Using a Zune 80GB as a Car Video Player

Following on the theme of trying to make it easier for my kids to watch movies in the car but without the hassle of the pesky shiny discs, I decided to try using a Zune 80GB as a car video player. This is clearly outside its design parameters, because the Zune Car Kit has no provision for video output as one example. Despite this "outside the box" usage, I persevered anyway, and here is my story.

Our family vehicle is a 2006 Toyota Highlander Hybrid, with the touch-screen nav system and in-car DVD system. While it works, the DVD system was designed by a team that did not have any young children between them, and as a result has severe usability issues with that specific scenario. I'll spare you the details, but if you have young kids you can imagine how much fun it is to have them yelling at you because they can't see the screen (as the remote to turn it on�doesn't work from the front seats) or because the screen is obscured by a huge dialog box with an OK button (which inexplicably appears every time you start the system). The only good news about the Toyota system is that it has an external AV jack at the rear of the center console. Even if the DVD UI had been not been designed one night down the pub, there is still the hassle storing and tracking the physical discs, keeping the kids away from them, and the impossibility of changing them when on the move (unless an adult is in the rear seats). A friend recently had his kids manage to stuff�four DVDs into the single DVD slot in his Honda: there's an expensive repair in his future.

The First Zune Trip (30GB version)

I started by borrowing a friend's Zune 30GB which handily came preloaded with a bunch of kid-suitable content as he'd already ripped a bunch of stuff for his young daughter. I bought a program to convert my DVDs at his recommendation, though I'm not going to name it here becauses it's not exactly legal or reliable. I used said software to add a few more movies to his Zune for our forthcoming July 4th trip. I used the Zune Cable Pack to connect the AV output to the car, and the usb cable to our 12V "cigar lighter" socket via an adapter we already had for our cellphones, and embarked on a 7 hour roadtrip. In retrospect I should have tested this on a short journey, or at least got it going before we left. I did neither, which is how we came to pull off the highway to deal with unhappy kids.

The first issue is simple movie selection: an adult in the front negotiates the movie choice with the kids in the back, then selects it on the Zune, hits Play, then immediately has to go to the Settings menu to turn on the TV output. At this point the LCD goes dark, and while the kids can see the Zune UI on their screen in the back, the adult in the front is left literally blind. If your kids can read this is probably workable, but mine are 2 and 5 so this is not an option. The trick at this point is to just hit Play on the device. Fortunately this much had been figured out before we left.

The second problem, which caused us to exit the freeway to fix, was that there was no sound. I hadn't bothered to read any documentation for the Zune, so it took me a little experimentation before I discovered how to change the volume on it. This feat acheived, we resumed the movie (with sound) and hence our roadtrip.

During playback the kids were very happy: picture quality is of no concern to them, so the 320x200 default Zune resolution is just fine on their 7" LCD in the car. At some point I hope that the children of an HD DVD veteran will truly understand what picture quality is all about, but at 5yrs old its not the time.

We were on our second Zune movie when the next problem occurred: the Zune battery died. Despite using the USB sync cable with our 12V adaptor, the Zune had not been charging at all. It looks like the Zune requires a high-power USB port, and our car adapter fakes up a low-power USB port. Oops.

We reverted to our well worn and well watched DVD collection for the remainder of our trip.

Switching to Zune 80GB

The Zune 80GB that we had ordered (a bargain at $234 via this offer) showed up the day we returned from our trip, so I proceeded to copy the converted movies to it. However, instead of just copying them (which takes almost no time), the Zune software insisted on transcoding the videos. This takes about 1x time (ie a 2 hour movie takes 2 hours to transcode�on my PC). What was weird is that the exact same videos copied without transcoding to his 30GB Zune. I'll spare you the details of how I figured this out, but the Zune 80GB only accepts WMV video in WMV9 format: formats such as WMV7 and WMV8 (which the converter software creates by default as its a lot quicker to convert) have to be transcoded. The Zune 30GB accepts these formats directly. The Zune documentation�lacks pretty much any technical information, and video is no exception, the best I could find was this KB article which you'll note doesn't actually tell you about which formats will copy directly and which require transcoding. The WMV9 format at 320x200 seems to take around 300MB per hour, which is reasonable.

