Hasta La Gadget!

Blockbuster just disclosed to the SEC there is “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue breathing, since there are no assurances it can meet the conditions of a $250 million loan that’s its current lifeline.

And even if the loan keeps going it still not “may not have sufficient liquidity to finance the ongoing obligations of our business, which raises substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern.”

So, uh, who didn’t see this coming? Unlike Circuit City though, this doesn’t exactly make me sad. [MSNBC via Technologizer, Image CipherSwarm/Flickr]

Best Buy, like many other stores, has a public “price matching” policy. But HD Guru reports that according to internal docs, personnel are trained to deny price-matches and even paid bonuses for shutting them down.

This all comes out of a lawsuit that was just granted class action status. Internal documents, plus depositions from past and current Best Buy employees reveal just how evil Best Buy is. A price match is when, say, Circuit City advertised a Sharp HDTV for cheaper than Best Buy, Best Buy’s public policy is to match that price.

But Best Buy actually trains employees in New York how to deny legitimate price match requests, and the average Best Buy store denies 100 price matches a week. You even get paid bonuses based on how many price matches you deny!

Here’s how it works, according to Phil Britton, a member of Best Buy’s Competitive Strategies Group:

What is the first thing we do when a customer comes in to our humble box brandishing a competitor’s ad asking for a price match? We attempt to build a case against the price match. (Trust me, I’ve done it too). Let’s walk through the “Refused Price Match Greatest Hits:

“Not same model? Not in stock at the competitor? Do we have free widget with purchase? Is it from a warehouse club (they have membership fees, you know)? Limited Quantities? That competitor is across town? We’ve got financing! Is it an internet price? It’s below cost!…..”

If you live in NY state, and you’ve been screwed by Best Buy’s anti-price matching, HD Guru has further info on the attorney to contact so you can take a piece out of Best Buy. What a bunch of scum.

Update: Giz reader Jake reveals how they scam you on model numbers to avoid price matching:

Example: A few months ago my wife and I were looking at a Frigidaire Washer. The model we were interested was the ATF8000FS. At Best Buy, we found the washer there however it was displayed as the ATF8000FSL. At first I figured “Oh this must be some variation on the original model number, like how manufacturers sometimes add a letter to the end of the model to indicate the product color.” Anyways, to make a long story short, this ATF8000FSL was not available from the manufacturer.

The “L” was added on by Best Buy in order for them to skirt around price matching. This is so no one can come to Best Buy and claim to have found a lower price of this product because no one else sells the product under the model number ATF8000FSL. It’s ATF8000FS everywhere else. Best Buy will tell people that its simply a different product, so therefore, no price matching. Even on the manufacturer’s sticker on the washer, it said ATF8000FS, as it was supposed to. Upon further investigation I could see that Best Buy’s internal computers even listed the model as ATF8000FSL.

Pretty scammy. [HD Guru, Image: bdjsb7/Flickr]

This week at the PMA camera conference in Las Vegas, JVC announced a high-def hybrid camcorder, the Everio X, which appears to be a symbolic push-back against the recent video breakthroughs in cameras.

The Canon 5D Mark II brought beautiful high-end video to cameras for the first time last year, leaving many camcorders in the dust.  Despite a significant price barrier that failed to place it in competition against mainstream camcorders, this camera offered people a high-quality video option (with the added benefits of better lens optics) that many saw as the beginning of a long-term feature raid by cameras.

So, it was only a matter of time before camcorders boosted their still-photo features to keep up appearances in that space, while still offering the best video bang for the mid-range buck.

On the surface, the compact Everio X (or GZ-X900) seems fully feature-packed for both video and stills.

It shoots video at a pixel resolution near 1920 x 1080, and is extremely pocketable and small at only .66 lbs. Using a 10.3-megapixel CMOS sensor, it takes nine-megapixel pics (see pic quality at right), has a rapid-fire mode that shoots 15 images a second, and promises simultaneous 5-megapixel still shooting during HD video recording (at a shutter speed of 1/4000.) It also has an interesting 10 x slow shooting mode (at three different speeds) that seems to combine both video and stills into a potentially seamless action scene mode (see pic sequence below).

