The war is over. It raged for two years. It was looking like it would continue for another year, at least, but then, to pretty much everyone’s surprise, it was over. This time Betamax won.

Of course I am really talking about the HD DVD versus Blu-ray format war. A few weeks ago Toshiba, the company behind HD DVD, gave up the fight. The tipping point was Warner Brothers, the film studio, changing its policy of releasing on both formats and instead just backing Blu-ray. Up until then the content market between the two formats was roughly equal. Warner Brothers tipped the balance. The remaining HD DVD only holdouts began their rumblings, if not officially. The format war wasn’t doing anyone any favours, merely scaring off all but the most determined early adopters. Sales figures were abysmal for both formats. The sniff of a victor was all that was needed by the industry. It was all over within a month of the Warner Brothers announcement.

I was one of those sitting on the fence. I promised myself I wouldn’t buy a High Definition player until the format war was over (or, at least, a foregone conclusion – the loser may have held on long past the point of no return). It’s been over for a few weeks now. Toshiba has thrown in the towel and Sony are doing their dance of joy. I didn’t expect to be buying one this early in the year. I thought maybe in the autumn. No. We’ve not even made it to spring and my resistance has failed me. Yes, I’ve bought a Blu-ray player.

Thursday/Friday of last week I was in the grip of the urge. The investigation phase had begun. What player? Where’s the best deal? The constant back and forth of should I wait longer or dive in. I went into every shop in town I could think of that might have one. There wasn’t much between them. In the end there was only one player worth looking at, only one that could be upgraded to the forthcoming ‘Profile 2.0’ Blu-ray software version. The PS3. Could I find a ‘movie bundle’ with one? Could I heck! In the end I paid the RRP (£299.99) but got a £45 game with it (which still remains sealed – I always hated the Playstation controllers, I much prefer the keyboard and mouse of the PC or the Wii remote).

There I was, walking out of Game on Sunday afternoon with a rather large box under my arm in search of Blu-ray films, the clock of Sunday opening hours against me. Given the format has been around for a couple of years I expected that most DVD stocking shops would have a small section. No. I was wandering around for about an hour trying to find a place with stock and decent prices. No such place exists in Crawley, it seems. The usual bargain DVD places, the supermarkets, were a bust. Asda (with its very cheap online Blu-ray collection) had none. Sainsburys had none. Tesco had none. WH Smiths had none. HMV did have some but only at full RRP. The same with the Virgin Megastore (sorry, Zavvi). Woolworths had a collection too, slightly cheaper, but they didn’t have the one disc I was after: Casino Royale. In the end I found it for £19.99 at GameStation. Still more than I’d like to have paid for it but better than the £25 that HMV and Zavvi were trying to get out of me! If I hadn’t wanted it for that evening I would have just ordered it online. That’s what I will have to do in future. Not that I expect to buy many Blu-ray discs, in the same way I’ve cut right back on buying DVDs in the past couple of years. Rental is the way to go. I’ve already added a good dozen or so BDs (the slightly silly official acronym for Blu-ray Discs) to my rental list, all top priority!

The lack of titles for Blu-ray was quite a surprise to me. Two years but so few films on disc? No matter, this is a longer term proposition. Certainly the Casino Royale Blu-Ray image quality is great. Unfortunately I couldn’t locate my DVD copy to do a direct comparison but I’m long used to HD quality now, thanks to the BBC HD television channel. Casino Royale looked better than BBC HD – I didn’t notice any compression artifacts on the Blu-ray disc, something I can’t always claim for BBC HD. This is what my 1080p LCD panel was made to show.

It’s going to be a while before we see serious take up of Blu-ray. A couple of years before we see any Doctor Who on the format, for example. There is hope for Torchwood rather sooner, though. In the meantime the latest Hollywood films are sure to appear on the format, probably US TV boxsets too. Also this PS3 is a rather more capable multimedia device than I expected – it can stream video files off a network. Time to start ripping my existing DVD collection to a media server…

Just a shame it had to be the Sony format that won. About time they had a winner, I suppose. I was hoping for a HD DVD victory (despite the lower capacity of the discs), if that had won then my first bought disc would have been Serenity (it’s only on HD DVD at the moment, that will surely change in coming months). That there is a winner is the main thing, though. Now we can all get behind the format and start enjoying 1080p video!

