DvdPlayback
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The Wii finally gets DVD playback -- no thanks to Nintendo
Carrying on the rich hacker tradition of picking up the slack for companies that are unwilling or unable to provide the functionality users need, a team of Wii coders have given the console what Nintendo could not: DVD playback. By installing a small, hidden channel on a system, this package blesses the console with a libdi file (DVD access library), and allows you to watch your favorite videos with the MPlayer application, an open source media player. The install file will run on modded and unmodded systems, and the software is also capable of playing media from SD cards (though it's experimental right now). Finally Wii owners can join the ranks of, well... pretty much everyone else.[Via TehSkeen; Thanks, brakken]
Are UK owners seeing green when playing DVDs?
Joystiq got a pretty good e-mail concerning a DVD playback issue. Apparently, the PlayStation 3 in PAL territories has a very difficult time playing any DVDs without giving the owners a big, fat green screen. What's the cause of this? Sony, for starters. See, it seems that on an SDTV, the PS3 can't quite play back DVDs using the AV-Multi/SCART connector. This applies only to European PS3's (I checked mine out before typing this up -- works fine), so we've got to wonder... what's missing? What changed so much to inhibit this standard feature?Apparently, at GAME stores, they sell a Sony brand RGB cable with a switch that fixes said issue, but it seems kind of ridiculous to have to shell out extra cash for a fix that shouldn't even be a problem. That brings us to the problem at hand: European PS3 owners, this is up to you. Let us know if you're having this issue and how much those Sony cables are at GAME -- if Sony does listen to this website at all (we've gotten a few e-mails from Sony reps about the site, actually!) then maybe they'll look into it a little further and possibly give a good ol' firmware update.Oh, the problem doesn't exist on HD connections. Just throwing that out there, so make sure you try it on SDTVs only.[Thanks, John!]
DirecTV remote can control your 360
Instructables stumbled upon a nifty little trick getting their DirecTV universal remote to work with the Xbox 360. After a few simple steps and about 5-10 minutes of cycling through codes, they were able to power up the Xbox and even get some DVD playback functionality out of it. The cool thing about this is that it opens the door to the possibility of other universal remotes being programmed to work with the 360. For example, DirecTV isn't available in Canada, but Shaw Cable has a similar service with its own set top box and universal remote that can manage every component of your home theatre, and if it can be configured to control the Xbox 360, that would be very convenient indeed. Full instructions and brief video after the break.
Nintendo confirms DVD-enabled Wii in '07
We were a bit skeptical when we first heard of the possibility of a "premium Wii" with DVD playback coming to Japan next year -- why would Nintendo announce such a console now and risk cannibalizing their sales? Well, Nintendo, who just confirmed just such a console for both Japan and North America in 2007, is spinning it exactly so: "If DVD movie playback is so important, people can wait for the later model next year. For most consumers it'll be about the games, so they'll likely not want to wait to purchase the new system." That way nobody is bitter about a 3x sexy console mere months after the original... not like that ever happens. As much as we'd love to gripe about the current absence of this fairly common-sensical feature, and though we still can't figure out why Nintendo didn't at least figure this out as a firmware-update (they're still citing cost concerns for the current exclusion), we can't really see this standing in the way of most Nintendo fanboys and their unabated Wii lust. We suppose we'll find out soon enough.
ATI, nVIDIA graphics cards trump dedicated DVD players
Judging the quality of a moving image is an extremely subjective task, so it's with a little trepidation that we report on Hardware.Info's test which compared two graphics cards with twelve dedicated HDMI-enabled DVD players on the same Samsung 24-inch LCD monitor. The tests found that the PC -- which alternated between a ATI Radeon X1900XTX running Cyberlink PowerDVD 7 and nVIDIA's GeForce 7900GTX running the card's PureVideo software -- offered substantially better video quality than the DVD players, but here's where the subjectiveness comes in: the testers chose to rely entirely on the HQV benchmark DVD -- which requires a human to rate each test -- to discern the quality of the playback. The test was also exclusively based around the HQV DVD, with not a single "real world" test in sight. Unsurprisingly, the ATI / nVIDIA setups blew away the DVD players with scores of 118 and 93 respectively: the closest score from the dedicated DVD players was the Panasonic DVD-S97 at 68, which goes for around $250 online. The reviewers concluded that people should ditch their DVD players for media center PC based on the results of their image quality tests: a conclusion that some would take issue with, mainly because there are a dozen different factors other than image quality that can contribute to a good movie experience -- but it's interesting to note all the same.[Via Slashdot]
