Live from Austin!

The New York Times reports that most people have decided to sit out the HD format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

I’m one of them. I remember DCC vs MiniDisc. MiniDisc won, if by ‘won’ you mean ‘lingered for a few years longer’. I also remember SACD vs DVD-Audio. Both of those lost, in that even people who have DVD players capable of playing DVD Audio (like me) typically don’t bother to hook them up to support it (like me). I saw an SACD player in someone’s house at Christmas, but it was being used as a CD player.

As the guy from Sony admits, the improvement from DVD to HD is pretty marginal unless your TV is 40″ or greater. This seems to match my conclusions from comparing 1080i OTA HDTV to upscaled DVD on our TV.

Then there are the downsides. The most obvious being the sluggish performance. For Blu-ray, typically it takes 30 seconds after hitting the power button before the disc tray opens; 30 more seconds after inserting the disc before you see menus. Of course, that’s the optimistic case, it can be much worse. Assuming it actually works at all. And to think I get impatient waiting 10 seconds for my DVD player.

Then there’s region encoding. I like being able to buy UK TV shows and movies legally and watch them, and I’m not prepared to go back to having a disc player that’s limited to US releases. So I’m not buying Blu-ray until region-free players become available.

Then there’s ripping video. Sure, it’s kinda specialized, but as iPods and portable video players and video-capable phones become more commonplace, it’s increasingly appealing. I did consider ripping some TV shows to watch on my BlackBerry on the plane this Christmas.

So as far as I’m concerned, wake me when the war is over and I can get a player that plays the winning format, in all regions, for under $300. Until then, I’m not interested. Even if I get a PS3, I can’t see myself buying any Blu-ray discs.

On average, computers last me for about 4 years. Last week, I was still using an 800MHz iMac.

Partly this is down to my being frugal. It’s like the TV situation, where I didn’t buy the HDTV until my family visited and laughed at the 20″ TV, and seemingly made it die of shame shortly afterwards.

Partly it’s because Macs remain usable longer than PCs. A PC Magazine survey found that Macs tend to last 3.9 years on average, compared to 2.4 years for Windows PCs. (Of course, with Linux you can keep an old machine usable for even longer.)

Partly, though, it was because I wasn’t wild about any of Apple’s offerings. The Mac Pro is too big and expensive. The current iMac is unergonomic and (in my view) ugly. The Mac Mini is too limited. The MacBook Pro series used ATI graphics. I was going to wait, and maybe get a plain MacBook as a kind of stopgap, more by a process of elimination than as a matter of choice.

Then Apple revved the MacBook Pro. They ditched the ATI graphics, and put in an LED backlit display in the 15″. I was sold. So, I have a shiny new Mac.

One advantage of making computers last 4 years is you really notice the upgrade when it comes. Going from a 16MHz B&W Mac to a 180MHz PowerPC color Mac was awesome. The switch to a wide screen and dual core CPU is almost as good. I can leave GraphicConverter optimizing PNG files, and the machine stays totally usable. Mail also flies with multiple threads able to run in parallel.

I use each upgrade as a cue to go through my files and clear up. I move old stuff to CDs, make my folder structure more consistent, get rid of cruft, and so on. This time there’s a lot to throw away, because any PowerPC Mac software I was keeping around is now obsolete. One problem area is PhotoShop Elements, because Adobe still haven’t got an Intel native version. The PowerPC one will run under emulation, but I’d rather wait for Adobe to get their act together.

On the plus side, now I can go try all the cool stuff that has appeared in the last year or so, that was too CPU-intensive for my old machine. And maybe do an official Red Pill Intel release.

Digital TV means crystal clear reception from an $8 wire loop antenna. It means beautiful sharp images a meter across with no visible scan lines.

It also means occasionally having to reboot your television.

It’s just the way things are. I have to reboot my cellphone every day or so, or a memory leak eventually causes it to crash. I have to reboot the printer once a month or so. Our answering machine has needed rebooting a few times, too, and the other day I rebooted the car. I haven’t had to reboot my watch, but it does have to sit and calculate for a while when I change physical time zone. I’m sure in a few more years, I’ll be rebooting the toaster whenever it starts burning toast.

