writhaus

Bill Hunt, of The Digital Bits, has had an impact. In the early days of dvd, he was on the front line fighting against Divx. No, not the video encoding format. Divx was originally a dvd byproduct pushed by Circuit City. The format was a pay-per-view dvd. For $5 (I think it was), you could unlock the disc for a day or two. After that time, it turned into a coaster until you unlocked it again. Bill saw that as a dreadful thing (and I agree). He rallied the enthusiast community. Thanks to his help to educate people, Divx died.

He’s played a similar role in the HD DVD/Blu-ray role. This time, the role appears to be different, though. He started writing for a Blu-ray owned site. He stopped taking advertising for HD DVDs. He will tell you his role was the same in both the Divx and HD DVD deaths, except there are notable differences.

Divx was launched by Circuit City. There were legitimate concerns as to how you’d play your discs long term like “What happens if the player’s modem died?” or “If the servers that unlocked the discs shut down?” HD DVD was a product that was ready for the market. It’s only disadvantage in the face of Blu-ray is that the maximum for disc storage space was 60% that of Blu-ray’s (which, incidentally, is why I am writing this on a laptop with a Blu-ray burner).

HD DVD had advantages, though, like price. The format was an outgrowth of standard dvd and authoring was cheaper because current dvd fabbing plants could upgrade, whereas for Blu-ray it was a new set of equipment that needed to be purchased. Another HD DVD advantage was that it had a complete format specification. Their format was complete at launch, whereas the Blu-ray spec wasn’t finalized until a few months after they started selling players, and all players don’t have to match the final spec until fall of 2008. That’s right, even today, on the eve of HD DVDs death, you can go buy a Blu-ray player that won’t play some of the content on discs on shelves right now. Hunt hasn’t rallied against this. He’s said comments that suggest this is an ok tactic to take…releasing a product before it’s ready. He points out that some HD DVD players have trouble, too. What he doesn’t mention is that every HD DVD player, because it’s spec-final, has an ethernet port so you can patch the firmware of your player.

He did have a column that was critical of the Blu-ray firmware update system by a columnist, but that column did not mention that the problem didn’t exist for HD DVD.

He readily criticized HD DVD releases for any fault he could find, but never offered similar criticisms of Blu-ray releases. If there was a release that HD DVD had the better release of, you simply find no mention of that title on his site, save for when the title was announced for release. The latest Harry Potter film featured an entirely new feature: The ability to sync HD DVD players over the internet where multiple people watched the movie as a screening. HD DVD offered live commentaries, too. Blu-ray can’t offer such until that final spec is in place, though.

The worst, in my opinion, though is that there is one Blu-ray player on the market that will play every disc: The Playstation 3. He mentions other players people can buy, but never suggests people buy the full featured one.

On Sunday, the 17th, he responded to people saying it sounded as though he was paid off with comments that there had been a lot of accusations of that in this format war. He also said that he only did what he thought was best. What he didn’t do was suggest he wasn’t paid by the Blu-ray backers.

I don’t think it would have mattered in this electronics fight. Nearly twice as much storage is a huge advantage, and Toshiba, to their benefit, didn’t force an update for HD DVD out that would have fixed this and left people holding the bag on non format compliant players.

This situation does call into question Hunt’s ability to be objective while reporting. Hopefully he will say whether he did or didn’t accept payments from Blu-ray backers to work against HD DVD. Until he does, there will be a cloud hanging over him that prohibits him from being considered a journalist.

Journalists work too hard to protect their reputations to have someone who doesn’t take the commitment to objectivity seriously damage everyone’s credibility.

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I arrived home to mom and dad’s Monday evening, but was too tired to do much more than simply fire the new laptop up. I nearly have it set up completely now. The penultimate task was resyncing my iTunes library, which is now done. There was an interesting problem with Blu-ray playing along the way, though. It seems WinDVD 8 is quite the little bastard.

Initially I didn’t have any reservations when I saw WinDVD was installed on the computer for playing our friend the Blu-ray disc. Surely since it’s a Sony computer and a Sony proprietary format, the vendor would meet their standards, right? As long as you aren’t a tinkerer, I suppose that could be true.

Unfortunately for me, I bought this laptop with one idea being that I could hook my Xbox 360′s HD DVD drive to it and have both formats covered, if not while I am in the Peace Corps, then afterwards as I reintegrate into society. With that in mind, I hooked the drive up Tuesday and discovered the WinDVD wouldn’t do anything with it. No problem, I will just find an upgrade and that will solve things, right?

