The Middle

Turns out today was Australia Day, a day for this country to "celebrate what's great about Australia and being Australian". Turns out, it pretty much just meant that all the stores between my hotel and the venue were closed up.

There was one nice suprise, however, when in the middle of the late night tennis match, fireworks erupted over Rod Laver Arena, giving each of the players quite a start. I did manage to run out from my subterranean lair to snap a few pics, enjoy. (And there's plenty more)

Australia Day Fireworks over Rod Laver Arena

Australia Day Fireworks over Rod Laver Arena

Australia Day Fireworks over Rod Laver Arena

Xbox 360 Fanboy points out this article comparing the relative strengths and weaknesses of a modded Xbox running XBMC vs. a shiny new Xbox 360.

While I don't argue with the conclusion in terms of media formats, they severely downplay the role of an 360 if you do have a Windows Media Center Edition machine.

To the best of my knowledge, the closest an XBMC machine can come to watching recorded TV is a hacked-up system of auto-downloading TV bittorrents from RSS to a samba drive, and watching them from there. It'll work in a pinch, but it's not exactly user-friendly. However, if you need to do anything but stream TV from an MCE machine, XBMC is the way to go.

It's much more polished than any other open source media app I've seen, it just lacks the hardware and software to do TV viewing. Perhaps someone will hack a MythTV frontend on the thing and complete the picture, but until then, anyone that wants to have the best of both worlds will end up using one of each. It's really quite a shame, as Microsoft could have completely obfuscated these original Xbox hacks if they hadn't been so shortsighted with the 360's media format support.

I eneded up staying way too late at the 'remote' office last night, so I got up a little late, and decided to grab some lunch on the way into work. Being boring and repetitive, I hit up the new local favorite of mine, Stalactites, a Greek joint. As my traveling companion Mike claims, they're the best gyro's outside of Greece. Mmm, tasty.

So as I'm walking out of there holding a giant gyro and trying not to spill food all over myself, I walk right past Kim Clijsters heading into a local department store. She apparently didn't recognize me. That just may be my Brush With Greatness for this trip, unless I see Roger at the grocery store tomorrow or something.

Truly, I was crushed that Microsoft sqaushed my home media dream with the exclusion of Divx/Xvid support from the Xbox 360. It's not just Divx either, there's additionally all the h.264/mpeg4 formats as well. Seriously, I'd settle for anything that wasn't WMV. If I'm going to archive all my digital content, it's going to be in something that works on all my machines, from Linux to Mac to Windows to whatever's running on tomorrow's whiz-bang handheld devices. Bottom line, MS wants WMV to be the 'mp3 of video'; the default, ubiqitous, support-it-or-it's-worthless format.

Sadly, that ship has sailed.

I honestly didn't expect to see it, but a guy can dream, can't he? So, lets speculate on why not. Below are most of the reasons I've seen, from user speculation to the Major himself, although I'm pretty sure the official company line is "No Comment".

"The device just can't do it"

-BS, that might've flown with the hardware only first gen extenders (and barely, at that), but I'm not about to beleive the box that can send me friend alerts while I stream music from my ipod to be the soundtrack to PGR3 can't decode movie files.

"We can't do codec updates"

-"Optional update for iPod Support", anyone? They can and have added codec support, via download, in this case when they realized iPod support would be useless without the default iPod AAC encoding format.

"The fees would be too much"

-Wow, if only there was a built in way for Microsoft to allow users to purchase content for download, thereby passing the fees only to the users that wanted the support. They could call it something like "The Xbox Live Marketplace". In fact, I'd almost bet DivXNetworks would write it for free, if MS would put it up in the marketplace, just to extend the reach of the format.

"We can't encourage piracy"

-But native support for MP3, the most successful 'pirate' format of all time, is A-OK?

"There's no commercial content"

-And those WMV-HD discs are flying off the shelves, aren't they? And where exactly is the commercial MP3 content, I wonder?

"We thought we'd ignore our customer requests and strong-arm them into using our own proprietary formats"

-Yeah, thought so.

The current word on the street is that in the future, your Viiv-based PC will magically trascode all content on the fly to a format the the 360 will accept (which is what the current hacks do), but I've got major beefs with that as well.

• What the hell is Viiv?
• I need to buy a Viiv-based PC to stream content to the 360 I bought to stream content from my current PC? Anyone see a problem here?

Microsoft has gotten so close to nailing it with the 360. At times it's really, really good, and I'm amazed with the box. Then, you remember that you're the frog in the pot, and they're just slowly turning up the heat.

First off, the Xbox Live Arcade is phenomenal. I personally think it's going to sell tons of boxes, and be the real reson the 360 is a success.

That said, I'm really not a fan at the moment.

The Start: You get a shiny new 360, connect it to the net, and you get a ton of great games, all at your disposal to download and play all you like. In fact, you can buy these games to unlock the demo mode and get the full functionality. However, there are restrictions, which I understand as this:

1) Any time you're connected as the user who downloaded the game, you get the full version.

2) Any time you're on the box where it was originally downloaded, you get the full version.

