After quite a bit of consideration, I finally decided to order myself a PlayStation 3, the 40GB model. Unfortunately I had to send it back for replacement or repairs, as the unit I received was obviously faulty. Interestingly, I am not the only European customer that has bought a faulty PS3 40GB unit. Read on to learn more about it, and my first impressions on the king of consoles.

I bought my device from Germany, as there seemed to be the best deals avaiable for us Europeans. The German starter pack came with two wireless controllers, and two games: Uncharted - Drake’s Fortune and Need For Speed: Pro Street. Overall a very nice pack to get you going.

Read more »

Pioneer Electronics just sent out an interesting announcement regarding their Blu-ray BD-ROM / DVD-RW combo drive. According to their press release, the BDC-S02 combo drive can now be purchased for less than €150 or £100 in Europe. While it is still somewhat more expensive than a plain DVD-RW drive, the price range of Blu-ray equipment is getting more and more appealing for the average consumer. Obviously the Blu-ray camp is now in a big hurry to push the format main stream, before any potential alternatives for high definition media delivery appear on the market - and we are not talking about optical disc formats, but download based solutions, solid state technology and so on. Read more »

Yet another proof that no copy protection is unbeatable, which again makes one wonder why do they put so much money and effort in developing them. Usually the protections get cracked and the one to beat the protection gets famous, like Jon Lech Johanssen aka ‘DVD Jon’, who craked the CSS protection used on DVDs. The story with BD+ is different, since this time the crackers have a pure commericial interest. Yes indeed, it is show-time once again for the Antiguan SlySoft, Inc., who make business by selling protection decyphering software for individuals. They have today sent out the following press-release about their new AnyDVD v6.4.0.0 software, which is able to bypass the BD+ protection with ease. Their press-release is interesting in many ways, as their CEO Giancarlo Bettini couldn’t resist the urge to touch the topic of HD DVD vs. Blu-ray format war. I am not sure what are his interests in making this statement, as it really makes no sense - AnyDVD may be a popular software, but it is certainly not a deciding factor on any market.

Read more »

One great thing about Linux is the furious 6 month development cycle that most major distributions use. That’s right, no matter if you use Ubuntu, Mandriva or Fedora you will get a fresh bleeding edge version of the operating system twice a year. The fresh releases have loads of bugs on the release date, then they are maturized for a few months and once the projects get the stability up, it is time to install or upgrade to the next bleeding edge version. Unfortunately there are also distributions that do not offer this excitement. One of these distributions is the PCLinuxOS, usually abbreviated as PCLOS.

Read more »

The momentum is high for the PlayStation 3. Price reductions brought the console quite close to Xbox 360, the game line-up is constantly improving and the Linux capabilities makes it a versatile platform with many uses. The most important factor however is the ending of the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD format war. The Blu-ray is now de facto disc format for high definition video, which makes the overall offering of the PS3 simply better than the Xbox has. The home AV media and consumers have also recognized the fact that the PlayStation 3 is an excellent video source - many people have bought it just for the video capabilities, not for gaming.

Read more »

Most people are familiar with the AVI videos and the term DivX is widely popularized, but when they come across a video file with a .MKV extension, there seem to be a lot of confusion. The purpose of this article is to clear these confusions and problems and give you clear instructions how to play MKV files.

The extension .MKV stands for MatrosKa Video. It has also an audio variant .MKA, which derives from MatrosKa Audio. Matroska files are container files, and for the end user they are very similar to .AVI files. Just like .AVI files, the .MKV files can contain different types of audio and video.

Most commonly .MKV files are used for distributing High Definition video encoded with x264, which is free AVC/h.264 implementation. Read on to learn how to use and play .MKV files!

Read more »

While the hype around PlayStation 3 is considerably building up, due to improved games selection and price cuts, one of the potential killer features of the console has not received too much media attention. Future will show if I am correct, but Sony’s strategic decision to allow Linux installation on the console may turn out to be a ace in their sleeve. Linux makes it possible for any capable coder to develop software on the might PS3 hardware, which makes it more of a HTPC than just a game console. One killer application that made Xbox 1 eventually a success, was the XBMC - the Xbox Media Center. While Xbox 360 remains to be a closed enviroment, the possibility to develop PS3 software on Linux should result in some excellent applications developed for the platform.

Read more »