IMO people dislike discs more than they like HD movies. Streaming content is the way of the future, and eventually we will get streaming HD.

i think it's a pretty well known fact that humans love collecting things, and people prefer having a nice collection of movie discs, then jus having a harddrive of movies. People love having a physical copy of something, remember DVD vs Divx when divx got destroyed because it was bascally movie rental and you couldn't own a concrete copy of a movie and consumers hated the idea of not having a physical copy of the movie that they could put in a collection, see, etc and wanted total control of their media.

i remember reading this a couple years ago, anybody want to tell me if it's turning out to be correct?

http://www.blogmaverick.com/2006/07/...verrated-too/3

No. Plenty of people have gotten rid of CDs to go to a hard drive full of music. Or gotten rid of film to go to a hard drive full of photos.

The main thing keeping HD streaming out of the mainstream is the size of the files. You need a fast internet connection and large hard drives to manage the amount of data in an HD movie.

I posted this in the E3 thread.. if this 80GB version, which is reported to sell at 399.99 in September is coming out, who is going to buy the 40GB at the same price point? Wouldn't they have to reduce the price on those units?

Sony's already said they've stopped shipping the 40GB units and won't be decreasing the price. I imagine stores (and Sony) will just wait for them to sell out before putting the 80GBs on the shelves. I guess they're just relying on consumer ignorance/impatience.

80GB model dated and priced for Europe.

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=189285
Doesn't seem like the greatest way of phasing out the 40 and bringing in the 80. I can't say I'm bothered about having got a 40 though, I intend to put a cheap 250 in there when I have some time to mess around with PS3 linux.

gus pretty much covered my thoughts here.

IMO I would much rather have an online catalouge of music/movies accessable from anywhere, then one huge ass collection on their bookcase shelves. The reasons seem obvious, obviously.

i shipped all my dvds to my computer to stream them via xbox fwiw

Might be of some interest to some of you: Bad voice acting in video games. A critique of hiring non-pros to provide voice talent to video games, with the specific example of Chaos Wars for the PS2. (Apparently the game company's CEO used his family to provide the voice).

hey guys so i have a wii but im thinking about getting a xbox or a ps3, which would people say is the better choice at the moment? The main reason for getting one is FPS and sports games really. Im not gonna play any RPGS or strategy games or GTA. What are the best games for either console?

Cleaning out a closet I found my copy of "Masters of Doom", book about the id software guys coming together and their ride to success. Good read if you're into the nerdy stuff imo.

360 sounds like it would suit you best. Games to look up to see if you'd be into would be Call of Duty 4, Gears of War, Bioshock, Orange Box, to name a few.

Searching these forums for this questions will give you a lot to digest on the topic as well.

The "what was this old turn-based strategy game" reminded me of a game I haven't played in awhile - Disciples II. If any of you like turn-based strategy, it's a Heroes of Might and Magic-style game where you have heroes running around with armies and stuff. It's insanely fun and I can remember some epic battles in that game.





Plus, Disciples III comes out in the next year

I like both. Hard drives occasionally get wiped out, and redownloading and/or rebuying stuff can get expensive, time-consuming, and messy, depending what services you use and what players. At least if you have your CD's at hand, you can start over again easily.

I have both Audible.com for books and Rhapsody for music subscriptions. I have to go through a very cumbersome and time consuming process to convert Audible books to play on my player of choice, a Sandisk e280 8 gig flash drive(may upgrade to the 16 gig one), so to tell the truth I would rather get my audio books on CD's.

For music, Rhapsody lets you listen to tons of stuff on the desktop, or port it over to your player for 30 days at a time. I have some of my own stuff on my player, and I can change what Rhapsody gives me whenever, either on the desktop or on the go.

Pretty nice flexibility. I wouldn't want to give up either CD's or online music distribution.

I remember reading excerpts of that in Wired or The New Yorker, I think. Good stuff. John Carmack was a pretty huge hero to a lot of people for a long time, which I thought was pretty awesome. I admired him a lot.

That's what backups are for. Hard drives are cheap enough that having an extra couple of external hard drives is not a big deal. And it's certainly easier than having to re-rip 100 GB of music. (I would not call re-ripping an entire collection "easy". It's incredibly time consuming.)

I couldn't even re-rip if I wanted to because I've gotten rid of most of my CDs. The only reason I have any CDs at all is because of my car. And once I change the head unit to one that accepts iPod/external AUX inputs, I'm going to get rid of those CDs also.

My new car lets me hook up my iPod and my older car had an MP3 CD player (burn a CD with like 150 mp3 files on it and the player will play them). I honestly can't remember the last time I touched an actual audio CD.

Maybe I'm just cheap, but spending an extra couple hundred bucks on that versus just keeping my CD's seems kinda wasteful. I already have three external HD's though so I could use them that way if I wanted to.

Actually, wait ... one pooped out on me so all that stuff is lost unless I want to pay a service to dig it out for me. Pricey, or at least it used to be.

In an entirely separate incident, I've had a power surge literally melt a very heavy duty battery back-up/surge protector and make it catch on fire before, so I just feel nervous about having everything in any type of volatile storage. I like the security of having something you can set a magnet on top of and that power surges can't harm.

I also have given away a ton of my old music and my collection now is very small, so starting over would still be a bit of a bear to me, but not the nightmare that it would be if I had 100 gigs. I think if I had a 16 gig flash player with an 8 gig add-in flash card, I'd probably be happy to never get one any bigger.

My car is too old to have an mp3 player or aux-in of any kind. Or a GPS. I'm going to really love the upgrade when I eventually make it.

a 500gig raid 1 setup is like 100$

I just think movies are different from music imo in regards to having them on a hard drive. Many services are pay per viewing or you have it for 24 hours which is just plain sucky paying for a movie again if you want, or paying a monthly service charge jus to watch movies where you get nothing if you cancel it. The re-encoding of movies, espically HD can take hours and hours and is too much hassle. You can't really bring them over to a friends house with different players like a dvd etc with all the different codecs but it could change in the future. Movies you don't carry around with you like music, etc.

We have the ability right now to make movie streaming movies a possibility, but i think many people will prefer blu-ray jus for the fast they have total control of it, they can bring it to a friends house, have subtitles, movie extras, etc. I think the Roku box that came out can be moderatly successful, but most consumers will go back to blu-ray or a physical medium like that.

I can easily understand music, but movies i don't think will catch on. I personally have a hard drive for movies but i'm not the average consumer imo.

I got the RROD. Again. F U MICROSOFT imo.

has anyone here played tribes 2? i just reinstalled that game from like 8 years ago and it is still as awesome as it used to be, except like 40 people play now

tribes was a sick game.. its been mentioned on one or two of these threads recently.. way ahead of its time IMO..

Yes the first Tribes was a major classic, not played by many though. It was way ahead of its time as 20Five mentions. Vehicles, commanders, turrets, ammo stations, cameras, jetpacks, sking, what a game.

Personally I found Tribes 2 to miss the mark a little though, which was a shame. Are there many servers out there to play on? I might give it a go again if there are some decent places to play.