gwax's rumblings

Yesterday, I wan­dered over to Best Buy and finally picked up a copy of Rock Band for my Xbox 360. As I have already estab­lish, Rock Band is awe­some, so I’m mighty psy­ched to have a copy at the place now. I wasn’t prop­erly set up for it ear­lier but now that we’ve got a pro­jec­tor and a proper sound sys­tem, we have an amaz­ing Rock Band setup. Rock Band, of course, is far bet­ter as a mul­ti­player expe­ri­ence than a one per­son game, so any­time that any of you folks want to stop by and jam with me, you’re more than wel­come to do so.

Halo 3 came out for the Xbox 360 on Tuesday and it’s awe­some. On account of Halo 3, I’ve been going to sleep at about 2am for the past three nights, which wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t also have to wake up for work at about 6am. That said, it’s totally worth the unpleas­ant­ness of not sleep­ing enough. Sure, it’s more Halo and not alto­gether too rev­o­lu­tion­ary but, it IS more Halo, it is pret­tier Halo with cooler weapons and vehi­cles. Basically, Halo was already King of con­sole FPSes and Halo 3 is just com­ing in and say­ing, “hey, I’m tak­ing over for my dad so sit down because you know your place!”

Soul Calibur IV has been announced for the Xbox 360 and PS3. For those of you that know me and my pref­er­ences in video games, you might have some idea of how very excited I am right now. For those of you that don’t know my fond­ness for the series, suf­fice it to say that I am very excited. Furthermore, for those that didn’t catch the ref­er­ence, HUGLAGHALGHALGHAL is taken from Jerk City (a puerile, offen­sive, not safe for work comic that I don’t rec­om­mend any­body read).

I hap­pen to have a friend that works for Harmonix, cre­ators of Guitar Hero I & II, which pro­vided me a unique oppor­tu­nity ear­lier today (tech­ni­cally yes­ter­day). I got a chance to play a devel­op­ment ver­sion of Harmonix’s upcom­ing game Rock Band for a cou­ple hours and, I have to say, it is awe­some, really awe­some. I had to sign a NDA so I am not allowed to tell you any­thing else about it but, seri­ously, Rock Band is awe­some. Now, it’s time for me to set­tle in and wait for the game to actu­ally be released.

About a week ago, I finally caved and bought myself an Xbox 360. Along with some really great games (ex. Gears of War) the 360 is also a pow­er­house of media play­ing capa­bil­i­ties. Using Microsoft pro­vided soft­ware you can set up your PC to serve media over the net­work to your 360. This means that you can lis­ten to your entire music col­lec­tion while you play you games (solves the only prob­lem with Geometry Wars, the mediocre sound­track); the 360 natively plays mp3s so you don’t need to do much of any­thing to make music work. Unfortunately, the 360 will only natively play wmv video files, and only ones that are prop­erly for­mat­ted, which means that you’ll have to do a bit of work to watch and DivX, Xvid or, for that mat­ter, just about any­thing else that you didn’t get from Microsoft to begin with. Playing my video files on my TV through my 360 is an impor­tant thing for me, so set about scour­ing the inter­net to fig­ure out how to do this and, hav­ing done so, I now report to you on what I have found.

If you’re run­ning Vista or XP MCE, it’s sup­pos­edly a lot eas­ier but, since I have nei­ther, you’re on your own and I can­not help. Supposedly, it’s pos­si­ble to use TVersity on a reg­u­lar XP machine to do real-time on-the-fly transcod­ing of your files into wmv but I was not able to make it work. It may be the case that my com­puter is not pow­er­ful enough for on-the-fly transcod­ing or it might be that I had it set up wrong but the sim­ple fact of the mat­ter is that, in my opin­ion, TVersity is pretty flaky and doesn’t pro­vide a very good net­work inter­face when you access it through the 360. Using Microsoft’s soft­ware and man­u­ally transcod­ing files before I watch them is thus my option of choice for watch­ing movies and lis­ten­ing to music on my 360. This brings us to the real meat of this post, how to best transcode files for play­ing on the 360.

I tried a whole bunch of transcod­ing options, none of which worked, before I came across Encode360. Encode360 encodes things per­fectly and allows for the vital rescal­ing (more on this later) but suf­fers from two prob­lems: it’s slow and it crashes a lot. A lit­tle more dig­ging turned up that some had fig­ured out how to use VLC media player to per­form the transcodes. I tried the VLC transcod­ing method and dis­cov­ered that it was both very fast and encoded per­fectly. Unfortunately, the batch files pro­vided for this pur­pose don’t do rescal­ing and have a num­ber of other prob­lems. The rescal­ing is vital because if you don’t scale your file prop­erly, the 360 will auto-scale to fit the TV and the 360’s auto-scaling is ter­ri­ble, leav­ing blocky arti­facts all over the screen. In order to deal with the 360’s scal­ing issues and some of the other prob­lems of the pro­vided batch files, I read through VLC’s doc­u­men­ta­tion and fid­dled around a bunch and am proud to say that I have come up with a few new batch files for VLC that will process video files and make them work prop­erly on your 360.

