The Recycle Bin

Two more significant wins for Blu-ray were reported today by blu-ray.com (and I am sure many other sites.

First, Best Buy will officially recommend Blu-ray over HD DVD:

Brian Dunn, Best Buy’s president and chief operating officer commented, “Consumers have told us that they want us to help lead the way. We’ve listened to our customers, and we are responding. Best Buy will recommend Blu-ray as the preferred format. Our decision to shine a spotlight on Blu-ray Disc players and other Blu-ray products is a strong signal to our customers that we believe Blu-ray is the right format choice for them.

Second, Netflix will exclusively carry Blu-ray:

Ted Sarandos, chief content officer for Netflix commented, “The prolonged period of competition between two formats has prevented clear communication to the consumer regarding the richness of the high-def experience versus standard definition. We are now at the point where the industry can pursue the migration to a single format, bring clarity to the consumer and accelerate the adoption of high-def. Going forward, we expect that all of the studios will publish in the Blu-ray format and that the price points of high-def DVD players will come down significantly.”

Blu-ray is going to propel the PS3 forward. Some would say kicking and screaming, but the situation is no longer dire for Sony. In fact, today is another feather (or two) in Sony’s cap.

According to espn.com, last Sunday a whole lot of folks watched the Super Bowl.

The 97.5 million viewers who saw the New York Giants’ last-minute win over the New England Patriots made it the most-watched Super Bowl ever and second biggest event in American television history.

Only the “MASH” series finale in 1983, with 106 million viewers, was seen by more people, Nielsen Media Research said Monday. Sunday’s game eclipsed the previous Super Bowl record of 94.08 million, set when Dallas defeated Pittsburgh in 1996.

Brady, Manning, and Vick. Which one doesn’t belong? It looks like Vick will have some money in his coffers to use in his defense against various lawsuits coming his way.

Jailed quarterback Michael Vick can keep all but $3.75 million of the nearly $20 million in bonus money he received from the Atlanta Falcons following a ruling Monday by a federal judge.

I am not sure how all the salary cap nonsense works, but I do know that the Falcons would get some salary cap relief for any of the $20 million they could recover. The Falcons are putting on a brave face by saying this did not really affect them for next year. I have my doubts.

Switching gears to college football action, the January 14, 2008 SI listed Georgia as their number one team going 2008.

“QB Matthew Stafford and RB Knowshon Moreno are among 17 starters expected back on a team that closed with seven strong wins.”

If it were only that easy. Going into Signing Day, or Super Wednesday, the January 25, 2008 Columbus Ledger-Enquirer ran an article that Georgia’s 2008 recruiting class was full.

Even if Georgia doesn’t add another commitment to its 25-man class, the group will rank among the nation’s best as long as there aren’t numerous defections. Legge [publisher of dawgpost.com] said it would be “stunning” if the Bulldogs’ class didn’t finish in scout.com‘s top five. Georgia’s current crop of commitments is rated third in the nation by scout.com and fourth by rivals.com.

Tomorrow may be more fun to watch than the results tonight.

I am not sure what I can say that has not already been said in the paper, on sports talk radio, or on TV. I do hope that the focus stays on Eli Manning and the Giants’ superb defensive effort, and not so much on spygate. Actually, the best thing about the Patriots losing may be that the spygate chapter will finally come to a close.

I have a feeling that this Tom Brady led Pats team was my best shot at seeing a team go undefeated in my lifetime (I was too young to remember or watch the 1972 Dolphins). Then again, I doubt that we will ever see brothers quarterback teams to Super Bowl titles in consecutive years.

I did not see much point predicting the Pats over the Giants, but what the heck.  Hopefully it will be a close game.

I am not sure what I can do to fix this issue, but as I posted below, I just cannot get Remote Play to work correctly.  I just tired a few more different ways to get this setup, with no luck.  At this point I have to assume that there is some sort of incompatibility between my ISP, my router, and my PS3.  I guess it could be user error, but I have no idea what to try next.  Very frustrating!

If I enable Remote Start, the PS3 will turn on every couple of minutes.  I know that if a PSP does not connect within a limited time window, the PS3 will power down.  At this point, I will not be able to get the PSP to connect via Remote Play.  I keep turning the PS3 off (press the O button to return the XMB and then power down via the controller), but it will power on again within two minutes.