General Zune Observations

I love the device itself, but I am not a fan of its PC software (a very dumbed down Windows Media Player-like clone) or its lacking documentation (see this page for an example of telling you less than the actual UI does).

When categorizing video files you can set certain metadata (Type, parental rating etc) for the files (though I took some time figuring out exactly how), but the edits you make don't get written in the WMV files themselves, they are stored in the Zune database somewhere. WMV metadata is read by the software if you have managed to set it, but never AFAIK writes it back to the file. This means that if you copy the files somewhere else, those metadata edits won't be copied.

The Zune software only offers primitive filtering on the metadata anyway: its support for TV series is good (you can give it the Series and Episode numbers and navigation on the device consumes this), but although it will display the parental rating�it won't let you set it, nor can you filter by it. In order to separate the few non-kids movies from the kids ones I left ours categorized as "Others" (the default) and marked the kids either as TV Series or Movies/Family. In general Microsoft's support for editing WMV metadata is very poor, Vista's Explorer Properties tab is about as good as it gets (and that isn't very).

Zune only supports playlists for audio files, not video files. This is a weird restriction, as Microsoft have at least two formats for playlists (ASX and ZPL files) either of which would suffice for video. This would allow the easy creation of "edited" movies by skipping the scary bits, for example, without having to resort to actually editing (and then re-encoding) the video.

I got a different 12V-to-usb adapter which was claimed to be Zune 80GB compatible but in fact was not. The Zune appears to have very special requirements for its usb charging, and I'm still looking for a solution that doesn't require $$$.

Requests for the Zune Team

If in-car video becomes a supported scenario for the Zune team, here's what it needs to be successful IMHO, and it isn't much really:

Let the LCD stay on when TV Out is selected, at least until you Play a movieHave a car dock kit that supports 12V charging with AV output

An actual Zune car dock that fits the latter specification is shown here but its an annoying Flash site ie looks great but is content-free. Its also not for sale yet, but it looks promising and the price is good (considering the Zune Car Pack costs an amazing $80).

Conclusion

If your kids are old enough to operate the Zune�themselves then its a good choice for in-car video. If your kids are too young for that, then the Zune is not a perfect choice for in-car video, but its usable. You need a bit of patience to set it up and have to cobble together sufficient hardware to connect it. It is better in every respect than an in-car�DVD player, as there are no discs to carry around or trash, plus its portable and can be used out of the car too of course.

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Blu-ray on Xbox 360: Never. Thank goodness for that

OK, I get all of your points as to why MS supporting Blue-Ray is a bad thing Andy. �But what your (MS) doing, is making me buy a PS3, because the stand alone Blue-Ray players are an unknown quantity if Sony choose to roll out a new profile.

MS offer downloads, but they are only for American users, the rest of the world has 2 choices, buy a PS3, or take a gamble on a stand alone player, either way, this is not a win for us consumers, nor is it a win for Microsoft.

I love my Xbox360, and I love the HD-DVD player, and I would love a Blue-Ray player to make my Xbox give me the best of all worlds.

I fail to see why you think this is a good situation?

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My Secret Project is no longer secret: the KIN phone

Since the demise of HD DVD (RIP) I have been working on the secret �Pink project� at Microsoft, which yesterday had its coming-out party under the name of KIN. Microsoft is usually not good at keeping secrets, so it has been a unusual two years of development for me for that reason.

Many Microsoft projects cannot be secret because they are part of a (often gigantic) third-party ecosystem, and those third-parties must have timely access to said projects well before completion. I mean it wouldn�t be much good to keep Windows releases secret once they get to the alpha stage unless Microsoft wanted to break piles of existing Windows applications and drivers�(or as I like to say �do an Apple�).

A few Microsoft projects did stay secret until almost the end, Xbox and Zune being the most obvious examples, and they happen to be in the same division as KIN (Entertainment & Devices). They also share other similarities, such as consisting of hardware, client software and server software. It is not easy to keep such a wide variety of information secret, and the problem gets worse as the team size increases. This is one area where Apple clearly have it figured out, although by taking things to extremes (e.g. red lights above office doors to indicate when a device is exposed to the air)

For example until Monday morning most of the KIN engineering team did not know the actual name of the product. All daily client software builds up until today announced themselves as �ZZZZ� and used a fake logo, so we could develop the entire software stack (and build pre-release hardware) without knowing the actual product name. A select few engineers were entrusted with the secret: a special branch of the source tree was created into which the actual brand name changes were checked in, built and tested, but only those lucky few had access to it. That all changed with Monday�s build which had the final text and graphics changes of course.

