@jtsiren

Quote:

I was more interested in how this store compares to the Australian hi-fi, or more importantly I guess, home movie retail market.

- "The company was the market leader in sales of DVDs and topped Christmas sales of ipods"
- "It is No.2 in the market for CD sales and car stereos (behind Strathfield Car Radios)"
- "No.3 in games sales"

@BrianK

Quote:

I didn't state I knew where MikeB was getting his numbers

The figures originate from Microsoft and NPD, the difference between these figures I made a percentage of what was shipped according to Microsoft.

@jtsiren

The data from press releases show they are doing well and their influence in Australia and New Zealand is growing rapidly.

Last edited by MikeB on 14-Feb-2007 at 09:36 PM.
Last edited by MikeB on 14-Feb-2007 at 08:23 PM.

@Jorge

Have you tried playing hi-def content under Linux yet?

One guy on IRC was trying to play 720p videos in a 1080p resolution, but playback was extremely laggy. He had to switch resolution to 720p and even then it was dropping frames.

Wondering if something's wrong with his setup or whether the lack of overlay is causing this.

@BrianK

Quote:

The 360 videocard is made by ATI it's highly doubtful it couldn't output digital to HDMI. It's definitely a possibility to have HDMI included. I've give this a possible.

While the video card itself is capable of this, the scaler chip (which comes after it) isn't. The scaler chip in the HDMI developer boxes is newer and has digital out. Of course you can still do conversion right at the plug (in the cable connector) which should still give you a 99% digital route (although the entire signal has been analogue at one point) which should help eliminate potential noise sources along the way.

To me the main benefit of HDMI is having it all in one tidy cable, so it would be a nice thing if someone did a converter (even if I have no use for it currently myself).

@minator

Quote:

If upscaled 480i content can look better than native HD, I wonder can the same filters have a similar effect on native HD.

Good point. At least some of the filters should be relevant for HD content too. It's just a question of whether they will be implemented since the technology is already fairly expensive (at the moment) and some may find current HD quality "good enough".

It doesn't change that if you have a big DVD collection, you may just find an investment in a scaler to make better sense than to buy them all again in hi-def.

@MikeB

The comparisons don't really mean much. I guess the Pioneer player might have a Faroudja chip in it, but I was talking about the really big league stuff.

For instance the 360 DVD player has average quality playback (it could be MUCH better with the hardware available) and even on that dvds look pretty good when upscaled to 1080p. But even then it's just bicubic sampling and none of the (expensive) advanced filters.

You can buy stand-alone units to put in between, though, and with a really good 480 player before the scaler you'll see some amazing quality - showing screen photos won't make much sense though. Real screencaps are the way to go - and by pros.

In other words "upscaled DVD" isn't just "upscaled DVD". There's a ton of difference whether you're doing it on a £300 player or a £1000 player...

@BrianK

Quote:

I stated the 25% is an over estimate

So you are the one arguing and questioning the 25%.

Quote:

My arguement, which I'll stand by for 2005 is that shipped and sold are statistically close enough to the same

Provide the proof, that's all I'm asking for. That you will stand by your argument isn't exactly substantial proof, right?

Quote:

Yo' bud you're the one arguing and questioning the 25% which is why I'm answering you ; this proves that you need to know what you wrote better.

I never claimed that 25% was sitting on the shelves and it was never my point, so don't throw it back at me.

Again, my point is that so far you haven't come up with substantial proof that those 25% were already sold, so don't use the 1.5 million as being sold by the end of 05.

@jiyong

Quote:

Again, my point is that so far you haven't come up with substantial proof that those 25% were already sold, so don't use the 1.5 million as being sold by the end of 05.

The then prices on Ebay were at least indicative that either
1) they were sold out
or
2) they were in transit

Which is which is hard to tell - there's no question that they were sought after at the time at least.

@Trezzer

Quote:

The comparisons don't really mean much. I guess the Pioneer player might have a Faroudja chip in it, but I was talking about the really big league stuff.

Well this user and others were credited for their efforts by those who care most about movie content. Overall such people agree HDMI and Blu-Ray offer much better quality than the XBox 360 upscaling DVDs over component (to me the PS3 DVD photo with the display doing the upscaling end result looked much better than the provided XBox 360 DVD upscaled photo end result he provided).

Quote:

1) they were sold out or 2) they were in transit

or
3) not actually shipped yet (pre-sold to retailers maybe?)

[*cough* Nintendo Wii shipment example *cough*]

@Trezzer

Quote:

For instance the 360 DVD player has average quality playback

Not according to experts:

Extreme Tech (January 30, 2007):

"Frankly, the Xbox 360 is a terrible DVD player. Yeah, we know it's primarily a game console. We know DVD movie playback is essentially a "free" feature. But it is a feature nonetheless, and an important one."

