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Potential new WoW feature caught on video
We're hedging pretty hard on this one, ladies and gentlemen, partly because I'm trying to rein in my excitement that this could actually be a real video of a new feature. Somehow, Aipok managed to leave what looks like an instance of Temple of the Jade Serpent and zone into Stratholme, taking the option to "Teleport to Instance" while still in an instance himself. Not that weird, right? Well this is when things start getting a bit odd. Because this has been doing the rounds, I was ready for what was coming. Aipok's health suddenly drops to 11.1k. He wades into the skeletons, as you would, with the confidence of a level 90 in a level 40-ish dungeon, and he dies. Only then, looking through his combat log, does he realize that something is awry. On ressing, his health is even lower, at 5.9k. He opens up his character pane, and all his gear has been downscaled to ilvl 43. His character attributes appear to have been downscaled, too. Now, this has Aipok in a strange position. Has he just happened upon a very specific and weird bug? Is this an accidental hop into an unrevealed new feature for 6.0? Could players entering old content be downscaled to match it? Or, could this all be an elaborate hoax? Personally, I want to believe, so I'm going to choose to. What's more, Blizzard devs have talked before about this tech being completed. As long as this was optional, and perhaps even if it wasn't, I'd love this. It'd refresh old content and make it a challenge again. And, if you could earn upscaled XP while downscaled, a fun way to reuse old content to level. But again, remember, this is not an official announcement, or an endorsement, or anything from Blizzard. It's one video of one weird dungeon. It could be a hoax, it could be a bug, it could be nothing at all. I'm excited, though. Are you? And what could it reward?
Confirmed: Apple TV can play 1080p content from iTunes, but still only outputs 720p
The header says it all folks. We just ran some tests on the AppleTV's playback limits by streaming 1080p movie trailers in iTunes and managed to verify murmurs saying the device can accept 1080p content. Unfortunately, output is a different story, since it downscales the image back to 720p on your display. Yes it's a little frustrating -- especially since it's predecessor was up to the challenge -- but it should at least comfort those with a massive library of 1080p videos who were worried about reconverting for their new black box. Considering the hardware gems discovered in the AppleTV teardown however, we're still holding out for the jailbreak community to let us play our 1080p files, and display them too. Oh, and if they could get to work on Super-Hi Vision support at some point, well, that'd be just dandy.
PS3 not all that upscale after all
I hated to have to break this disappointing news to the shivering PS3 fanboys camped out in the cold and wet at my local Best Buy, but somebody had to do it:As it turns out, gamers who own older HD sets that feature only 480i, 480p, and 1080i resolution input capabilities will have to settle for the display quality being downsized as the game boots in its 480p mode rather than upscaling the image from its more desirable 720p mode to the TV's 1080i. We tested this development on older HDTV sets with games designed for 720p but not 1080i -- Resistance: Fall of Man, NHL 2K7, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07, and Need for Speed Carbon. Sure enough, the system downshifted all four titles to 480p rather than moving up to 1080i. The PlayStation 3's competitor, Microsoft's Xbox 360, does upscale 720p games to 1080i if the HD set supports the latter resolution but not the in-between and commonly-employed 720p resolution. One guy countered (illogically) that he didn't care because 360 controllers are too big for Japanese hands. Apparently he still thinks we're wrasslin' with the Duke, although it might have been the hypothermia talking.[Thanks Nathan]