Like a Mac, our TV is entirely software controlled, even powering itself on and off when ordered to by the software. There’s no physical on/off switch, just a button that requests that the software turn the set on or off.

Unfortunately, there’s a bug. Every now and again, the software will think there’s no incoming signal, and ask the hardware to turn off the screen to save power. After a second or two it’ll realize it made a mistake, and ask the screen to power up again. It happens very intermittently, I’d guess once every dozen hours or so, but that doesn’t stop it from being annoying. At one point there was a TV episode on the TiVo that would reliably make it happen at a certain point.

So, I wrote to Sharp asking if this was a known glitch with Aquos TVs. They called me back, and had me put the TV into a special hidden maintenance mode. It turned out my TV needed a software update, something to do with a power glitch in Aquos models that support CableCard. I was refered to a local Sharp service engineer, who brought over a couple of flash cards and apparently did the update. So far, so good.

Something about this disturbs me, though. More and more outwardly simple objects that we interact with are controlled by complex software, and we’re apprently still no closer to solving the problem of delivering reliable software. I didn’t feel too bad when the car needed a firmware upgrade, because a car is a really complicated system—especially a hybrid car that needs to control 2 engines at once and trade off energy between them. But TV is conceptually so simple, and it used to involve no software at all. Digital is nice, and all, but because of the need to decode MPEG-2 we’ve quietly lost simplicity of design. And that’s before you even consider the fact that ATSC is a horrible, horrible piece of design-by-committee with 18 different formats.

I’ve had it for over a month now, and I have to say the Oppo OPDV971H is great. If you dislike censorship, like obscure movies, or download unavailable TV shows and movies from the Internet, this is the player for you.

In a nutshell: It will play any DVD from any country in the world, on any TV in the world. It’ll also play XviD and DivX Pro MPEG-4 files on CD-R, CD-RW, or DVD-R, at resolutions up to 720×480. It runs at 110 or 240V, 50 or 60 Hz, so you can plug it in in any country.

If you have an HDTV, it has HDMI/HDCP and DVI output. If you have a reasonably new non-HD TV, it has component output and S-video. If you have an old crufty TV, it has plain old composite video too.

It has a Faroudja DCDi chip in, which is pretty much the state of the art in consumer upscaling. What does that mean? It means your regular DVD can be interpolated up to a proper 720p or 1080i signal, so you don’t see pixels or scan lines on your HDTV. It also does cross-color suppression, so your classic black and white movies stay black and white. It also does 3:2 and 2:2 pulldown, to turn movie DVDs into 24 fps progressive signals.

There’s the usual optical digital output for the audio, or coaxial digital if you prefer. It handles DTS as well as Dolby Digital 5.1. The onboard digital circuits are 192KHz 24 bit, and there’s a 3D virtual surround encoder for those who don’t have 6 speakers and don’t have a receiver that’ll do the job. There’s an adjustable delay to deal with lip sync problems caused by the advanced video processing; I find 30ms is about right.

It supposedly plays DVD-Audio. I haven’t tested that, because DVD-Audio is crippled into uselessness by its DRM—you can’t rip it for your iPod, car, or computer, and you need three extra cables because the music industry won’t allow the signal to travel digitally.

It also does slideshows of JPEGs burnt on a CD, and plays MP3s if you make sure the filenames are short (12 characters + extension).

Yes, it handles anamorphic just fine. Play anamorphic PAL region 2 releases on your NTSC TV, play PAL DivX rips scaled up to 720p, play NTSC DVDs on a PAL TV.

And the best bit: it’s $200, including the cables.

There are a few tiny downsides. The remote’s a bit crap (all the buttons look identical and the labels are hard to see). The disc drawer feels disturbingly flimsy. Sometimes the DivX decoder can’t quite keep up the frame rate at high bitrates, and you get a visible tear in the bottom third of the screen—but that doesn’t seem to affect DVDs. Oh, and it’s a bit slow to boot (you have to wait 3-4 seconds after power up before the tray will eject).

So: I say get one and give the finger to the MPAA. Watch the uncensored Region 3 version of Eyes Wide Shut. Watch UK comedy and Japanese Anime. Download bizarre 50s educational movies from the Prelinger Archives and view them from the comfort of your couch.

