And the winnaah is… Blu-ray!

The battle is over and the result has been announced: in the great HD DVD versus Blu-ray (BD) contest there was room for only one winner and HD DVD just didn’t cut the mustard. To be honest, I don’t know which format is better from a technical point of view, or even whether there’s really anything to choose between them at all, but having two formats was plain daft. And so BD it is.

This has significant implications, of course, for the desktop computer market. Not only are we going to see an explosion of interest in desktop BD burners, but the prices of the blank discs will collapse once production volume starts to ramp up. At present, the costs are frightening, at around £10 for a single-layer disc and nearer to £25 if you need the 50GB dual-layer version. However, I can remember the days when I went into Contributing Editor Mark Newton’s shop and paid nearly £5 for one 1.44Mb HD floppy diskette, and that was only 20 years ago. So I shouldn’t be too hasty to criticise vendors, since it’s clear that prices will fall.

What the world needs now is a cheap desktop BD drive that can write not only single-layer but also dual-layer discs, and I found such an item at my local computing emporium recently. Made by LG, the GGW-H20L is a SATA-connected internal 5.25in drive that can write all forms of BD, and can read HD DVD discs, too (and obviously it does all the kinds of DVD and CD). So, basically, it does the lot and at a cost of well below £200, which is frankly a steal – I just had to have one.

When I got back to my lab I sidled up to “Stripey White Value”, my super-cheap quad-core Medion monster from Tesco Direct, and started the installation process. Just as I expected, Stripey White turned out to have a horrible, press-fit plastic fascia contraption, complete with a nasty sliding door, but it was powerless to resist my determined prising with a couple of flat-blade screwdrivers. Within minutes, the drive was inserted and cabled up to the on-board Intel SATA controller, then booting Vista SP1 resulted in a flurry of new driver loading and it was done.

Since I prefer whenever possible to do the proper thing, I loaded up a shiny new copy of Nero 8, which usefully has full BD burning support. Once Nero was running, I dropped in the LG-supplied 25GB rewritable blank disc and then dragged-and-dropped a whole heap of data into the burn window. A few clicks later and Nero was happily burning to the disc.

So what’s the advantage of BD over DVD? Well, much larger capacity for starters, at 25GB per disc as opposed to 4.7GB for single-layer, and 50GB as opposed to 8.4GB for dual-layer (subtracting the usual bits for formatting information, of course). The burn and read performance in terms of megabytes per minute is pretty similar, but you just get a lot more onto a BD disc. Naturally, that means there’s a lot more to lose if you damage the disc, or it becomes unreadable: losing 50GB of data is more than a bunch of holiday snaps, it can be your whole “digital identity” (for want of a better term) plus a huge amount of video and audio, too.

I have to make the comparison with the Plasmon UDF drive at this point, since it, too, has a capacity in the 60GB range, although that’s organised as 30GB per side. However, the Plasmon erects a fully protective shuttered plastic case around its optical recording medium, and its underlying technology has been around for decades. But while I’m loathe to recommend BD as an archival solution, I can see that it will be used more and more for that purpose once the disc prices drop, especially in smaller businesses where money is tight. That’s simply because Plasmon’s solution is much more expensive still: the desktop drive runs to about £2,000 and the discs are even more expensive than today’s BD prices. Although I’m utterly convinced that the Plasmon solution is safer and far more appropriate for archiving duties, the cost differential even today is too steep, and as prices of BD media start to fall it will only become steeper.
Where does BD’s victory leave Microsoft, which after all has been pushing the now-failed HD DVD format on its Xbox 360 platform as a low-cost add-on drive? It isn’t clear how successful take-up of this add-on has actually been, and I suspect that not many people use it for playing back HD DVD discs (I read that there are some disc compatibility issues with HD DVD-authored movies). But none of that matters now. What does matter is whether Microsoft buckles and plumps for BD support on the Xbox? I’m not sure it’s in any rush, as after all its operating systems have historically been very slow to support new optical disc formats: Windows XP – which is still in use all over the place – has native support for CD burning but not for DVD, while Vista brings DVD-burning to the table but has no idea about anything bigger, whether it be HD DVD or BD. Don’t expect any in-OS support for these formats until at least the next version of Windows, and who knows, maybe not even then if Microsoft is still in a huff about HD DVD…

