Tag Archive for 'video'

iPlayer on Wii makes mockery of PS3 and 360, says BBC

Published
by
John Griffin
on April 15, 2008
in Gaming, TV and Tech
. 1 Comment
cunt

I have been saving this rant since last week due to the blog issues. I still think it’s relevant.

When I read this blog post by the BBC’s Darren Waters last week I started to get very angry. Now that I’ve had some time to think about it I can make a cool rational judgement - something I suggest Mr Waters tries.

“The BBC’s announcement of a deal with Nintendo to put the iPlayer’s streaming service on the console makes something of a mockery claims by Sony and Microsoft that their consoles are the true multimedia machines.”

I don’t care which side he is on but the fact is that he and the BBC should not be taking sides. It’s all very well to brag about how amazing your online video service will be on the Wii but it’s another thing to shit all over Nintendo’s competion. It’s called impartiality buddy.

Now to the techie meat of the issue. Any browser that supports the latest flash can play iPlayer content. So that’s why Wii and PS3 support is on the way - they have browsers. The catch is that this is the low quality version, the high(er) quality video must be downloaded. Unlike that BBC blogger I have a PC connected to a large screen and attempted to watch Doctor Who via the flash player this week. It looked horrendous. I couldn’t watch it. The same video I couldn’t watch will be what is offered on the Wii and a download option can never be implemented that platform.

People don’t mind watching YouTube videos on their PCs in tiny windows but when you stretch it out on a huge screen they will not be impressed.

Requiem For A Dream Makes Everything Awesome

Published
by
John Griffin
on April 1, 2008
in Gaming
. 0 Comments

Even GTA 4!

Not long to go.

The Verdict on Xbox 360 Xvid Playback

Published
by
John Griffin
on December 29, 2007
in Gaming and Tech
. 0 Comments

In the latest Xbox 360 dashboard update they added support for Xvid aka DivX aka MPEG-4 ASP at long last. I finally had the opportunity to try it out this week and so far I’m very impressed. For some reason it isn’t included as standard in the dashboard and requires a 2.5mb download of the “Optional Media Update” which you are prompted to fetch when it encounters a suitable file. Once you have this the 360 will read AVIs off DVDs, CDs, USB drives and over your network with very little trouble. All the files I tested worked as documented in the above link with no playback issues at all and while it doesn’t support AVIs with an AC3 track it will playback 720p Xvids no problem.

Good work MS it’s great to see this feature finally working, just keep the codec machine churning and eventually we will have a fully functional media center :-). Next on the agenda Matroska containers with x264 encoded video please!

PS3 Strong at TGS

Published
by
John Griffin
on September 26, 2006
in Gaming, Podcasting and Tech
. 1 Comment

This week’s 1-UP show has the most credible and positive discussion I have seen/heard/read on the PS3 yet. Aside from the lackluster keynote this is probablly the best week SCE have had in a long time and they certainly proved they have no intentions of losing the Japanese market just yet. As for the West, that’s shaping up to be a completely different battleground.