"As you can see, the Xbox 360 is basically a total failure at the HQV benchmark disc."

"Still, the 360 failed all of them, and failed some tests (the "jaggies" tests) that are critically important for DVD players."

here

Comparison shots:

"The Xbox 360 fails the Jaggies 1 test completely."

here

"The famous �Faroudja Flag� test has long been used to test de-interlacers. Appar-ently Microsoft hasn�t heard of it, or doesn�t care."

here

"The 3:2 pulldown detection 'racecar' test is a commonly run on many video proces-sors."

here

"Another abject HQV failure, the combined 24fps film and 30fps video scroll test."

here

"Pitiful Xbox 360 playback performance isn't reserved for the HQV benchmark: That's just the easiest, most scientific way to clearly demonstrate them. Here are just a few examples of the problems we have found in real, everyday, bought-in-a-store DVDs."

"This closeup of the Sin City title menu clearly demonstrates the Xbox 360�s problem with many animated DVD title screens."

here

"Even the THX logo doesn�t display correctly."

here

Quote:

Frankly, the Xbox 360 is a terrible DVD player

Let's imagine Sony wouldn't have put much effort into making the PS3 the best, cheapest and most future-proof (easily update, HDMI 1.3) Blu-Ray player available. If this was revealed with regard to the PS3, I think there would have been endless media reports. Actually at this point it even seems as if a Sony Exec farts, there already be stories of Doom and Gloom written by most US media.

Blu-Ray offers a lot of benefits with regard to gaming, I think this will already become apparent when you see games like Lair and Motorstorm on a good HDMI display with Dolby TrueHD 7.1 audio sound system. A gamer could view the PS3 as also offering the best Blu-Ray movie playback as just an added bonus.

Hopefully all the attention will be on games from competent game developers and not on small degrades found in Madden or FEAR, the FEAR developers did not really use the SPEs and for some reason FEAR looks muddy compared to the by far more complex Resistance: Fall of Man.

Last edited by MikeB on 14-Feb-2007 at 11:17 PM.

@BrianK

Quote:

Actually yes $15 isn't bad. Though a related game of the fighting genre, Virtua Figher 5, seems way too much at least in Japan. Various sites show with 80K 360s sold in Japan 60K copies of DOA4 sold. In the same timeframe we have 600K PS3s sold in Japan with 30K copies sold.. Ouch!

The actual figures:

Virtua Fighter 5 for the PS3 sold 49,500 copies in 2 days of sales, topping the Japanese sales chart for the week. (DOA4 reached 66,000 sales in 2 weeks, without ever coming close to topping the Japanese charts, as it was a faster sales week, the game's best ranking was 10th).

As of the 11th of February 2007 there are:

672,250 PS3s and 345,500 XBox 360s sold in Japan. 360 sold 5,250 and the PS3 sold ~28,750 for the week.

@MikeB

Quote:

Overall such people agree HDMI and Blu-Ray offer much better quality than the XBox 360 upscaling DVDs over component (to me the PS3 DVD photo with the display doing the upscaling end result looked much better than the provided XBox 360 DVD upscaled photo end result he provided).

Yes... I thought I made it quite clear that the 360's dvd playback is not exceptional in any way.

@MikeB

Quote:

Not according to experts

*One* set of experts. I've read that review thoroughly in the past.

You'll find plenty of reviews saying it's simply an average player for the price point. Mind you, you can get much much better players if you put more money on the table. You can also get much much worse players at a lower price point. You can probably find better players at the same price point as the 360, but then you don't get a full gaming console as well.

@MikeB

Quote:

Let's imagine Sony wouldn't have put much effort into making the PS3 the best, cheapest and most future-proof (easily update, HDMI 1.3) Blu-Ray player available.

It doesn't exactly take much effort at the moment, since only the first players for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are out. Typically these players only mature later on - however most stand-alone players also feature software upgrades nowadays.

Quote:

Blu-Ray offers a lot of benefits with regard to gaming, I think this will already become apparent when you see games like Lair and Motorstorm on a good HDMI display with Dolby TrueHD 7.1 audio sound system.

Blu-Ray doesn't improve gameplay.

Sure Lair and Motorstorm will look fine. Motorstorm will look great on component too, but of course you probably won't be able to play Lair in its full glory without paying for both HDMI and a set capable of HDCP. Sad really considering that a lot of people will be stuck with a monitor without HDCP or a set with no HDMI in. Let alone the handful of people who have Dobly Whatever 999.24.

Heck, I'm not even bothering with 5.1 since I don't like a wire mess (much less moving it around).

Nice to see you're busy bashing developers. I'm sure they'll appreciate it.

