Kotaku 
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Denver, 2:01 PM
Sat Nov 28
27 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/23/09
10/23/09
I blame the lame advertising for Blu-ray for this overuse of the word uncompressed. Lossless is the best quality you can have. While uncompressed is identical to lossless compression, uncompressed means you're just wasting space for the sake of wasting space.
I cannot emphasize how large even a lossless 1080p video would be. And for uncompressed, we are talking terabytes. #bluray
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/22/09
Optical drives really are outdated at this point. They are slow (-lead to long loading times), error and crash prone (especially with consoles where its common to use cheap parts its a common reason for the system not working properly anymore after a while) and they force higher costs on us (console and game creators could offer the same consoles/ games at same or lower price and still make the same or higher margin if there were no disc drives in consoles and no need to press discs and sell em in big boxes).
I totally endorse a totally download only future, sure it comes with its own downsides (loosing ownership on media if publishers get it wrong or things unreasonably still costing the same or more despite digital delivery (see sony and psp go), people not having fast enough connections to download things quickly until there´s enough pressure on the phone companies to act properly etc), but yeah, still better than investing in yet another disc drive and discs that make no sense to deal with anymore in first place.
Yes, i´m spoiled thanks to having a fast internet connection and getting everything i can via download services, but yeah, maybe it takes trying that for a while to see how much of a waste the dust collecting dvd collection is and how weird it is to collect plastic boxes with a plastic disc on second thought. #bluray
10/23/09
..so.. downloadable content, including HD movies is go again, then...?
*ahem* eeeh, but not everyone has 10Mbit internet connections or HDTVs, screech, whine, repeat. #bluray
10/23/09
Thing is, like Nipsen said, not everyone has a good connection (i'm on 512k), and not everyone had the harddisk capacity either.
So think of it this way. Disk media is just a convenient way of getting the large amount of data from the company to you. Like i'm sure none of us wanna download MGS4... #bluray
10/23/09
Give it 1-3 years. #bluray
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
I was joking. It costs... practically nothing to get a hdd with 500Gb on now. The ram-storage on a PC is not a problem.
See, the processing power and storage needed to stream HD content over adsl-connections has been tested and is available for any PC platform. But it has never been accepted as commercially viable by "the industry", since there's no way to actually control the distribution to the level "the industry" wants.
So here comes MS, and introduces 1080p streaming that is never stored in anything but the (eminently hackable) memory on the 360, before it is flushed away again.
Regardless - so are we on the same message here, then? Digital downloads that you can store on the disk, and watch whenever you want: bad. Digital downloads that are volatile: good.
Ok? ..ok. #bluray
10/22/09
10/23/09
...valuable storage space. #bluray
10/22/09
Is he joking? He makes it sound like everyone, regardless of their connection speed, will just be able to easily take advantage of that feature. As we learned earlier this week, having anything less than a 1Mbps downstream connection doesn't even allow anything to buffer. Yeah, the majority of connections nowadays are faster than that, but still. Not even allowed to buffer? You HAVE to direct download? It completely and utterly defeats the purpose. You might as well pirate it when downloading it instead of downloading it legitimately, as it would be faster over the BitTorrent protocol. That's what people will end up doing when this feature doesn't work for them. It'll be a small demographic, but one nonetheless.
Technically though, they should have said it would be the first console to offer a SERVICE that will stream 1080p instant-on PROVIDING THAT you have a good enough connection. That would be the proper way of wording it.
It's technically not the first console to offer 1080p streaming in and of itself. I've been doing that to my PS3 from my PC from day one, over Gigabit Ethernet, which is faster than the "instant on" you'd get over consumer Internet connection speeds. So technically that statement is not even true the way they presented it. It's marketing mumbo-jumbo.
I wish just one day, just one time, someone from one of these console companies, just for one particular statement, threw away the laymen's terms and just talked technical. I don't care if some people would be lost, I would appreciate it on rare occasions. #bluray
10/22/09
10/23/09
..the point here is that they want to offer kiosk-services. TV on demand that cannot be saved or viewed when you want.
They're the first to offer that in 1080p.
..Of course, to suggest or imply they're the first ones to offer streaming 1080p video is ludicrous. But that's not really what they're doing. They are correct that it's the first kiosk-service in 1080p.
No surround-sound, though. #bluray
10/22/09
"So...wait, let me get this straight Steve. You said that hardware can be added to the 360 and gave a list of random stuff, including blu-ray drives, and the gaming press jumped on it?
"That's about right. Gizmodo interviewed me and I just pointed out what the 360 will do, talking about Natal and pointing out how we're really pushing new hardware features and that we're keeping our options open."
"Didn't we talk about this?"
"Yeah, it's just so hard to forget how dumb these guys are some times."
"Why do you think I left?" #bluray
10/22/09
10/22/09
Frankly, I could watch him sell me Windows for hours. #bluray
10/22/09
PS, my first 360 broke on my yesterday, and its a terrible feeling. #bluray
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/22/09
.....though he is kind of an idiot sometimes. #bluray
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/22/09
Obviously, if you took the time to reply, silly (: #bluray
10/22/09
10/23/09
No, no, you're right. He didn't mean you could get a blu-ray accessory for the xbox. He just meant, you know, in general. That you could, if you wanted, get a blu-ray accessory, possibly for a PC. Along with your xbox, where you can stream 1080p. Which you can't on the PC, obviously, through the Windows media player (without at least installing several programs on your own). #bluray
10/22/09
10/22/09
Accessorizes to actually play blu-ray discs..well that's a different matter. #bluray
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/23/09