Blu-Ray, PS3, Rock Band

As a recent HDTV owner, and even more recent PS3 (and thus, Blu-Ray owner), I’ve been following the HDDVD vs Blu-Ray format wars perhaps a little more closely than your average joe. I’ve hated seeing competing formats, because I think it’s paralyzed a lot of people for fear of making the wrong decision. From a consumer point of view, a single format should give you confidence that you’re not wasting your money. The beginning of the end was when Warner Home Video (who makes up a significant portion of the pie) jumped from HDDVD to exclusively Blu-ray. This turned a pretty much 50-50 split into mor e like 70-30. They announced this at CES, and shortly thereafter, a big HDDVD press conference was abruptly cancelled. They must have been really shaken by the news.




Within the following weeks, Blockbuster, Netflix, Circuit City, Amazon, and WalMart all announced that they’d offer Blu-ray exlusively, or at least push Blu as the right choice. It didn’t take long for HDDVD to crumble, and within the past week Toshiba finally shut it down altogether. With HDDVD pronounced dead, Universal and Paramount (the remaining big players on the HDDVD side) were released from their contract, and within a few days announced that they were going Blu as well.

I read an interesting (if not conspiratorial) article talking about Microsoft’s angle in this whole thing. Microsoft not only makes the Xbox (which doesn’t come with but supports an add-on HDDVD drive), and I think is also involved with the technology behind the HDDVD software. If HDDVD “wins”, everyone would basically have little Microsoft computers in their living rooms. One report was that Microsoft was “writing $150 million checks” to various entities to keep the format alive.

Today, there is an article that speculates that Sony paid Warner up to $400 million to jump ship (and start the landslide). That’s a lot of coin. Lots of people are comparing this format war to the old VHS vs. Betamax war that our parents fought in. Betamax was the Sony-backed technology, so they may or may not still be smarting a little.

So, with any luck, consumers will all go out and buy Blu-ray players. Studios will start pumping out Blu-ray titles (Lord of the Rings, please?), and we will all watch our movies in glorious high definition (DVD is 720x480 pixels. Blu-ray is up to 1920x1080 pixels. More pixels means much more detail and clarity. To say nothing of the better sound that will accompany it).

Speaking of PS3s, I conquered my Rock Band drum career on Hard difficulty last night. Actually, I only had a few stumbling points (“Don’t Fear the Reaper” (one of my favorite songs) and “Run to the Hills”, notably). RttH required some time spent in Practice Mode, playing the song on a slower speed, and I still never really got the timing down, but was able to fake my way through it. Now, onwards to Expert difficulty!

Part of what allowed me to beat Hard difficulty was I was able to get in some playtime after the ladies went to bed. And part of what allowed me to play when others were sleeping was my little arts and crafts project. The Rock Band drumkit is really nice, but the sticks make a healthy THWACK when you hit a pad. A solution posted to the various interwebs is to take some stick-back craft foam (found in the kids sections of crafts stores), and put that on your drum pads. Then, on top of that, add a layer of felt. So, that’s what I did. I cut the circles of felt and foam at different radii, which I think makes it look pretty sharp. Cuts down on the noise a lot as well, which means I can play without waking anyone up. Good times. I also got a nice metal support and some Gorilla tape (strongest tape there is!) and reinforced the kick trigger, since I could already feeling it warp a little while playing. It was only a matter of time when that bad boy snapped (which has happened to many other players).