@MikeB

Quote:

Virtua Fighter 5 for the PS3 sold 49,500 copies in 2 days of sales, topping the Japanese sales chart for the week.

Hmmm. I would have expected greater numbers. They're nice enough but not much more than Gears of War which you were certainly quick enough to dismiss. Then again the culture around Virtua Fighter is different in Japan than it is here. People get off from work, go to a local arcade and play Virtua Fighter - typically with various groups of machines for beginners, intermediate players and experts.

In its first week of sales Dead or Alive 4 for Xbox 360 sold 59000 copies.

Quote:

360 sold 5,250 and the PS3 sold ~28,750 for the week.

Let's not forget the 71,750 Wiis. (or the 31,500 PSPs / 167,500 DSes). I'd say Japan belongs fully to Nintendo these days. At the moment it's usually a strong week for Sony if they get a look in on the top ten (and I'm sure they're happy with the PS3 being there). But out of the top 20 games only three were for Sony platforms and one was not in top 10. Of course Wii isn't really getting that much space either with only two titles, but at least they have their first million seller in Japan and are well on the way to number two.

Last edited by Trezzer on 15-Feb-2007 at 03:33 AM.

Fun with numbers (North America):

In November '05 1,437,750 games were sold for the Xbox 360 - that was the console's first month on the market.

In November '06 258,000 games were sold for the PlayStation 3 - also the first month on the market.

The Wii, which launched a week later than the PS3, sold a little over 1 million games in its first month.

The following month for 360 it was 1,373,000 while for PlayStation 3 it was 1,220,000 - meaning PlayStation 3 took two months to sell the number of games that were sold for 360 in the first month.

How did Resistance: Fall of Man fare against Gears of War in North America since they were launched at the same time?

Well, at the end of December Gears of War had sold 2 million copies and Resistance: Fall of Man had sold 335,250.

How about some Japanese numbers for game sales?

We can take the same two games again.

Gears of War has sold 45,000 copies in the three weeks it's been on the Japanese market. In the first three weeks Resistance was on the market it sold 30,750 copies.

Even though they're not the same genre, they're both big titles, so let's look at how Blue Dragon and Motorstorm hold up against each other:

After 8 weeks on the market Blue Dragon sold 135,000 copies. Meanwhile Motorstorm sold 48750 copies.

I'm certain that gamers everywhere will embrace and enjoy the pervasive true next-gen online experience that the Xbox Live service offers that enables the gamer to enjoy the true power of the Xbox 360 and take the future of gaming to new heights. I'm sure many will appreciate that they do not need to invest a fortune to get true digital surround sound and 1080p/60 graphics and that the 360 is the cheapest, most flexible and powerful solution for the future of gaming as well as instant high definition video content delivery directly through your internet connection - not to mention the next generation of television in the form of IPTV. They are also certain to enjoy such features as haptic feedback, voice and video conferencing and achievements, which adds extra depth to already amazing games such as Gears of War, Viva Piñata and Mass Effect. Furthermore they are sure to be blown away by exclusive games like Too Human, Alan Wake and Square-Enix's recently announced MMORPG. Millions of gamers have already enjoyed true next-generation gaming, making Gears of War, Madden NFL '07 and Tom Clancy Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter the three best-selling next-gen titles in North America.

... DISCLAIMER:
The numbers above are purely an example of how you can abuse numbers to represent things as you see fit. The marketoid-speak near the end nearly made me nauseous, but I figured the best way of demonstrating how silly it sounds is to go all the way in TrueHD and TrueSurround 16.2.

Last edited by Trezzer on 15-Feb-2007 at 04:25 AM.
Last edited by Trezzer on 15-Feb-2007 at 04:25 AM.
Last edited by Trezzer on 15-Feb-2007 at 04:18 AM.

@Trezzer

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh! Now we have two of you guys in this thread.

But I do get the point. MikeB especially is using the numbers game and selective quoting to paint a particular picture that is not always the whole picture. I wish he'd do differently, because there really is stuff to discuss and debate in this topic, but it's hard when he turns most everything into marketing speech.

Last edited by jtsiren on 15-Feb-2007 at 07:33 AM.

@MikeB

Quote:

- "The company was the market leader in sales of DVDs and topped Christmas sales of ipods"

Acknowledged, thanks for digging it up. I wonder how much of that is marketing speech (see below for EzyDVD). Sounds like an important player there that chain nevertheless.

I'd still love to hear from an Australian how they see this on the street. If this store doesn't carry HD-DVD, but three other majors retail chains will carry it, then this would be a less of a problem - but if all major retail chains refuse to carry it then it means a lot more. I think HD-DVD has not yet been launched on the retail market there, so I don't know if its too early to comment on this.

