• Friday, June 30th, 2006
Anyone who has been reading my entries here would know I’ve tended to be in favour of HD (High Definition) formats to some extent. I’m no fanboy of them by any means but I am convinced that HD is better and I personally want to be watching material in some HD format in the coming years. The reason I bring this up is that there’s been a lot of negative stories doing the round lately regarding HD-DVD and Blueray. Anyone reading the earlier reviews Toshiba’s HD-DVD player or current reviews of Samsung’s new Blueray player would have to have doubts with talk of poor video quality and a lack of storage space. I for one was certainly not impressed with what I was hearing and it does make you wonder if these formats will just be avoided in favour of tried and tested DVD.
As is often the case though, things are not as cut and dry as they may seem. It appears that Samsung’s Blueray player is plagued by a poor HDMI implementation and that many of the video problems do not exist on the component video output, even running at 1080p resolutions. Apparently this issue does not exist in Pioneer’s soon-to-be-released BDP-HD1 player either. The talk of Blueray lacking disc space is also somewhat ridiculous. HD-DVD holds 15GB per layer while Blueray holds 25GB per layer. Even if HD-DVDs are currently coming out on dual layer discs, that’s only 5GB advantage over a single layer Blueray disc. The other factor not being talked about generally is compression codecs. As far as I’m aware, all currently released HD-DVD discs and Blueray discs are MPEG-2. Both formats also support MPEG-4(H.264/AVC) and VC1(Microsoft’s HD format) which both have far superior quality to bitrate when compared with MPEG-2. MPEG-2 is currently more tried and tested and software to compress it well has had a long period of tweaking and tuning. As compressors for MPEG-4 and VC1 mature and those mastering discs get a feel for the formats, MPEG-2 will be put out to pasture. Quality and efficient use of space will be the winners in the end.
These issues are no different to those facing DVD back when it was the new kid on the block. Anyone who remembers the early DVDs will remember the compression artifacts, poor conversions of movies not originally developed for the format and generally poor video quality compared to a well mastered modern disc.
Despite the skepticism surrounding these new formats, I am optimistic. I have seen it said that by those viewing a well mastered disc in the new formats that going back to DVD is very hard. For those who have no problem with DVD, it probably isn’t going to appeal, but to those do have issues with the current quality delivered by DVDs, I feel the future is looking bright once the first generation issues are worked out.
• Thursday, June 29th, 2006
Ah, what a crazy few days. I haven’t been updating as much as usual recently but a lot has been going on. The the RAID controller of the server hosting my domain died on Monday taking the entire RAID array with it. I recieved no notifications of the failure and it wasn’t until I contacted them the next day that I had any idea what was wrong and what they might do to fix it. It wasn’t until Wednesday that the server was available again and they had no backups so it was it was a real pain. I did have my own backups but they were from about a month and a half ago. Needless to say I have a new hosting provider where they do regular backups and I can do my own custom backups without extra costs. As a side benefit I have twice the disk space and six times the bandwidth for the same money. Hopefully this place will live up to my expectations, I’m sick of having to change hosts all the time.
A friend of mine has been talking of designing and building his own valve based audio amplifier and has asked if I can offer some help with the mathematics side of it. Amplifiers was the only aspect of analogue electrontics that ever appealled to me although I am well out of practise. I’ve been picking up components and finding some good reference material so that I can brush up on it. I’m looking at building some simple solid-state and valve based amplifiers (not hybrids, separate amps) to help brush up on the theory and find pitfalls to look out for. I expect some may think valves must be hard to find these days but in some countries such as Russia they are still being manufactured even today. I picked up some boxed brand new Sovtek 12AX7 tubes at the local Jaycar, easy as pie. They aren’t top notch by any means but should do fine for my practise purposes. I’ll be interested to hear the sound of some valve gear again, I have fond memories of them from my younger years. I’m sure the high voltage circuitry needed to make valves operate will bring it’s own challenges though when compared against the typically tame solid state circuits.
I was recently asked by Nyabear to compose some music for a recent 3D animation she made. It’s quite difficult to plan ahead so it will all sync with the video but I feel I’ve made reasonable progress so far. Might need to move to the Powermac though, my laptop has trouble handling the number of tracks I’m dealing with. I think after seeing how hard it was she felt maybe she shouldn’t have asked me to do it but I’ve enjoyed working on it and the challenge is good. It’s not every day someone asked me to write music for some animation let alone something as great as this one. I feel there’s a lot of potential that could be brought out with an appropriate soundtrack.