That seems awfully nice of Uncle Bill, doesn't it? He's letting anyone that comes to your house play your game! And letting you take it places! Man, what a nice guy.

The Background: Imagine if you will, and I know this is hard, a household where TWO people play games. Two people, under the same roof! Playing games and living in harmony. In fact, these two strange folks even have separate, individual accounts on the xbox live service.

Tragedy Strikes: Your shiny new 360 develops a nasty habit of failing to play games within weeks of it's purchase. You call Uncle Bill, and he promises to make it all okay. He's so kind, in fact, that he sends you a letter that says:

"So that you can get back to playing and enjoying your Xbox quicker, we have replaced your Xbox console with a replacement unit."

Well, there's only one problem with that, now all my downloaded and paid for content doesn't do what it used to!

The Lingering Questions: In the above scenario, what have I done wrong? Why is it my problem the product they sold me broke? Why is it my problem that it's cheaper for them to send me a new box than replace my disc drive?

And who in the world do I have to call so my girlfriend can earn her own Zuma achievements? I mean, she's really good!

So as I understand it, the only way around this is to use the second account on the console to BUY the download again. Now, I realize that I'm talking about something like $5 here, but it's not the money that bothers me. What happens when I buy Madden 2009 for $75 electronically in the future?

The Conclusion: I bought two things from Microsoft. A console and a download. Then one of those things broke. "So that you can get back to playing and enjoying your Xbox quicker", they screwed the downloaded content. That's what I call broken. I understand DRM, I understand they're trying to be fair and restrictive at the same time. Here's the lesson: That doesn't work.

I got my new Xbox 360, and it was good.

But after a few days, it was bad. After only 3 days of owning and using the console, I got a random This disc can not be read, please ensure it is the correct region for your console, or restart the console error in the middle of a PGR3 race. Uh-oh.

I rebooted, went back to my race, and continued on my way. Never did I experience a frozen screen or overheated power-supply. But a week or so later, I got another error, this time in the middle of my Browns giving the Steelers a sound thrashing in Madden 2006. Same thing, the dashboard screen sweeps in and accuses my disc of being the wrong region. So, I went off to the store and convinced a clerk to let me swap my copies for unopened replacements, blaming the two discs.

A couple of weeks passed, and the error didn't repeat itself. Granted, in all this time, I was playing more Geometry Wars and Zuma than anything else, but confidence was high that my 360 was A-ok. Finally, one night around Christmas, I got the error not once, not twice, but three times. Better yet, once on my second copy of Madden, again on my second copy of PGR3, and a third time on my freshly opened Kameo.

This was not a problem of bad discs.

So I called 1-800-4MYXBOX and talked to a lovely gentleman there who asked me to confirm that all my games were indeed NTSC. Check. My console is NTSC? Check. Alright, we'll send you a box, put in just the console and send it back. Now, the box did not come overnight, as some people on the net were claiming, but arrived in 2 or 3 days (New Years Day was in there somewhere, if I recall).

At that point, I sat on the box for about a week, because I needed to get in my fix before I left the country for a month, but did finally drop it off at the DHL shop on my way to the international terminal at RDU. Six days later, I got a return box from MS containing a new 360, with a new hard drive and a power supply thrown in to boot. They left me a very nice letter saying that to speed up the turnaround time, they had sent me a replacement 360 rather than repairing my disc drive, which is just what I had feared would happen.

Who cares, a box is a box, and you kept all your profiles/saves on the hard drive you still have, right? Not quite. Apparently, Bill and Co forgot to include "not screwing people out of functionality they've already paid for" when they designed the Digital Restrictions Management in the box.

Bottom line: Reasonable turn around time, no cost to me, freebie HD and power supply, and busted purchased content.

A kind reader (I know, a reader! God bless you, google search...) sent me the following email:

"Hey, I'm in the middle of building myself a PVR and stumbled across your articles on switching from MythTV to Win MCE. How did the switch go? Did you ever come back to MythTV? And have you tried an Xbox 360 as an extender yet? Thanks for the helpful blog"

So these are my random thoughts on the topic:

• I have no intentions of ever back to MythTV. It's a pain. Windows MCE is very, very easy. Guess how many tweaks I had to make to my lircd.conf file to get my remote to work with MCE? I'll give you a hint, it was less than 1 and rhymes with 'hero'.

• I have no intention of dropping the MCE machine in favor of a crappy PVR from my local cable monopolist. They aren't that great, and I'll wait for cable card for HD. Why? Extenders. I don't want to record Monk on three PVR's throughout the house. I want to record it once and have it available from anywhere. MCE lets me do this.

• The 360 as an extender is really good, but not great. It's easy to setup, it's not much more expensive than a standard extender (assuming you go Core), and it'll do HD content. Plus you've got that whole 'video games' thing going, if you're into that.

• The 360 turns off. When I had a PC in my living room, it was loud, 24x7. The 360 is definitely not silent, but when the TV's off, so is the 360, so silence is restored. This is in direct contrast to the MCE PC, which was cranking all day and night. The 360's only loud when I'm watching TV, which is exactly when you can't hear it.