Virgin Media has crossed me for the last time! I must say goodbye to their TV service and their TV Drive (aka V+) box and its High Definition goodness. It’s, sadly, hello HM Murdoch and your Sky HD box.

The final straw for Virgin came last night as I got home and opened up my latest bill from them. The first thing I checked was that they had, finally, reimbursed me for my recent telephone outage (of the best part of a month, no less). Sure enough, they had deducted about £12 off the bill to cover that. How much does that drop my monthly payment, I wondered idly. Huh, it’s gone up, not down? How can that be? They’d broken out my component costs – telephone, broadband, TV subscription, TV Drive box. What had happened to the deal I negotiated when I took on the TV package that lumped them all together?

Turns out it wasn’t a mistake brought about by my discount, as I originally assumed, but instead the deal I negotiated only lasted a year. Shame they didn’t tell me that when I signed up! I wasn’t particularly happy with that deal I already had – I sure as hell am not paying even more for their service – especially as it has deteriorated considerably over the last year rather than improved.

Some of Virgin’s recent transgressions:

• Leaving me without a telephone service for about four weeks (not to mention the hoops I had to jump through to get it restored at all…) Apparently someone had randomly unplugged my phone at the local junction box. I know I’m not the only person to suffer from that problem…
• A while back there was a national TV Drive outage. They sent a letter out apologising and offering us all a free Pay Per View movie, of our choice. Automatically taken off our next bill, they claimed. It wasn’t. I couldn’t even be bothered to fight that one – they never got another PPV penny out of me.
• Loss of TV channels. I start up a 12 month contract and by the end of it I’ve lost major channels without any change in the monthly charges. Yes, I’m partly talking about the Sky channels. More importantly, I’m talking about ITV HD. When I signed up they had two HD channels. Both were, admittedly, trial channels – BBC HD and ITV HD. Nonetheless, I was led to believe (in very vague terms) that they expected to add more HD channels over the coming year (i.e. 2007). Instead we now have only one – BBC HD. HD was the main driving factor for the TV Drive and the Virgin (or Telewest, as was) TV package. That was unacceptable.

To be honest, I came so close to dumping Virgin entirely after my recent telephone problems – customer service like that deserves severe punishment. Only laziness kept me with them. There’s still an inertia there from me, even now. Virgin will retain my custom for the telephone and broadband, for the time being. I am seriously considering moving my phone back to BT and trying out for ADSL again (I’ve so far failed three times to get ADSL due to distance from the telephone exchange, that’s when Telewest finally provided broadband in my area – it was ISDN up until then.) The hassle of attempting to retain my phone number and the inferior offering of ADSL to cable broadband will keep me as a reduced Virgin customer until at least next year.

I’m not alone, either. Elsewhere on this blog and in the Staggering Stories Musings, you will hear the horror stories Tony has to tell of Virgin Media (and his trouble with them isn’t entirely over yet, as I understand it). I know my parents are considering dumping them, too. It’s a small sampling but, including myself, that must be over 50% of the people I know who are Virgin customers are either dumping Virgin or are seriously considering it. Word of mouth gets around and this particular Virgin is leaving a sour taste in many mouths indeed!

