Posts by Iain

AMD goes after AppleTV

No competition?

That's odd. The last I looked, a PC hooked up to a HDTV over either VGA or a DVI-to-HDMI cable does a perfectly good job of letting iTunes play all your purchased video.

Add in the XBox 360 (at the same price as Apple's device and yet allows you to play games too) and PS3, both of which will play any H.264 files you have without encryption, and there seems to be a fair amount of competition for the Apple device really. Doesn't the Wii's browser work with YouTube as well?

Xbox 360 Elite to raid Europe next month

Launch for Video Marketplace

Sadly, we don't know for sure if the UK Elite will ship with the die-shrunk chips yet. The real point of it all, however, is that we'll be getting the Video Marketplace at last. Without it there wouldn't be much point; there really are only so many demos and 50Mb Live Arcade games that you need to fill your drive with at once.

Samsung to launch '€400' Blu-ray/HD DVD player next month

Sony?

What have Sony got to do with this, other than as one of the many people behind one of the formats the device can handle?

Personally, I've already got the HD-DVD add-on for the 360, so I'm not in a hurry to buy a new player, but this is still good news.

Xbox 360 price set to crash?

Price in Argos?

The bundle deals with the 360 have got more and more impressive. The last I looked, I could get pretty much the two hottest chart titles free at any time, the deal updating whenever something new and big came out. Which has got to be worth at least £50 or so off the console, should Microsoft decide that the US gets a price cut and we get one too.

DVD ripping to be rendered impossible?

Impossible? No. Ever so slightly more difficult? Yes.

All they're doing is making it impossible for software developers to purchase a CCS license to sell boxed product that does all this for you without any hassle. If you've already got stuff that does this it won't be broken, and if you know how to operate Google you'll still be able to find free stuff that will do it.

Once again, this is the standard DRM technique of making life a bit more annoying for the average user who has forked over cash for their product, while singularly failing to inconvenience the pirates for more than a very short while.

So what's in a URL? The Reg URL?

.co.uk

And for God's sake, please don't try to be clever with redirection based on IP. The wonders of company proxy servers mean I look like I'm coming in from the US when that's not the case.

Elgato Turbo.264 H.264 encoder

Re: PSPs

Joe K may be correct that the PSP's screen is higher than 320x240. However, if he hadn't installed cracked firmware on his machine, he'd be aware that you've got to encode at this resolution for Sony's bundled player to support your file - the company reserve full resolution playback for shop-bought UMDs.