDP-S300 being anecdotally by far the most popular standalone on UK shelves, in my experience) and the PS3?

Methinks someone wasn't counting the PS3s there, who are a much bigger share than all the other players put together.

Blu-ray awareness rising

@Scott

Where are you finding the £5 HD DVDs? The best I've found so far is Play.com's 3 for £20 offer. Although, having just found Pan's Labyrinth in HMV for £10, I've got most of the UK discs I'm particularly after, apart from the really recent releases that aren't reduced at all yet.

"Freeview branded hardware"

That stat of 3.8m units includes all the set top boxes for existing standard-def tellies, though, so Camp Blu can't really take it as an indication of HDTV sales.

I'd like a Blu-ray player, because sooner or later I'm going to run out of films to watch on my HD-DVD box. But most people I know who aren't fellow film geeks, including several with HDTVs already, can't see the point in anything better than DVD.

Videogame retailers support Byron Review, says Byron

Re: "Xbox 360 System"

What's wrong with the picture is that you've not configured the account for parental controls correctly. It's not difficult.

http://www.microsoft.com/protect/products/family/Xbox360family.mspx

Microsoft denies Lite-On Blu-ray rumour

@Highlander

Every company has stated that features they are missing are unimportant, right up until they had them, yes. I think I said that earlier, but if you'd like me to say it again I'm happy to.

All I'm saying is that for my setup, they were right - I'm hooked up over VGA and it handles the native res. of my screen.

Sony may be right about the Sixaxis, and you don't like rumble either, and that's fine. I know some Wii owners who don't have HDTVs, and it's true that they wouldn't benefit from HD output.

Microsoft will continue to argue that the 360 doesn't need a Blu-ray drive right up until the point where it's really true, or they release one.

@Highlander

"In the end though, MS added HDMI, and some truly 1080p games have arrived on the PS3, though 720p is clearly the standard. If HDMI is so unimportant, why bother adding it?"

It's rather odd, that statement, now. Not just because there are some truly 1080p games on the PS3, but there are some on the 360 as well - Virtua Tennis 3 is 1080p on both formats, for example.

As for HDMI being unimportant, what they said was technically correct - the 1920x1080 VGA output looks just as good. But fortunately, they listened to their customers; more people have a spare HDMI input on their telly than a VGA one, and some people like to use their fancypants audio receivers as a HDMI switcher. HDMI is important for convenience, not any superiority of image quality.

Conversely, I know several people who wished the PS3 offered VGA as well as the current HDMI connection, but they're stuffed.

@Richie M

No, there are at least a couple of games that require the hard drive. Every variant of Football Manager, and Final Fantasy XI. Mark would no doubt argue for the inclusion of Burnout Paradise, because you can't use the multiplayer without one, but that's pushing it a bit.

Microsoft didn't deny HDMI outright, they tried to explain why you didn't really need one because the VGA output looks just as good. Which it does. Still, it's nice to have, since some people don't have a VGA in on the telly. I don't have a spare HDMI meanwhile, so I can't say I'm bothered about the issue.

Prevarication and hand-waving justifications of features your competitor has are standard operating feature, though, as Mark's beloved company demonstrated with the whole "Vibration is just _so_ last-gen" nonsense and the way they've stopped trying to have a go at Microsoft's patchy backward-compatibility strategy the moment they announced the 40Gb PS3.

To pick a less confrontational example, there's Nintendo's "nobody really needs HD" explanation for not allowing the Wii over 576p even for titles that have enough polygon simplicity to run smoothly at higher resolutions.

Blu-ray Xbox 360 to be sold at a loss?

@AC

Maybe Mad Hacker has a recent enough 360 that he's got a HDMI connector. Or maybe he's using the 1920x1080p VGA output. Maybe he's only got a 720p screen anyway. Maybe he's already got the HD-DVD drive, and doesn't want a whole second console and a second video input to deal with.

Any of which would make a 360 Blu-ray drive useful.

@fishman

How many PS3s sit in home theatre setups, never seeing a game disc, or are being used as Cell calculation units? How many of those second 360s are then passed on second-hand once they return from being mended and the impatient owner bought another?

We'll never know, so at best they're a rough guide. Go look at the software sales if you want to see what the development studios really care about - why do you think it's worth concentrating millions of pounds on 360 and PS3 game development when the hardware sales are so much better than Wii? Because Wii owners don't buy games as much, and they certainly don't buy 3rd-party ones.

