The Connected Home Blog

Toshiba have finally announced that they are stepping down from their efforts to push HD-DVD as the format of choice for the next generation of video supplying high definition pictures, sound and better interactivity than we see with existing DVDs which makes Blu-ray, Sony’s alternative, the way forward.

This is good news for consumers in many ways as it means that there is now a clear upgrade path for people wanting to move their home cinema package into the HD age without the risk of subscribing to a technology that will become defunct after a long and drawn out format war, as was the case the Betamax and VHS in the 1980s.

I have to admit though that I am slightly sad to see HD-DVD killed off so quickly. Whilst there is no real perceivable difference in sound or video quality of the two formats, both providing images up to 4 times better than a standard definition picture, there were many things that i liked about the HD-DVD format.  

For starters, the name and the logo are much more in keeping with the existing DVD standard and clearly describes what the product is a HD DVD. I think that my mum could understand this where as I doubt she has a clue what  a Blu-ray Disc is.

I was also impressed by the backing that HD-DVD had away from the film studios including Intel, Microsoft and HP, which showed an appreciation that the format would be used for more than just films. HD-DVD was also proving cheaper to produce, the very thing that won the 80s format war for VHS.

All that said, I am pleased that this is now resolved and believe that consumers will be better off for this decision by Toshiba.

How the war was won

Sony’s big weapon in the format war was undoubtedly the PS3. Having had their superior Betamax video tape technology beaten in the 80s, Sony were clearly reluctant to be the losers a second time. By equipping the PS3 games console with a Blu-ray Disc player they ensured that Blue-ray would become the format of choice as people buying the console for its gaming abilities were also having their decision made for them as to which HD format to side with. Sony has sold more than 10 million PS3 consoles compared to Toshiba having sold only 1 million HD-DVD players giving Blu-ray ten times as many consumers able to play their format without even counting stand alone Blu-ray players.

The HD-DVD camp did try to replicate this success though by teaming up with Microsoft to provide an add-on for the Xbox 360 allowing HD-DVD playback, but as additional cost this option has failed to reach mass popularity.

Microsoft seem to have been keen to avoid including the HD-DVD technology directly in to their console and have left the door open to switch allegiances and begin to package the Xbox 360 with Blu-ray capabilities, perhaps as soon as late 2008 in the form if the rumoured Xbox 360 Ultimate edition console, to include built in Blu-ray, HDMI and improved hard drive capacity.

Verdict for the Connected Home

A a way of distributing high definition media, it is no doubt an advantage to have a single format for consumers and industry so we are pleased with this news.

Whether Blu-ray Disc will prove to be the future for media distribution is still to be seen though as we see more and more content becoming available through download and media streaming.

Although Microsoft may have been backing the loser in HD-DVD they have not put all of their eggs in one basket and we may yet see their ever evolving Xbox 360 movie download service continue to thrive and leads the way for how the digital media of tomorrow will be acquired and made available.

There is definitely a place for Blu-ray Disc players in the connected home for now, but I suspect that they will become unnecessary over time as faster internet connections become the norm and more download and streaming services launch to provide us with our digital media.

Matt S

As of Midnight 28th January EST or 5 in the morning here in the UK on the 29th January, the Qtrax beta became available for download from http://www.qtrax.com/ . This new service promised free downloads via a legal peer to peer network funded by advertising. Qtrack announced that they had signed deals with all major record labels - a claim the record labels quickly denied. Turns out that discussions were underway but nothing had yet been agreed.

The player and download tool is a modified version of the Mozilla Foundation’s free and open source Songbird music player software. It seems nice enough although within the first few hours of launching it crashed many times and was not able to reach the Qtrax servers.

The biggest problem though is that you can not actually download music. The Qtrax web site now announces proudly that the high levels of demand have left them with some technical issues they are ironing out (which I suggest means having problems with the record labels they claimed to have deals in place with).

It is a shame because the prospect of advertising supported free music is an interesting new development as companies look for new ways to differentiate themselves to become our digital media providers of choice.

The Qtrax offer sounded too good to be true. Turns out it really may be.

We will keep an eye on this to see if the service does eventually get off the ground.