Microsoft has had a varied track record of product names, with some not so great (�Windows Live Search� anyone?) and some much more successful (�Xbox�, �Bing�), so I am pleased that our product name is short, sweet, and easy to remember. It even works as a verb (�I kinned that earlier�) which is the Google test of a decent brand name I guess.

Keeping the name secret is one thing, but keeping actual hardware secret is quite another, especially when that hardware has to be used out�in the real world as a part of development and testing. To this end both models had �ugly kits� made for them, large black rubber cases that completely disguised their form factors. For the KIN Two it also made the device very bulky in one�s pocket, but these were necessary to prevent leaks, and it worked out well. The only leaks we had were CGI renderings of prototypes and a very fuzzy screenshot.

As of today so much that was secret is now public: not just the name and the hardware, but the capabilities and the feature set as well. There are a few things that are not yet public, such as the exact release dates and pricing, but these are for our partners to announce in due course. I am very excited that the product is now announced and folks can get an idea of what we have been up to. I�m looking forward to seeing production devices in stores next.

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Who doesn't take credit/debit cards in 2008? Washington State Licensing, that's who

Normally I renew my car tabs online with a credit or debit card, but that wasn't possible this week so I visited an actual License Office. Much to my amazement there was a sign stating "We do not accept Debit or Credit cards". When my turn came to speak to an employee, I asked why. She said "we don't have the machines". I emailed the Customer Service and they responded:

We do not accept debit or credit cards in any of our licensing offices, only check or cash. �We only accept the credit cards online only.

When you visit an actual office for tabs you pay an additional $4 for the privilege compared to the online price (where you can pay with plastic). Those $4s are insufficient to buy a few card readers I guess.

I remember being amazed in 1995 when finding my first local liquor store to discover it didn't take plastic either. In WA state liquor stores are run by, you guessed it, the State of Washington. It took them a few years but they did eventually get with the program.

Meanwhile here we are in 2008 and for some reason this particular piece of local government is still stuck in the 1980s. I guess they want folks to pack large wads of cash to their facilities, along with the security issues that result, both for us customers and for the offices that handle them. I mean who uses checks any more? Maybe their plan instead is to make us use the no-name ATMs in their licensing offices, which I assume they make a nice commission on.

Please WA licensing, get with the program. Let us use plastic to buy things in your offices.

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Zune Installation in my Boxster

Following the recent success in using a Zune for the kids to watch movies in the family vehicle, I decided it was time to update the music system in my car. I was a very happy customer of a Kenwood Keg which had been professionally installed in my Boxster years ago, but frustrations with that system, combined with my new-found Zune-love led me to an upgrade path.

Out With The Keg

The Kenwood Keg was a great hard-drive based system in its time (I think I got mine in 2003) and I got the 20GB system along with a new Kenwood head unit to drive it, speakers and a sub woofer. The original Boxster head unit (a CDR210) had no provision for aux-in (did anything in 1997?) though could connect to an over-priced CD changer (which I did not have). This, combined with the trashing of the factory speakers (due to excess volume I guess) led me to replace everything. The Keg software was primitive but did work, and was required to get MP3s onto the hard-disc. It served me well for several years, but since upgrading to Vista 64-bit the software was unavailable to me. It looks like it is possible to get it to work on Vista so long as you have a USB 2.0 cradle for the hard-drive (as it requires no drivers), but I was stuck with a driver-less USB 1.0 cradle. The newer cradles go on eBay for around a hundred bucks, which I did consider for a while, before my affair with Zune started.

Before I could go further I needed to get an aux-input on my Kenwood head unit. This turned out to be a $5 cable that plugged into the same connector the Keg used, the CD changer input. I also needed the magic tool that pulls Kenwood radios out of dashboards, and Frys Electronics in Renton just gave me a set when I asked, gratis. [Frys rock]. So far so good.