Oh do stop lying, Mark.

The European price cut caused sales to rise by over 30%. Your rants on every single 360-related story are tiresome shilling.

PS3 shills, and the "Everything will be all right tomorrow" excuse.

Why is it that PS3 fanboys never talk about the games that are already out? It's all "just you wait, Lair will arrive and it will be awesome", "Little Big Planet is coming soon", "MGS4 will destroy your puny 360", "I saw a press release for God Of War III, and the pictures in my head were really pretty".

That, or talking about how their games console is the best because you can watch movies on it. Yawn.

Welsh couple cop Mosquito flak

Fair retailiation: A step-by-step guide.

1) Buy, beg or borrow an SPL meter.

2) Find out exactly how loud that mosquito actually is.

3) Line up speakers at his house.

4) Fire pounding drill 'n' bass nonsense at him at an equivalent volume.

Job's a good 'un.

Blu-ray drive in development for Xbox 360

They promise to add deformation for GT5: Proper, do they?

That's odd. They promised to add online multiplayer to GT4: Proper as well, and that didn't happen. They promised to add deformation to Prologue when GTHD didn't get it. I'm thoroughly bored of Polyphony's excuses, and so wait until we see what actually comes in the box on release day.

But then, Sony shills' entire philosophy is based around the promise of things to come rather than actual product, so I shouldn't be surprised.

Exec sounds death knell for games consoles

Funny definition of "dead", then

So there won't be such a thing as a games console because we'll all be using online-enabled set-top boxes to play HD games with fancy graphics.

That'll be "games consoles", then. We might be getting all our games over the net via an equivalent of the Virtual Console, Live Arcade or the PSN, but if it is a machine that plays games on a telly, then it's a console. The 360 already lets you download movies to watch, and there's a Freeview PVR adaptor on the way for the PS3, Both those formats can (well, could given there aren't many HD-DVDs left) play disc-based HD films. So the convergence is there already.

Whether you call it an STB that can play games, or a console that can play TV is a marketing issue, not a technical one.

Blu-ray 'to bloom', now HD DVD's dead

@Mark

"Infact, if you were not interesting in pirating their CD's, you would not even know you had it."

Not true; everyone who put left autorun on and inserted an infected disc in a machine had the rootkit installed, leaving them open to a remote exploit, as well as degraded performance and an inability to rip audio for personal use.

Not now, probably

With the mass fire-sale of HD-DVDs currently ongoing, I think I've stocked up on enough new movies to keep me busy until at least autumn. I got a standalone player to replace my 360 drive too, since I needed a new standard-def player anyway, and it was only £60 - it does such a good job of upscaling that spending large amounts of cash on a Blu-ray device even when this stack runs out isn't desperately important to me, either.

Minor irony value - the new HD-EP30 sits on top of my Laserdisc player, underneath my Minidisc recorder and record deck; it's like the museum of dead tech on my hi-fi shelves. Microsoft should be worried; there's a 360 in there as well.

BT admits misleading customers over Phorm experiments

@The Late Inspector

Sorry, Morse. While TOR should indeed offer you a secure way out of BT's network, it's out of the frying pan and into the fire. There are instances of TOR hosts (who could be anyone from freedom-loving geeks to organised criminals, and you won't know who you're using) running even worse snooping than Phorm offers. As in credit-card scamming. So that's not a solution as I see it.

Firefox cookie disabling may, or may not, cause you to opt-out of tracking. But your data gets sent for processing even if they double promise to honestly not keep the outcome of that processing for later. AdBlock Plus means you won't see any adverts from OIX, but a DNS entry will acheieve the same thing, and it's not about viewing the adverts anyway; it's the tracking to gather the info to target them that is the issue here.

In short, you're screwed. Your only choice is who you trust the most to do said screwing in the least painful manner.

Microsoft denies Xbox 360 is Blu-ray bound

BD-less PS3 (@AC)

Sony will never make a PS3 without BluRay support. For one, because all the games ship on that format of disc, so you need the drive present. Then the decoding and display of the video files contained on a BD movie is done through software on the Cell. So, since a PS3 without a Cell isn't much of a PS3, there's no money to be saved there, either.

The only point you'd save on, is not paying the rights holders for the various codecs. And that's not exactly a huge amount for the value proposition of continuing to associate PS3==BluRay in the consumer's mind.