Wrong. The upgrade only worked to break the installation of WinDVD BD for Vaio. Since Sony keeps all your backups on a hidden partition, I had no idea how to reinstall the OEM version. A moderately quick call to Sony’s Bangalore office had my software reinstalled and Blu-ray functionality restored.

But I hadn’t succeeded in my task. What to do except keep trying, right?

On the Nero website, I bought a $25 license for HD DVD/Blu-ray playing for Showtime. That was Tuesday night. To this point, all Showtime has done is tell me that Blu-ray discs are unsupported, not to mention HD DVDs. Back to the drawing board, I supposed.

I did notice one interesting quirk in WinDVD BD for Vaio: A tab for HD DVD had been added. This gave me hope! I zeroed in on getting the rest of that functionality installed from the full WinDVD 8. Every time I tried to install it, though, I was struck with error 1721 and 1603. When I tried to uninstall everything and start over from scratch, the uninstaller didn’t work. Bah!

I searched the internet and found info on their user forums that helped remove the old version, allowing me to start over completely with the installation. Installation success finally came, but when I tried to run the software, I ran into an MFC error. Last night I began troubleshooting this problem. There were many posts across the internet about programs causing these errors. I read the solutions hoping to find something that would help me. Most of them ended with people getting new revisions of the software. This was not a good sign.

I turned again to the user forums from Corel. There were five posts linked from a related thread. I read in them the same solution I had tried earlier in the week. I was desperate though, so I tried again and again, looking for anything I might have done wrongly.

It’s worth noting, too, that I had embarked on a separate adventure, the Windows Anytime Upgrade, modifying my Home Premium installation into an Ultimate one. This left me unable to revert to WinDVD BD for Vaio, greatly increasing the need to have this problem solved.

Finally, I decided to try another alternative suggested offhandedly by a post on the AVS Forums…try PowerDVD. I went to their site and purchased the software. Unfortunate to today’s standards, the purchase had to be approved by a human being and it was in the wee hours of Saturday morning in Germany where Cyberlink appeared to be based.

Until 3:30am, I worked and finally gave up. I went to bed with all my hopes pinned on Cyberlink.

When I went back to the computer at about 9 Saturday morning, I had a verification of my purchase along with the download link and my serial number. It took only a few moments to download and a few more to install. I rebooted my computer anxiously.

As Vista Ultimate whirred to life, I noticed something going on…PowerDVD recognized my disc! It started playing The Road Warrior, which had been living in the drive the last few days. Success!

Or at least partial success…I still needed to see what would happen with the 360′s HD DVD drive.

Skip ahead a day. I have just finished watching The Big Lebowski in high def on my new laptop. PowerDVD recognized the drive perfectly and played it’s disc like a champ. Finally, complete success!

I am glad to report that this is a story with a happy ending. This whole Windows Vista thing is a strange journey. I won my first trial, even if it meant kicking WinDVD to the curb.

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For the longest time, I eshewed laptops. They were weaker. They couldn’t be upgraded. You had to swap out the drives. The list of things I didn’t like went on and on.

I’ve been forced to reassess, though. In another month, I move to Ukraine for two years. I wanted to have a computer there and a) couldn’t take my tower and monitor and b) didn’t want to shop for a computer there and risk a Cyrillic keyboard layout.

First, I decided what features were going to be important to me. I didn’t want a mammoth-sized system because I need portability. I would want to be able to at least consider some gaming, so it needed to be moderately capable in those regards. I did want to investigate into the new high def era optical media.

One interesting thing is I found very few builders that even had a next gen storage option at all. Thankfully, three companies had options with them. I started exploring the websites for Dell, HP and Sony. The cheapest Blu ray enabled Dell was well over two grand. Sony’s Blu ray started at $1500 and HP had an HD DVD burner I configured just a hair over $1900. Survivor-style, Dell was voted off the island. This left me with a home theater enthusiast battle between HD DVD and Blu ray.

I looked thoroughly at the pros and cons of both formats. Ultimately, Blu ray won because of it’s higher storage capacity. While movies will surely be watched on this laptop, I wanted the ability to archive media and back up internet music purchases. My entire music collection will fit on a dual layer BDR. That was the key decider.

With the base system, I began tossing around whether to get a preconfigured system or custom build. Sony’s FZ180 was very close to what I wanted. It had a solid 2ghz Core 2 Duo and 2 gigs of ram, two things I was committed to. When I tweaked the FZ190, though, I got what I wanted for a few dollars less plus a nice freebie: a Location Free Base Station. Depending on how well it works, that might enable me to see American television while I am overseas.

