Alde’s Stuff

Being True to Yourself is the MOST important thing.

December 24th, 2007

Computer Upgrades, v2

So, instead of piecing together the franken-puter, Beekers convinced me to go with a custom built machine. But who would be the one to make the box itself?

First part in any good project is to determine specifications. Mine are:

  1. Intel 6750 processor
  2. nVidia SLI
  3. nVidia 8800GT
  4. 2GB Ram
  5. Expandibility (Able to upgrade to a Quad Core down the road)

This put me in quite an odd area of the market; I’m not a budget gamer, because I still want support for the high end, should I desire it, but I’m not the extreme overclocker that those types of hardware are built for.
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December 18th, 2007

Sony’s Inability to Sweat the Small Stuff

Hurray! Firmware 2.10 is out… The PS3 supports DivX. Which is quite handy, seeing as DivX gave out free versions of it’s 6.8 software just recently.

But yet again, Sony misses the mark. It’s become increasingly frustrating, as the PS3 was targeted as a home theater entertainment hub, that an owner would use to “enjoy their digital entertainment content where they want to.” But Sony really doesn’t believe that.

Sure, you can use that big PC you have, only if you use a certain version of Windows, or some third party Universal Plug-and-Play software to share your files. It would be beyond Sony to support Samba, an open source file sharing software.

Sony added playlist support on firmware version 2.0, but it’s only for audio stored on the PS3 itself. Nevermind that Western Digital World Book that you ripped all your CDs to using 320kbps MP3 (Sony.. FLAC & OGG support please thanks.), you can’t use a playlist on that at all.

So, it’s beginning to feel the same with the DivX support. Guess what: It doesn’t work over shared UPNP services. You can’t even copy it to the PS3. So I took a MOV I shot with my Minolta Dimage camera, opened up DivX Convert. Dropped the MOV file onto convert, copied the resulting .divx file into my UPNP share, refreshed the share itself, and the movie shows up as “Unsupported Media”. I take that same file, copy it to a SD card, take it over to the PS3, Movies->SD Media… Then have to hit triangle to have the PS3 “Display All”.. And there it is, watchable.

I don’t understand, Sony. Why must you test my patience so.

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