Brandon Wirtz's Digital Mix

So wow. I have my Xbox 360. The setup was easy enough once I figured out that there was a switch on the video cable. One of the interesting things was That there is Support for downloads of movies in HD, to the box. we watch Chronicles of Narnia trailer and the experience was quite good. I'll do a full review later, but wanted to mention that this would be an Ideal Competitor to any of the STB solutions that do download and play from the internet.

I was playing Star Wars Battle Front 2 last night, and there are interlacing artifacts in the video cut scenes. It used to be that you knew when a game was showing cut scenes because the video got better. You would think that with Xbox using a DVD as its media that you could have amazing cut scenes. DivX, or WMV, or Bink Compressed Video on a DVD would allow for DVD or better quality video in the 6-8 hour range and still leave room for the game itself. But it seems this facet of games is ignored a great deal.

It will be even more interesting with Xbox 360 and Ps3, Will 1080i games have 480i cut scenes? The Xbox 360 I tried out at the Best Buy had 480p Cut Scenes, Maybe that was just a demo disc and not represenative of the finished product, but I some how doubt it.

Mark at Sysinternals Has discovered that Sony's CD DRM Scheme basically works the same way as a Root Kit, Or malware. Not a real suprise considering DRM relies very heavily on Obfuscation. But Sony's CD DRM actually works by HiJjacking your CD-ROM Drivers and reading a "Bozo Bit" off the CD that says I am protected, and then prevents you from certain IO operations.

Mark's experience of blowing up his PC trying to undo what they did to his machine lends to an interesting debate of what means can a distributer take to protect their content? After all this story is mild compared to what a HASP driver might do to your machine when you install Carbon Coder or many other USB Dongled Sofware.