Where to begin?  Recently Sony updated PS3 to PSP Remote Play capabilities to allow for remotely turning on the PS3 with a PSP and to allow playing Original PlayStation (PSX) game disks.  This sounds great.  If only I could get it to work.

Remote Play mode in itself works great, if I put the PS3 in Remote Play mode.  I can then connect my PSP to the PS3, view videos, play music (in theory, but all my iTunes music does not work), browse the internet, go to the PlayStation Store, and of course play original PlayStation games.  For testing purposes, I tired remote play with Road Rash and with Moto Racer World Tour.  Needless to say, it is very cool making use of my long forgotten PSX games.

As far as I can tell, Remote Play also works from within a closed network (i.e. within my house), but not over the internet.  The upside here is that I can play PSX games on my PSP within my house.  Nice feature, but not really what I want.  I would like to put a game in my PS3, and play it on demand outside of my house.  This would be extremely cool for my next trip to Costa Rica or the UK, or even on a visit to my in-laws house.

Now for the hard part.  I cannot get Remote Play to work correctly if I want to control turning on my PS3 and starting Remote Play from the internet.  If you do a few simple Google searches you will find that I am not the only one with the problem.  There is so much misinformation about this feature, and how to get it working correctly, that it comes across as black magic.  One commonality between all the issues and mine is that I have a Linksys WRT54GS router.  I upgraded to the latest firmware, but that did not solve the problem.

The problem if fairly simple, so it would seem.  Once I register my PSP, setup my PS3 for Remote Play (enabling the option by allowing internet startup of the PS3), and turn off the PS3 the problems begin.  My PS3 will randomly turn on and go into Remote Play mode.  When I use the term randomly, I mean that I did not invoke my PSP to start Remote Play, and I did not press any PS3 controller (or Blu-ray remote) buttons.  The PS3 just fires up and eventually shuts off.  The turning off part is normal behavior according to the PS3 manual.  The problem is that once this behavior happens, Remote Play startup no longer works correctly.

I have tried everything under the sun.  I assigned the PS3 a static ip, within the DNS range and outside of the range.  I have put the PS3 in its own DMZ.  I have made sure UPnP is enabled, and setup port forwarding for 9293.  The list goes on and on, but to no avail.

At one point yesterday I thought I had everything working (static ip within DNS range, and PS3 DMZ).  The system did not randomly turn on, so I was able to go into Remote Play mode using the Internet option (from my house, which is not a good test since technically that is almost the same a private network) and then turn off the system.  Very nice, however, later in the day while I was running errands, I attempted to start Remote Play mode from two different internet hot spots, only to have the connection to the PS3 timeout.  Once I returned home, I attempted to start Remote Play, but could not get it started with the internet connection option.

I am pretty much at the point of throwing in the towel, but not ready to give up yet.  If this is a router issue, I am not prepared to purchase another router when everything else works fine.  My PS3 has no issues connecting the internet, and while PSN downloads are slow, all other activity associated with my router works fine.  Wii?  Check.  Personal laptop?  Check.  Work laptop?  Check.  PSP?  Check.  Remote Play via internet?  Black magic.

Yesterday Sony’s official blog reported the street date and price for the highly anticipated Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Sony has decided to opt for digital distribution and a retail Blu-ray version

“The BD version will offer added value with an exclusive behind-the-scenes High Definition (HD) video feature called “Beyond the Apex”. This video will offer some awesome access to the folks at Polyphony and give some background on how they are able to create such a realistic and beautiful driving simulator.”

As much as I love the Gran Turismo series, I do not really care for the behind-the-scenes stuff, but I would rather own a disk vs. a digital copy of the game. This is not a matter of over coming some mental ownership hurdle of being able to physically touch a disk versus not being able to touch something on my PS3 HDD. After all, I download music from iTunes all the time. For me it is much simpler. I like having the ability to sell my games, so I will be picking up the Blu-ray version of the game. Besides, downloads from PSN take forever and a day.

There is only so much more time I can spend with the Gran Turismo HD Concept demo, but it looks like I still have another 10 or so weeks of Time Trial action.

If you are wondering, the price tag of the Prologue “demo” does not really bother me. I expect this $40 demo to be better than most racing games, so this should be a non issue for most fans of the series.

With the release of the PSP 3.90 firmware, Sony officially supports Skype, but only on the PSP-2000 series. Come again? Yes, those of you with a PSP-1000 (the original, non-slim version of the PSP) are left in the cold when it comes to using Skype.