Sony touts tasty portable DVD player

Why?

If you weren't the sort of person who reads the Reg, I could understand the attraction of a dedicated device where you just throw DVDs in.

But I'd expect anyone here who wants to watch movies on a 7 inch screen with a device of that form-factor would be better off spending the extra ~£50 to get an Eee, surely?

Digital TV sales soar as Brits flock to Freeview

@Dick Emery

If you don't want a tuner, consider either an LCD monitor for small sizes, or if you need the big screen a Panasonic professional-series panel like the ones in Tesco. The latter give a wonderful picture over HDMI, component or SCART if you buy the appropriate interface boards, and don't come with a tuner as standard.

Top security firm: Phorm is adware

@Steve B

They only replace the adverts on sites that have signed up to the service; if you run a site with Google Ads (for example) they're not going to steal your revenue stream.

The Phorm party line is that this is going to be wonderful for the user, because more targeted adverts will mean companies need to place fewer ads. Which says to me "companies are going to pay a premium for a Phorm-served ad".

At which point, automated reloading of Phorm-associated sites, frequent cookie recycling and similar techniques to poison the waterhole will be pretty effective in killing the whole process. Advertisers aren't completely stupid; they won't pay a premium if they're not seeing escalated returns for their money.

Steve Jobs rescues freetards from BBC iPlayer wilderness (for now)

@T LI

I don't know about you, but I like watching my TV on a TV. Which isn't something I have a Firefox (or other) browser for, but I do have a multitude of video players, some of which have H.264 support, and the rest can play DVDs that are easily created from H.264 files.

Not something I'd want to archive for later release, but it's still easier than faffing around with P2P solutions.

This is ace

Neither Kontiki's malware nor the flash player will stream to the XBox 360 I have hooked up to the telly. As I don't want to sit in front of the PC to watch TV, this is a Godsend.

Plus, since my entire setup is running OSes designed by Microsoft, I'm officially not suffering from a mental disability according to El Reg.

MS to cut Xbox 360 prices this week

Hardly...

It's hardly a fire sale. The 360 came out November 2005, nearly two and a half years ago. I think it's about time that it had its first price cut, don't you, given that the PS3 has already had two?

Man webcams butt in Burnout Paradise prang rage

PS3/XBox differences?

I don't have a PS3 yet (I'm waiting until (a) I get to the end of the big pile of unwatched HD-DVDs I currently have, (b) the white one comes out in the US and (c) April pay packet comes along), but at least as far as the 360 goes then:

1) you have to choose to accept vidcam images from people not on your Friends list to have this sort of thing happen (or at least have Friends you can't trust to be more reasonable). In fact, it's possible to not even accept voice from strangers if you get tired of being sworn at by American teenagers.

2) there is easily enough evidence here for the complaining parent to go straight to Microsoft and get the perp an immediate life Live ban.

I'm surprised this doesn't go for PSN access as well, if it doesn't. Or is this just another case of outraged parents thinking that a phone call to the nearest tabloid is more sensible than the people in charge of the offending service?

Sony chews the Blu-ray fat with Microsoft

@Waldo

HD-DVD and BluRay both use(d) either H.264 for the even more efficient VC-1 codecs when creating 15-30Gb video files, even before you add audio.

How, pray, do you suggest amateurs without access to dedicated hardware re-encode that lossy data to 4-8Gb including audio for those pirate downloads without losing any quality? It's plain impossible. You might still find the quality acceptable, but we don't all have such low standards.

@Chris

You know that downloadable HD won't look or sound as good as BluRay. I do, too. But when at least half the country seem to think that Freeview is already HD because it looks so nice on a 32" 768p LCD screen, and that upscaled DVD is 'good enough', the performance increase over a 5-10Gb H.264 file probably isn't going to be big enough to persuade them to shell out £15+ to get the best quality available.

On the other hand, is that really such a disaster? Blu is already on course to do better than Laserdisc, and as someone with some lovely Criterions still at home I'd be happy with that.

@AC

Yes, a dual-format add-on drive that means I don't need to make room for a third component next to my 360 and HD-DVD drive would be nice. LG already have dual-format readers for not much more than Blu-only ones, so it's feasible.

We don't know for sure that they were talking about 360 stuff at all, though. Apparently, Microsoft make this OS for PCs that has Blu support. Perhaps someone has heard of it?

