Sony Blu-ray Media Center 122
An anonymous reader writes "Sony announced its Blu-ray equipped VGX-XL202 media center box a while back and a full review has finally appeared. This looks like it could be the ultimate media center PC with a Blu-ray re-writer, HDMI and HDCP enabled NVidia graphics, integrated wireless, gigabit ethernet, digital TV tuner and twin hard disks. Unfortunately it doesn't come cheap."
I wonder if... (Score:3, Funny)
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Sales Volume Helps (Score:2)
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Who the hell wants to pay a lot of money for something that's unnecessarily large, wasting people's space? This reviewer is an idiot if he thinks that enthusiasts want their brand new toys to be big and clunky. The last time I checked, people enjoy things that are slim and sleek.
"but at this price its only audience will be hardcore enthusi
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why Sony wins. (Score:2)
Okay, I still say the Wii is going to be THE runaway gaming machine, but as far as a Blu-Ray player goes, Sony wins if this is included in the PS3.
Reason? Porn.
No, I'm not joking. A lot of guys in the porn industry are switching to online distribution, which, while I'm sure a lot of guys won't mind jerking off at the desktop, will likely want to take it to the TV. A Blu-Ray re-writer/burner makes that possible.
Even if the PS3 doesn't include this particular kit, as long as it's easier to write to Blu-Ra
Re:And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why Sony win (Score:1)
Re:And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why Sony win (Score:1)
Blank Hi-Def media is going to be insanely expensive for the forseeable future - hell, even DL-DVD is way over-priced, and the extra resolution on your pr0n isn't going to warrant you wasting 50x the download in order to get it (compare 25 gigs to a 700 meg divx).
If anything the p
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DRM and Proprietary formats for the win!
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I would go in search of a more d
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This sillyness is brought to you by: Company policy and that creepy stocky fellow in HR, he's coming for your children!
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It's not just the media, either. In among all of the CD and DVD burners, Fry's has a Blu-Ray burner on the shelf. At $750 each, I suspect most of them will stay on the shelf. I can make HD movies fit on DVDs (single-layer in many cases, dual-layer for the rest) with either MPEG-4 or H.264 that'll be nearly indistinguishable from the original sources.
Re:And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why Sony win (Score:1)
This is another one of those mind-warping contexts -- after the porn post, I read this as "We're impotent".
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Especially when all t
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Andrew Blake [andrewblake.com] make HD stuff for some time already. And it is definitely worth its every bit.
No thanks (Score:1)
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No thanks. I'll stick with my Mythbox, thank you very much
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
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Note: DMCA does not apply to Fair Use
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Moreover, Sony's track record with consortium-backed formats is quite good. Sony and Philips were part of the original consortium that created the CD, and both were founding members of the DVD Forum.
Regarding non-consortium-backed formats, the record is substantially worse. MiniDisc and Memory Stick never achieved ubiqtu
Die in a fire (Score:2, Insightful)
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Whoa there, Silver! Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. At least not yet.
We all have a lot of reasons to be displeased with Sony, and the debacle that is the PS3 probably isn't helping anything. But that doesn't mean that Bluray is a bad technology. In fact, it's superior to HD-DVD in many ways; not the least of which is greater storage capacity over HD-DVD. It also has greater capabilities for interactivity and better su
Advantages for HD-DVD (Score:2)
Actually, you're forgetting that the players are much less expensive for HD-DVD (Toshiba HD-DVD: under $500, Samsung Blu-Ray: $720, Sony Blu-Ray: $999)... that doesn't take into account the PS3 yet, but at best it will be the same price as the Toshiba HD-DVD player, and will have limited availability for a while. Also, production costs for pressing the discs are much che
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M$ Xbox HD-DVD - IIRC - $200. Enjoy.
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That would be a good point, but you still need the $300 - $400 XBox 360 to be able to use it (as far as I know it won't work with a PC, but I could be wrong?), and is that drive available yet? I'd say it's at best the same cost/benefit as a PS3, except that the drive is a bulky add-on to the XBox, and it can't be used for game content.