QJ.net recently explained (or speculated)

“Although PSP-1000 and PSP-2000 are identical in basic functions, there are differences in hardware specifications to some extent and, for that reason, PSP-2000 may differ in features from PSP-1000. We had studied the possibility of supporting Skype with PSP-1000 but had to give it up because of the smaller size of main memory on PSP-1000 series.”

I guess I really did not pay too much attention to what was going on behind closed doors. After all, last fall I came close to preordering a new PSP (wanted that Star Wars version), but decided that the smaller footprint, video out, and faster load times were not worth the upgrade.

I guess the memory upgrade (64MB vs. 32MB) was the hallmark feature of the PSP-2000. Now the cows are out of the barn. What other future features will be excluded from PSP-1000 owners? Last night I wrote about PS3 SKU confusion, and now we get this beauty.

In the interest of disclosure, I do not use Skype, but that is irrelevant. Sony is going to isolate and piss off their core fan base, myself included. I have owned a PSP (original, fat, phat, PSP-1000, etc) since its launch, and I am rewarded by Sony deciding that my PSP is no longer in its future. I never realized that the leap from the PSP-1000 to the PSP-2000 was akin to a hardware leap. I thought this was more along the lines of Nintendo’s typical strategy of releasing a GameBoy Advance, followed by a GameBoy Advance SP, followed by a GameBoy SP Super Special Limited Edition (or whatever).

I am all for progress, but I would rather Sony come clean and say that those of you with a PSP-1000 are about to be left in the dust.

I started to post; stopped myself.  Then decided to do it anyway.  The entire internet is swarming with rumors about the demise of the 80GB PS3 and the interdiction of a new super, duper 120GB (or larger) PS3.  Why should this matter?  Why should I care?

Actually I only care because I want to see Blu-ray succeed, and I do not want any SKU confusion to … well … confuse developers.  Which features and extras are in and which are out?

Additionally, for selfish reasons, I want to see Sony continue with hardware backwards compatibility.  Once it is eradicated from current SKUs, it will be long gone and forgotten.  There are still many PSX and PS2 games still in circulation.  I want to be able to play these and I do not want to have to connect multiple systems to my TV.  Besides, the PS3 (and PS2 before it) have nice options to smooth out graphics and increase disk access times.  Keep it in Sony, even as a “premium” SKU to go with a “standard” SKU.  The more PlayStation options, the better.

How do I see things playing out?  In order to keep costs under control, and thus sell more PS3 systems, Sony will continue pulling features (and of course pushing Blu-ray) with each new SKU.  Sony will probably keep a higher end SKU, with a bundled game and high capacity HDD, but backwards compatibility will continue to move towards software emulation.

At some point, the PS2 will be officially retired.  By then, Sony will have costs under control, and realize that they can introduce a “new improved” premium SKU that includes all of the PS3 60GB day one features (4 USB ports, Wi-Fi, flash card readers, and of course hardware PS2 compatibility with the Emotion Engine).  Now that would be progress.

This is not going to be very pretty. I have spent too much time trying to get my PS3 to stream my iTunes music files. Looks like it is not going to happen anytime soon, which sucks because the PS3 is supposed to be some sort of centralized, all-in-one media and entertainment gizmo. Unless it comes to AAC files that are coded to iTunes (i.e. Apple specs; MP4 … not sure of all the technical codex jargon).

First I had to get Windows Media Player to allow Media Sharing. That was pretty easy (Library – Media Sharing option).

Out of the box, Media Player does not support playing AAC files. I guess Microsoft knows that iTunes users will not want to use anything less than iTunes, so why bother. At least I assume something silly like that is their reasoning for not providing simple, out of the box support.

In order to fix this problem, I had to make liberal use of Google, leading me to the installation of two Media Player plugins: Tag Support Plugin for Windows Media Player and The Orban/Coding Technologies AAC/aacPlus Plugin.

My Media Player can now see and play my iTunes files, but that was not really what I wanted. Streaming to the PS3 was the goal.

After all this time and effort, my PS3 could see the files, including some simple file info (artist, album, song name), but my PS3 could not recognize the file format. Those liberal Google searches that I mention led me to one cold hard fact. For some inane reason Sony has decided that support for AAC files (at least ones generated by iTunes) is not that important. This just does not make sense to me.

First, if I rip my own music from CDs that I have purchased, they should not have any copyright info, so they files should play. If Sony wants to support (and push) their own ACC format, more power to them, but I should be able to use the most popular music format on my PS3. Second, Apple (via iTunes) allows you to register several computers to play your purchased files. The PS3 is just another conduit for playing music files. Or rather it should be that cut and dry.