Zune Car Kits: Not Much Choice

I knew it was tricky to even get a car charger that worked on a Zune, so I relented and bought the Microsoft Zune Car Kit, and instantly regretted it. Although it could at least charge a Zune, it used an FM transmitter to get the audio to the head unit, which I didn't want. There is no other audio-out mechanism, I even checked the internal pictures on the FCC web site to see if there was a "secret" audio-out but couldn't see one, so I stopped short of breaking open the car kit to investigate further. I had forgotten that my cigarette-lighter outlet was Always On, and that the outlet was close to useless anyway after wearing it out with my Valentine One years ago. From what I can tell the Monster car kit is no better. Fortunately some heavy web searching led me to the Soundgate site, and they have what I consider to be a real Zune car kit. It did recently show up on the official Zune web site, but its still hard to find (here's an Amazon link).

There appear to be exactly zero Zune car kits that offer a remote, or an external�screen that can show anything, with the exception of the Ford Sync stuff (buying a new car was way out of the budget for this plan). The Soundgate kit does have a socket for a remote and several Sony wired remotes are claimed to work. However my anti-Sony feelings remain, plus the model that looks decent costs $100, so I'm holding off on that for the moment.

As I need to see the screen I couldn't hide the Zune away somewhere under the dash, but on the other hand I couldn't leave it out for all to see as its a convertible and would be too tempting a target for some miscreant. I explored some options, like getting a cassette holder and putting the Zune in there, but that looked like it would be too small (plus Boxster cassette holders are hard to find in 2008). However the perfect location exists in every Boxster: the ashtray, which is in the center console so easy to get to while driving, and it has a very cool motion-damped flip-up lid on it.

I'll spare you the nasty details but I spent many hours dremeling away the ashtray itself and the dashboard part it plugs into, and I reasonably successful. The Zune is hidden under it, but the cool flip-up action is not quite as smooth as it was, due I think to the loss of weight of the [bakelite?] ashtray (3/4ths of which I removed to make room for the 16GB Zune). The good news is I still have all my fingers, which was looking to not be the case a couple of times with the dremel.

Soundgate ZNCBLPAK Installation

The electrical install of the Soundgate kit was relatively painless, once I got comfortable with dismantling chunks of my dashboard: I got the aux-input cable from the head unit down to the lower front console by dremeling a tiny hole in the dash (under the left-hand panel), and mounted the Soundgate box on top of the airbag control box. Power came from the spare carphone socket that hides in Boxster dashboards - details of the dashboard mechanics can be found here, though I only found this particular site after I figured most of it out myself. I wired the Soundgate to the ignition-power cable, giving the benefit of an automatic Pause whenever the car is turned off. The Soundgate comes with a cigarette plug power cord�too if you aren't able to hard-wire it, plus a bunch of audio cables I didn't need to use (the aux-in cable ended with a 3.5mm jack which went straight into the Soundgate box). If you have the requirement for in-car video the Soundgate will give you that from the Zune too, but I don't (in this vehicle anyway). As the Zune connection is via the sync plug and not the 3.5mm AV jack, no messing with volume on the Zune is required to get a decent level into the head unit.

Keg vs Zune

Although I was pretty harsh on the Zune software's handling of video�in my previous posting, for audio I am much happier with it. Its easy enough to find things, can handle large collections (after the several-hour painfully-slow�initial sync time) and is easy to buy music (I stick to MP3 format tracks�so I can play them on my various other devices). Zune wins.

In the car the Zune is pretty good, but it's harder to see what's playing on the screen compared to the much larger text display that I had from the Keg. The Keg also had the great ability to announce the names of playlists as you cycled through them while keeping ones eyes on the road. I haven't even figured out�a way to cycle through playlists on a Zune (without looking), so Keg wins.

To sync the Keg I had to pop the front trunk, remove the HD, plug it into the cradle and use the crappy software to get the songs on there at USB 1.0 speeds. To sync the Zune I have to pop the ashtray cover, unplug it from the car and plug it into my Vista machine and use the much better Zune software at USB 2.0 speeds. I can in theory sync it while its still in the car using my home WiFi network, but I get no coverage in the garage so I need to fix that first. Zune wins.

I disabled the Touch feature of the Zune pad as it was impossible to use it accurately while keeping my eyes on the road. With the recent Zune 3.0 upgrade you can tag songs from FM radio stations for later purchase online, which is a fabulous idea. However I can't get very good radio coverage from the ashtray area, as I think the Zune uses the headphone cables as an antenna and I don't have any plugged in of course.

