It’s taken long enough but it finally looks like next gen HD disk format has been chosen - Blu-Ray has won. Ever since Warner went Blu-Ray only the writing has been on the wall. Most people seemed to give HD-DVD until the end of the year. That looks to have been optimistic.
Reuters are now reporting that Toshiba are giving up on the format. RIP HD-DVD. This comes in the same week that many large retailers moved to either Blu-Ray exclusive or to promoting Blu-Ray as the first choice format. I couldn’t give a toss about what format was the best from a technology standpoint. I just wanted one to succeed and for the HD market to grow with a sole format like CD’s and DVD’s. Hopefully thats what will happen now even if the HD-DVD fanboys think that Blu-Ray is a bad choice or that downloads will now take over.
The downloading options are starting to get interesting though. Apple TV Take 2 launched last week offering HD video rentals. I’d dismissed these as although they are HD in terms of resolution there bitrate is usually low to reduce bandwidth, so making them not much better than DVD, especially a good upscaled DVD. However the reviews have so far shown the rentals to be very good, in between Blu-Ray and US cable broadcasts. With start times rumoured to be under a minute it’s starting to look good for HD, especially with Apple TV. However why spend £200 on Apple TV when a PS3 costs £280, can play Blu-Ray disks, is a very capable media playback device (for Mac users try MediaLink) and when Play TV is released will be a Freeview player including HD and also act as a PVR. Even more impressively, the PS3 allows you to browse the internet and again with Play TV can do a slingbox and broadcast TV to the PSP. All very impressive. Almost forgot - it plays games too.
If someone asked me today to recommend one media player it would easily be the PS3. That’s something I didn’t expect to say even a year ago.
After a quite spell there have been some significant HD announcements for the UK. ITV HD channel will launch next spring, BBC HD has been recommended to start as a full time channel as soon as possible, MTV HD is due to land next year and Channel 4 have announced a C4 HD to launch from December. Great news and about time that there is more commitment from providers other than Sky and BBC.
I think it’s around two years since TV shows were first available on iTunes in the USA. Finally some content was made available to purchase in the UK this week. First thing you notice is how little there is - it’s all American and there’s not much off it. There’s rumours of BBC and Channel 4 content to come later but there’s nothing at the moment.
Then you notice the price. It’s high. £1.89 per episode. That would be £43.47 for Lost series 3 which sounds a lot but the whole series can be bought on iTunes for a reduced price of £32.99. Currently the box set is available on Amazon for £44.98 so there are savings to be made however it’s almost double the American price, like most things here in the UK. While I’m saying there are savings to be made on DVD’s, that’s for latest box sets only. Earlier box sets are available for much less than the iTunes price, and would you really want to pay more for lesser quality?
I’ve just spent £1.89 to test just how good the iTunes TV shows look. (more…)
Bit of a lazy weekend has been had although there’s a few things worth noting. Firstly, Casino Royale on Blu-Ray looks fantastic. If you’ve got a PS3 or a Blu-Ray player (all 10 of you in the UK) then this is a must own title. I’m enjoying the PS3 for movie playback so I’ll be picking up the remote which will get a lor more use than the 360 equivalent. Only annoyance is the remote is Bluetooth rather than Infra-red so I can’t program it into the Pronto.
The new Bond has moved to the Bourne style of movies and low and behold if there isn’t a Bourne Ultimatum trailer available. Really looking forward to this and hope it meets the same high standard of the last two.
More style can be found in the new trailer for Forza 2 (cheers Graham). Around one month to go for this must have 360 title that can’t fail to be good - can it? There hasn’t been a decent racing game on the 360 since PGR3 (Test Drive unlimited is a sims game rather than proper racing - harsh but true) so i can’t wait!
I also decided that I would start hand crafting my own site style a good while ago but that stalled after a couple of days so I finally got round to putting some time into it this weekend. A new app from Panic may help (Coda) but it isn’t even revealed until tomorrow so that will have to wait. I’m finding it all a bit frustrating at the moment but I’m getting there…slowly. I’m guessing at my pace it will be a few weeks before I have something to show for my efforts. At the moment I’m aiming for white, minimal and little or no graphics or ajax. It’s time to get simple.
Trialling .Mac at the moment and it’s great for keeping the two Macs and their apps in sync (calendars, address book, iGTD, Transmit and Yojimbo). The trial lasts for another couple of months before I have to hand over any cash but it’s likely thats another £70 to the Apple temple which is a tad annoying as .Mac doesn’t offer much disk space - this is an area Apple could address for not much money. It would be great if the £70 bought 40Gb of disk space to back up to and share.