To the future, then. I have bought a Sky HD+ box off eBay (apparently an authorised Sky reseller, certainly the AV forums have generally positive noises about the reseller in question). It was an ouch moment. I hadn’t expected to be having to pay out for a Sky digibox (the TV Drive/V+ is rented, Virgin have already set a date to pick it up, just after Christmas). £265, including a new quad LNB (the active bit of a Sky dish – my existing one doesn’t have enough outputs) and extra coax cabling. Bad time of year for that sort of expense. It should repay itself soon enough though…

From my investigations I should be able to slot in my existing Freesat card and, hey presto, I will have access to all the Free to Air and Free to View channels – including BBC HD. In practice I will need to call Sky to link my card to the new box but that should be it. In truth all I really care about, at least right now, is getting the normal ‘terrestrial’ channels (suitably upscaled to 1080i) and BBC HD. I don’t need a subscription for any of those. Why have I been paying Virgin all this time, like a sucker? I lived for a good year or two with just Freesat before I got my new TV a year ago. HD and upscaling were the only reasons I went with Virgin TV in the first place. With talk of ITV HD making a return and Channel 4 HD turning up shortly, all Free to Air or Free to View – I will have plenty of good TV available (and without a subscription, as it should be – I pay my TV Licence, damn it!)

The only fly in the ointment with this free Sky business (trying desperately to ignore the up front cost of a HD box) is the loss of my TiVo. My TiVo was replaced by the TV Drive and its PVR (personal video recorder, aka digital video recorder – DVR) capabilities. TiVo used to cost me £10 a month for the subscription, but couldn’t support HD. Enabling the PVR features on my Sky HD box will cost me the same. So, Sky will get £10 out of me a month, after all. Heck of a lot less than Virgin were charging me for their TV package. Effectively I’ve got myself a HD TiVo with a built in Sky HD tuner. Not a bad deal.

I’m sure I will one day return to Virgin for their TV service, spitting blood over a series of slights from Sky. They’re both about as bad as one another. Right now, though, Virgin have passed my wrath threshold. So, it’s good riddance Virgin Media TV!

It’s a shame – I used to be so impressed by Telewest at one time…

I’ve just finished the fantastic PC game Portal. One of the best games I’ve played in a very long time – I highly recommend it to all. It’s basically a puzzle game where you play a test subject who has to use an innovative ‘Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device’ (aka the ‘portal gun’) to step from one part of a level to another (or move objects past barriers). That’s not a great description, you really have to play it to fully understand.

The physics of the game are what makes it special. That and the dark sense of humour that pervades it. I don’t want to spoil the ending, it’s definitely worth seeing unprepared, but if you find yourself stuck on a puzzle don’t give up – the ending is funny enough to keep trying!

Just to explain the game concept a bit more, you can think of the Stargates from SG1 or the Jump Gates from Babylon 5. Basically you have two portals that you can cast onto walls, floors or ceilings (with deliberate exceptions). Go into one and you come out of the other. Unlike the Stargates or Jump Gates, you can actually see through the portals. So, if you put two portals on opposite walls you will be able to look into one and see your own back. In fact you will be able to chase yourself through an infinitely recursive series of portals – like looking into a mirror with another mirror behind you.

The physics get fun too. Imagine casting a portal onto the floor and another onto the ceiling directly above. Step into the portal on the floor and you fall through the portal above you and then into the portal on the floor and then through the ceiling… Yes, you can fall forever! Other interesting effects happen when you cast onto a wall and the floor, for example. You can look through either portal and the world you see beyond will be at a right angle!

It’s not often that a truly innovative game comes along these days, especially not one done so well. It might be a little short but it is pretty cheap to make up for that. I bought it as part of The Orange Box (Valve’s amazing pack of AAA titles, Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal) for £25 from Sainsbury’s (more normally £30 or £35). I bought it mainly for Portal, I heard such great things about it – clearly I wasn’t disappointed. You can also buy Portal on its own for $19.99 (plus VAT for us Brits, taking to about £12, probably) on Steam.

Yes, this sounds like an advert! Not many games are good enough to make me recommend them so strongly. I’m afraid there doesn’t appear to be a demo for Portal but Steam does have a Trailer.

My only reservation is: who got my cake?

Firebat is under construction as I type. Firebat? Yes, that’s the name of my shiny new computer. My first new desktop machine in a good four years or so (Mac Mini not counting, as that’s really just a web terminal in the living room and a chance to play with PowerPC based Linux).

