Problems with Heroes Disc 2 on HD-DVD? Read This!

If you've bought Season 1 of Heroes on HD-DVD recently, you might be running into probably getting the second disc to load. What's the solution?

Sadly, just patience.

The second disc is web-enabled, and when you first load the disc, it will attempt to download the web content to the hard drive built into your HD-DVD drive. Of course, this is a popular web series and the servers seem to be getting overloaded. This means that it might take up to an hour to download the content.

The disc should give you the option to cancel if it appears that it's going to take a prolonged amount of time. All I can recommend is that you load the disc before you want to watch it and let it download while you make dinner or something.

Just a reminder, Season 2 starts on September 25th!

Universal Exceeds Expectation with HD DVD

HD DVD is having a rough time of it in the media, but a problem some consumers have run into is discs that just won't play. It seems to be mostly HD DVD/DVD combo discs, and appears to be a slight film that doesn't come off the disc in manufacturing.

A copy of Smokin' Aces that I bought recently had this problem, so I contacted Universal to get a replacement. They offered to send me a postage-paid envelope to send back the disc ... just the disc ... and they'd mail a replacement.

In six to eight weeks. How annoying.

In a couple of days, I had my envelope and mailed off the bad disc. In just two weeks, I had a replacement in a brand new case! Now I have an extra case should I ever need it, and they beat their shipping estimates.

This is how you delight your customers ... by handling problems promptly and by exceeding expectations. It would have been great to have the disc work right the first time, but this was the next best thing. Universal is clearly embracing the format.

As for the movie ... Buy It.

37" Westinghouse LCD 1080p - First Impressions

Well, my graduation present (the Westinghouse LVM-37w3se) arrived yesterday morning, and I only got a chance to unpack it and make sure it worked before heading out to work, but once I got home, it was time to experience the HD revolution.

The first thing I did was hook up the TiVo, since it's one of those things I just can't live without. Sadly, being on the cutting edge means making a few sacrifices, and the TiVo's low-res display looked terrible once it was deinterlaced and upscaled to the 1080p of the screen. Of course, I knew this going in, but was a bit surprised at just how bad it really looked. It didn't help that I was literally kneeling in front of the screen while I set everything up, either. Of course, the PS2 and Wii fared about as well. Only capable of 480p, both consoles looked just terrible blown up, even over component connections.

Next was the Xbox 360. I just couldn't take another disappointment, so I hooked it up to the VGA port of the TV, went into the system settings and set it to 1080p widescreen. It was absolutely gorgeous. No more "dot crawl" like I had on my old Sony, fonts were smooth and clear in the Dashboard, and the whole thing just looked, for lack of a better word, spacious. Seriously, it felt like you had room to move around in that thing.


I couldn't let it rest there. I hooked up the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive and threw in a copy of Mission: Impossible III to see if there was really that much of a difference. I remember being blown away by the quality of DVD when it first came out, and HD-DVD is a similar leap forward. It was really impressive just how good it looked. The "In-Movie Experience", or IME, was nifty too, adding video overlays of commentary or other features while you're watching.

Was it really that much better than DVD, though? I'm not sure yet. My next test will be to run my DVD and HD-DVD copies of Mission: Impossible (the original) at the same time and flip between them to see how different they look, controlling for the fact that the DVD would likely be upscaled by the TV rather poorly.


Speaking of which, I heard that the last Dashboard update for the Xbox 360 added the ability to upscale DVDs to 1080p over the VGA connection. So I tossed in the first Harry Potter movie to see how it worked, prepared to be disappointed after M:I III looked so great. Despite the very dark opening scene lacking detail, it actually looked pretty amazing, and didn't look like it was upscaled. It certainly wasn't as razor-sharp as M:I III (you could see every pore in Lawrence Fishburn's face), but it was more than adequate.

I pulled out Star Wars: Episode I and ran the THX Optimizer, a special video tuning program on the DVD. After adjusting the settings in a dark room, I flipped back over to the TiVo and noticed two things. One, properly adjusted, the standard definition upscaling doesn't look too bad. Don't get me wrong, it's still awful, but it's at least watchable now. Second, viewing distance matters a lot. From right in front, it was all a mess, but 8-ft. back was a slightly different story. Macroblocking (giant pixels) was less evident, and it just felt a bit smoother.