There’s no question we need BD support on the desktop for high-definition video work, but the tool of choice in that domain is Final Cut Studio running on a Mac. Apple hasn’t yet announced BD support, though it is part of the Blu-ray Disc Association. Maybe the arrival of this new LG drive is going to spur the firm to bring something to market, although making a laptop-sized, ultra-thin BD burner is going to present quite a challenge!

PlayStation 3

All this talk about BD leads me to another topic – Sony’s PlayStation 3. In defiance of my initial scepticism, Sony is doing an outstanding job driving this platform forward, releasing regular feature-enhancing new versions of the operating system, and games developers are definitely getting to grips with its unusually parallel hardware architecture and implementation.

Given my love of high-end sports cars, I keep an eye on the simulator games that are available, and the new Gran Turismo 5 Prologue has knocked me sideways. Playing into a large high-definition television set with surround sound, picture quality is absolutely astonishing and knocks anything I’ve ever seen on a PC into a cocked hat. It seems to me that we’ve finally hit that tipping point where the suitability of the PC as a high-end gaming platform has been pitched well and truly into the dumpster. The limited implementation of real 3D in Vista hasn’t helped, especially given the weak base Intel chipset implementations that have prevailed across the board so far. I know the chipset vendors are pushing forward with dual-slot SLI, and even quad-processor stuff, but to what end? Costs are shooting through the roof, and I’d question whether the game video quality significantly betters that of a PS3, especially when the price/performance ratio is taken into account.

And once you start to consider the ongoing graphics card driver nightmare that any sort of high-end gaming plunges you into nowadays, I simply can’t see the point any more. GT5P draws a line in the sand that says “Game Over” for high-end PC gaming: it was fun, but it’s time to move on.

OOXML and ISO

To no-one’s great surprise, Microsoft has at last managed to shoe-horn its OOXML file formats through the ISO standardisation process. I’ll confess that I’m far from shocked at the outcome and, to be honest, I’m really not that surprised by Microsoft’s position and tactics, either – it’s all about business to Redmond, and if that means tying the ISO into knots then so be it. It’s clear that ISO has come out of this badly, too, as it should have had more effective means to control the more obvious trolling. It’s reported that one country’s panel voted 80% or so against the OOXML specification, but that the national committee overrode them and voted “yes”. If that’s true, then questions need to be asked of ISO about how it runs its affairs.
And at the end of the day, none of it matters a damn. Microsoft felt it needed ISO approval as a tickbox item for winning government contracts, and now it has it. Does this make the standard any more useful or usable? Of course not. It’s still riddled with errors, inconsistencies, poor thinking and sloppy coding. I’ve covered this subject ad nauseam in past columns, so I’ll just say it’s a bad standard and one that doesn’t deliver on the grand claims that Microsoft made for it: “Because documents stored in the Open XML Formats are machine-readable and editable by any text editor or XML processor, solutions need not use Microsoft Office programs to view or edit content within the documents. Enterprise business solutions can access document contents easily and efficiently. Technology providers can utilise the Microsoft Office System and Office authoring applications within their solutions, reuse Microsoft Office documents as other Office documents, or open and act on Office documents on other platforms and in other applications.”

All that’s flannel: Microsoft has achieved its goal of removing an obstacle to winning government contracts, and what we’ve got is a half-baked mess of a so-called standard. So it’s business as usual then for Redmond.