Matt S

I am a huge fan of the new Windows Live services and software.I think that Live Mail is truly excellent and use it to manage 7 email accounts, including Hotmail and GMail. I also think that the Windows Live Writer is brilliant and provides a much easier interface for blogging than is possible when doing so through a standard webpage method provided by the various blog providers. There is nothing really wrong with these sites for blogging,but I find being able to write posts offline with a more familiar menu system and UI suits me better.

There seems to have always been one element of Microsoft’s suite that has been missing though, a Windows Live Calendar. It had been discussed and we knew it was coming but it took a lot longer than the other services.

This was the one element that actually excited me more than any of the others. Having played around with Vista’s Windows Calendar I was impressed by the ability to publish and share calendars. If only we had somewhere to publish them to, and a way to view them online away from the home computer and then perhaps build the offline functionality in to an email and communication client.

I really hoped that upon its launch Live Calendar would add Vista’s Windows Calendar functionality and more to the Windows Live Mail client and that this would be synced with an online calendar in Hotmail, all able to be published and shared and hosted effortlessly alongside Hotmail.

Unfortunately when Windows Live Calendar finally launched it fell short of this mark and did little more than replace MSN calendar in Hotmail. Yes the sharing of calendars is there, but it isn’t linked to a desktop client and as such fails to be useful to me.

I like most people only go to Hotmail to check emails when away from home, otherwise I use Live Mail. Why on earth would I break this habit and start to open up a webpage and go though Hotmail to view my calendar?

I worry that the good people at Microsoft may have missed a trick which could have helped them to take back some of the ground that Google has been making in this area. What is available now, whilst only in Beta doesn’t seem to fit in with the ethos of the Windows Live experience of online content and desktop clients. It really does seem to have been a rebranding exercise.

I hope as the service moves from Beta to the main steam we see some of these features emerge. For now I will try out Vista’s build in calendar again, and maybe try to host it myself on my Home Server. I won’t then have access away from home through a web UI but it is a start.

Matt S

Happy new year to everyone. Sorry that there has been a shortage of posts recently but as is often the way with us amateur part-time bloggers the real world and day jobs sometimes get in the way.

With the craziness of Christmas now over with and 2008 well underway I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all our TCHB (The Connected Home Blog) readers for continuing to visit and support us and to encourage you to subscribe to the RSS feed  if you haven’t already. Look there is even a nice easy link here!

Here are just a few of the things that you can expect from us over the coming weeks and months:

• Fix the Firefox & Safari bug - a lot of effort went in to the design of this blog and the template took weeks of tweaking before i was happy with it, mostly because of having no experience of anything similar in the past. That said I am delighted with the result and feel it was well worth the effort , or at least it was if you use Internet Explorer. It looks like my lack of experience and technical ability may have showed after all as neither Firefox nor Safari display the page as I intended, and IE does. This could be quite time consuming, but a worthwhile exercise and one that I really should have done some time ago. If anyone is feeling particularly generous and can point out where I have gone wrong I could probably do with the help!
• Provide product reviews and information - there is a lot of very good software and hardware out there which really helps with the ideal of a connected digital home. In 2008 I want to share my thoughts on some of these and provide more information as to the role they can play in the home. We have talked a lot about Windows Home Server and Windows Live Services in passing, but done little to actually review them or suggest how they can be used. Other products we are keen to look at include Sonos, the various media extenders that are now appearing on the market, NAS devices, backup systems, home network solutions including info about the Draft N WiFi standard, power line network adaptors, network ready TVs, IPTV services and a whole host more.
• More info about the ideal - what does the connected home really look like and what would we like to see to improve it further
• More regular posts - the real world or work and family life permitting.
• More web pages/sections - with all of the extra content will come better organisation. I hope to have some dedicated pages/sections for reviews, for tutorials or how-to guides, and I also hope to be able to provide some additional services which I hope to talk more about in the future should there be an appetite from TCHB readers.

So that is a taste of what is to come. If there is anything that you would like to see please let me know by leaving a comment.

Thanks again for reading and for your continued support.

Matt S

Not quite sure how I stumbled across this but as I was heading for Microsoft Connect to download the new beta of Live Messenger 9.0 (yes, I got accepted on to the beta, but can’t really share anything yet) and I ended up at https://connectbeta.microsoft.com which seems to be  a Microsoft Connect Beta page, nothing too strange there, although I’m confused how I got there. What really surprised me though was to find a picture of Terry Walsh on the page from the We Got Served WHS blog. Weird.

Matt S