Looks like PS3 is going to be booming soon

[Zervun]

Talk about quick, in less than a week HD-DVD has lost 40% of market share from the big players even the pr0n industry.

I wonder if this will boost PS3 sales and games.

Blueray has always been the superior tech, and open source codec interestingly enough -

Of course PS3 games blow in number and quality overall to xbox360 - should be interesting to see

[[BDB] Puppy Stomper]

I understand that HD-DVD is becoming obsolete faster than expected as well. A lot of the companies putting their movies on DVD are elected to either release on either HD-DVD or Blueray... and many of them (so far, close to 60% and climbing) are going Blueray.

While this blows for anyone who just went and bought an HDMI player, I suppose it will boost sales on the PS3.

One thing that most people aren't aware of, is that Blueray really doesn't have much of a noticeable difference in visual quality to HD-DVD. It makes a large difference for high-end video users (video editing gurus, etc), but you and I won't notice a difference, even on our 52" HD LCD sets. The only real difference is the interactive element to the DVD that you won't get on HD (who gives a shit?)

Again... all aiming to boost PS3 sales. It'd be nice if Sony would support their own product sales by coming out with industry challenging games and not benefiting so heavily from an outside market influence. I wonder if they'll have the motivation to develop high-quality games at a reasonable rate?

[Zervun]

Ya, I heard the codecs aren't that much different in quality - I was under the impression that the only bonus's were that Blueray can hold more data per disk, and that the codec is more "opensource" so doesn't get screwed like dvd codec has been.

IMO, I've seen both and can't really tell the difference in quality, hell I think regular dvd is fairly good (which is so much less than hdtv lvl)

[Mephisto]

The last comparison I saw, HD-DVD had the lead in the quality of their compression. Also HD-DVD is cheaper to manufacture. The Blu-Ray consortium has just been spending boatloads of money and using Sony's marketshare in order to force it onto the market.

As for games, its not that Sony doesn't want high-quality games, but its the fact that the PS3 is hell to program for and Microsoft is a whole lot nicer. I work in the game industry (I've worked for both Konami and EA) on many platforms and titles (Rock Band was my biggest) and I can tell you for a fact that Sony sucks to work with and Microsoft really cares about their support. Sony charges up the ass for their dev kits(think 35 grand each... and you may need a half dozen of them... and thats not even the testing kits(5 grand ea. and you need a couple dozen) and then about the price of a new car for EVERY submission. Microsoft does it much cheaper and submission is usually free. Microsoft also has better documentation and a better testing platform. Not only that but the PS3's Cell processor sucks to program with (which is why Kojima (MGS series) always jokes about making MGS4 for the 360) while the 360 is basically a PC (and uses a version of directX). So basically, many devs (esp new companies) really dont want to risk working with the PS3 because its so expensive and its a bit harder to get things working (which is why many multiplatform titles launch on the 360 first).

oh.. and the PS3's that have "TOOL" written on the side... 100+ grand... i think... i havent seen one yet but i have seen the PS2 TOOL which was about the size of a small bookshelf

[Teth]

HDDVD vs Blueray.

BlueRay has basically won now and you shouldn't be worried about it.

Unlike DVD there is a choice of codecs supported for releases on the HD. VC1 is the true 4th gen HD compression codec. HDDVD releases started using it first hence the better looking transferes while BlueRay was just encoded as very very high bitrate mpeg2. HDDVD doesn't allow mpeg2 so the were forced to impliment VC1 straight away. BlueRay supports VC1, H.264, Mpeg1 and Mpeg2 major format wise and a few more less well known ones that may never be used.

Interactivity wise HDDVD's featureset was a bit more advanced than the BlueRay but there are BLueRay 2.0 specs which are somewhat backwards compatible that close the gap. From my point of view I really don't care cos how much do you really care about the pretty bits ona disc. You buy it for the movie and possibly watch the bloopers or listen to a good commentary. I don't think the interface being fully translucent and animated like a bad flash website adds to that experience :)

In the long run I think BlueRay winning is better. We always say when new storage comes along "why bother you'll never use X amount of space" then 3 years later you run out. My first HD was 3GB. Now I have a 2TB Raid array + 160GB Raid0 Stripe set in my machine. The extra capacity of blueray will future proof it and the manufacturing cost will drop with volume as it always does.

BTW. First post. Hi all

[Teth]

Slightly more on topic. I think the next 12 months will be great for PS3 now that we're getting games that were developed with PS3 as the lead platform rather than PS2, 360 or PC. Its rather easier to write for PS3 with is PPC processor and 7 SPU's and then port to 360 with its 3 PPC cpu cores than to do the reverse. Likewise if you write for RSX in shader 3 directly its easier to port it to dx integrated or whatever MS are callign it now for the 360.

Burnout Paradise is the first title I've played with PS3 as its lead platform and if you download the 2 demos it is noticable. Likewise DMC4 is a dual platform title not sure what the lead platform was there but it plays magnificently on PS3.

Personally I have both so I like to go with best experience available so I'm loving RezHD in 360 and Paradise on PS3 right now. With DMC4 on PS3 looking liek a buy and Wipeout HD on PS3 a dead cert for my cash. Its a good year to own a console especially a PS3.

