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DIGITAL DIGEST - http://www.digital-digest.com
DIGITAL DIGEST | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 71
9 December, 2007

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TOP NEWS SUMMARY:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

4. How to cancel/change your subscription email address/settings
- how to maintain the subscription to this newsletter even
if your email address has changed

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1. Introduction

If last week was about me "working" on the PS3, this week has been
about the Xbox 360, as the "Fall" update was released and despite
Sony annoucing DivX support first, Microsoft is the first to add it
into the console forcing Sony to play catch-up once again. I updated
the Xbox 360 DivX, XviD Playback Guide to reflect the new update,
and from early testing the DivX/XviD playback is quite good. It's
been a good week for HD bargains, as Amazon and other places ramp up
their holiday sales campaign. Whether it's a HD DVD player with 10
free movies, or half priced Blu-ray movies, now is a great time to
get into HD (although as with any technology, prices will continue
to drop, although you will get less freebies).

Links:
* Amazon: Blu-ray 2-for-1 sale (US), 3-for 2 sale (UK), 40% off selected HD DVDs
http://www.digital-digest.com/blog/DVDGuy/2007/12/04/amazon-blu-ray-yet-another-\
buy-one-get-one-free-deal/
* More Hot Amazon HD DVD and Blu-ray Deals
http://www.digital-digest.com/news-60825.html
* Xbox 360 DivX, XviD Playback Guide
http://www.digital-digest.com/articles/Xbox_360_DivX_XviD_Playback_Guide_page1.h\
tml

-- DVDGuy


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2. Weekly News Roundup

Welcome to another weekly news roundup. I've been thinking about
changing the name of this weekly feature, as "Weekly News Roundup"
lacks a certain something. Perhaps "Digital Digest's DVDGuy's
Digital Digest", or "DVDGuy's Dazzling Digital Diary". Umm … I think
I will stick with "Weekly News Roundup" for now.

Now for something completely different. Starting with copyright
news, Steve Biddle from New Zealand wrote in his blog (1) about
trying to do something very simply in Vista that Vista's DRM system
would not allow. All he wanted to do was to simultaneously output
5.1 audio through SPDIF and stereo audio output to his TV, but Vista
won't let him (2) and would only allow SPDIF output at the same time
if it carries a 2.0 channel signal. How does having this restriction
prevent piracy, I'll never know. Meanwhile, the troubled Bush
administration has launched a new war on terror front, this time a
war on copyright infringement. All those terrorists sitting in their
caves downloading the latest episodes of Heroes must be quaking in
their boots (if they do indeed wear boots). Seriously, does the
White House have nothing better to do? They should just get back to
what they do best, and that's to make up intelligence to support yet
another war in the Middle East. The MPAA is joining in the fight and
says it's in the best interest of ISPs to filter out "inappropriate"
content (3). Last week (or the week before, I can't remember), I
also reported a story about the MPAA asking Universities to install
software toolkits to monitor student's Internet usages, in a bid to
stop campus piracy. It has now been revealed that the "toolkit" may
have violated copyright terms (4) since it uses many pieces of open
source software, and has modified them without providing the
modified source code. The ISP hosting the toolkit has been sent a
DMCA notice (haha). Perhaps this ISP should have filtered out the
obviously "inappropriate" content. In other words, while the MPAA is
forcing people to respect their interpretation of the copyright
laws, they themselves might have been breaking the same laws to
achieve their aim. Oh the irony.