For my last hurrah for the night, I turned the Xbox 360 back on and threw in Gears of War. I'd played this on a 1024x768 projector on a giant screen at MindCamp, but WOW. I was absolutely blown away by the graphical fidelity. I don't know if it's rendering a 1080p frame buffer, or just 720p upscaled, but it just looked amazing. The best way to describe it is like playing a war movie set in the future. I expect to really impress some of my friends when they see just how good it looks at 1080p.

So that's it for now. I have more stuff to try, but it'll take a few more days to get everything together and whatnot. Next up: Windows Vista Media Center and HDTV!

Keeping up with the High-Definition Joneses

I graduated from the University of Washington yesterday, and it was a bit of a melancholy affair. The four-year grind has culminated in my Bachelor's degree, but it's also come at a fairly high price (not just tuition-wise, but relationship-wise as well). People keep telling me that they couldn't have done it, but at the same time I wonder if knowing what I know now if I'd have made the choice. I guess I'll never know.

Regardless, it's done now, and to celebrate, I ordered myself the 37" Westinghouse 1080p LCD TV (LVM-37w3) that I've been lusting after for a few years. Costco has the TV (monitor, really, since there is no tuner in the set) on sale for $799, and I just couldn't turn that down. Even after tax and shipping, it was $100 cheaper than I could find it anywhere else, and Costco's return policy is fantastic.

Of course, that means I'll be rewiring my entertainment center (one of my favorite hobbies), and probably moving my computer into a smaller media center-like case to take advantage of my HD card. I might upgrade my DirecTV receivers to HD, but since I may be moving shortly as well, I'm probably going to hold off, especially since Verizon has FIOS rolled out on Washington's "Eastside".

I'm also pretty excited to see how the Xbox 360 looks after the 1080p upgrade, since they rolled out a software release turning on 1080p upscaling a while back. The PS3 is still way out of my price range, but maybe after a year or two I'd be able to afford it.

New TV should be here in a couple of weeks!

More News from X06

Peter Jackson is working on a new Halo title with Bungie. It's not Halo 3 since Bungie has said that the series is ending at 3. Speaking of Halo titles ...

Halo Wars, a brand-new real-time strategy game set in the Halo universe, made by the current kings of RTS titles ... Ensemble Studios. Suddenly, Microsoft putting the smackdown on fan-made RTS "Halogen" makes more sense.

This isn't all that's keeping Jackson busy, though ... Jackson and Microsoft are teaming up to create Wingnut Interactive, a new game studio. Wingnut will be producing another Jackson-helmed game under this new partnership, exclusive to Xbox 360.

Still need more Peter Jackson news? How about this? Included with the HD-DVD drive for Xbox 360 will be the Universal Media Remote and a copy of Jackson's King Kong on HD-DVD. All for $199.

Grand Theft Auto 4 may not be exclusive to Xbox 360, but the two downloadable episodes will be, and they'll be out just "months" (way to be vague) after the release of GTA4.

GTA4 isn't an exclusive, but the next Splinter Cell will be. Also exclusive is Bioshock, Microsoft having deftly ripped the game away from the PS3. If you're not familiar with Bioshock, just know that it's the spiritual successor to the acclaimed "System Shock".

Project Gotham Racing 4 was announced, the worst kept secret ever.

Oh, and when exactly is DOOM coming to Xbox Live Arcade? How about just a few minutes ago?

Sony PR Goes From Worse to Brain Dead

Update: OK, and killing all of your brand-positive advertising in Europe (where you're going to need a lot of it) isn't what I had in mind either. Apparently, SCEA's hired a new PR guy after Molly Smith bolted from the company, which certainly explains part of the company's complete disfunction. It'll be interesting to see if Dave Karakker can translate his experience shilling for Kahlua into getting people to buy the PS3.

Of course, when I suggested below that Sony needs to fix their PR image, I in no way indicated that a good way to do that would be to have Ken Kutaragi (the head of Sony Computer Entertainment America) tell everyone that the US is only going to have 400,000 units at launch, and Japan? Yeah, they get a paltry fourth of that (for a machine that should be far more popular in Japan than Microsoft's Xbox 360).

So who's going to be standing in line waiting for a PS3? Before any of you Europeans raise your hand, you'd better re-check the calendar, because none of you will be seeing a PS3 until March 2007.

Sony needs some good news, and pronto. At this point, I'd suggest that they either start making things up, or start paying bloggers like myself to start writing nice flowery prose about them. Anything to stop the bleeding, because there's only so much more of this that people will take before they just give up and either buy the console that's already out, or the one that will cost just a third the price of PS3.