JsARCLIGHT

I guess I must just be unusual. I rarely if ever even use the preprogrammed chapters. I generally just stick in a disc and hit play, unless I'm showing off the system to someone then I have my "go to" discs (POTC for Blu Ray and Hot Fuzz for HD DVD) which have their "go to" chapters (The boat fight in POTC and the big shootout in Hot Fuzz).

I'm not sure about letting you "make your own chapter stops" but HD DVD does let you assemble "clips" of your favorite scenes in movies using a feature called "My Scenes". The way it works is you more or less watch the movie regularly and as you watch you can "bookmark" scenes by pushing a button on your remote. The player then "remembers" those bookmarks and when you go to the "My Scenes" selection from the menu of the HD DVD it will play back all the scenes you bookmarked. I used it once on Hot Fuzz... and that was about it. I mean it's really a useless feature as all it does is allow you to play back a movie scene by scene as you selected them. If I want to see specific scenes I'll just select them from the "Scenes" menu. Having the ability to see them all "in order" is kind of... well... not all that useful. I can see it's pseudo usefulness for "demo-ing" your HD rig for people, but most of the time you only want to show them like 5 minutes of a movie (that one really great, clear, really "HD" scene) and not a long string of clips. I myself prefer it when the HD discs make their own "HD Demo" settings. Like POTC on Blu Ray... it has it's own little "play me to make your friends envious" option which automatically goes to the most impressive sections of the movie and lets them have it.

My PS3, while it has never really been "used" on the game front yet, has never once had an issue connecting to my WiFi or maintaining a connection. I was watching Dawn of the Dead on Blu Ray last night and it was chirping away on the WiFi like a bandito... what it was doing is beyond me but it was linked for 2+ hours and the little WiFi light never went off.

Actually Microsoft's "business plan" with the 360 was to "eventually break even" some time in 07... but that did not factor in the loss of repairing so many consoles, plus the shipping for those consoles. If Microsoft is "making money" on the 360 hardware at this point it's almost moot because they are still trying to dig themselves out of the galactic hole of it's initial release loss PLUS the repair replace loss they are continually sustaining. One single game doing boffo business is more of a band aid on broken revenue stream rather than some kind of "miracle" profit turnaround. Figure it this way, on release it was rumored that MS was losing $125 per console they sold. As of Mid '06 before the design changes MS had reportedly sold 3.3 million units. That is a sustained loss over a few months of a little over $412 million dollars. You don't just "bounce back" from that kind of loss... not even Microsoft. Even if you calculate an appreciable decrease in manufacturing costs of 50% per quarter with an eventual "break even" point achieved in '07 as MS predicted that still puts them hundreds of millions in the hole. Add to that the cost of repairs which let's estimate at a generous $50 per broken unit (which is probably much lower than reality, heck shipping alone is most likely 75% of that price), and let's also estimate a generous failure rate of 30% (also which is much lower than reality) of the 3.3 million installed base as of the mid '06es and you have a potential failure pool of nearly a million units costing MS nearly $50 million alone. And when you compute advertising and all the other myriad of press and merchandising costs for just the hardware the hole starts to get deeper and deeper. Any forward progress in this is almost going to be drops in a lake at this point. MS'es overall strategy from day one was "lose on the hardware, gain on the software" but that is a very, very long term strategy that will only balance out years from now. If left to just it's Hardware numbers MS will most likely be in the hole until the Xbox 1080 (or whatever they call the next one) comes out, and then the "in the hole" starts all over again. MS is no doubt making money somewhere, but my guess would be it's not in it's games division. I'd like to see their books for recent fiscal years just to see how many red pens they went through.

Not when the company is probably hemorrhaging money like a pumping artery over this issue. It's terrible to say but if I was MS I'd be spending as little as possible on the refurb repairs. I imagine the "repair center" is probably more like a chop shop than an actual honest to god technical repair center... the place is probably a bunch of minimum wage grunts with screwdrivers all in a row... one set of them taking the boxes apart, another set throwing away the broken parts, another set bolting in new parts and yet another set screwing them back together. And probably like any assembly line the "quality control" testing is probably just one special station staffed by a fat guy who just shoves the console into some jacks, flips it on, waits for a series of lights on his panel to light up signifying the deck is "working" then he shuts it off, yanks the leads and puts it in the "done" pile. I mean, by all accounts MS is losing money on each unit sold... then guess that each unit sold has to be repaired at least once. That is even more money lost. The redesign of the system can be seen as a proactive cost effective measure as it will be cheaper to produce and potentially cost the company less in the long run from fewer returns for service... but the "repair process" is most likely subbed out to the lowest bidder staffing the cheapest cost people doing the fastest job possible. There is no way they have a room full of lab-coated certified computer electricians in clean rooms gingerly inserting and repairing these things with the utmost care and respect then wiping them off with lemon pledge and a chamois, giving each a little gentle kiss on it's lid as they carefully pack it with love into it's little box to go back to you. If anything those systems probably get dirtier being fixed...