Go get your hands on a copy of VLC media player and then grab the batch files I have made (vlc2xbox480h.bat and vlc2xbox720w.bat). You will need to mod­ify the batch files slightly for your sys­tem; open the file in a text edi­tor and change the very begin­ning to point to where you have installed VLC (“C:\program files\vlc\vlc.exe” is where mine is, change this if you need to). In order to transcode a file, you will drag-and-drop the file that you want to transcode onto one of these batch files, depend­ing on the files aspect ratio. If the files aspect ratio is less than 16:9, drop it on the 480h file; if the aspect ratio is greater than 16:9, drop it on the 720w files; if the aspect ratio is 16:9, drop it on either one. It is impor­tant to note that your file’s file­name can­not have any sin­gle quotes (‘) or it will cause prob­lems. So there you have it, the best way that I’ve found to transcode files into a 360 ready for­mat. I might improve the batch files later or I might try writ­ing a wrap­per appli­ca­tion at some point and, if I do, I’ll post those updates here.

One of my house­mates got a Nintendo Wii and, I have to tell you folks, it really is the best thing to hap­pen to video games in ages. I’ve been play­ing a lot of Wii Sports and Zelda: Twilight Princess, both of which are phe­nom­e­nal games that I rec­om­mend; I also highly rec­om­mend Excite Truck, which takes great advan­tage of the Wiimote (con­troller). I haven’t had this much fun play­ing video games in a very long time and, con­sid­er­ing how much I like video games, I’m say­ing a lot here. Twilight Princess is so much fun that I’ve logged about 34 hours within the past week and I haven’t even been side-questing very much.

As much as I love the Wii, my point in this post is not to sing the praises of the Wii but to warn you of the dan­gers and sug­gest pos­si­ble pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sures. There have been a num­ber of sto­ries prop­a­gat­ing their way about the inter­net about peo­ple throw­ing their Wiimotes into win­dows, tele­vi­sions and other peo­ple. Nintendo’s response to hear­ing the peo­ple have been throw­ing con­trollers into tele­vi­sions and such has basi­cally been to tell peo­ple to hold on the con­trollers. Prior to yes­ter­day, I would have, and did, scoff at those idiots that broke their crap but that would have been before yes­ter­day. Yesterday, I was play­ing Wii Sports bowl­ing with a few of my friends; we were using one Wiimote between the four of us and since the tran­si­tions were fairly rapid, we weren’t both­er­ing to use the wrist strap (big mis­take). One of the house­mates I was play­ing with *cough*Paddy*cough* lost con­trol of the Wiimote and threw it into our won­der­ful 51″, rear-projection HDTV. The front sur­face of our TV was 0.093″ PMMA (a.k.a. Acrylic or Plexiglas), which is a fairly brit­tle and not very tough mate­r­ial. Needless to say, a Wiimote thrown fairly hard at a thin sheet of PMMA results in a pretty big crack (see image). A bro­ken HDTV is a very sad thing, espe­cially when it’s your TV.

So there we were with a cracked TV so, clearly, the thing to do was pull it apart and fix it. It took me a while to get the thing apart but even­tu­ally we had TV bits all over the liv­ing room floor and I’d got­ten that PMMA screen out. Having pulled the PMMA out at about 2am and hav­ing no replace­ment on hand, the parts were left sprawled out in our liv­ing room. First thing (1:30pm) today, I went off to Home Depot with the respon­si­ble party and another so as to obtain a nice big sheet of 0.093″ Polycarbonate (a.k.a. Lexan), which is about three times as expen­sive and about thirty times as strong (impact strength) as PMMA. After a bit of time cut­ting the sheet of Polycarbonate down, a bit more time putting the Polycarbonate in the screen and a bit more time reassem­bling the TV, we have a func­tional 51″ HDTV. Additionally, Polycarbonate is what’s used for bul­let­proof glass so hope­fully that’ll make it Wiiproof too.

So, the morals of this post are: 1) make sure that you always use the wrist strap, and 2) replace your screen with Polycarbonate or put a sheet of Polycarbonate in front of your TV.

Just this morn­ing, I was think­ing about Nintendo’s upcom­ing video game con­sole, code­name Revolution. At the time I was think­ing about how fan­tas­tic a mar­ket­ing and hype-building job Nintendo has been doing. The end line of my think­ing was the only thing that Nintendo could do wrong at this point is choose a bad release name for the con­sole and they’ve done just that; they’ve decided to call it the Nintendo Wii (pro­nounced like “we”). Now, cer­tainly part of my dis­like for the new name is based on hav­ing con­sid­ered it the Revolution for so long and hav­ing a gen­eral repug­nance for the prac­tice of name chang­ing (that’s a whole other dis­cus­sion in and of itself); I expect that I won’t dis­like “Wii” as much when I get used to it. That said, “Wii” is a ter­ri­ble name for the US mar­ket; “Xbox” and “Playstation” aren’t great either but at least they can be pro­nounced with­out ambi­gu­ity and have some rec­og­niz­able traits. In Nintendo’s defense, I think they’ve got “Revolution” planted firmly in a lot of heads so peo­ple are going to buy it regard­less of the name and call it what they feel like; heck, I might just call mine a “Nintendo”.