10 Reasons Why High Definition DVD Formats Have Already Failed

Found this linked to from this week's This Week in Tech. Interesting commentary on why they feel both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are doomed. Interestingly, this weekend I was able to see Blu-Ray on a real nice Sony rear-projection screen at the local Sony Style store. The clip from Chicken Little was pretty awesome. The clip from Ultraviolet was less so. Then I went to the Best Buy across the street and saw their HD-DVD player hooked up to some crappy $2K Westinghouse screen. Not sure if it was the Westinghouse screen or the poor quality of the clips, but it was truly underwhelming. Cinderella Man in particular looked downright poor.

10 Reasons Why High Definition DVD Formats Have Already Failed

HD-DVD? Blu-Ray? How about a nice Oppo?

Now, I'm linking below to the good old Digital Bits and their "My Two Cents" daily posting, so after a day or two you'll have to scroll down or follow the link for older postings. But today they looked at the first lineup of Blu-Ray discs and the Samsung player, and they were pretty unimpressed. They noticed problems when outputting 1080i instead of 720p, and also noticed a slight stuttering during playback which sure sounds familiar... I could accept it with my home-grown MythTV box, but not with a $1000 brand-spanking-new Blu-Ray HD player, that's for sure. They also said that The Fifth Element--certainly a movie that has and should be used as a benchmark--looked decidedly un-HD. They said the Superbit DVD, played through a good upscaling player like the Oppo 970HD, compared quite favorably to the Blu-Ray disc. Hm, $1000 for a Blu-Ray player, or $150 for an Oppo? Hm.....

The Digital Bits - We Know DVD!#mytwocents

Opera browser for DS here soon?

Oooh, what a cool thing to run on my new DS Lite... the Opera browser. Only $33 but so far only a Japanese date. Maybe my first foray into the import market?

Opposable Thumbs: Opera browser for DS given date, price for Japanese release

Some pretty cool Parallels results

I've been playing with the Parallels virtualization software on my MacBook Pro and finally had a chance to put it to a real test. Well, I'm not sure how good a test it really was, but it was a test nonetheless.

http://www.parallels.com/

OK, here's the rundown: MacBook Pro with a dual-core 2GHz Intel processor, against my three-year-old work Alienware with dual-1.7GHz Athlon processors, against my work PowerMac G5 with dual-2.5GHz PowerPC processors.

The MacBook is running Parallels, which has Fedora Core 4 installed under it as a virtual machine. (BTW, after some searching, I found an xorg.conf file on the Parallels forum that allowed me to run in the MacBook Pro's native resolution of 1440x900 (something like that)). The G5 is running 10.4.3, and the Alienware is running XP.

On each setup, I installed the open-source 3D program called Blender, as well as Python.

http://www.blender.org/
http://www.python.org/

I used a Python script I found online that allows you to import molecular model data in the PDB format. I of course imported a stretch of DNA...

http://www.malte-reimold.de/blender/pdb2blend.html

I stopped timing when it was done converting/importing. And the results? Pretty amazing.

G5 dual 2.5 GHz: 8 min
Dual Athlon 1.7 GHz: 6 min
Dual-core Intel 2 GHz: 2 min!!!

That's running IN A WINDOW while inside of OS X! Now, other performance wasn't that great, but I know one thing... I'm going to need to get a faster PC at work!