Same thing is happening to me and my bookmarks are set to http://mw.com. For me it seems to happen in 8 to 10 hour stretches or when I change venues. For example, when I'm at work it will keep me logged in but when I go home and go to MW I will be "logged out". I assumed that had something to do with changing IP's so I ignored it. But lately I'll be logged in at night and then in the morning before leaving for work I'll check MW and on some days I'll be logged out and I'll have to log back in but on others it remembers me. It's been very irregular in when it happens lately.

I'd shove that back up their ass if I were you. That is kind of the "problem" with MS'es daisy chain repair replace system they have going. It's a crap shoot that your system will break down and then it's a crap shoot that the replacement system you get wasn't owned by some greasy slob who left it next to his hair collection on a pee stained rug while blowing cigarette smoke into it the whole time. When mine breaks I plan to buy a new one with the 65nm chip and the HDMI, send the broken one in and sell it when I get it back. I figure the break will be a good chance to upgrade when it happens. Speaking of that... if I buy a new system and just swap hard drives the new one will just start up thinking it's my old one, right?

The greatest benefit I've seen of LCD and Plasma to a CRT unit IMHO is their perceived clarity. To a human eye the newer "digital" LCD and Plasma screens appear vastly "clearer" than the CRT HD units. They do indeed suffer poor black levels but they have actually begun to overcome that with variable backlighting and other tweaky features. I'm not saying it's true of all CRT HDTV's as I've only seen the one my friend has but his is actually kind of... blurry. The set just has this "fuzziness" about it, this lack of fine definition. Sure it's HD and it looks "good" but there is just something "off" about his picture. It's not his settings as he has the thing tweaked out to all ends of the spectrum, it's just the "CRT"-ness of his monitor. After watching something on his CRT HD set for an afternoon in 1080i and then going home to watch my plasma in 1080i I can't help but feel my picture is just... "sharper". I don't know why... his set is good, but it just seems to be lacking in it's definition. It's all personal perception in the end but it just seems to be "off". If you press your face right up against the glass on both units mine has the usual "tiny color cells surrounded by black" and if you stare hard you can see the "rainbow shotgun" as I call it, the rainbow colored static that lives in the off-blacks. It's not all that noticeable when watching something but when you have a "dead signal" on the screen and it's that off-gray color you can really notice it. My friend's CRT does not have that problem, his blacks and grays are ink blank... but when you look close at his screen the color dots sort of bleed into each other "fuzzily". I think that is the spot where the LCD and Plasma screens gain all their perceived sharpness is in the per pixel level. Those little black corrals really go a long way to creating "false" sharpness in an image compared to a CRT that has basically a lot of color bleed going on. Another thing that bothers me about his CRT is that it can't properly display 4:3 images. It displays them but it's almost like the ray guns in the thing can't properly "focus" on the truncated image aspect ratio and the top and bottom edges of the side "letterboxed" image actually warp. So instead of seeing a perfect square inside a rectangle like you do on my Plasma you see a square with jumpy, "leaking edges" at the top and bottom on his CRT. I don't think your average man on the street would notice but I'm kind of nitpicky about picture and the minor distortion that caused at the top and bottom drives me nuts. He doesn't care though. I thought his unit was defective but he told me "all HD CRT's are like that". I myself don't really know... it looks like the thing is broken to me but it displays proper 16x9 HD material very well so... I myself am shopping for a new, bigger LCD monitor to replace my 42" Plasma. Before I moved we had the Plasma in a smallish living room and it was not that bad. But now it resides in a large room and it looks totally dwarfed. Plus I'm a videophile and I can't stand 1080p24 lording it's "betterness" over me. It must be mine...

I still think the new selection stinks. The only movie in that entire offer I'd want is Pirates. The rest are either shoddy movies or shoddy HD transfers. These special offers are pretty much "hey what isn't selling? Let's offer people those!" Oh and just a word of warning to possible buyers, Full Metal Jacket on Blu Ray is abysmal. The transfer is utter crap. They are going to release a supposedly new version of it soon (like they did with Fifth Element) but until they do avoid it like the plague.

Um... how can a cable "go bad" from non use? I know they can go bad from misuse and abuse but... doesn't that mean that all those cable packs sitting on store shelves in their packaging are going bad right now?