In HD news, LG has finally launched their dual format drive here in
Australia (5). Their recommended retail price is more than double
the store pricing of the same drive in the US, but some have found
luck in getting the drive at a more reasonable $AUD 450. It's still
a bit too expensive to mark it as a must-have item for your next
computer, but it's a 50% price drop away from becoming just that. I
will probably write another "If I were to buy a new computer today"
blog entry this week, like the one I did back in September (6), and
I must just include this drive in my recommended specs. Staying in
Australia, retailers are saying the HD DVD people are not doing all
they can for the Australian market (7). There is no point in denying
this claim, because HD DVD has had a late and fairly quiet start,
while Blu-ray has been going all guns blazing in the promotional
stakes. Both sides are still doing poorly on pricing and releases
though. The HD DVD side has been relying mostly on the Xbox 360 HD
DVD add-on drive here in Australia, which was the only HD DVD player
until about 3 months ago. But we still end up paying more and
getting less for the add-on drive, as compared to the US in any
case, where the pricing of the drive has dropped to less than $130
(8) (although the price has gone back to $180 on Amazon.com at
least), and includes 6 movies (we only get 1 free movie in the box).
So much for the high Australian dollar. Another problem that people
have been having here in Australia is trouble accessing the web
content on titles such as Transformers. People with the US version
of the movie (thank goodness for region-free HD DVDs) have not had
the same problem, and according to the HD DVD group, the web
features are very popular indeed (9). If you really had to compare
Blu-ray to HD DVD, then on paper, HD DVD wins in everything but
studio support. Early HD DVD release have better picture and sound
quality than Blu-ray (most used VC-1, while older Blu-ray movies
used the less efficient MPEG-2), most HD DVD releases are 30 GB
compared to 25 GB for Blu-ray (BD-50 discs are still a small
minority of releases, and HD-51 is coming soon), all HD DVD players
and movies support advanced interactive features that not even the
newest and most expensive Blu-ray player support and HD DVD hardware
is cheaper too. But it doesn't stop the myth that Blu-ray is
superior to HD DVD, a myth that has been propogated by people (10)
such as Transformers director Michael Bay. Transformers on HD DVD is
probably the best selling movie on either HD format so far, and of
course it might sell more if it was a Blu-ray release too, but then
I'm sure all his older movies would sell more if they were on HD DVD
too. His claim that Microsoft deliberately supports HD DVD to get HD
to fail, is tinfoil hat madness. Microsoft has lots of things
invested in the success of HD (their VC-1 codec, used by the
majority of Blu-ray and HD DVD releases, for one), and their digital
distribution plans (of which is doing quite well in the US through
Xbox Marketplace) is a completely separate issue. Sony also has
digital downloads coming soon for the PS3, so do they wish HD to
fail too? As for his claim that Blu-ray is superior …

There's a lot of HD news this week, so let's start a new paragraph.
Analysts have predicted that there will be parity between the two
competing HD formats (11) for the foreseeable future. I can't see
either format just fading away unless the studios all become
exclusive for one side, so protect yourself by becoming format
neutral. There are always rumours floating around the Warner
Brothers, the only studio to be format neutral, is going to go
format exclusive and supports Blu-ray only (12). You can read about
what I think of this rumour in the link, but suffice to say, I don't
think it will happen (if anything, it might go the other way). HD
DVD is certainly the weaker of the two sides when it comes to sales
figures (although beware that the often quoted Nielsen HD sales
figures do not include Wal-Mart, which came into the HD game quite
late, but is now having an influence on things by being HD DVD
exclusive, the Sony PS3 apart), but I can't help but feel that it
has a more mature strategy, rather than the "let's sell as many PS3s
as possible at a loss so we have lots of Blu-ray players in people's
homes, even if they don't know what Blu-ray is" approach. There is a
nice article that summarises the state of HD DVD (13), and its well
worth a read. Speaking of the PS3, more and more rumours suggest
that it will become Blu-ray profile 1.1 or 2.0 sometime soon (14).
Unless there is some technical problem that prevents 1.1 or 2.0
certification (eg. if the cell processor can't handle simultaneous
multi-track video and audio decoding), then it's a "when" not "if"
in my opinion (that's why I purchased a PS3 as my Blu-ray player).
Still, it might take a while since there are hardly any 1.1, let
alone 2.0, movies on sale. And we're still waiting for DivX support,
which was announced weeks before, but in that time, the Xbox 360
went ahead and added support for it already. YouTube HD (15) coming
soon via H.264? Not so far fetched with the power H.264 (16) can
offer.

On that note, it's on to gaming. Is it me or is the line between
gaming and HD getting blurrier by the minute? Of course, here on
Digital Digest we primarily cover the video aspect of gaming, so
we've already intentionally blurred the lines. The holiday sales
period is an important period to see which console will dominate in
the year ahead. Analysts predict that the Xbox 360 and Wii will be
side by side (17), followed by the PS3 by some distance (although
not as distant as it used to be). Meanwhile, Nintendo has pulled ads
for the Wii (18) because demand is so high. Putting on Michael Bay's
tinfoil hat for a minute - does anybody else think that Nintendo
might be deliberately not producing enough Wii's to keep the demand
up? It's had a whole year to get the production up (Wii was last
Christmas' most wanted gift too), and it doesn't seemed to have
helped (if anything, this year's stock is even less sufficient). And
if you look at the low number of games being released in the same
period, which would have crippled any other console, you do wonder
why demand is still so high. Of course, that's just conspiracy talk -
the most likely explanation is that Wii is attracting non-gamers,
and that's a huge group of people who suddenly want a Wii for
Christmas. Or that some people are hoarding stock to sell at a
premium on eBay or something.

