I recently downloaded Superman Doomsday in HD off the Xbox Live Video Marketplace (see my previous post). I wanted to offer up some thoughts after watching the video.

First off: I was a bit disappointed at the animation quality. I can’t really put my finger on exactly what. I’ve been hearing quite a bit about this Direct-to-DVD animation project (Produced and Directed by Bruce Timm - the dude behind Batman: The Animated Adventures) for a while now - especially from Comic-Con this summer. I just expected better animation.

Secondly - the script. Wow. What a mess. Horrible dialog. Lex Luthor actually says "Who’s your daddy" - come on! Oh and the dialog about the cat and the little old lady was hilarious. I never read the "Death of Superman" comics (yet) so I’m basing my opinion on what I see from this video. Also: its very "jumpy". Not a lot of actual storyline development or character development takes place to really make you get into the story. Carrying a PG-13 rating, there is a few spots of language not suitable for Saturday morning cartoons - but it seems very forced and unneeded. Oh and there’s more blood too which makes sense and is a nice touch to something that was meant to be a little darker than what we see normally with cartoons.

The cast all did very well (Adam Baldwin, Anne Heche…) with their roles with bad dialog aside.

After watching this I just felt like it lacked something making it what it was suppose to be. I know Bruce Timm and his team put a lot of work into this and it shows in some parts but it just didn’t meet the expectations I had.

Geek Score: C

Major Nelson lets us know of this week’s Xbox Live Video Marketplace releases. Included in this week’s releases is Season 5 of Family Guy. Family Guy was added to the Video Marketplace only a few weeks ago. The Xbox Live Video Marketplace allows users to turn their Xbox 360’s into entertainment hub for the living room. As more shows and movies are added, it keeps getting better and better.

Here is the full list of this week’s releases:

Movies
We Are Marshall HD
Superman: Doomsday HD
Disturbia HD
Troy: Director’s Cut HD
Decadent Evil 2 HD
Lucky You HD
Borderline Cult
Acts of Death

TV
Family Guy: Season 5
Ty Murray’s Celebrity Bull Riding Challenge
South Park: Matt & Trey’s Top 10
Upright Citizens Brigade Season 2
Josie and the Pussycats
Aqua Teen Hunger Force Season 2
Chappelle’s Show: Top 10 Best episodes of Chappelle’s Show
Moral Orel: Season 1
Avatar Season 3
Ghost in the Shell
Gossip Girl

If you have all been keeping up with the whole MediaDefender fallout you might have heard about this story. It seems like Interscope Records are using P2P networks as marketing tools. Some more outrageous emails have been uncovered from the MediaDefender debacle, but in an email transcribed from an Interscope Records exec to a MediaDefender employee asking if a new single of their artist was gaining traction on P2P networks. They quote saying:

“Nicole from pussy cat dolls has a single called “whatever u like”. It’s not selling well on itunes or playing that great on radio. A song called “Baby Love” just leaked (I don’t know how long ago). Interscope wants to know if Baby Love is picking up steam on p2p. They need to make a decision by early next week on whether they should switch to this song as the single. Please get me a score comparison on Monday for these two tracks. Also, please put beyonces, fergie, gwen, and nelly furtado singles as comparisons.”

We are fairly certain other record companies are doing this as well, they leak a song and they want to see how well it performs in an open market. So P2P users and networks are being used as a tool, providing record companies with valuable marketing information. It seems a little hypocritical if you ask us. So while innocent people are being sued by the RIAA, record companies are doing the same thing P2P users are doing and more. It sure tells you how much they love an artist when they leak tracks for them.  The war continues….

 

So this is a self proclaimed week called “A Geek Week in Piracy and Online Freedom”. Meaning this entire week is dedicated to online piracy and your online freedoms. So we start with an article that has been spreading around the web like wild fire. It first shot up from TorretFreak’s site. If you have not read the original article we will bring you up to speed in the next paragraph, or you can head over to our good friends over at TorrentFreak.com.