It looks like a whole new offer. Same deal as before in that you buy a Blu Ray player and get 5 free movies but the movie selection is different. ... and this new movie selection sucks even worse than the previous one.

My PS3 tag is JsARCLIGHT... Except I own zero games and have yet to actually "play" anything on the system other than a demo.

Most of the posters on the next gen media forums I browse have claimed to have received their Blu Rays within 4 weeks on the PS3 offer. All I can think of are that the movies you chose are very popular and you're stuck in a "waiting list". I picked a lot of movies that I'd guess very few people wanted.

Have you called them to see what your status is? I posted the number for the Blu Ray deal either in this thread or in the PS3 thread a few weeks ago. I'd give them a call if I was you, everyone I have seen has received their Blu Rays in about 4 weeks.

I sent in for mine. It's part of the greater Toshiba offer and from all reports I've read the Toshiba offer is taking a laborious amount of time to process. The small print says to allow 8 to 10 weeks but it's not uncommon for it to take 4 to 6 MONTHS to receive your HD DVD's. Many people say they have received "delay notice" post cards in the mail. I found a 800 number online that you can call to check on your "order", let me try and find it again. Oh and I bought mine on August 1st, the first day of the offer, and mailed it the next day... I have yet to receive anything in the mail. HOWEVER my PS3 Blu Ray movies got to me in under 4 weeks.

Huh, I never knew that. Then again I rarely use XBL. I bought like 6 months of it back when I first got my system and was quickly put off by all the foul mouthed infantile people online. Here is an Xbox question that I have not heard an answer to: Let's say you have one of the new Xboxes with HDMI or an Elite with HDMI... is the audio output only via HDMI? Or can you output audio using the optical jack or the RCA jacks from the other output port at the same time? I ask because a friend of mine just bought an Xbox (and it supposedly is one of the ones with HDMI) and his HDTV is an older CRT model that has only one HDMI port and he wants to connect to his HTiB for audio, but the HTiB he has doesn't support HDMI throughput. Can you have both Xbox outputs connected and running at the same time?

Also, why the "2" XBL Headsets? I was always under the assumption that you could only have one person logged into XBL from one machine and that only one headset would work at a time?

That's my first thought when reading this... operating costs are too high for the small volume and number of releases they produce. Couple that with the licensing fees, rather limited sales futures that such a niche market can sustain and the ever growing rate of piracy and bootleggery I'm shocked legitimate stateside anime importers have stayed in business as long as they have.

Personally I've always thought of Flashback as DYRL "bonus materials". If there is ever a HD release of DYRL I would like to see both the Saturn shooter intro animation and Flashback 2012 (in it's entirety) as additional "bonus features". I'd also like to see a pop up facts feature for the movie (notating all the "in jokes", cameos and other tidbits of info) and possibly a commentary track with Kawamori and the other original crew. There are just so many neat things that can be done with modern bonus materials using HD DVD's and Blu Ray's built in "real time" functionality, provided the studio puts in the time. Picture in picture, storyboard to video comparisons, you name it.

Is it wrong that that is what I thought was happening the first time I saw that "Mountain Dew Game Fuel" commercial with all the fan boys screaming?

The place I put all my chips in are the reviews at High Def Digest. They have been spot on for all the stuff I've seen and bought. Like myself their reviewers are nit-picky.

I was also all revved up to buy it until I found out it used the old master. The two reviews I've read of it describe the picture as, once again, "not worth the upgrade". It's really sad that these companies are just barfing all these titles out onto the market with no really decent remasters. What compounds the situation are the handful of truly outstanding HD media titles out there that really show you what a good HD master can produce.

Effectively a "master" is the main copy... THE copy that every other copy is made from. A master should be the best quality that the material can be, because every copy of the master will progressively lose quality. Hence why when you have people "remaster" and existing master without going back to the source film you tend to lose quality rather than gain it. When you are dealing with standard DVD you can get away with so much it's not funny, the same goes for broadcast standard definition television. Until HD came along productions could "fudge" so much and get away with so much lazy efforts because the resolution of standard def things just can't display any minor anomalies or blips that a large resolution print would suffer from. Now that everything is going high def they can't get away with as much anymore... yet they still lazily produce things. As I said it's mostly a matter of money, as in they don't want to spend fifteen million dollars restoring The Last Starfigher for it's HD DVD release (which was last week) when they could just use the old master they made for the standard def DVD release some 6 years prior. And today everything is digital. If someone where to go back and make a new HD master of DYRL from it's original film stock that new master would be 100% digital. In the past masters where cut to tape and all sorts of other media. Today it's all gone digital because digital doesn't degrade sitting in a pile in a closet like most movie masters wind up doing. Heck, the existing master of DYRL that Bandai used to make the past DVD release is probably digital. The question always comes down to how much care was taken in the "digitizing" or "mastering" process and how much effort was made to clean and restore the film footage during the remastering process, because even when going from film to digital you can still botch the transfer.