Alienware punches out four-GPU CrossFireX gaming PC

So that 3GPU NVidia lasted long, then.

That didn't take long. Anyone for 5 GPUs and then another one dedicated to beard trimming, sorry a second monitor screen?

DAB: A very British failure

Internet Radios FTW.

They're a bit more expensive than DAB (£70 rather than £40), but Listen Again ISIHAC makes it worth every penny.

But then, I can't get a DAB signal at home anyway, so that's rather academic.

Taking the piste: Wii to bring skiing to the living room

Re:shameless fanboi flamebait

Ha! PS3 Ridge Racer 7 is just a ripoff of Ridge Racer 6 on the 360, too!

This is just Horace Goes Skiing with fancy graphics, a silly control scheme and no Frogger bit.

@Greg

No, it's got nothing to do with 'real' skiing. Neither has pushing a joypad around, but 1080 White Storm on the Gamecube was still a great game in its own right.

Rather cheaper than a trip back to Banff, too. Although I suspect my cash would be better spent getting some practice in on the local dry slope, if it ends up as bad as Snowboard Kids.

Sony exec confirms arrival of in-game PS3 messaging

Re: DTS-HD

This wouldn't be an issue if Fox were to use either Dolby TrueHD (which is more efficient) or PCM (well, there's plenty of room now they've started using dual-layer discs at last), both of which the PS3 does support. Instead, they went with a format that until recently absolutely nobody had support for, simply because it's a little bit cheaper than a TrueHD encoder.

Re: complaining so much about it, I don't think people would have quite so much of an issue if Sony didn't keep making vague noises about being added any day now.

Monkey: There was a whole load of talk about the PS3 being a poor BluRay player before it came out, not because we were Eeevil 360 Fanboys, but just because the PS2 was so astonishingly poor at DVD playback on release. I think everyone who is vaguely sensible has since realised that it's in fact by far the most feature-rich player on the market, and the only reason for buying a standalone player is because you're either really desperate for the analogue audio output sockets, hate Sony a lot, or can get it cheap through some deal.

Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 delayed

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

...my MSDN download installed just fine thanks, and seems to have done a fair bit to help Vista from sucking quite so hard as it used to. How is the public release so broken?

Pioneer to stop producing plasma panels

No money in the high end?

Pioneer plasmas may be painfully expensive, but their 1080p ones are about the best screen you can get, of any technology. It's a pity to see them go.

What about that super-cool "Project Kuro" ones they were showing off at CES, that could go to all-the-way black for effectively infinite contrast ratios? They looked awesome.

Sony drives at Ion with own-brand USB turntable

Current deck plus amp line out = win

What's wrong with using the line out on your amp all of a sudden? Do people really want to go out and buy a whole new record deck with a USB connection instead?

I just don't get it.

White PS3 rumours hot up

I'd like a white one, yes

I just think it will go with the white 360 and Wii better than a black one. The only black bits left in my setup apart from the screen itself are my old amp and laserdisc player.

Metal Gear Solid 4 to launch on 12 June

Re: importing

You don't _have_ to think about importing, AC. You're quite welcome to sit there without a PS3, safe in the knowledge that SCEE are missing their sale to you.

I, on the other hand, would rather sit there with an imported PS3 actually watching some movies, even if it means I'm no longer interested buying a UK model in the event of SCEE doing a better job eventually. Right now, however, there are easily enough people who are willing to pay over the odds that your money won't be missed.

@Adam

Movietyme and Videogames Plus are your friends. Import via either of those for less than the price of a UK one anyway - plus Region 1 DVD support. All PS3 games are multi-region as part of the spec, and Europeans aren't allowed backward-compatibility anyway, so only being able to play US PS2 titles on an imported 80Gb isn't a big deal.

Boffin stacks 16 PS3s to simulate black hole collisions

@Highlander

Yes, I should probably have mentioned that even the official Sony docs suggest that you avoid using that painfully small bandwidth from the CPU to the RSX's memory, and get the RSX to write the data to main memory where the CPU can read it at the normal (very, very quick) speed.

Although, this is discussing the specific case of trying to use RSX memory when the CPU memory pool is already full - at which point there isn't much space to do such a thing. A small 'paging' area would work, somewhat like the old memory pages on the 128k Spectrum, if you're elderly enough to remember working on that.

I don't know the guy's application code, but it might well be that 256Mb is enough anyway. There are plenty of clever things you can do in that space, without needing any more.