The system was ordered a week ago and should be in my possession in another week or so. I will write up a review at that time.

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Like many people, I have watched the HD DVD/Blu-ray battle with a mix of interest and contempt. One side of me says, “How dare they be so stubborn as to allow a format war to happen?” The other says, “Given how Sony’s entire corporate structure seems to be based on owning their own format, what happens when they finally have one they control?” [On a side note, Sony's lust after owning an industry standard format reminds me of a guy who completely obsesses over a girl who has no interest in him. It's creepy and usually ends badly.]

Initially I was going to sit out this format war all together, but I was lured in by what I perceived as a good deal. I bought into HD DVD first for the princely sum of $200, thanks to the add-on for the Xbox 360. I was amazed at the quality, even on my 720p HDTV. Things just seemed more alive. With that I was sold on high def video discs.

Now we are a year into this morass. Things don’t look very good for HD DVD, pretty much only because of the Playstation 3. We can charitably say the Playstation 3 has been much less of a success as a game console than it has as a (comparatively) cheap Blu-ray player.

All is not lost for HD DVD, though, if a few changes happen.

First, for combo titles, DVD-only SKUs must be eliminated, i.e. 300 doesn’t need to have a stand-alone DVD sold if there is a DVD/HD DVD combo disc being produced. By doing this, you force people to start buying an HD DVD library. Once they have a few key titles (the aforementioned 300, The Departed, and a few others), then they will lean toward HD DVD when they upgrade.

Second, because you are going to blast the sales of these titles through the roof, we need a reasonable price for them. As an HD DVD owner, I want to own Slither, but I am not paying $37.99 for it at Best Buy, period. Once you remove the redundant SKU and the sales surge, I don’t see why these would have to be priced any higher than $21 or $22.

Third, if you have combo discs, have a minimum of one killer feature on the HD side. Give people a compelling reason to upgrade. Make them want to play the HD side.

Finally and maybe most importantly, transition to twin discs. For those who don’t know, the DVD/HD DVD combo discs are dual-sided. That means you have to flip the disc. It wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t always supplements you wanted to see on the standard def side, but when you make your consumers have to get up to continue watching their bonus features, you are turning people off. Twin discs remove this problem by having up to three layers glued together on one side. To my knowledge, the only twin disc released to date has been Freedom 1 by Bandai. Guess what else they did? That’s right, there is only one SKU for this title. If you want it, you get the HD version and the SD version, all without having to flip.

If these changes are made, software sales will go up immediately. Next thing you know, everyone has a few HD DVDs on their shelves. At Christmas when they are looking at things, they will see the HD DVD players and remember they already have a mini library of titles, and didn’t we want to see the blue screen version of 300?

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When first I heard that this was a major update, I thought it would clear up compatibility for those few discs that didn’t work, and that would be that. I mean, I had read about the Children of Men troubles as well as problems with Video Essentials. Heck, I had my own problems with the Discovery Atlas Australia Revealed disc.

When I saw what all was changed afterwards, I was shocked.

Sure, all those discs play fine now (at least for me!) and that would be worth the update in and of itself. You get more, though.

Apparently the HD DVD drive was stuck in “Night Mode” where audio range was compressed. That’s now selectable. Again, if they just added the compatability and this, whew, job well done, right?

There is one more huge thing, though.

A primer, first, though: For digital audio, Dolby Digital has a lower bitrate than DTS, so much so that in the early days of DTS DVDs, the discs would end up dropping features to accomodate the beefier space requirements of the sound mix. This problem was alleviated somewhat when DTS introduced a lower-resolution codec. DTS still benefited from having that higher ceiling for their bitrates, though. Without getting too technical, this update allows you to set the HD DVD drive to pass all audio through as DTS, thereby giving you every bit of the audio you can have from the drive short of Microsoft enabling it to support the new lossless codecs.

The benefits are apparent with any of the spiffy titles such as Batman Begins or M:I:3.

Now, you have read about these changes. How do you access them, you might wonder. While watching a movie, access the display console. There is an Audio Options button. Tap it and voilà, your settings are revealed. All in all, this update is an A+. The bug fixes are awesome and are all I was expecting. The DTS audio options, though, are a work of art. I am very happy to see Microsoft invest the time and resources adding such a great feature!

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