During a game session of GRAW2 on Xbox Live, two guys were chatting:

gamer1: Hey guys, this is my first game night after 3 weeks without my 360.
gamer2: Why? What happened?
gamer1: My 360 decided to meet the Big Kahuna in heaven.
gamer2: What do you mean?
gamer1: I got tagged by the three red lights.

I know it’s old news, but I decided to write something here after I received a newsletter from Sony with the title “The world has decided”.

In 2006 I said that I would go with PS3 (if I could afford it). Well, by the time the opportunity came, I could not, so XBox360 was the obvious choice. So, what does that all matters? If you read my post about PS3, you’re going to see that back in 2006 I was already prising Blu-Ray over HD-DVD, because by that time I already made my choice of format.

No, I’m not saying “I knew it”, I’m just writing this post to say that Microsoft lost this war.

Nobody knows for sure why M$ was going against the obvious (some have a few ideas why), but the fact is that the battle has come to an end, and the obvious has come to surface. Search around the web, and you’re going to see how many sites talk about companies declaring HD-DVD EOL. Even M$ did it already.

On Wikipedia, the official death of HD-DVD has been marked as February, 19, 2008, after Toshiba decided to EOL it’s production.

That’s it. It’s over. Good luck. Bye bye. Now let’s move on to the next format war.

[Update on Mar/13] Microsoft publically stated their Blu-Ray support.

I had a problem at home: 2 HDMI devices, 1 HDMI input on my TV. Solution? An HDMI switch.

So, I bought the Terk HDMI-31 . The automatic switch works beautifully. It jumps to the most recently switched on device, and jumps back to the last active device when you turn off the current. It also has a button so that you can manually switch, in case your device does not support manual.

Simple solutions for complicated problems. Better than buying a hole new TV.

After trying a lot of junk to share my music with my XBox 360, I just discovered Coherence, a nice DLNA/UPnP framework. It does the job fine, even though with a few glitches, but the developers are very open minded and willing to help. So far, so good. New project to dig in.

Oh, and let’s not forget about Elisa. Seems promising.

Update: Both Coherence and Elisa are very promising replacements for Windows XP/Vista Media Center, and also can connect to PlayStation 3 consoles. (That comment will make web spiders happier.)

I was reviewing my posts, and found one I had to do a follow up. Once I said that I would go with PS3 if I could afford it. Well, I can, but when it came the time to buy, it was not worth it.

There is a big price difference between the PS3 with no accessories, and the XBox 360 with extras (controller, DVI, 1 game, remote control, etc). In the end, the XBox offered a better price/benefit rate, and I decided to go with it.

Also, the price of the games in Brazil is also huge, and it’s easier to find good titles for the XBox than the PS3. The amount of PS3 games selling in Brazil is lower than XBox, and even if I would go with legacy PS2 games, what good would be to have PS3 and run legacy? In any case, XBox also runs legacy games from the original XBox console.

So, now I have an XBox 360, with a few accessories and some nice games. The graphics look fantastic on my 32″ LCD TV, connected using the HDMI cable (1080i) Well, let’s be honest, that’s all Windows is good for: games.