War notes

A good post I read written by someone commenting on Joystiq’s news comment form:

I would like to add some insight to that and possibly have people learn why SONY is having trouble with getting the PS3 out so soon. What most don't realize is that the PS3 was designed from the begining to be a media device and not necessarily a "next-gen" gaming machine (It may have been SONY's idea of what next-gen would be). The cell processor performs best as a multihead DVR capable of streaming, decoding and encoding multiple streams of video. It does that because that's what SONY really designed it for. Ken Kutaragi was probably under the impression that making a unified CPU for media and gaming functionality will allow SONY to market their failed "PSX" device a lot cheaper. SONY's understanding of next-gen gaming was that the main CPU of the cell (running at 3.0GHz) would be next-gen enough along with the 7 SPUs used as GPU pipes to process vertex and pixel streams. With the challenge from the XBox camp with their XNA tools, SONY needed to counter that with an easy to use SDK. In doing so, it was only then that they realized their mistake. They may have been building the ultimate media center device, but in gaming capabilities, the PS3 would fall flat on it's face due to it's inability to implement powerful and efficient GPU functionality with it's 7 SPUs. Their assumption of extrapolating the 2 VPUs of the PS2 to 7 SPUs in the PS3 was a pathetic attempt at making a next-gen console considering the technological advances happening in the PC gaming markets, not to mention the state-of-the-art gaming GPU that they heard ATI was making exclusively for the next-gen XBox.
You can imagine the trouble Kutaragi San must have gotten into when he realized that he would not only have to increase the cost of the hardware significantly by including a GPU and all the plumbing, etc required to accomodate it, but also have to push out the release of the console significantly in order to accomodate these changes.
In such desperate times, was the SONY nVidia alliance born to proclaim the PS3 as a nex-gen game console rightfully. On the brighter side, going with nVidia brings some really nice things to the PS3. nVidia is one of the strong voices on the OpenGL ARB and also have their own dev tools that have been deployed in the PC gaming world and the PS3 gets to use all of those. They now have a decent counter-attack for XNA. With E3 looming up and Microsoft poised to make a sure-shot announcement to release their next-gen console, SONY had to show up and steal the show somehow. They did exactly that. Announcements like BlueRay DVD inclusion and impressive demos stole the show. Having come this far, there are still troubles with the PS3 as a gaming device. To name a few..

• Cache coherency and the transfer of data between the CPU and the SPUs. Basically different game threads will have trouble sharing data. To their disadvantage, XBox 360 just rocks in this department.


• BlueRay is bleeding edge technology and as a result the first-gen drives are not going to be smooth in terms of various perf. characteristics (like the seek times and transfer rates) and doubling them as DVD drives has it's own issues as well.


• Their software emulation layer for the backwards compatibility isn't going as smooth as they want it to be. The sheer number of games that made PS2 a success is coming back to haunt them in their backwards compatibility story. They included the PS hardware in the PS2 and can't do the same in the PS3. As is the costs are skyrocketing!!

Basically, because of the late changes in design, SONY is vigorously trying to iron out all the kinks that are coming in. To make things worse they have announced an aggresive release schedule. How well they fight it out is yet to be seen, but so far we are yet to see the promised playable demos. One thing I can be sure of. When the PS3 comes out, it will be one amazing media center DVR like device. As for the BlueRay, expect to see problems with the first batch of PS3s. These problems will quickly be corrected before their US launch.Seeing the problems that SONY is facing, it surely begins to make sense why Microsoft steered away from a next-gen DVD drive and announced limited backwards compatibility.

Stop the Presses

Stop the presses, media connect v2.0 is released and supposedly you will be able to stream video to your 360.  I really doubt it though since Media Connect is supposed to stream to a lot of other devices besides the 360.
The video options are probably in there for all the other devices besides the 360 that stream video.

As I mentioned earlier the streaming of video to the 360 is more complicated than just running Media Connect and that the 360 is expecting a specific protocol for streaming video that Media connect simply doesn't have.

Anyway I hope I’m mistaken because I don’t really want to install Windows Media Center 2005.