So that's it for another week. While you are all busy going from
store to store to try and find a Wii, I will be here as usual
gathering the news and writing page fulls of nonsense ready for next
week's Dazzling Digital Diary. See you then.

Links:
(1) http://www.geekzone.co.nz/sbiddle/
(2) http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=85165
(3) http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=85186
(4) http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=85225
(5) http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=85149
(6)
http://www.digital-digest.com/blog/DVDGuy/2007/09/26/if-i-were-to-buy-a-new-comp\
uter-today-september-2007/
(7) http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=85148
(8) http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=85164
(9) http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=85185
(10) http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=85168
(11) http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=85175
(12) http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=85221
(13) http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=85204
(14) http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=85224
(15) http://www.digital-digest.com/news-60829.html
(16) http://www.h264info.com
(17) http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=85153
(18) http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=85233


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3. Weekly Software Roundup

December 9, 2007 AVStoDVD 1.2.1 (Freeware)
December 8, 2007 MediaCodeSpeedEdit 1.1.0.12 (Freeware)
December 8, 2007 VSO PhotoDVD 2.5.2.1
December 8, 2007 K-Lite Video Conversion Pack 1.1.0 (Freeware)
December 8, 2007 ffdshow Rev. 1688 (Freeware)
December 8, 2007 h264tsto 1.3 (Freeware)
December 7, 2007 AviSub 2.2 (Freeware)
December 7, 2007 Txt2Sup 42.7 (Freeware)
December 7, 2007 D2MP 3.92 (Freeware)
December 7, 2007 Txt2VobSub 3.1 (Freeware)
December 7, 2007 Plato Video To Zune 3.70
December 7, 2007 Plato Video To iPod PSP 3GP 3.70
December 7, 2007 Plato Video to iPod Converter 3.77
December 7, 2007 x264 full rev. 709 (Freeware)
December 7, 2007 BurnAware Free Edition 0.9.9.1 beta (Freeware)
December 6, 2007 RioDVD Region Free Player 1.11
December 6, 2007 MediaCoder 0.6.0.3990 (Freeware)
December 6, 2007 K9Copy 1.2.1 (Freeware)
December 6, 2007 MeGUI 0.2.6.1041 (Freeware)
December 6, 2007 ProgDVB 5.12.4 (Freeware)
December 6, 2007 Ulead DVD MovieFactory Plus 6.0 Hotfix
December 6, 2007 Ulead DVD MovieFactory 6.0 Hotfix
December 6, 2007 Ulead VideoStudio 11 Hot Fix
December 5, 2007 Encode360 2.0 RC2 (Freeware)
December 5, 2007 Joost 1.0.3 Beta (Freeware)
December 5, 2007 AVI to AC3 1.0.4.7 (Freeware)
December 5, 2007 J. River Media Center 12.0.380
December 5, 2007 DVB Web Scheduler 5.0.0.16 (Freeware)
December 4, 2007 XP Codec Pack 2.3.3 (Freeware)
December 4, 2007 DivX Codec 6.8
December 4, 2007 TVersity 0.9.11.3 (Freeware)
December 4, 2007 EMDB 0.57 (Freeware)
December 4, 2007 FinalBurner Pro 1.25.0.140
December 4, 2007 FinalBurner 1.25.0.118 (Freeware)
December 4, 2007 Photodex ProShow Gold 3.2.2047
December 4, 2007 Photodex ProShow Producer 3.2.2047
December 4, 2007 Photodex ProShow 3.2.2047
December 4, 2007 Muxman Pro 1.0.2
December 4, 2007 DVDRemaster Pro 4.0
December 4, 2007 DVDRemaster Standard 4.0
December 3, 2007 RipBot264 1.7.0 (Freeware)
December 3, 2007 KMPlayer 2.9.3.1421 Beta (Freeware)
December 3, 2007 DVB Dream 1.4e (Freeware)
December 3, 2007 eac3to 2.08 (Freeware)
December 3, 2007 Comskip 0.79.112 (Freeware)
December 3, 2007 InfraRecorder 0.44.1 (Freeware)
December 2, 2007 Vista Codec Package 4.5.4 (Freeware)
December 2, 2007 Cuttermaran 1.69 (Freeware)
December 2, 2007 AutoMKV 0.92b (Freeware)
December 2, 2007 DVBcut 0.5.4 Rev. 105 (Freeware)

http://www.digital-digest.com/software/lastweeksoftware.php


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