So what gives? I have several hundred CDs that I decided to rip using iTunes. Before I had my iPod, I would use Easy CD-DA Extractor to create MP3 files for my music programs. After I purchased my iPod, I decided that I could get better music quality, and take up less space, by using iTunes to rip music in its preferred format. MP3 was dead. Long live MP4. Seems like a reasonable decision, and I am sure that millions of other iPod owners do the same.

Seems like Sony has different ideas. For some reason they will not allow ripped iTunes music files and the PS3 to play nicely. I blame this all Sony because the rest of the world has accepted iTunes native music format as the digital music standard. I blame Apple for now allowing me to play purchased iTunes music files on my PS3. If Apple wants everyone to go digital, they should make previsions for playing legally purchased music on my entertainment centers (be they consoles such as the PS3 or a standard laptop).

Not a pretty picture.

Watching the Rolex 24 at Daytona, doing some blogging, and catching up on the PlayStation blog. Just came across something I am not sure what to make of; should I be happy or just kind of blah? Twisted Metal: Head On – Extra Twisted Edition (PS2; MSRP $19.99) will be out next week (Feb 5).

At first, while watching the video I was thinking this was a PSP game. I guess I have been spoiled on PS3 graphics, but then the PS2 logo was shown. I really like the Twisted Metal series, especially TM1, TM2, and TM Black. I sold my PSP TM game because I could never get into the controls, so I was really hoping for a new PSP version with tighter controls. Then again, we really need a new PSP with a better analog stick, but I digress.

I doubt I will pick this one up, but $19.99 is a great price. Hopefully they are working on a PS3 version, complete with 1080p support (yes; color me a graphics whore).

As I mentioned in the MLB 08 post below, I really like what Sony is doing with their blog. Yes, it is a propaganda piece, but it is also nice to see some of the Sony employees answer questions (which is the reason I linked to the post with comments).

I have not been able to watch as much of the race as I would like, but what I have seen has been fun.  It is always good to see NASCAR drivers do well in this race.  With less than 45 minutes left in the race, Juan Pablo Montoya’s team is in first, Jimmie Johnson’s team is in second, and Kurt Busch’s team is in third.

I know these guys are not the flagship drivers, but it is still very cool to watch the Cup boys run in front of the pack.

Sony is getting smarter with their official blog, which they can use to help pimp their upcoming titles, and reach out to their fan base. The recent MLB 08 entry is a good example.

“This year, we added over 500 more gameplay animations. That number doesn’t even include the presentations, personal pitcher deliveries and batter stances (including their own personal walk up sequences). The pitcher batter duel is also an area where we put a lot of focus. Personalizing pitchers breaks, how they attack the batter/user and the adjustments that the pitchers make based on the users tendencies all were improved upon.”

I did not try the PS3 version last year, but have been a fan of the PSP games. I am sure both versions will be pretty, but I want the developers to concentrate on quicker games (under thirty minutes), realistic statistics, and of course quality AI. The article talks about situational awareness, but pretty much from a graphical standpoint.

I hope Sony goes all out and provides some nice PS3 to PSP options, gives us 1080p support, and plenty of online support (say online leagues). I am not sure that I will play online, but it would be nice to be able to setup some leagues.

It should be interesting to see what Sony throws up for their weekly MLB 08 nuggets, but so far I have not placed a preorder. I am waiting to see something that knocks my socks off.

I am surprised with the number of hits, searches, and referrals I get for airgun info, so a couple of weeks ago I added a new airgun category to allow those of you coming to the site for airgun info to quickly find airgun posts.

I also moved up the Category section on the left nav because it was lost below several years of archive links.  This will allow you to quickly navigate to airgun posts (if that is your thing) or just stay on topic with videogame posts (for those of you that do not care about my airgun digressions).

Crosman is introducing an entry level PCP called the Crosman Discover. It comes in .177 and .22 flavors, with or without a pump, and will allow for CO2 or compressed air. Sounds interesting.

I love my Beeman R7, but would like something with a little more pop to take out those pesky squirrels. Don’t get me wrong; I can take them down with the R7, but the Discovery in .22 would give me more options and another toy to play with and a reasonable price just shy of $400.

I guess I do not really need another airgun, but the Discovery is pretty darn tempting.