Well it all started when a group called MediaDefender was caught setting up a shell website called called Miivi.com, this site was intended to look like a fake p2p movie downloading site that offered blockbuster movies to download for free. The main reason for this website was to collect IP addresses of users downloading from their fake website. By collecting these IP addresses they eventually would send copyright infringement letters to your ISP. This obviously sounds like entrapment, plain and simple. We at The Geekery think this is extremely wrong, and incredibly unethical, as well as illegal. But online entrapment is a very gray area. A company like MediaDefender says tactics like this are honeypots not entrapment. Honeypots are not illegal, depending on what you collect, this is all true. So this is a very gray area, but none the less it is very unethical.

So various parties figured out that MediaDefender was behind this scam of Miivi.com and they ousted them, one of those parties was Ernesto from TorrentFreak. After so many diggs about miivi.com being fake they took the miivii.com site down. At that time if you were to run a Whois the owner would come back being a man named Randy Saaf, a MediaDefender employee and the registrars email address was to a @mediadefender account. Interestingly enough a Whois report for miivi.net which is obviously different from the .com shows it being registered to a Jonathan Chang, with a physical address of a Popeye’s chicken in Santa Monica, Califonia. So obviously these people at MediaDefender like to play games with people.

So some people decided to play some games with MediaDefender. A group called “MediaDefender Defenders” in essence hacked the companies email, SQL, VOIP servers and started collecting a little data of their own. Once they felt they had enough info to prove MediaDefender of entrapment they decided to turn up the heat a little more. So what do all black hat saints do when they feel an injustice has occurred? They release their findings out to the BitTorrent world! In what has been described as “The Biggest ever BitTorrent Leak ever”, which we certainly agree it is.

So now the juicy stuff begins. At first we did not comprehend all the data that was just lumped right in front of us. So we will cut out the boring stuff and go straight to the guts of this matter. Now to be respectful of our friends out in the blogosphere we are not going to copy and paste all of these emails that we did not discover. So to get straight to what you want to see go here, it’s a link to some of the emails that are absolutely amazing to read. The lengths these crooks go to catch someone sharing a file are mind blowing.

Now to add to the confusion and the cool factor of the story, the MediaDefender Defenders released a phone conversation involving a New York attorney and MediaDefender employees regarding a child pornography case. “Their job is to identify child-porn images and report the IPs of the offending computers back to the government. A tricky project since it would mean that they actually have to download and rate the illegal content.”

In addition to all of this they also leaked an enormous MySQL database; this database shows tracking and decoy file information for the Gnutella network which is used by P2P clients such as LimeWire, and Bearshare.

So far MediaDefender Defenders are ahead at this game; this obviously creates a huge problem for MediaDefender. I really don’t think even the word “huge” can describe it. This is company ending “huge” in the form of bankruptcy.

We assume their will be many updates on this situation throughout this week, so stay tuned. Once again we thank TorrentFreak.com for breaking this situation wide open to the public. People need to see these scam artists at work.

A quote from my good friend the Geek’s Henchman sums this week up, “They may take our internet lives but they’ll never take our internet freedoms!” With all of the new info and news about piracy this week we decided to put a hot spotlight on all the rumors, news, and information on how we all can defend our online freedoms. This idea came to us after reading about the whole media defender debacle. Now in the past we have blasted many companies and sites about disregarding freedoms of their customers and users which we think is wrong. We will continue to back the consumer, and continue to back the people.

So with that we give this week to you, the consumer. This whole week will be dedicated to piracy, and how we feel about. It will also be dedicated to how you can fight for your online freedoms. Now we fully respect the intellectual property of artists in the music, movie, and software industry, but what we don’t respect is how “private contractors” go about hunting down and entrapping people. These companies like the MPAA and RIAA are just that, companies, so many people think they are a part of the US government. They are not, people think this because the MPAA and the RIAA act like they own the internet, and they feel that they can create laws that are only sanctioned by them. They do have the backing of the US government because they have persuaded the judges of this country into taking freedoms and protection away from the consumer. In reality they classify themselves as non-profit trade association, which is  some what of a joke.