@Andrew

There are several games on the PS3 that qualify as 'Decent'. There may, or may not, be anything that appeals to you personally, but the suggestion that none of them are good on the semi-objective criteria that reviews use is silly.

@Mark

While the main Cell SPUs can indeed communicate with the RSX to read from the latter's 256Mb pool, it's PAINFULLY slow to do so - 16Mbps. No, that's not a typo; it would be faster to use swap on the hard drive.

There was a whole bunch of scaremongering around launch about this meaning the PS3 was 'broken', but in reality it's just not something that you ever do in practice. Also, as the AC notes, it's something only game coders are allowed to do, as the hypervisor for the Linux environment blocks off that particular pool completely.

Gravity simulations, like game physics calculations and rendering, involve a large number of iterative calculations on reasonably small datasets, and so are ideally suited to the Cell architecture.

Which is all a bit of a pity, as it's just _so_ tempting to make a joke relating to the fact that a PS3 is even heavier than the original XBox, and the rest of my post is rather boringly sensible now.

HMV blames rival for PS3 PlayTV pre-order puzzle

@Andy

Standard def may well be "shite", but that's all that Freeview currently broadcasts in. So that's all you're going to record using this box, either.

The only legal ways to get broadcast HD in the UK at the moment are via Sky's SkyHD and Virgin's V+. Both of which come with their own PVR decoder boxes as part of the price - there is precisely ZERO market in the UK for a standalone HD PVR, and this will remain the case until OFCOM stop being idiots about HD Freeview.

The other way is to let it fall off the Internet from the US, but if you're doing that it'll come down onto your PC, and the PS3 and X360 can already stream straight off that box's share without any additional hardware purchases.

@price again.

My DVD recorder is perfectly fine, thanks. Made by Sony, coincidentally enough, and multi-region unlike the PS3, so I'll need to keep it around anyway.

The main point really is that I fail to see what a makes a Freeview decoder cost 99 smackers when all the expensive bits are in the PS3 hardware itself, like the hard drive, upscaling CPU, video output and so on. It has its uses (though not in my house, as I can't get a freeview signal and this one won't record analogue apparently) but it looks like a hell of a ripoff.

Sony preps Blu-ray boosting PS3 bundle

Expect a rounding down

The current, nothing free at all, pack costs €400 already, so I imagine these bundles will stay £299 in the UK shops.

Personally, I suspect I'll go for Movietyme's "£399 for a bundle with Spidey 3 and 9 other movies of your choice" offer, but part of me is tempted to hang on until the DualShock gets thrown in instead of the obsolete SixAxis, given the extortionate price Sony have announced for a standalone controller.

Sony talks up Metal Gear Solid 4 PS3

Thanks Highlander

I'm still unsure where in the world I want a PS3 from at the moment (US for cheap BluRay Region A imports, upscaling all my R1 DVDs and indeed cheap consoles, or UK for R2 upscaling and ease of returns if it dies), but I don't really need:

The memory card reader - I'm happy streaming my pictures off my PC with the 360

The extra USB ports - I don't quite know what they're for, and I've got a hub in case

I don't know about the disk space, yet. On the one hand, the paltry 20Gb in my 360 seems to be enough for memory saves and downloaded games, but on the other hand I know some PS3 games are cacheing gigs of stuff on there. We'll see.

As for the other advantages of the 80Gb model, we don't know yet if the 40Gb will gain a DualShock, or indeed if this 80Gb will still have the backward compatibility. Mind you, I only have 1 US PS2 game anyway - Katamari Damacy - so I'll be keeping my softmodded, hard-driven real PS2 going for a while yet.

At the moment it's mainly to be a BluRay player, and the 40Gb model does that just fine. The only games I'm really exited for on the format so far are WipEout HD and SingStar, but there are bound to be more at the format goes on; my PS2 eventually got tonnes of use.

I guess that kills pricecut hopes, then.

$499 for the console and one game? I might as well start thinking about pulling the trigger on the $399 base model sooner rather than later, then, given that I wouldn't bother keeping MGS4 in the house.

Sony claims home cinema kit helps movie buffs keep the noise down

How is this a new feature?

My Pioneer receiver from 1999 has "Midnight Mode" that does exactly this, as do all my DVD players and my 360. The Dynamic Range reduction info that allows it to work is in the Dolby Digital specification.