Ars re-reviews the PS3, which they gave a 6/10 upon its original release. What with all the firmware they been revisin’, though, today’s PS3 earns a handsome 9.

From my position of ignorance – not owning a PS3 at present (although thoroughly convinced that Future D owns one) – I can hardly disagree. If people ask me for console advice, after asking them searing and insightful questions that reveal their darkest inner souls and gaming habits, I tend to advise a good hard look at Sony’s fatboy. Sure, the 360 has a great catalogue and online service, and the Wii is great if you like party games and plumbers. But if you’re at all thinking about HD over the next few years, which you probably should be, it’s hard to argue with that Ray of Blu. To say nothing of Sony’s excellent track record in hardware design, and all the games that you know, should come out at some point, hopefully.

And now I’ll shut up about Sony being so awesome already.

Hey, this is pretty cool: TweakTV, a site with a database of ideal HDTV calibration settings. A lot of HDTVs come with bad factory default settings, often amping the colour to ludicrous levels so as to show off on the showroom floor. If your model is in TweakTV’s database, they’ll tell you how to adjust it to get a better picture.

In an ideal world, I’d test it out at home before posting this, but last time I checked we’re all still sweating it out in God-Emperor Cheney’s Heck House, so I’ll give myself a pass for now. I’ll update this later when I get a chance to AV-geek it out. (thanks Karim!)

Well, shucks.

I know the “format war” ended and stuff but this quick. Money must be made! I wonder if HD 360 players are going to become collectors items in like fifty years? And why did it have to be called Blu-Ray? HD sounds so much better. Meh, at least I didn’t buy an HD player of any kind. Ha ha!

Technology you move so fast!

You so sexy!

First off, speaking of Sid Meier, Sid Meier’s Pirates will be released as a download in the Xbox Originals category next week, along with Black and Ninja Gaiden Black. I’ve been meaning to play that bastard for some time, but have been unable to track down a copy, so I’ll give it a whirl upon release.

In other sort-of Xbox news, Xbox Media Center has been ported to Intel Macs. I say sort of because you don’t actually need an Xbox to run the software. It’s free, open source media center software developed for the original Xbox, but has been ported to Linux and now Mac OS X. Why would you run that and not Front Row or the AppleTV? This interview with lead programmer Elan Feingold gives some reasons:

• Resolutions up to, including and even surpassing 1080P (AppleTV is currently at 720P)
• DTS/AC3 passthrough (which is great for playing DVD/BluRay/HD-DVD sourced audio). This means if you have a surround receiver you can have it decode multichannel audio
• Almost unlimited video and audio format support since we can play anything ffmpeg supports
• A great virtual file system layer with support for protocols like UPnP
• There is a great looking weather item that puts very useful info in front of your eyes.
• Since it is an open platform, the sky really is the limit, things like Youtube browsers, RSS readers, visualizers, MAME/Other emulators are all being integrated seemlessly. Heck, one could even imagine running an Xbox emulator on my quad-core machine…now that would bring us full circle!

So there ya go.

Hello Internets!

A thrilling new installment of the action-packed, high-octane Angry Robot podcast experience. Topicz: our favourite new headscratcher of a game Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom, Xbox Live vs. The Playstation Store / network thing, Blu-Ray wins but will inevitably lose to the Flesh Drive aka synthetic fat man full of hard drives who follows you around.

This episode features the debut of the Technical Difficulties Theme, on account of – you guessed it! Technical difficulties. Awesome!

Hay, I just noticed that the acronym for our new crush is KUF: COD. Catchy!

Next week we’re totally doing the podcast again and I’m gonna try to put EVEN MORE exclamation points into the writeup!!!!!!!!!

Angry Robot Sounds 9 (22MB mp3, 24mins)

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So it’s over. Warner is dropping HD DVD support and going all Blu-Ray, all the time, and the rumour has it that Paramount, and Universal will follow when their contracts run out in a few months, completely ending studio support of the format. Warner’s reasoning is as follows (from the press release):

The window of opportunity for high-definition DVD could be missed if format confusion continues to linger. We believe that exclusively distributing in Blu-ray will further the potential for mass market success and ultimately benefit retailers, producers, and most importantly, consumers.