Tom Tomorrow has his panties in a bunch over the outrageous behavior of Internet users. He was shocked this week to discover that some people were reading his published web log using special purpose web log browsing software (aka “news aggregators”), rather than the software he wants them to use (a web browser). Worse still, the miscreants were skipping the ads! Quel horreur!

It rather reminds me of the CEO of Turner Broadcasting, who declared that skipping TV ads using fast forward was “stealing the programming”.

Here’s the deal: if you publish or broadcast something, you don’t get to control how people choose to read or watch it.

If I want to watch Cartoon Network on an HDTV and chop the logo off the bottom of the screen, I can. If I choose to read AOL Time Warner’s web sites using a non-AOL web browser, I can. If I want to block your ads or change the layout of your web site using a local style sheet, tough luck, you can’t stop me.

I think the argument that it’s rude for me to skip TV or web ads is ridiculous. However, you may disagree, in which case here are some rules which may soon appear in the Tom Tomorrow Guide to Etiquette.

• When viewing television, politely sit and watch every TV ad. Do not go to the bathroom or fetch a snack. If you must use a VCR to time-shift, do not fast forward through the ads. What, you expect the TV companies to let you watch that programming as you wish?

• Make sure you are careful to read every ad on every page of the newspaper. If you must throw away a section of the paper, be sure to read every advertisement first. Otherwise, you are automatically skipping a big chunk of ads which helped pay for the newspaper you enjoyed, and that would be quite literally stealing content from the newspaper, wouldn’t it?

• Make sure you open and read every single piece of junk postal mail you receive. The postal service you use is heavily subsidized by the money it makes from bulk advertising mail. To toss junk mail in the trash automatically without opening and examining the ads would be taking advantage of something without paying for it. That would be stealing, wouldn’t it?

• When you’re listening to the car radio, never change the station during an ad break. The ads pay for the radio transmitter and the electricity used to broadcast the music. If they couldn’t advertise to you, why, the radio station would go away entirely. So if you skip the ads by pushing a button, you’re obviously human scum.

• You know those advertising inserts in magazines? They’re there because the publisher wants you to have to look at them and move them aside to read the whole article. If you rip them out so you can just read the entire article without seeing the ad, well, you’re stealing. What, you want the content handed to you on a silver platter?

Meanwhile in the real world…

People skip ads all the time. Sometimes manually, sometimes automatically, but mostly without thinking or even registering the presence of the ad. Our daily environment is so ad-infested at this point that even the advertisers are admitting that it is becoming harder and harder to ‘reach’ people (where by ‘reach’ they often mean ‘interrupt’, ’distract’ or ‘annoy’).

If people’s desires and behavior make advertising ineffective, that’s just tough luck for advertising. If technology makes it easy for people to skip ads and people want to skip ads, then people will skip ads. You can rant all you like, but the world was not designed for the express purpose of advertising, and there’s no guarantee it will stay amenable to your marketing messages.

In fact, the Internet was never designed to be friendly to advertising. The fact that you can advertise on the web at all is accident. The Internet existed before web advertising, and will probably still exist in some form when capitalism has collapsed on itself and mass marketing is something kids are asked to read about in history textbooks. If my skipping ads breaks your business model, you need to find a new business model.

And now it’s disclosure time. I’m one of those evil RSS-readin’ web-aggregatin’ freeloading varmints. Except that I have bought a bunch of Tom Tomorrow books, and I wear a baseball cap with Sparky the Wonder Penguin embroidered on the front, purchased from you-know-who’s web site. (As an aside: I wish Ted Rall was still selling embroidered caps in custom sizes, I could totally go for an El Busho cap too, but One Size Does Not Fit All.)

I think I’ve demonstrated that I’m responsible and adult enough to make my own moral choices, so I don’t particularly appreciate being told that I’m “human scum” because I choose not to look at ads every day, and only go browse them when I feel like getting a new T-shirt or some bumper stickers.

According to market research, women would rather have a big HDTV than a diamond ring.

Let’s just say I am highly skeptical of this one.

I have located a 34” HDTV which does all US HDTV standards, plus NTSC and PAL, and also works as a Mac or PC monitor. Now all I need is $2600…