Partner programme

I recently wrote that the excellent Microsoft Action Pack Subscription (MAPS) for authorised partners in the Microsoft Partner programme had changed its rules for subscription renewals, and that now you had to sit an online exam to qualify. I was surprised, then, to receive an email stating: “On 30 November, 2007 Microsoft implemented an assessment requirement for new Action Pack subscribers. The same requirement was scheduled to take effect on 1 March, 2008 for renewing partners that have a subscription expiration date of 1 March, 2008 or later. Due to unforeseen system issues, we are extending the assessment deadline for renewing Action Pack subscribers until 19 June, 2008. This means that all renewing partners whose subscription expires on or after 19 June, 2008 will need to pass a qualifying assessment with a score of 70% or higher in order to renew their Action Pack subscription.”

I tried to find out what those “unforeseen system issues” were, but to no avail. Suffice to say that if you’re on the MAPS programme and are due to renew, you can avoid the tedious exam process providing you get in there before 19 June.

Disc speed utility

I have a visceral distrust of utilities that test part of your hardware setup and then, after the obligatory “Ping!”, spit out a number that purports to tell you just how good your graphics card or hard disk is. Most are calibrated in undefined “units of goodness”, under which a rating of 27 is obviously better than a 21, and that a 15 is a cause for concerned sucking of teeth: “Only 15 eh, that’ll be yer problem with Vista then…” says The Pundit leaning against the counter in his computer emporium.

But I’ve recently been playing around with one such tool, called HD Tune Pro 3.00 from www.hdtune.com, which tells you the transfer rate across your disk surface and also does a useful random scatter test for access time and tells you the CPU usage. Maybe I’m just being swayed by the pretty pictures it shows, but this certainly seems useful when I’m trying to work out how quick a new USB hard drive actually is, and whether I’m better off connecting it over FireWire or eSATA. Registration costs a few pounds, and I think it’s worth it.
Swann song

An unexpected email from a PR firm led me to the website of Swann (www.swann.eu.com), which carries a huge range of IP-based security products – webcams, surveillance devices, video recorders, motion detectors and so forth. I was particularly struck by a video camera kit of two outdoor-quality cameras plus a Wi-Fi unit for less than £200, and the DRV4-ProNet four-channel network monitoring system that does motion detection and recording and can be watched over the internet. It’s an ideal solution if you want to have your house watched while you’re at work, or for a modern take on the baby alarm. These devices have come right down in price and are easy to rig up, too. I might be investigating some of these products soon and will report back here.

Spanner in the Works

A friend from my village plonked her new laptop down on my table and wailed that it was taking five minutes to get to her Ebay page, and five more to actually pay for anything. I promised I’d take a look, while dreading the thought, because often these issues can turn into complete machine rebuilds. Fortunately, the computer was bought for Christmas and I knew it was likely to be clean of viruses. But I still quailed inwardly and was far from looking forward to what I might find.

The machine was clearly sick: its hard disk light was continually flashing and never went off, while trying to click on any icon resulted in so long a delay that the machine was obviously doing something far more important than deigning to interact with my mouse strokes. After 20 minutes, it did calm down and the hard disk light went out, if only for a few seconds.

This was clearly a clean machine, albeit with all the usual OEM preloaded crapware. I tapped into Task Manager and quickly saw the problem, something to do with the Microsoft Works Calendar syncronisation application, which was soaking up 100% of the CPU time. I asked if she ever used Works; she didn’t, so I killed this rogue task and uninstalled Works completely, taking my example from Aliens (“I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure”). The laptop sprang back to life, shut down promptly, then came up to speed with no issues. Sometimes a spring purge is a good idea.

I had a similar problem recently with Stripey White Value, which has two SATA 500GB hard disks in striped set hanging off a motherboard-mounted Intel RAID controller. WSV’s exterior construction is as economical as its nickname would suggest: cheap tin and plastic that rattle like a tube-train window. Something in Vista was causing the disks to chatter incessantly, whether I was doing work or it was just sat idling.

In the end, out of pure frustration, I went into the Services panel and nuked the Windows Indexer, after which a reboot was required to finally make it shut up. I still have no idea why it decided it needed to keep rebuilding the index, as the machine had had weeks of idle time in which to create a current one. Okay, now it isn’t quite as quick to find things on WSV as it was before, but at least I can now bear to sit next to it again…