I.e. if we’re not careful, people will give up on HD discs altogether and stick with their DVDs. Clearly they have data indicating that HD disc player sales lag far behind HD monitor sales, which is scaring them.

Let’s skip the inevitable discussion of how downloads are the future and just concentrate on one point: Sony was right. About everything. After all the mockery about the ludicrously high price on the PS3 when it came out (because of its Blu-Ray drive), everyone points to the PS3’s Blu-Ray drive as the deciding factor in Blu-Ray’s victory. Yet to be seen is whether a focus on the HD optical drive (Sony) or a focus on games (Nintendo) is the more lucrative path. Yet, console and game sales aside, obviously Sony will clean up with Blu-Ray licensing fees and patent royalties. I just can’t find data on how much money this might make them.

At ars, Jacqui Cheng debunks the Microsoft HD/DVD conspiracy theories. Or does she? She notes that there’s no proof that Microsoft wants to keep the format wars going in order to champion (Microsoft-supplied) downloads. But where’s the proof that they want to win?

If Microsoft wanted the format wars over and a clear winner decided, they would either a) not be in bed with Toshiba behind the HD DVD format, ceding the fight to Sony’s Blu-Ray or b) put everything at their disposal into HD DVD. Have they really done the latter? Microsoft still doesn’t include an HD DVD drive with the Xbox 360 – they sell an add-on drive. While the drive is cheap (now $129 in the US, $200 in Canada), it’s still $579 for the console + drive, while the entry-level PS3, with its built-in Blu-Ray drive, is $400. So if they were really trying to battle Blu-Ray, they’d be competing on price at the very least.

Microsoft makes no money from Blu-Ray, whereas they earn licensing fees from HD DVDs, and they must take a substantial cut from their own digital downloads. They clearly don’t want Blu-Ray to win, but the question of how badly they want HD DVD to win could be answered if you knew how much money they made from downloads vs. HD DVD. Since we don’t know that, we can only speculate… and from their actions, they’re not backing HD DVD that hard.

I stepped up and finally bought the HDTV I mentioned a while ago. I got the newer, 4ms refresh rate one. I also got a HD PVR and a fancy-ish universal remote. They are all handsome creatures, but my was it a shock to be thrown back into the sweaty, confusing land of the AV nerd for the past few days, what with all the setting up of things and cabling them together and the fussing over how to achieve maximum quality. Thought I might share some frustrations and possibly even pointers for those who may follow after.

Disclaimer: boring. Not really I suppose, but the following information won’t be that exciting to people who aren’t planning on going HD any time soon, or who did it long ago.

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There was, of course, the articles about the $150-million payout to Viacom and Viacom’s subsequent switch to HD-DVD exclusive. Then there was a little bit of lash back when Fox reaffirmed that it and MGM’s titles (which are distributed by Fox) will be Blu-Ray exclusive. My theory is that the HD-DVD people knew the Fox announcement was coming and tried to pre-empt it, but I have nothing to base this on.

We know that Blu-Ray is outselling HD-DVD two (or is it three?) to one. So any ‘victories’ for HD-DVD seem like needless prolongation of a war that has already been decided.

That said, I was discussing with a friend the other day whether the war itself is irrelevant and perhaps downloads will win the day. It’s safe to say that downloads will eventually win, it’s a question of when. The interested parties are waging their own war: that of network neutrality. Those who control the pipes can effectively destroy any download business if they so choose with bit caps and bit throttling. Their current plan offerings, at least in Canada, do not really allow for large-scale downloading, say of hours of HD-quality video a night. Bell will rent you a fibre-optic connection for $75 a month, but that comes with a 30 GB bit cap, above which you are charged by the gig. You could get into surcharge territory after six hours of continuous downloading. So a carrier victory in the network war could substantially delay the obsoleting of physical media, at least long enough for us to actually have to pay attention to the tiresome Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD flareout, which sucks.