Most important difference. My PS3 doesn't feel like gaming at an airport :D

[Zervun]

Interesting stuff there Teth - I have kind of kept out of console gaming for a while but have gotten back into it now that I'm building a HTPC with sage TV and might do a front end on it with a ps3

[rek]

I hate all compact disks. So useless. I have high definition video on my computer, using much better compression, and it can't get lost, scratched, chipped, or any of those other problems CDs have. And you can back files up quickly and easily without having to keep track of more stupid disks.

I'd never buy HD-DVD or Blu-ray. Little scratchable disks, what a terrible idea! I can't wait until they are gone forever (shouldn't be long considering things like video on demand and dirt cheap flash drives).

[Zervun]

Unfortunately video on demand is a long ways off considering that US bandwidth is so extremely far behind to the consumer

for most movies I still will be doing the netflix and hopefully they will do blueray

we go through about 2 movies a week or more from netflix and the mailing is slick

of interesting note - I'm also extremely interested in blueray for server backup, it's much larger size

[Teth]

IMHO the days of removable media for server backup are dead. That covers any kind of Optical or magnetic tape solution be it cartirge or not.

Its got too many things agtainst it now.
Too small per item. So you need to get involved in autoloaders and magazine systems.
Its not robust enough. Even IAT carts have an in use failure rate far too high for comfort hence the need now for staggered backup sets so that you have at least 2 seperate tape combinations to sucessfully rebuild from. Friday tape + monday to thursday diferentials all falls apart if tuesdays tape lost bits.
Expense. Byt the time you have a robust enough system with sufficient capacity you've spent more than the rest of the server cost.

NAS and DAS are now so cheap they eclipse tape and optical backup and even SAN is getting price competitive.

My personal choice for server backup is a NAS (fancy name for a server with alot of HDs and little processing) which all your other servers drop backup images onto at a set time of the day every day.

You then have DAS devices on the NAS ( basically an external hard drive 500GB is less than $100 now). All the images from all your servers go onto that at regualr intervals this can use extreemly high compression because the NAS has nothing else to do during the work day unlike other servers that must backup when they wont affect productivity and availability.

You then simply rotate these DAS devices as per a standard oldfashioned tape system. only one of them onsite at any time.

Larger enterprises with multiple sites can use spare leased bandwidth at night to sync NAS storage at multiple sites to furthur aid disaster resistance.

With VM technology going so mainstream now you can literally have any server role duplicated onto new hardware almost imeditaly after any failure possibly even ona different site somewhere else in the world. And all for coparitively tiny sums of money.

Here I have 3 servers all running raid 5 on their data disks to cover hardware failure which backup to what is basically a desktop with 2 big hard drives. It has space for 3 weeks of backups for each server and they are duplicated offsite using simple 500GB Seagate E-SATA Drives. They are run in a 3 teir system. 1 attached to the machine, 1 in the firesafe here, 1 in a partner schools firesafe. We do the same for them.

Other than an event that wipes out northern Ireland we're covered and all for less than HP AIT 360GB tape system without the tapes.

[Zervun]

For corporate business's that require sarbane-oxly and PCI Compliance standards and store a ton of data though, it is just not reality and still very far off. Tape is actually making a come back ironically. Personally I find it the most PITA crap I have ever dealt with.

Although we currently use Sun Storagetek that does 400GB a tape, in 3u (we also got an additional shelf), it stores about 50 tapes or so - we have yet to have an issue with it, and it can backup an astronomical amount per day (it goes through a san switch to the VTL).

We have to have offsite storage, it's required, and tape is the easiest way, (it also has to be encrypted on the way out which we use neoscales for). We also have to have it stored in a "rated" storage company such as iron mountain.

Another main issue, is that we have over 80 terrabytes per datacenter. One which includes a production and a development environment which cannot be shared due to requirements. To have two seperate 40 TB worth of NAS, takes alot of room and power, when we can do streaming backup to tape in just 3u worth of space, it is actually more cost effective for us by a large margin. Power > any other cost in the datacenter, and tape takes little. Our latest 3par 40TB SAN requires 4 208v whips which cost a bundle, and then requires a NFS gateway. We also have netapp, and EMC in house, all with similar issues.

There is also the matter that power outages don't affect any way our tape restores, where they do a NAS/SAN whether it shit cans (highly unlikely) or has to rebuild. Worst case senario if the datacenter power is completely down for a day we can have tapes shipped to our other datacenter.

I hate tape but it is still a necessity in big business at this point. Storing our increasingly every amount of growing data where power is the largest cost not the devices is very problematic and I don't see that going away any time soon.

We also do SAN/NAS replication and the costs are excrutiatingly high for our datasize on bandwidth and software, we also require tape backup even with that. With companies that have to be in sync 24/7 and have a large amount of data unless you have the new 1000gig long distance 100mile fiber with datacenters less than that distance it isn't reality due to costs and speed, and even then the few that do, still backup to tape.

Of course our company is fairly different, but we were only a 50 person company before we were gobbled up and were still doing that kind of datasize.


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Although for my webhosting and other shops ;) I just run a raid 1 across 2 drives with a spare, a jmpdisk which in turn ftp's backups off site to a home nas, very simple and great ;).

[effonge09]

xbox360 has acceptable game play but unacceptable controllers.
Charging to play a GAME on the corresponding CONSOLE is a scam. You can spend 300 just to PLAY the game, then spend more to play it online?
No Blu-Ray.
Overall fail.

Ps3 wins