TV research

Been thinking of buying a new TV… yeah you know why.  Not that my current TV isn’t good, it’s just not HDTV compatible nor do I find it big enough.  The picture quality is pretty good but being your typical technology chaser I feel dirty not having a HDTV.
In the process of researching TVs I was thinking that going to buy a 1080P TV would be the best bet since at this time that display’s the largest image but after doing some research it appears that it may be overkill at this point.
I came across this HDTV AV page and a particular paragraph caught my eye.  I’ll quote it here, hopefully the plagiarism police doesn’t come kill me:

Cove also discussed the resolution limits of the human eye—about 1mm at 10 feet—and how this affects the optimum screen size for a given viewer. With a 480p, 42-inch (diagonal) set, he argued that you can see all the resolution the set has to offer at 12 feet. Move up to 720p, and you need to reduce the distance to eight feet to see it all. And at 1080p, the optimum resolution distance decreases to five feet. In other words, if the average viewer sits farther than eight feet from a 720p, 42-inch picture, he or she won't see all the detail the set has to offer. If you sit much closer than this, you won't see more real detail. But you may see other things more clearly, such as video noise, artifacts, and the set's pixel structure! The corresponding distances for a 65-inch picture were said to be 12 feet for 720p and eight feet for 1080p.

So I guess that leads me to believe that the amount of extra image the 1080P set displays will be difficult to notice.  After reading that I dug further along the lines of considering the 1080P set as a future investment.  This page gives some information on “future proofing”.

I was planning on waiting on buying a HDTV until 1080P sets became more common and when someone made a HDTV capture card for your PC so that I could build a TIVO from all the spare PC junk I have lying around.  In case you weren’t aware, there currently is no viable way to build a DVR that will record HDTV broadcasts.

Getting Connected

Here are the Premium and Core version of the 360.  You may ask “I plan on buying the Premium edition because (insert reason here) but I don’t have a HDTV”.  The premium version comes with HD component cables so how will I hook up to my standard television.  Well as long as your TV (or other associated stereo equipment) has the red, white, yellow RCA connections you can use those HD component cables.  There appears to be a consensus that it would be wiser to buy a connector that converts the RGB cables (which would be unused if you went the RWY cable route) to SVideo but finding that sort of adapter may be tricky and I’m not convinced that the color improvements would be huge.  I don’t have a HDTV so I’m stuck going the RWY route for now.

Walmart getting Kiosks

Walmart appears to be getting 360 Kiosks, not likely they'll be getting any here but still would be nice to see everything in action. I don't have an HD TV so probably better that the Walmarts here don't get the kiosks because I have a feeling that seeing the content on HDTV will ruin the experience for those of us cheap mofos who haven't bought one yet.

Moe Powah

Not that it really matters but the 360’s power supply (the DC transformer brick) is going to be pretty big.  There are some DevKit Power Supply photos floating around but the story is that the Final Power Supply is slightly smaller and is grey instead of black in contrast to the DevKits.

streaming content to your 360

In case you didn't know, if your 360 and your Windows PC are connected either by ethernet or via wireless you can stream content from your WinPC. Content is defined as:
Audio

1. Windows Media Audio (.wma)


2. MP3 (.mp3)


3. WAV (.wav)

Video

1. Windows Media Video (.wmv)


2. Microsoft Recorded TV Show (.dvr-ms)


3. Audio Video Interleaved (.avi)


4. MPEG-1 (.mp1, .mpeg, .mpg)


5. MPEG-2 (.mp2, .mpeg, .mpg)

Picture

1. Bitmap (.bmp)


2. Graphics Interchange Format (.gif)


3. Joint Photographic Experts Group (.jpeg, .jpg)


4. Portable Network Graphics (.png)


5. Tagged Image File Format (.tif, .tiff)

The catch is that unless you’re running Windows Media Center Edition 2005 (WMCE) you can forget about streaming the video portion.  There are several reasons why streaming video from your standard WinXP (pro/home) won’t work and probably won’t work for a while (if ever)

1. Microsoft wants to drive sales of WMCE


2. A special protocol is required to stream video

I’ll quote what I read on the forums:

When connecting to a media center PC the Xbox 360 (or any MCE extender) creates a Terminal Server (TS) session to the MCE PC. This is a special TS session that can only run the ehome UI.

Anyway, it’s not a total loss, if you’re running WinXP (home or pro) you can still stream photos or music from your PC.  You will need to install Windows Media Connect on your PC, this tool will allow you to define what folders/files your DMR (Digital Media Receiver, in this case your 360) will be able to view.

In the future there is speculation that the next version of Windows (Vista) will have all this streaming stuff built in but the release of Vista is quite a ways away so it’s kinda irrelevant at this point.

My blog

First post!!!!1!!one!!1
sad when you're posting on your own blogger and fighting to get the first post. Why is it important for people on forums to get the first post? Maybe they should be awarded if they make the first post worth reading.

Anyway, I'm going to try and post some notes and shit about the 360, there is so much damn misinformation or repeated questions that maybe having a site that covers some of the more obscure or heavily repeated questions would be nice.