Since it’s nicely designed for portability, the camcorder also has a ‘one-touch’ feature built-in that facilitates video downloads to YouTube, just like the iFlip.

At $1000, this camera is going to have to definitely push the hybrid angle. It could potentially suffer against similarly-priced camcorders that don’t have the HD camera feature but might surpass it in video-only quality. But for those looking to use only one device while traveling, this one has a lot of potential.

Included digital copies are still the exception rather than the norm in the Blu-ray world. Lame. You’d like to rip those discs for playback elsewhere, right? But there is something you should know first.

And that is this: Ripping Blu-ray discs sucks. Hard. It takes forever, eats up a ton of hard drive space, and for all practical purposes requires software that isn’t free. It’s like trying to rip a DVD in 1999: computers still have a long way to go before this is easy.

But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s impossible, and once your system is set up it’s something you can start before you go to bed and have finished for you in the morning. Here we’ve outlined exactly what you need to rip your 1080p Blu-ray discs (the ones you own, of course) and then convert the video into a more manageable file size for watching on a computer, phone, game console or PMP. Because hey, you own this movie, and you should be able to watch it on whatever device you want.

But you’ll have to earn that right. Let’s start this painful process, shall we?

What’s you’ll need:

• A Windows PC (the Blu-ray ripping process is, at the moment, Mac-unfriendly. I used Windows 7 Beta 64-bit and all the following software is Windows-only)

• AnyDVD HD (free fully-functional 21-day trial, $80 to keep) for ripping and decrypting BD discs

• RipBot264 (free) for transcoding from AVC (you’ll also need a few codecs to go along with it: .NET Framework 2.0, the avisynth and ffdshow codec packs, and the Haali media splitter)

• tsMuxeR (free) for muxing (may not be necessary)

• A Blu-ray drive (I used OWC’s Mercury Pro external)

• A ton of free hard drive space (80GB or so to be safe)

• A decent understanding of how video codecs and containers work (Matt’s Giz Explains has everything you need)

How it Works
AnyDVD HD is a driver that sits in the background, which automatically removes the AACS or BD+ security lock and the region code from any BD disc you load, allowing it to be ripped. The video on most Blu-ray discs is encoded in the MPEG4 AVC format in .m2ts files, so it will need to be transcoded from AVC to something else (like an H.264 MP4 file) for playback on other devices. MPEG4 AVC doesn’t have wide support in all of the best video transcoders we alread love, like Handbrake. This makes finding a free and easy transcoding solution a little tougher, but thankfully RipBot264 seems competent.

You can then either transcode directly from the disc, or go the route I took and rip the disc to your hard drive before running it through the transcoder, which reduces the chance for errors. Give both a shot to find what’s easiest.

Thanks to poster Baldrick’s guide on the Videohelp.com forums and the folks at Doom9—these instructions are based on info found there. Check them out if you get stuck.

Rip Your BD Disc
Again, if you want to try transcoding directly from the disc at the sacrifice of speed or the chance of corruption, you can skip this part (except for step 1) and go to step 4.

1. First up, download and install all the necessary software: AnyDVD HD and RipBot264, which also requires .NET Framework 2.0, the avisynth and ffdshow codec packs, and the Haali media splitter. (All links lead to their Videohelp.com pages, a fantastic resource). These codecs, nicely enough, should give AVC decoding capabilities system wide, so apps like VLC and Windows Media Player should be able to play them without problems.

2. Fire up AnyDVD if it’s not running yet, and from the fox icon in the system tray, choose “Rip Video DVD to Harddisk.” Choose a save point where there’s a healthy 40-50GB free and start it a-rippin’. It’ll probably take around an hour.