Conclusion

The Zune is generally poorly supported in the car integration area by Microsoft and 3rd parties, but the Soundgate system is better than anything else and is reasonably priced. Dismantling your dashboard and dremeling your car can be nerve-racking but resulted in a pretty nice installation for me. I miss the voice prompting of the Keg, but for everything else the Zune rocks in comparison.

[Updated 10/2/08 as I got the flip-up action�working a lot better by re-routing the cable that was fouling it]

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What did you do in the Format War, Daddy?

My kids are 2 and 4 yrs old so have little concept of what Daddy does, though they do know the words DVD, Xbox, and Lightsaber. However in a decade or so they might be able to understand what Daddy did in the format war, so here�s how I plan on explaining the last three years of my work:

In early 2005 Daddy joined what was then called the Professional Content Group at Microsoft, who were working on the replacement for DVD. At the time the team was mostly program managers who were working on the advanced interactivity aspects of the formats, then called iHD. There were two competing formats, one mostly from Sony called Blu-ray, and another mostly from Toshiba called HD DVD. Blu-ray was originally a very primitive high definition recordable format, while HD DVD was created by the same forum as DVD as a high definition replacement for it.

While the program managers worked on the standards committees specifications themselves, us developers started implementing iHD. It was designed based on certain tenets from studios like Warner and Disney, with features to match. Before I got to the team it had produced a demo with Disney called �WayVD� [strange name, that�s another story] that had helped convince the DVD Forum to accept iHD. However not long after Disney switched to the Blu-ray camp, for reasons never made public. The BDA (the cartel of Blu-ray supporters) voted to accept iHD as well, but due to complications this decision never stuck, and in the end they went with a Java-based solution called BD-J instead. For this and other reasons Microsoft ended its format-neutrality and became HD DVD-exclusive.

Toshiba licensed the iHD code that Daddy�s team produced and used it in every HD DVD player they shipped, starting with the HD-A1, which became available in April 2006, at a reasonable price of $499. Along with the three launch titles it got rave reviews, which surprised many as Blu-ray had been talking a lot of smack in the years before release and fooled many people into thinking HD DVD was dead before it even launched. The A1 proved a lot of people wrong.

A few months later the first Blu-ray player appeared, the Samsung BD-P1000, along with launch BD titles, for $999. The reviews were not so great for this player, as it deliberately softened the picture and its 1080p output was really the same 1080i output the Toshiba had, but put through a de-interlacer. It was also twice the price of the Toshiba competition. The poor BD launch continued when Sony themselves released The Fifth Element on BD, and it looked terrible, worse than the same title on DVD. Over a year later on AVSForum the BD folks admitted they launched BD about a year earlier than they were ready to, because they couldn�t let HD DVD be alone for that length of time. The Fifth Element proved such an embarrassment for Sony that they eventually re-mastered it in 2007 and offered the poor owners of the original free replacements.

While some of Daddy�s team continued work on the Toshiba code, Daddy moved on to help�out with�the Xbox version of the software. This was a full end-to-end solution, where we owned everything (unlike the Toshiba which ran their Audio-Video-Network stack), which was over 5 million lines of code. The Xbox HD DVD drive shipped at $199 and proved very successful: it quickly became most popular HD DVD player and remained so for over a year.

When Daddy was young there was a similar format war, between VHS and Betamax, but it was different in an important way: all the movie studios produced tapes for both formats. Only the player manufacturers �took sides�. Betamax (from Sony) eventually lost, so to make sure that didn�t happen again, Sony bought Columbia Studios. When the high definition format war came around, Sony didn�t want a level playing field like last time, as they knew they would have serious trouble competing on disc and player costs with HD DVD if everything else was equal. To avoid this they made their studios Blu-ray exclusive and then started trying to �persuade� other studios to do the same. They had some success, but Warner Bros, the biggest, stayed HD DVD exclusive for a while, though eventually produced discs for both formats. In the end it would be Warner that brought the war to an end.

Another thing that was different for this format war was the internet: the format war was a very hot topic on discussion forums and web sites, and news & rumors spread very quickly indeed (even when they weren�t true), generating huge amounts of discussions, taunting, abuse and FUD. Daddy participated in AVSForum, as did several of his co-workers and his VP, and so did a bunch of BD folks. However while us Microsofties were proud to show our names and employer, the BD folks all hid behind anonymizing screen-names, not revealing who they were, what they did or even who they worked for. While we all took great care in what we said and used respectful tones, they were free to say whatever they liked, how they liked, with no comebacks on them or their employers. The Industry Insiders Thread on AVSForum lasted for just over a year and ended with around 13,500 postings on that single thread.