Maybe I shouldn't be disagreeing with someone who was supporting my original point, but I'm just trying to look at things realistic
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http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/17/xbox-hd-dvd-dr
Re:Die in a fire (Score:5, Informative)
PS3 vs. Vaio (Score:1)
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wtf!? (Score:1)
VGX-XL202 (Score:5, Funny)
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The most important part of the article... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Image Constraint Token... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, it's supposed to be capable of supporting that, but supposedly none of the studios are implementing that on current discs... yet.
I'd say this is just a case of the media PC being a pile of crap. "Watch our awesome Blue-Rayz movies on this awesome computer... " *hiccup* *crash* *smoke*
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As I understand it, the hardware is supposed to be capable of downgrading any HDCP signal.
There is something called the ICF (Image Control Flag, or something like that) which applies to Blu-Ray discs (I'm not sure about HD-DVD) which the pigopolist-types have announced will not be used until 2010. Other HDCP-encoded sources should already be affected by the SDTV downgrade if a filthy-nasty-pirate ("analog") devi
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Set up right you can get quite a bit more depth than not set up at all which is normal.
PenGun
Do What Now ???
Strange type of review (Score:5, Insightful)
- The extremely high price, yes, we can set that to one side for "new" technology.
- Then you have the "No output at all without HDCP" problem (although early adopters should know this already)
- Then you have the software problems related to Blu-Ray which stop you using the built-in software that plays EVERYTHING else (and only Vista will support Blu-Ray properly, it seems).
- Then the right-handed-only keyboard/mouse combo (instantly denying comfortable use by a fair percentage of the population)
- Then the spurious errors and crashes
- The Keyboard's high power usage (4AA's)
- No SCART/DVI-I ports *at all*
- Single TV Tuner preventing simultaneous viewing/recording
- Frame-rate issues (Possibly the most worrying problem)
- Possible minor quality issues on the playback
But yet the summary of the article is almost 100% positive about it.
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That does raise some eyebrows - but to be fair you need to detail the rest. There are Component, FireWire (!) and S-Video out ports, and you could adapt the HDMI to DVI cheaply and easily. The supplied BD-ROM had HDMI copyprotection on it, but how many of these are really out there yet?
The fact that the hardware can throw a snit about this is bothersome. Sony has 'promised' (whatever that means)
how? (Score:2)
And 4AAs in the keyboard doesn't mean high power usage. My Apple Bluetooth keyboard uses 4AAs and yet the batteries lasted two years.
You can adapt HDMI to DVI-I with a simple cable that you can get for $5 at monoprice.com. No SCART is an interesting point. Although I know SCART is popular in Europe, if you want to watch a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc you're gonna wa
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8 out of 10? Sounds more like 2 out of 10 to me. (Score:5, Insightful)
You've got to be kidding me. Keep in mind while you read this that this device costs around $3,360 USD.
If this thing gets an overall 8 out of 10, I can't help but wonder how a device can possibly get dinged for less. I mean, really, from TFA:
So your fancy expensive toy won't let you watch your movies.
All that money, and it stores less than one of my desktop's hard drives
Ooh, around $150 worth of software, which they've undoubtedly OEMed for probably less than $20.
So you can only record one television station at a time. I hope you don't have two favorite shows that happen to come on back-to-back, or you're just SOL. Even my five-year-old TiVo has dual tuners, and it's not you can't get a dual-tuner component [amazon.com] for less than $70.
This extra bit of complication brought to you courtesy of the letters D, R, and M.
Oh, so to play our movies, we'll have to actually upgrade to Vista when it comes out. Good, because it's not like you've already spent enough to buy the box itself, right? And I'm sorry, I'm not going to use a frickin' keyboard to play a frickin' movie from my frickin' DVD player on my frickin' tv.
Yet more hoops to jump through to play a movie, again brought to you by the letters D, R, and M.
Oh, now we see why it earned an 8 out of 10! Oh, wait, those are bad things, aren't they? Well, all of that is worth it if we get image quality that knocks our socks off, so let's get to the bottom line:
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Even my five-year-old TiVo has dual tuners, and it's not you can't get a dual-tuner component for less than $70.