• Friday, June 09th, 2006
Originally published at Garden of Thoughts.
Sony is taking a lot of heat from gamers right now over the PS3. There are some things to genuinely be annoyed/worried about with the PS3 but unfortunately it’s being lost amongst the nit picking and inaccuracies. There was an article suggesting the PS3’s performance was lacking due to the CPU being incredibly slow at reading from the “local memory”. What the author failed to comprehend is that the “local memory” is actually Video RAM and the CPU should never be reading from this anyway. This is no different to any PC or games console.
There was also another article suggesting Sony is crazy for not releasing a cheap PS3 without a Blueray drive so that people who don’t want to watch HD movies on it can save money. From a gaming perspective that would defeat the entire purpose of having the drive there in the first place just as the Xbox 360’s HD-DVD expansion does. If it’s not built in by default, no games will come out that make use of it. For me the most annoying feature of the Xbox 360 is the racket made by the 12X DVD drive and the PS3’s 2X Blueray drive spinning at much slower speeds should be blissfully quiet in comparison. There is also the whole capacity issue, DVD is just outright not suitable for HD content. This is clear with Xbox 360 ports that use low res/overcompressed FMVs and textures or just outright cut features.
What worries me more are statements like “We don’t say it’s a game console. PlayStation 3 is clearly a computer” and “I think it’s okay to release a configuration every year” both from President and CEO of SCE, Ken Kutaragi. Sony’s Phil Harrison backs this up with “We believe that the PS3 will be the place where our users play games, watch films, browse the Web, and use other computer functions. The PlayStation 3 is a computer. We do not need the PC.”. Another odd comment from Sony’s David Reeves… “The name of the game is not market share, it’s how fast we can grow the industry”. Doesn’t Sony realise that the whole appeal of games consoles is that they are cheaper than computers and you don’t need to upgrade them annually? This all made me think of an old meme but updated for “the times”.
• Tuesday, June 06th, 2006
Originally published at Garden of Thoughts.
This morning I believe I had got some kind of irritation in my left ear pretty much the same as last year. Things sounded slightly muffled but otherwise I could still hear through it okay. So anyway I was trying to listen to my iPod on the way to work but it just sounds strange when one side is muffled (and I wasn’t about to turn it up to compensate). To cut a long story short, why doesn’t audio equiment come with balance controls any more? My ear issue is probably not an ordinary situation but how many of us sit right in the middle of the sound field when listening to music/movies, etc. From when stereo was first developed right into the 1990’s balance controls were common on everything except portable equipment but today it seems even a lot of Hi-Fi and home theater gear just don’t have them.
Staying with music, today is the “National day of Slayer”. I’m not a big metal fan myself but I’m all for having “days” for purposes other than the usual.
I have been getting heavily into the Arcade Fire album, Funeral. I picked it up some time last year but it didn’t grab me at all. From time to time it would pop up in my iPod random play and I found I was really starting to like it. After that I started listening to the complete album and reading through the liner notes that came with the CD. At this point I’d say it’s one of my favourite albums. Not one for everyone but one of the better albums of the last few years without a doubt. I’m currently digesting Art Brut’s “Bang Bang Rock & Roll”. I like it but I’m still a little concerned about it’s long term lastability. I’m also finding I like a lot of stuff being put of by indie label SubPop. I’ll have to see if that trend continues. I’ve heard some of the Editors “The Back Room” as well. They sound like a mix of The Killers and Interpol to me and seem to appeal to fans of both but it’s just not really my cup of tea.
I played a little of SiN Emergence Episode 1. Most reviews I’ve seen seem to think it’s okay but too short at somewhere between 4 to 9 hours of gameplay. I’ve even seen comparisons to Doom 1&2. Personally I feel it’s rubbish and playing it for more than 30 minutes would be a chore. It’s clearly trying to titillate with it’s female characters but that isn’t going to save it. Essentially it feels like Half Life 2 trying to play like F.E.A.R. but it just doesn’t look or play as good. No, 2003’s Disgaea is proving a lot more interesting to me but I’ll probably talk about that some other time.