Why Firebat? I try to name my computers after things from some of my favourite old computer games. First there was my Atari ST, named Benson – after the sarcastic computer from Paul Woakes’ amazing Mercenary games of the era. Then came the Atari Falcon, named Benson 2, aka Benson Junior. My first PC, in about 1997, named Benson 3 – can you see a theme here? Benson 3 is still in use today, as my IPCop firewall, but now named Jameson, after Commander Jameson from Elite. Benson 4 was originally a Pentium 2 machine, my first home built machine, but has seen so many upgrades over the years that about the only remaining original parts are the case and floppy drive (and name!) Benson 4, aka B4, is still in good use as my secondary desktop machine and also running Ubuntu Studio to record the podcasts. Benson 5 is, for this second at least, my primary desktop. B5 is the last of the Benson computers. That’s for no other reason than as a reference to Babylon 5 – the last of the Babylon stations. My two laptops are named after Myst objects, the latest being called Kormahn. Finally, my home server is called Threepwood, after Guybrush from the Monkey Island series. There are other machines but they have boring names like Mac Mini and Zaurus. Yes, my electricity bill can be a little high…

I still haven’t explained Firebat, though, have I? I needed another classic game from my past. Something I spent far too much time playing. There are a good few but not many suggested a decent name for a computer. Populous? Civilisation? Quake? Diablo 2? Hardwar? Evil Genius? Black and White? Tomb Raider? None of those leapt out at me as a source for the name. I didn’t want to call my computer Lara Croft! How about Warcraft 2 or 3? Nah, I wanted something more Sci-Fi. StarCraft! Of course! Kerrigan? Protoss? No. Firebat – yes. A silly sounding name but I took an instant shine to it!

So, Firebat is still installing. Windows XP – this is as much, if not more, a gaming machine than anything else. I considered Vista but there appears little or no benefit to DirectX 10 right now, the only possible reason to consider the appalling bloat that is Longhorn. I’ve also got Fedora 8 being torrented down right now, another few hours to go. Coincidentally, Fedora 8 was just released today – perfect timing for dual booting on Firebat.

For the statistics interested people out there, this new machine is running an MSI P35 Neo motherboard, an Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 CPU, 2GB of DDR2 800Mhz RAM, a 500GB SATA HDD and (my favourite bit) a BFG nVidia 8800 GT OC (512MB). I wasn’t sure if that graphics card would hold up the order a few weeks as these new 8800 GT cards are THE card of the moment, high end performance for mid range price. They are selling out quicker than they get in stock at the moment. I got very lucky! I look forward to testing this machine with 3DMark and the like. It should put B5 to shame!

I should also point out that this machine being bought/constructed was not influenced by the Dunn’s recent purchase of a new machine. Really. I just got fed up with B5 freezing up two or three times an evening while I was playing World of Warcraft. Probably just an underpowered PSU, given all the drives I’ve got inside it now, but it was time for an upgrade anyway! Once Firebat is up and running I may fiddle around with B5 and may well end up fixing it. In the meantime I’ll have something a little speedier and, hopefully, rather more stable!

“Need a light?”

For what may be a short time only, the Cadbury’s Wispa is back!

Many people would have heard about Cadbury relenting to the Internet pressure (on the likes of MySpace, Facebook and various Internet petition sites) and agreeing to bring back the ‘Velvety Textured Milk Chocolate’ bar for a limited 23 million run.

And I have two! I haven’t dared open one yet. Can I defile the sacred Wispa wrapper? With only about a third of a bar per head of population, do I have the right? Do I risk my immortal soul by even thinking of biting into a Wispa?

Well, of course, I don’t believe I have an immortal soul, no matter how god-like Cadbury seems right now! If these 23 million sell well enough I suspect there will be a second run or, maybe, even a full return to production for the chocolate bar. It will be like the summer of 1983 all over again!

One thing I notice is that they now call them ‘Aerated Milk Chocolate Bar’ on the packaging. Not quite as interesting sounding as the ‘Velvety Textured’ they made so much of on its original launch. Describe it how they will, it had better be the same inside! I’ll have one for lunch today and let you know…