You linked to the 150 model which also only has one tuner. Here [amazon.com] is the 500 model which has dual tuner support.
and your link (Score:2)
your link is not to a tivo, and is not to something available 5 years ago
"Date first available at Amazon.com: October 28, 2004 "
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"The software supplied is InterVideo WinDVD BD for VAIO, a rather convoluted title. On first attempt we got a region code error message. I then went into the software and selected Region B.
Yet more hoops to jump through to play a movie, again brought to you by the letters D, R, and M."
This isn't a DRM issue this is a method of "price discrimination" which all companies do.. it is annoying as crap - but alteast the player lets you change the region.. but i a
Region coding is a form of DRM (Score:2)
It is price discrimination, but it's also a form of DRM, at least as I define it: Anything that keeps you from doing what is reasonably technically possible due to legal or administrative reasons.
There is no technical reason why I shouldn't be able to watch a movie I buy in Japan on a player I buy in the U.S. In fact, they had to add stuff to the discs and players to ensure that I can't. That's stupid, it's a form of "managing" my digital rights, and it's why I don't feel the least amount of guilt abou
Re:8 out of 10? Sounds more like 2 out of 10 to me (Score:4, Funny)
750 GB hard drives (Score:2)
Yup. And while they're still pretty expensive, (around $360 [amazon.com]), they're well worth it. The really sucky thing is that 2 250GB hard drives will set you back around $220 [amazon.com]. For $3,360, they weren't even willing to spend the extra $140 (probably less as a vendor) to bump you up to 750GB.
How many ways are there to say it: Sony sucks, and this device is crap.
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Re:8 out of 10? Sounds more like 2 out of 10 to me (Score:2)
Never heard of the site before and will never use it now. Never heard of the product before and will never buy it now.
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Studios doesn't want you to watch unencrypted content which would be in a secure safe as "master" just 5 years ago. That is the deal. Think the Blu-Ray, HD-DVD like "source" of a commercial computer program. They got amazing specs including sound.
$3160 is considered "cheap" in high end stuff. I know people paying $200
Missing features (Score:3, Funny)
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Between the 8-track slot and the Elcaset. [wikipedia.org]
Doesn't jive... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but HDMI and HDCP enabled and ultimate media center just don't go together in the same sentence.
Any media center PC that's designed to keep me from recording the TV shows I'm receiving does not qualify as ultimate
no, really? (Score:1)
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I keep wondering who's buying this crap (Score:3)
From TFA:
So a paid-for movie on BlueRay, combined with a Sony "root-kit-o-matic" Vaio, and a non-HDCP display (which is most displays in homes... heck most displays on the market right now) is going to fail to play. Apparently without an error message. Just craps out.
I hope that this "wired DRM" will seriously backfire on all the cretins supporting it: Sony, Microsoft, the studios, etc. I don't understand how they expect to get people to switch over to their new DRM scheme when the massive downside is that for most consumers, right now, anything they buy that uses this scheme is going to fail to play. It's either going to fail because they don't know which movie format to buy, or fail to play because their media is now tied to their player, or fail to play because the player will refuse to send data to a non-DRM'd display.
Two or three failures of this sort will be all it takes for most people to give up on the technology. DVDs (and iTunes, and other similar schemes) succeeded because the DRM is mostly transparent. Yes, there's no way to skip through the FBI warning at the beginning of the movie, but most folks don't care because eventually the movie plays and the 10 second wait isn't that frustrating. But when the system won't play a BlueRay disk and they can't figure out why (and it's happened twice before) I think a lot of folks are going to shrug and say "Well, I guess I'll stick with DVDs"
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I concur. Somehow I get the feeling this is going to be a slightly bigger hurdle for Joe User than the last time when he tried playing a DVD in a standalone CD player.
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I share your ambivalence over this thing, but be fair. The supplied disc was HDCP-protected. So it didn't play on an HDCP-monitor. We know how this works (and yeah we don't like it). But that is a far cry from 'can't watch my movies' or 'can't record
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But let's not let facts get in the way of a good bit of poo-slinging....