This week we will cover a lot of important pieces to this gigantic shell game the consumers and contractors play. We will touch on how ISP lie about what they watch you do and how they track your actions to simply protect themselves. We will touch on how you can protect yourself using P2P services like Bit Torrent. We will show how to protect yourself if you do by chance get a call or letter from one of these evil entities. Now we will never be able to match the funds that the MPAA and the RIAA have to fight back, but we can let everything be heard, and let our judges and elected officials know how we feel about it these issues. 

So we all here at The Geekery want you to sit back and just read, even if you do not agree on some of these controversial topics, its always good to hear all sides of the story. 

 

Warner Home Video has announced that it would postpone the release of its hybrid Total HD discs that combine Blu-ray and HD DVD layers to 2008. The company explains the delay with the decisions its management yet has to make and remains tight-lipped about technological side of the project.

Currently Warner releases movies in both next-generation formats, Blu-ray and HD DVD, but in this case the company’s retail partners have to carry two hi-def video disc for every movie from Warner, which effectively means that the company has two times less shelf space at retailers. In order to tackle the issue, engineers of Time Warner developed the so-called Total HD technology that allows to have both BD and HD DVD layers on a single optical disk. However, even though Total HD was promised to be rolled out in mid-2007, the company now postpones its release to Q1 2008.

“That is one less SKU to sell. With high-def, we’re trying to put Blu-ray and HD DVD on the same disc. Total HD is not coming until first-quarter 2008. We will find shelf space, said Warner Home Video’s vice president of sales and planning and operations Dan Miron at a session during the

Entertainment Supply Chain Academy conference.Separately, another Warner executive said that the company wants to have 10 to 20 titles for Total HD roll out, but declined to reveal when exactly the company will release its first discs compatible with both Blu-ray and HD DVD players, reports Video Business web-site.

“There is no expiration date on the viability of this concept, so we’re not in a rush to do it. We’ll do it when it makes sense and when it’s right,” said Steven Nickerson, Warner senior vice president of marketing management.

Both Blu-ray and HD DVD use 405nm wavelength laser to read data from the recordable media of the discs. However, the data layer of the Blu-ray discs is located 0.1mm from the disk’s surface, whereas the HD-DVD data layer resides 0.6mm deep from the disk’s surface. Warner’s engineers plan to create a disc with a Blu-ray top layer that works like a two-way mirror: it should reflect just enough blue light for a Blu-ray player to read, but it should also let enough light through for HD-DVD players to ignore the Blu-ray recording and find a second HD-DVD layer beneath, it was reported earlier. Theoretically, triple-layer DVDs can be created too, if DVD layer is located on the other side to the Blu-ray and HD DVD layers.

Even though the Total HD project sounds like a simplistic one, it involves pretty complex technologies on the optical disc side as well as custom-made replication equipment, which makes Total HD a pretty expensive initiative. Moreover, in addition to increased cost of the disc itself it involves increased cost of replication, which adds several dollars to already not really affordable Blu-ray or HD DVD, which cost $20 - $27 online. Moreover, Warner also has to standardize its Total HD with both Blu-ray disc association as well as DVD Forum. Given that LG Electronics has already released its hybrid player that sports both BD and HD DVD and Samsung Electronics is expected to follow, Warner Home Video may wait and see whether it actually makes sense to release dual-format discs.

Sorry for the childish title, but I am genuinely upset today. The other day I thought I would get a nice gift for my fiancé, just because. So I go on down to the closest Apple store at our local mall. I walk in and was nicely greeted by a younger attractive female Apple employee , she asks me if she could help with anything, and I told her that I would like to purchase an iPod Touch. So she grabs one from the back and then I proceed to check out. Before I pull out of the mall’s parking lot I get it out of the box to make sure it powers up. But I really just wanted to play with it before I handed it over to my fiancé. So it powers up fine, and the UI is glorious.