3. When it’s done, open up the BDMV/STREAMS directory and try to play the largest .m2ts in VLC or WMP. It should play fine with sound, but if anything’s fishy, you may want to try re-loading RipBot264’s required codecs or trying another AVC codec like CoreCodec’s CoreAVC. This is more paid software, but like AnyDVD, it comes with a free trial period. You need to be able to see and hear an .m2ts file normally during playback before you proceed.

Transcode Your Rip
Now, the fun part.

4. Open up RipBot264. When you try to run RipBot264 the first time, it may say you haven’t installed ffdshow even if you have. If this is the case, open the RipBot264.ini file in Notepad and change “CheckRequiredSoftware=1” to “CheckRequiredSoftware=0” and save it.

5. Click “Add” and select the largest *.m2ts file found in your ripped BD disc’s BDMV/STREAMS folder. RipBot will then analyze it and find the various programs available to encode—you want the one that matches the runtime of your movie, and not one of the special features. RipBot will chew on this file for a long time, and hopefully when it’s done, will present you with this dialog:

6. If RipBot throws an error of any kind here, first make sure you’ve got a bunch of HD breathing room on the volume you’re using.

If errors still come up, you may have to mux your rip. To put that in English: Blu-ray discs have a lot of different files on them representing several different audio and video streams. The process of joining all of these disparate elements into a single stream (usually a .ts file) is called multiplexing, or muxing, and its necessary to do before transcoding. RipBot264 can do this on its own, but it has problems with certain discs. So if any of the above fails, download tsMuxeR, select the biggest .2mts file in the BDMV/STREAM folder in your rip or on your disc, choose the appropriate language, and hit “Start Muxing.” You can then add the resulting .ts file to RipBot264 as the source.

7. Now you can choose how you want to convert the video. RipBot gives you presets for Apple TV, iPod or iPhone, PSP or a high-res file which can then be re-burned to a new BD disc. I chose the iPod/iPhone level.

8. Click “Properties”—here you can fine tune the output size of your video (I chose a nice 640×360 file) and preview it before you begin. MAKE SURE you preview your choices using the “Preview Script” button, because you don’t want to sit through the eternity of transcoding only to find that your dimensions are messed up and everything is in the wrong aspect ratio.

9. If all looks and sounds good, press OK, then “Start” and watch as your system transcodes the massive 1080p AVC stream into a new MP4 file. On my 2.53GHz Macbook Pro, it averages around 20fps, which is actually slower than real time playback. Yuck. So you’ll want to set this and forget it.

10. Wake up the next morning, have your coffee, and check your output file. It should play beautifully in your media player of choice, and look crisp as a kettle chip. My 640×360 encode of the Dark Knight was around an even 1GB in the end, which is not bad at all. Copy it to your device of choice and enjoy.

As you can see, this process is a bitch. It takes an hour to rip the disc, another hour and change for all the software to read your rip and get ready, then an amount of time equal to or even longer than the movie itself to transcode it, depending on your system. So hey, movie studios: how about making digital copies standard features on your BD discs so we don’t have to go through this, mmkay?

Note to Mac Users
While the BD-ripping world is largely a Windows one, you may want to fiddle around with DumpHD, a ripping tool written in Java that supposedly works with OS X. I couldn’t get it to work, but you can read more here to try for yourself.

If you manage to rip your BD disc, you’ll then have to find an AVC converter that works with OS X. Most of these are paid and I haven’t used any, but they exist. If anyone has had luck with a particular tool, let us know.

This method was tested and worked perfectly for me, but if you’re a video jockey and know of any additional software or methods that I didn’t cover that may help, PLEASE tell us about it in the comments. The knowledge dropped in the comments of these Saturday how-tos are a huge help to everyone, so please be constructive and provide links to other tools you’ve had success with. Have a good weekend everyone!

Today was supposed to be the day Hulu stopped streaming content to to your TV via Boxee, but luckily there could be a way to get around this problem.

An XBMC team developer with the forum handle “d4rk” has developed a quick and dirty plug-in that should get Hulu back up and running (although it is untested). Not surprisingly, hackers have chosen to fight the power. [XBMC via Boxee Forum via Lifehacker]