Yes but, (Score:1)
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My three top questions and their answers (Score:2)
1) Can I use this just like a standalone DVD recorder, i.e. can I record any program I'm watching on my TV, whether broadcast or cable, and then burn a DVD from it that will play in an ordinary DVD player?
2) Will it play (just play, not record) HD-DVDs, just in case the movies I want to buy aren't released in Blu-Ray format (or just in case the local video store happen
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> than a DVD to be obvious to everyone?
That's because most Blu-ray movies aren't that much better than standard DVD. HD-DVD, on the other hand, has a consistently better picture (due to a better codec and more space - 30G vs 25G, although there's now one 50G BD disk available that has average PQ as well
To answer your HD-DVD question, it doesn't play them. There's no dual players (yet?), and Sony wouldn't produce something that plays the rival form
Rootkit? (Score:1)
The press are telling people not to buy this stuff (Score:2)
Every single article said "don't buy it". Everyone is being told that it is Betamax-versus-VHS all over again. If that's the message from the popular media (who usually just regurgitate marketing hype without thinkin
Cablecard (Score:2)
Not a media center (Score:2)
Currency Exhange (Score:1)
Alternatives? (Score:1)
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B-b-b-b-but I thought.... (Score:1)
PS3 w/ Linux + Myth TV (Score:2)
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/16
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PenGun
Do What Now ???
PS3? (Score:1)
TLP is WA-A-AY off-base. (Score:1)
With a SONY product in it? Wait, lemme guess - it comes pre-rooted from the factory, right? No need to purchase any audio CD's from Sony? Yeah, this is the ultimate media center PC - if, by ultimate you mean "Ultimately pwned by the *AA"!
Not that HD-DVD is much better at this point, except that I don't recall anybody having their machine rooted (administered? pwned?) by a HD-DVD manufacturer. The DRM being built into HD
it's about relative value (Score:2)
I wonder if that's why this thing exists in the first place: to make the PS3 look like an absolute bargain in comparison.
Choices, Choices (Score:2)
- or -
Invest that money in getting a PhD so I can earn three times my salary and buy the exact same hardware for only $2000 in three years time.
Hmmm.
I think I'll go with option B.
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But still, even though one could try to get along just with the Media Center, in reality you'd want all the goodies that add on to it. It's like when you buy a house, you think "Oh, it only costs $465,000" and later you realize it was $465,000 plus 6 percent commission plus 2 percent closing costs and taxes plus you now have to buy drapes, tables, lights, and all the other things.
Hmmm something's wrong with this picture (Score:1)
Okay, maybe that's a bit far from reality, but with Sony's strong support of DRM, (and you KNOW they will support any broadcast flag and macrovision stuff that comes out), wouldn't that make the blu-ray burner kind of useless?
I can see it now:
* Cool! A great big DVR... Sure, but you can only fast-forward when it's not at a commercial
* I can make a Blu-Ray copies of TV shows the same way I use
Truth in advertising (Score:2)
HDMI and HDCP enabled NVidia graphics
I think you mean HDMI and HDCP DISabled Nvidia graphics. These technologies prevent usage, not enable it.
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For real? Did you even read the review? Here's the short summary (see my comment above for the long one):
This machine really sucks ass. It won't let you play your movies. After a bunch of jumping through hoops, it may oblige, but when it does, the quality isn't even that good. Oh, and it's about five times more expensive than everything currently out there.
Final rating: 8 out of 10!
Seriously, are you on drugs?
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Sony has done nothing but amaze me for this past year. Just when I think you^Wthey couldn't possibly fuck up any worse, BLAM! They completely blow away my expectations. Broken low-end PC disguised as a £1600 BR player? Genius.
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Any money you spend on Sony 'gear' goes to Sony Electronics.
Any money you send on Sony BMG discs goes to pay for DRM.
There is a difference. "SONY" is not a unified company like you think it is.
I'm not really saying you should end your boycott, but you should at least understand that when you don't buy a Sony stereo reciver or PS3 or whatever, Sony has no fucking idea that this was because of th
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They do as far as I am concerned. I emailed them to that effect and got an acknowledgement.
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I very much doubt that the robot which answered your email has any significant sway over board meetings.