I get home and I am so excited to give it to her, but before I give it to her I was going to load a bunch of her favorite tunes. So I take it out of the box once again, plug it in via USB, power it on, and then hear this weird sound. I instantly knew it was dead.

So I called Apple support, and once again was helped by a very nice technician. The technician and I came to the conclusion that the device would not power up properly. The tech told me I could either send it in, or I could take it back to my local Apple store. I pack everything back up and drive back to the mall and tell them it is dead and they go through the process of trying to get it to boot up. I was so upset at that point I told them I just wanted my money back and I did not want to exchange the device. 

I had plans for a great review of the iPod Touch, but after I saw some of the recent articles of the iPod touch being either DOA or people getting a dead touch screens it made me think a little more about the iPod Touch and Apple.

They usually have great products, the concepts, the user friendly UI’s, but the actual hardware sometime just “Sucks”! With all the reports of bad touch screens, bad monitors in the new iMac’s, bad batteries in everything, overheating in the notebooks; it just makes me go mad. But I have found out why consumers keep on going back to Apple, it’s because of the employees, the support, and just how friendly and attractive their employees at the point of purchase are. But today I’m not going to be that sucker, we are sticking it out with our Zunes! Sorry Apple.

 

WOW! WOW! This is just ridiculous.

At first I thought it would be a disaster to have Robert Downey Jr. play Tony Starks aka Ironman, but as time went on and rumors went out, I kind of got excited. Now that excitement has been bumped up to a sheer WOW factor for me! This trailer is insane, I want more now!

Robert Downey Jr. is for real, and this movie looks like it is going to be huge. I give kudos to everyone that has anything to do with this production…. Did I already say that Robert Downey Jr. is for real! He really is the Tony Starks! I mean the comic books are alive, this is how comic movies should be.

Ok, I am getting way ahead of myself, but I am so excited about this!

Update: They took the trailer down, so here is a link to it!

Words cannot describe on how this trailer makes me feel. It puts me back to my early childhood, to the days that I once believed I was Anthony Starks.

The new Indiana Jones movie set for Memorial Day 08′ will be called…..

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull !!

Wow this is very cool, the recently released the new logo as well.

All this talk about the new Indiana Jones has got me fiending for some old time Indy, time to break out the trilogy.

It looks like those iPhone price cuts were just the thing Apple needed to drive sales, as this weekend Apple’s iPhone reached the 1 million sold mark. “One million iPhones in 74 days-it took almost two years to achieve this milestone with iPod,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We can’t wait to get this revolutionary product into the hands of even more customers this holiday season.”

While reaching this milestone may seem like great news for Apple (and in most ways, it is) there is one downside to that number that is not mentioned in Apple’s press release – namely, Steve jobs promised all iPhone buyers (pre-last week’s price drop announcement) that they would receive a $100 credit to the Apple Store.

Generously assuming that the $200 price drop brought in another 150,000 iPhones customers last week, and that maybe 50,000 folks who bought iPhones in the 2 weeks leading up to the price drop may have gone ahead and gotten their $200 back from Apple during their 14-day price protection policy, that still leaves 800,000 potential iPhone owners (myself included) that will be looking for $100 back from Apple. That adds up to a potential $80,000,000 hit Apple would have to take.

Now, of course, Apple knows not everyone will take advantage of the $100 store credit, and, in order to use it, you have to be buying something at the Apple store anyway, so odds are Apple will make some money off the credits to help lessen the hit, but still, that is a staggering number when you think about it, and it makes you wonder if Apple would have done better to hold off on the price drop a month or so and wait until they had a 16GB version of the iPhone out to justify the drop in price of the 8 GB version.