Universal: no blu-ray

media Sony

Universal retracts support for retates it is not supporting blu-ray

And so it begins to tip and slide. People said generally that Bluray had the upper hand in the beginning of this format war. It certainly is no ‘war’, since nobody cares. But it looks like Blu-Ray’s chances of getting the market are slimming down quickly. It’s not at the tipping poing yet. But it might happen quicker than Sony wants.

This kind of press puts even bigger pressure on the PS3. Not that it could deal with the current level. I have not seen an announcement that production has begun. Two months left to launch, and nobody has ever seen a PS3 how it would be sold. Just design mockups and Blu-Ray players.

update 9/24/06: it seems that this news item was kind of a press stunt: Universal never backed Blu-ray in the first place. They just said again they would not do it.

an alternative approach

confessions of a pixel pusher misc

Just heard an interesting interview with Jon Favreau who will make Iron Man the movie. At some point the show should be available as a podcast

He seems to consider carefully where to use CG, and where not to. He cited “Top Gun” allot, which I saw for the first time yesterday. Which would be in itself worth a longish blog post, but I have to work today. Sundays are great for work, since there are less interuptions.

d new tunes

Apple misc

iTunes 7. It’s blue. Again? Wasn’t it already? Album art is nice, yet also scary: I think you need an iTunes login to use this feature. So in theory Apple knows what Music you have. They say that they will not keep this data. It would be a big blow if they would. For everybody. I wonder if the RIAA sharks start to circle the infinite loop.

Apple could use this data. Big time. Imagine what kind of data mining they could do. Knowing about the Music collections of millions of people. Think Amazon’s ‘people that bough this also bought that’ feature on steroids.

Just let’s pretend that Apple sticks to their word. And let’s hope that as well.

Video playback is nicer now. It was actually a horrible hack: “Ze Frank” was mostly tugged away in the lower left corner of the interface.

npr real player, why?

internet

On NPR I heard that the director of “French Connection” did cut the chase to a Santana Track without an intention to actually use that sound in the movie. Which is a neat little story I think. The NPR page for this has a real player link to the movie and the audio. That’s great, just that real player is so horrible it stopped worked a while back.I hope NPR eventually will realize that it real player is not working. For nobody.

They might as well try to sell their programs on 8Track tape.

who knew

daily life free of any reason politics

The Saturday stroll through those internets. Things I found along the way:

Spinach is bad for you while booze isn’t

Men are smarter than women and coding in Basic is awesome

In politics that are not occupied with an impromptu re-enactment of mideval ages there is Herman Munster (again!) and a President that will fix everything, with, well: Torture if his own Party would only let him

But there are also more substantial things to find, like the Stormtrooper Effect

all your content are belong to us

internet media technology

Entering

star trek closer video

into google will provide you with lots of different sources for a rather entertaining mashup. It’s interesting how content that is able to strike a cord with people will propagate into lots and lots of outlets. Virtually impossible to control.

little people

BlogsNow malware

little people a nice project. Almost cute.

Unrelated, just that I picked up it from there: BlogsNow is seriously clogged by spam right now. Problem is that 90% spam is preventing the crawl of the real sites get done in time. Many of those spam sites don’t even react in time. Spam is usually horrible about that. They just junk as much as they can, no matter if it even makes sense or not. They are just rushing to the next thing. And it’s done by idiots in the first place. No wonder they can’t keep their stupid little scripts straight.

bsd vs linux

linux

Maybe someday I will find the time to read this interesting yet long article about the difference of BSD and linux.

red: great, no need to eat my hat

technology

I had not thought that RED would show images @ IBC. I thought I needed to get ready to eat my hat on that one, when they actually did. The footage itself I have not seen, just the the youTube version. Interesting choice of subjects I would say.

Now looking at the images of the actual device over here I think that RED is back in the bin where I had them @ NAB: Funky billionaire bubble stuff. No practicle application that I could think of.

Looking at the thing I wonder what kind of camera operator they would have in mind? By the time you are done you have to spend between 50 and 100K for the kit. You want to be caught with some funky lump of metal for this kind of money? I didn’t think so either.

if this works it will end the ‘format war’

media technology

Toshiba and Memory Tech announce a HD-DVD / DVD disc

They call it ‘tripple layer’. It plays in DVD and in the new HD-DVD players. Which is the end of the usual chicken and egg drama with new formats: Not enough players, not enough discs. And it finally respects the consumers.

Every launch of new technology pretends as if people have nothing in their home. Just empty shelf space to fill with their products. With a DVD/HD-DVD combo disc there would be room for a transition. If the Studios would release movies on these combo discs and would not charge more for it, then the format war would be over, and everybody, including Hollywood would be happy.

Technically it is not possible for Blu-Ray to pull this stunt. Given the impact that this would have if executed right it is very surprising how the HD-DVD could take so long to get going on this.

Update: Arc Technica has the better view on this matter.