No, they are simply using and older master. The same older master that they probably used to make the original RSF DVDs from. The master is higher resolution than the original DVDs that were made from it. The "problem" was that that older master lacks the quality to be used as an HD master. They should have spent more time and money cleaning that existing master or remastering the material from it's original film stock again to achieve a cleaner, clearer, better print with which to make their HD release. As it stands now pretty much every movie on Blu Ray / HD DVD that has NOT been in the theaters in the past couple years but HAS come out on DVD in the last 10 years or so was made from a master that was originally made to produce DVDs. Those masters are higher resolution and markedly better quality than the DVDs they mint from them but in many cases those masters are not up to par for use as an HD master. As an example: Army of Darkness on HD DVD. They remastered that movie in the late '90s early '00s for DVD release. The master that they created for that DVD run was the SAME master they used to make the current HD DVD's from. That master is... "average". The picture quality is so-so and it shows a lot of "age" and grain. These things are not all that noticeable on a standard def DVD so for that purpose that master was fine... but when they reused it to master the HD DVDs the HD picture was only marginally better than the regular DVD. On the opposite side of the fence take the new movie Hot Fuzz. It was shot in HD, mastered in HD and they had a pure digital HD master from which to craft the standard def DVDs and the HD DVD. The standard def DVDs look good but the HD DVD looks simply amazing... and that is because they had perfect, pure source material to create a perfect HD master. A movie like Army of Darkness (and Royal Space Force and just about every anime movie made before the year 2000) were all shot on film, old film that has degraded. They were previously mastered into high resolution masters for DVD release and without a large expenditure of money and manpower those older movies will most likely never have a good, high quality HD remastering that would create a good, high quality HD media release of that movie. It's all business... and businesses will reuse their old masters to create new material, especially for "fringe" things that won't really turn that big of a profit. Heck, even when some movies don't have a current master a studio will rush the remaster which results in a sub par HD master ergo sub par HD media. It's all in how much you are willing to spend to get something looking as good as it possibly can... and by all accounts BV spent little to no time and released a product not really worthy of being called a "HD" release. Yes the movie is in 1080p... but it doesn't look it.

Well, if something was original on film, as in theater release film, then it is in "film resolution" which varies from studio to studio project to project. Once something is "mastered" for video release from those film masters it is sort of "set" in that resolution until it is remastered larger or smaler. Most modern studios will master in HD these days at 1920x1080. If a studio has an HD master it can run that to Blu Ray, HD DVD or like media or downgrade it to 720x486 NTSC for release on regular R1 DVD (PAL being slightly different). That downgraded version will have the same "look" of the high def master but will lack the detail. At the same time any artifacts, be they digital or physical (dust, film scratches, fading, etc) will usually be muted in the down conversion but the will be quite visible in the full HD master. On top of remastering something a studio can restore it as well, that is take steps during the remastering process to eliminate and clean up all those artifact issues. Depending on how the film was shot this process can be easy or very expensive and difficult. Most old movies where shot on film (as opposed to digital today) and that film degrades over time. So many older movies are not in very good shape and thus require quite extensive remastering and restoring to actually "look good" in HD. And that is where most studios "fall down"... they fail to restore their older movies and they just rip them to HD with minimal cleanup. Then when they master a regular standard def DVD from that "lazy master" it looks pretty good because all the junk and artifacts from the bad mastering can't really be seen in regular DVD resolution... but when you rip a HD release from one of those "lazy masters" all that horrible picture crap transfers right over. A prime example is the notorious Blu Ray release of The Fifth Element. They made a HD master of the movie years ago for the standard def DVD releases and it looked just fine... but when they used that same master for the Blu Ray release it looked like total crap because it was a "lazy master" and it contained tons of artifacting, grain and other poor picture qualities. They then went back and completely remastered the movie from the film to create a new, cleaner HD master with which they used to re-release The Fifth Element on Blu Ray again and the difference was very noticeable. In many cases a lot of the "first batch" of HD media releases used old standard def DVD masters and it showed. They where blurry, grainy, had artifacts and just plain looked bad... you were buying a HD movie for the HD and instead were getting what looked like a regular DVD upconverted. Many studios have realized this and are taking steps to make sure that sort of "shovelware" doesn't get out all that much... but it still does because studios are still releasing "quickie" shovelware titles all the time from old masters. It's the nature of the business.