Australia's (why are we discussing Australia? ) largest online DVD store, and a large chain of stores, according to their own claim is EzyDVD... Marketing speech: "There are 70 existing and upcoming EzyDVD stores! ... EzyDVD has achieved an exciting concept design that combines Australia’s No. 1 DVD website, with Australia’s No. 1 DVD retail outlets."

EzyDVD carries a large selection of HD-DVD for all you Aussies reading AmigaWorld.net. They also carry Blu-ray.

In Finland I'm looking forward to seeing how places like Anttila handle this. I guess they sell much of the DVDs and games here. Funnily Universal Finland is also a Sony distributor in Finland so they'll distribute both HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

All the specialist stores that carry HD, that I know of, in Finland carry both formats, but I don't think either format has really seen real "the launch" here yet. I guess Blu-ray will be marketed when PS3 hits the streets in March. Microsoft's HD-DVD is supposed to come this month, so we'll see if any marketing is to accompany that.

I'm still on the sidelines in all this personally, but I'm following with interest.


@BrianK

Thanks for the American perspective! You guys sure are ahead of the rest of us in the HD area.

Last edited by jtsiren on 15-Feb-2007 at 07:46 AM.

Just stumbled upon this concerning Oblivion on PS3:

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/02/10/oblivion-downgraded-for-ps3-not-happening-on-wii/

"When we learned that the PS3 version of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion would not feature the majority of downloadable content found on the Xbox 360 and PC versions of the game, it was a blow to fans of horse armor everywhere. An episode of The 1UP Show (02/02) provides the follow-up hook as 1UP relays a juicy bit of info from Bethesda. As it turns out, it may be due to a memory limitation with the Playstation 3 itself. 1UP says that Bethesda simply could not find a way to load every piece of downloadable content without affecting the performance of the game. Considering that the Xbox 360 can pull off this feat without a hitch, that seems quite odd. Bethesda will still be looking into getting that content available for PS3 users."

"As for the PS3 version of Oblivion trumping the 360 in the visuals department, it just so happens that the new shader techniques applied to the PS3 will also be worked into the 360 version of the game."

Sorry if this was already covered? I wasn't really following the Oblivion discussion, I just stumbled upon this link just now.

See, you guys, this thread has a way of pulling you into the silly link quoting.

I think Oblivion will be great on either console. Nothing that I've seen so far suggests PS3 to be really inferior to Xbox 360, both have their plus sides and seem to fare pretty equally as a whole as far as technology is concerned.

@Trezzer

Quote:

Yes... I thought I made it quite clear that the 360's dvd playback is not exceptional in any way.

It's exceptional, as in exceptionally bad!

Quote:

You'll find plenty of reviews saying it's simply an average player for the price point.

No, as a DVD player it's very expensive. The 100-120 USD upscaling Pioneer player clearly beats the XBox 360 hands down, the same goes with regard to the PS2 (also on a HDTV if your display has a good scaler).

Quote:

Blu-Ray doesn't improve gameplay

Of course c64 games can be fun to play as well, a harddrive and Blu-Ray player can add to the gaming experience.

Quote:

a monitor without HDCP or a set with no HDMI

This a standard developed by Intel, used by many players within the consumer electronics market (including Windows Vista with regard to HDCP). So eventually more and more people will.

Quote:

They're nice enough but not much more than Gears of War which you were certainly quick enough to dismiss.

I am sure Virtua Fighter 5 will beat Gears of War hands down, the game already sold more and it's already clear Gears of War in Japan will not get close to Resistance sales figures.

Quote:

But out of the top 20 games only three were for Sony platforms

Top 20 sales data isn't available yet, but yes the top 15 chart is dominated by the Nintendo DS, but I don't view the Nintendo DS as a direct competitor to the Playstation 3.

Quote:

How did Resistance: Fall of Man fare against Gears of War in North America since they were launched at the same time?

Apples and oranges, at the time after a full year of XBox 360 sales the console had a much larger install base.

Quote:

... DISCLAIMER: The numbers above are purely an example of how you can abuse numbers to represent things as you see fit. The marketoid-speak near the end nearly made me nauseous

You should put that below most of your postings, as you spread misinformation. You alledge me to spread selective data (which I consider good considering whatever point you are trying to make, what's the point of adding sales data for washing machines and vacuum cleaners?) although I made clear on multiple occasions that I view the XBox 360 as the PS3's real competitor, just like I view HDTVs as the main competitor of HDTVs and not old but cheap Tubes. BTW, everyone is free to quote Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS sales figures *if* they think these are in direct competition with the gaming market the PS3 targets.

Last edited by MikeB on 15-Feb-2007 at 09:38 AM.