The 360 weekend mixed bag

I finally scheduled time this weekend with Dave to crank up our 360s and try some Xbox Live gameplay. I'm obviously late to this particular party--people have been playing Halo 2 for a number of years now and seen how fun it can be. Yes, people, mine eyes were opened. It was great fun, first being able to voice chat prior to the game as well as during the game, and then being able to play either head-to-head (Halo 2) or co-op (Gears of War) with someone 500 miles away. We had some snags trying to do the co-op play in Gears, but it eventually worked, and voice came in handy when I had to tell Dave "help, I'm dead again, come revive me, I'm over by the stone statue."

So, flush with our success, after we ended our session I decided to try out the new downloadable movies on Marketplace. I really wanted to see what HD flicks looked like, so I decided to rent Unforgiven. Now, Penny Arcade had warned me about trying the HD downloads (describing it in inimitable PA fashion as akin to doing something naughty to a porcupine), but that was on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. By Saturday night, the initial download spike should have been over and all would be good with starting the download going on and then letting it run overnight. Right?

Wrong. It failed almost instantly and created a file on my 360 which, when I deleted it and tried the download again, resulted in my getting charged twice for the failed download. It seems to be particularly screwy for HD content, as I then successfully downloaded a South Park episode (the World of Warcraft one) with no problems.

So, hence the mixed bag. Bill giveth and Bill taketh away. I'll try again, but not for a few weeks.

Burn baby burn! Beryl SVN repository

I kept waiting and waiting for the usual Ubuntu repositories to get the latest version of Beryl out. Luckily, someone Dugg a site that has a bunch of unofficial packages built from SVN versions of Beryl. I added it to Synaptic, added the GPG key, and my software update icon magically told me I had updates to Beryl. I did have to work through a few dependencies, but now all is working. It's a LOT faster, and now when I minimize my windows burn! Woo hoo!

Trevino's Beryl Repository

Firefox 2.0 problems solved

I had seen a lot of crashing after upgrading to Firefox 2.0, but that seems to have gone away after turning off the old Google Toolbar that had been installed previously. Yes, another scintillating blog post! Thank you, thank you very much.

One of my favorite show themes EVER

I was trying to catch up on watching Rocketboom episodes and came across this one with Joanne on a sled. The theme, however, is good old "Tank!" from Cowboy Bebop. Man, that is one helluva song. You can get the live version here... the studio version's good too. The anime series is awesome as it is, but the music just pushes it over into mega-awesomeness.

PS3 scales down, not up

OK, I don't want to sound like a total 360 fanboy, or make it sound like sour grapes that I'm not one of the few people in the world to actually own a Playstation 3. But this report from Ars Technica is a little puzzling. Basically, if your TV (like mine) can only do 1080i, even if you're connected via HDMI, the PS3 will not scale your DVDs or games up to 1080i... it will scale them down to 480p! I can kind of forgive the 360 for not scaling my DVDs, since it doesn't do HDMI for some inexplicable reason. But it's equally inexplicable that the PS3 won't scale.

It's looking like both companies are driving people to upgrade their "old" HDTVs. OK, twist my arm.

Ars Technica article on PS3 and scaling

Xbox 360 first impressions

Did I confess that I got a 360 over the weekend? Yeah, Target had a pretty good deal on them (you got a $50 gift card with your purchase) so I picked up the 20GB version and a copy of Gears of War. Earlier I'd gotten the HD-DVD drive.

It's been a couple of days now and I haven't done much with it (Gears is still shrink-wrapped, for instance) but I have hooked it all up and have some first impressions...

* That power supply is easily the largest damn external power supply I've ever seen for any piece of electronic equipment I have ever owned. What the hell is up with that?

* I'm too used to Apple's elegant packaging. The box-opening experience was underwhelming.

* If you get a Xbox 360, have a USB keyboard handy. It's a lot easier to do all the registration for Xbox Live with a keyboard than with your wireless controller.

* People complain about how loud it is... I can't hear it over my MythTV backend, which is noticeable but not particularly loud. I'll admit it did make me reconsider how loud my backend is. I might have to try to quiet it down some.