• No Divx/Xvid. Sad, sad, sad. Because I lost my ability to watch divx/xvid, I was forced to buy a separate component, and an add-on accessory to run custom software to watch divx remotely. But that's a whole separate rant.

So I like it, I really do. It's got it's quirks and shortcomings, but it's the best solution I've found.

So I managed to score an Xbox 360 on launch day. It's been my new obsession and near-constant companion for the last two months (sadly, I couldn't justify bringing it with me to Australia, but listening to Major Nelson and my damn joystiq feed have me wishing I had). So here are my thoughts thus far.

The Setup: Super fast and easy. Plug the enormous power supply in, throw in the video cable, plug in the waiting ethernet cable, and you're rocking and rolling. Nothing too hard here.

The Games: Overall, they're launch games. Some are good, some are just ok, all are easy on the eyes.

The HiDef: Must...buy...HDTV... Truly, the difference is stunning. I've got a paltry SDTV at home, but have used the 360 on a few HDTV's, and it's like night and day. HDTV's killer apps are the Superbowl and this.

The 'Connected' Stuff: This is where it starts to get really interesting, and where the box shines. The whole thing, from Media Connect, to acting as an Media Center Extender, to the Xbox Live Marketplace and Xbox Live Arcade is done beautifully. And Arcade is, by all accounts, the killer app for the box. Anyone who's gotten his hands on a 360 and not downloaded and payed for the full version of Geometry Wars is doing himself a severe disservice. I think I could really never buy another game on disc again and be perfectly happy with the box.

So, I've got a lot more things to say in depth, but I needed to write a little overall blurb to get the juices flowing.

You're sitting around in summer 2005 as a dedicated gamer, dutifully reading your joystiq feed daily (okay, hourly), and you're seeing all kinds of ramblings about a holiday release for a fancy new next-generation console.

Everyone knows that holiday releases of consoles never have have supply problems (N64, PS2). There's certainly no chance there could be a shortage predicted even before the console was released.

So you do what any scum-sucking, bottom-feeding, ebay-selling entrepreneur would do. You preorder as many of the things as you possibly can. You preorder core systems from the local Gamestop and EBGames because it's all they have left. You get up (or stay up) to get in line at Target at 4:00 AM on launch day. You even buy vast preorder bundles from big-name online retailers, betting that the ebay prices of the console alone will cover the hardware, the games, the accessories, and the taxes and shipping.

Worst case scenario: You have to return a few packages to the local WalMart or CostCo, and you get a refund for your $50 Gamestop deposits.

Best case scenario: You leverage the real-time synergy of the ebay economy to schlep your consoles at 100% mark-up to people with more money than sense to preorder appropriately, or rich people with spoiled kids who need to have one for Christmas.

I fell into the later scenario, thankfully. To be fair, I wasn't greedy, and put up all my consoles with very fair and low-priced 'Buy-it-Now' pricing, which was used in most of my auctions. ("Low-priced" compared to other auctions, not compared to MSRP, which I doubled, in most cases)

The end result? Four consoles sold, a few games and controllers returned to stores, and I was sitting on a new premium Xbox 360, 2 wireless controllers, 4 games, a year of Xbox Live Gold, a few batteries, 2 play and charge kits, and a couple hundred bucks to buy Christmas presents for my family.

Who's excited for the PS3 to be delayed from spring to November? I smell a holiday console launch....

Like I said, it's hot. Real hot.

So it's been 123 days since I last posted, what can I say, I've been busy. But I'm freshly motivated now.

There's nothing like a work trip to get you back in to posting, need somewhere to put up all the pics that I haven't taken yet.

The flight to Australia was horribly uneventful. My traveling companions sadly lacked the ability to get on an airplane, immediately fall asleep, and not wake up until the bump of landing gear hitting pavement, so it wasn't as smooth for them. But after about 20 hours of sleeping from Raleigh to Melbourne, I was wide awake and totally jet-lag free.

So it turns out Australia in January is hot. It was only 34-38 today depending on who you ask, but the forecast is for 40's. Not January weather.

Other than that, it's not as strange as I would've expected. It's just like the US in most respects, everyone just has an accent.

And the sports on TV are wild. I did catch some replays of the NFL playoffs (at something like 8:00 AM, which was weird enough), but that's just the tip of the iceberg. So far, we've also seen the obligatory soccer and rugby matches, and that's before getting to most of the really weird stuff, like "Competitive Stunt Airplane Flying", "Lawn Bowling", and "Snooker". I'm still waiting to see Lawn Bowling for myself, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time.

So, I'll be sure to keep up with the "Things in this strange place that the small-town Ohio boy thinks are weird" posts, and maybe throw up a pic or two. Plus, I've got 97 rants to put up that I've been sitting on for the last 123 days, so maybe I'll get around to those as well.

But, that all depends on how much time I spend enjoying another discovery I've made here in Australia, Kilkenny Beer. That stuff is fantastic. It's like Guinness, but it actually tastes good.