The second Blu-ray player to come out was Sony�s PS3 which was really a games console with a BD drive in it. At $499 it was substantially cheaper than the other BD player and remained so for about a year, until BD player prices started to fall once the original ones started to become obsolete. Not only was the PS3 the cheapest player, it was the only one that could run the BD-J software at a vaguely decent speed, as well as play PS3 games of course. Although the attach-rate for PS3s (that is movies-per-player) was low, the sheer number of PS3s substantially helped the overall sales numbers of BD discs.

Due to the premature launch of Blu-ray, there were a bunch of features missing from the original players. They became known as Profile 1.0 players, and had additional problems when discs using BD+ appeared. BD+ was an attempt to add another layer of protection onto the discs, pushed mostly by Fox, but when the discs appeared many BD players had serious trouble playing them. The BD folks then created Profile 1.1, which added picture-in-picture, audio mixing, and persistent storage to Profile 1.0, in an attempt to catch up with the HD DVD feature set, but players didn�t have to conform until late 2007. They also created Profile 2.0 which made a network jack mandatory. Yes kids, I know it�s hard to believe, but in 2008 the BDA didn�t think that internet connectivity was important enough to include in every player. Of course HD DVD had all these features back in 1.0 and that was done in late 2005, with every player supporting every feature.

During 2007 things got a lot more interesting: new players from both side, with BD players consistently being around twice the price of HD DVD players, and still all Profile 1.0 (the most primitive version). Similar numbers of movies came out for each side, and much time was spent talking, ranting and misleading about the format war on the web. Daddy spent much of 2007 working on an HD DVD Emulator, which was a special version of the Xbox player that made it much easier for content creators to make cool HD DVD titles. I also helped out on the various updates that were done for the Xbox player itself. As a "thank you" to the team everyone got a special black Xbox HD DVD drive, and Universal also gave everyone a boxed set of "Heroes Season 1" (which Mummy & Daddy had previously missed on TV but got to really enjoy from those HD DVDs). Another perk of the job was access to the team's HD DVD library, which contained every HD DVD there ever was worldwide. Daddy so enjoyed his work that he even changed the license plate on his car to "HD DVD".

One surprise was that Target announced they would not sell any HD DVD players except the Xbox, as a result of a deal with Sony. This was weird, as Sony were paying for a store to not sell a competitor's stuff. While Microsoft has been in trouble a bunch of times for anti-trust issues, no-one seemed bothered by this highly unusual behavior. Sadly it would not be the last time that Sony would do this.

In August 2007 we got another surprise: Paramount, which had been supporting both formats, announced that they were dropping Blu-ray and going to only produce HD DVDs, which also meant Dreamworks would do the same. This was fabulous news for us, but it got Sony very worried indeed. So worried that the Sony CEO (Howard Stringer) personally called up a bunch of other CEOs and tried to "persuade" them to ditch HD DVD. As the format war had just entered a new phase, a phase where the underdog (us) suddenly looked like it stood a chance of winning, everyone passed on his kind offer. However, about five months later, it looked like many of those same CEOs would return the call to Howard and see if the offer was still open.

Christmas 2007 went pretty well for HD DVD, with Toshiba reducing their 3rd generation player prices further and even forcing the BD companies to cut their heavy prices a bit. Rumours began to emerge that Warner was going to make a decision and pick a single format: as the largest studio they had some serious clout, and they knew it. After a lot of high-level wrangling among various CEOs, Warner was close to picking HD DVD (along with Fox, a long-time BD supporter), but Sony got wind of this and came calling again with their check book. After a rumored $300-$500 million deal (along with $120m for Fox) both companies decided instead to dump HD DVD on Janury 4th 2008, the day before CES opened. This was Daddy's Black Friday, a real shell-shocker of a day for him and his team. It was pretty much all downhill from there. CES was a glum affair for us and the cool demos the team had been working on never got a public showing.