* Like I said, I haven't tried Gears yet. All I've tried is UNO and Geometry Wars, both of which are very pretty and surely push the awesome firepower of my next-gen gaming platform to its limits. :)

As for DVD and HD-DVD playback...

* I'm really disappointed in DVD playback. First of all, it's not upsampling... it switches down to 480p since I'm connected via component. Even that wouldn't be so bad, but it's the black level that's the real problem. It's washed out and icky looking. The blacks are fine, however, in game play. So if I adjusted for DVD playback, blacks would get crushed everywhere else. Ugh. Guess the "real" DVD player is going back into the mix.

* I finally got to watch a bit of my bundled HD-DVD version of King Kong. It looked darn good... but I'm not sure it's all that much better than a DVD. People have mentioned this as a problem with both the HD disc formats... people may not notice the difference that much. I'll admit that it could be a limitation of my very old HDTV, so a new TV could fix that. Nevertheless, the picture was good, and I didn't have the black level problems I saw with regular DVD. The only other issue I had was that the soundtrack seemed to lack "oomph." The dynamic range that I'm used to on most discs didn't seem to be there.

All told, I'm pretty pleased. Looking forward to trying out movie downloads later this month!

Uh, I meant to do that

(title should be spoken using your best Pee-Wee Herman impression)

I got the bright idea yesterday to upgrade my Ubuntu install's kernel to one specific for the AMD64, with SMP support, blah blah blah. So, instead of reading about what I should do, I just opened up Synaptic and found the SMP kernel and said "install this."

I rebooted and boom, X server is dead. Turns out when you upgrade the kernel you also may have to reinstall the Nvidia drivers, at least when you're using the beta drivers that are required to run Beryl. OK, no problem, I'll redownload and reinstall the beta drivers. Well, yes problem, because for some reason they won't compile. I tried this, I tried that, I tried the other... and then I gave up and reinstalled Edgy from a CD.

This time, however, I installed the x86 version of Ubuntu... too many things were wonky when running the AMD64 version. I still can't print (grr) but at least the Ubuntu splash screen is in color again. And beryl seems to be running faster. Hm.

Shuffle-flavored beer

Ars Technica reviewed the new Apple iPod Shuffle. I'm linking to the second page of the review, which included a torture test to see how durable the new Shuffle is. When she drops it off of the third-story balcony, it reminded me of the episode of Hey! Spring of Trivia, where they point out that you can drop an ant from any height and it won't be killed by the fall. In fact, the Shuffle survives all but the final challenge...

iPod Shuffle review

Xbox Live HD movies -- rough size estimate

Well, thanks to a screenshot in a GamersReport article, I have an answer to the question about how big HD movies will be. The screenshot shows that fine piece of entertainment, ATL. It clocks in at 107 minutes and is a 1.2GB download in standard def, 4.7GB in high-def (720p). Basically, looks like the standard 20GB Xbox 360 is going to store, oh, _one_ movie at a time...

GamersReports -- Interview with Xbox's Aaron Greenberg

360 to support HD movie downloads

Uh oh, Apple, it's ON, baby! Xbox 360 will be supporting SD and HD downloads of movies and TV shows. They specifically mention HD purchases of TV shows, including classic Star Trek (oooh, gotta tell the neighbors!). They don't mention cost of rentals of HD movies, nor do they mention how blinking long it's gonna take to download something that really is HD (I'm assuming 720p).

Other sites report that rental media will only stick around for 24 hours after you start playing it. That's fine, as long as the price is fair. In fact, most movies I'd rather rent... if I'm going to buy it I'll buy it on a disc of some sort. Apple's FairPlay DRM really needs to figure out how to do a rental of some of its media, as I'm certainly not going to pay Apple's price to own a featureless, menuless, non-anamorphic SD movie.

Anyhow, this makes the Xbox 360 purchase even more inevitable-er.

Watch Movies and TV On Your Xbox

HD-DVD software emulator available

If you buy a Xbox 360, that is... apparently it's a 4.7 million line of code software program that allows the 360 to play back HD-DVDs from its upcoming external drive. Jeez, that's brutal. Hope it works well.

Xbox 360 HD-DVD: Over 4.7 million lines of code