Illegal TV downloads as popular as they are only because the media refuses to deliver


Last night’s penultimate episode of Doctor Who series four didn’t let up on the excitement from the opening teaser to the last second. It was incredible, and how fans outside the UK can avoid spoilers before getting the chance to watch an official broadcast on their own local channels, I’ve no idea—but trust me, if you’re one of them, you should try. It has to be said, though, that fantastic cliffhangers don’t exactly discourage illegal downloads of shows via the likes of BitTorrent, do they? Not when populations are otherwise expected to wait a year or more to see all the fuss for themselves.

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Sunday, June 29th, 2008

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Blu-Ray: it’s not just a blue laser, it’s an orgy of intensive and unfathomable geekery


HD-DVD may be about to bite the dust but the incompatibilities, technical differences and lack of upgrade options on nearly every Blu-Ray player currently available are mind-boggling… then there’s all the in-depth hardcore geek talk… such as discussions about the PS3, one version of which can’t be upgraded via the Internet, one can, but both use software decoders instead of hardware, running at 60 frames per second when movies are 24 frames per second leading to jagged artifacts on screen during playback… Huh? Yeah. I’m lost too. I’m staying well away until it all makes sense, doesn’t cost a fortune, and doesn’t involve the risk of a player that won’t play all features on newer discs. By which time, downloadable HD movies will have made the whole disc format war as irrelevant as CDs. Probably. Maybe. Who knows? Who cares?

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Monday, February 18th, 2008

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