In the weeks that followed we were told privately of what Toshiba's (and the HD DVD Promotion Group's) response would be, but only the first phases of that ever came about: both Toshiba and Microsoft cut hardware prices, but it wasn't enough. One by one other companies started dumping HD DVD (coincidentially it was the same companies that Sony's CEO had called in August after the Paramount deal) until the pressure got too much, and in February 2008 Toshiba had a board meeting and cancelled HD DVD. After that the remaining studios (Paramount and Universal) had no choice but to give in too.

In the weeks that followed Daddy went out and bought up all the best titles on HD DVD and another Xbox player as a backup, so he could be sure of playing those titles for as long as he could. He also decided to add certain companies to the family "No Buy" list (which had consisted of just Apple for years up to that point), as well as adding Amazon, Universal and Paramount to the family "Favored Companies" list.

After doing HD DVD in,�Blu-ray's next battle was with DVD. Unfortunately for them Sony couldn't just write checks to get people to stop making DVDs,�so that battle proved to be a lot harder.

And that is how it all happened kids.

[with apologies to the Blake Edwards movie]

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Celebrating the first Apollo Moon Landing

In a matter of days it will be the 40th anniversay of Apollo 11 landing on the moon, a seminal moment for humanity, at least as far as I am concerned. Less than a hundred years since man figured out he could fly, three men travelled to another celestial body and came back to tell us about it.

It bugs me greatly that I cannot recall the first moon landing. I'm pretty sure I didn't watch it live (it was around 3am in England, not a good time for a youngster to be up) and my Dad was away (in the Navy) at the time. We had a tiny black & white TV, and I can remember watching non-specific moon landings, but not the first one. There's not much I can do about it now except grumble.

I am very familiar with the JFK "moon" speech, well at least I thought I was until I watched it recently on http://www.wechoosethemoon.org/�which features a longer version. I had no idea JFK included some reasonably funny lines in what I had always assumed was a very serious speech.

Last year, before I realized the anniversary was coming up, I tried to explain the moon landing to my kids (then 2 and 5). Hand waving wasn't much good, so I dug out "Apollo 13" on HD DVD and "From the Earth to the Moon" on DVD and played the best bits, which got their attention. I then bought the Space Voyagers "Ultimate Saturn V" at the Museum of Flight and was very impressed. Although not quite age appropriate, my 2yr old son took to it immediately and demanded I recreate the mission several times a day for about a month. The toy is a great size and pretty accurate, and kid-proof except for the lunar module adaptor which breaks very easily. The rocket also emits a good countdown sequence and vibrates when it "launches", all very fun for me and the kids. This proved to be a good introduction to the Solar System too, and by the time he was 3 my son could list all the planets, in order, and recognize their pictures.

In my twenties I got to visit Cape Canaveral and it was the highlight of that USA visit. Here in Seattle we have the Museum of Flight which has a reasonable Space section, but nothing beats standing next to an actual Saturn V rocket. Right before I moved from England it was the 25th anniversary of Apollo 11 and I bought some fabulous large-scale�Revell plastic�kits of the Saturn V and the Apollo hardware. Those kits now sit, mostly unbuilt, in the garage, awaiting a moment when I have the time to build them and the kids are old enough not to immediately trash them when I do. I also have re-purchased Airfix kits at a smaller scale, kits that I�originally built when I was about ten years old and which I hope to build again one day.

I set my TiVo to record anything with Moon or Apollo in it, and have been very disappointed with the results. American TV doesn't seem to give much of a rip about this anniversary, which I think is a great opportunity missed. By the time the 50th anniversary comes around some of the participants might not be around any more, which would be a shame.

I have bought some kids' books on the moon landing and the NYT reviewed three more this weekend which I need to investigate. I've also read a couple of grown-up books on the technology behind Apollo, and its even more amazing they made it given how primitive the computers were that they relied on to get there and back. However for the bigger, non-electronic hardware Apollo remains the reference implementation in many areas. It is still the largest, most powerful rocket ever, and parts of it are being used to assist those working on current NASA projects in order to get to the Moon again (and further), even digging old Lunar Rover tires out of closets for closer inspection.

Will man ever do something as amazing�with technology as the Apollo missions again? I'd like to think so, but its looking less and less likely, at least in my lifetime. Maybe my kids will get to see it, and hopefully they'll watch it live and remember it. It won't be in black & white, that's for sure.

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