As an aside, my test system is a pretty outdated Sempron 2600+, 2GB of memory, and a NVidia 6800XT with 256MB; it can play Quake 3 extremely well, but anything beyond that, eh, not so well. This is really the low end of usability on high performance applications today; by far, it is below average without question. The test video is Final Flight of the Osiris, the 9 minute video from The Animatrx produced by the Square film production unit that produced Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. As I have the DVD for The Animatrix I can see what the difference is side by side.

Unbox does not work with Linux. At all. Not in Wine (installer freaks out), and don’t even bother trying in VMWare due to lack of video card acceleration (this may change in the future, however, as VMWare wants to pass acceleration through to X at some point). This alone makes me want to severely dislike the product; not only this, if I owned a Mac, it doesn’t work on Macs either. If I was scoring this on a 10 point scale, Amazon has already lost 5 points.

So, to perform any video quality testing, I had to reboot to XP, something I very rarely do as Wine and Windows in VMWare does everything I need to do. Just to make what I said clear, I will never ever use Unbox again outside of this try-out as I refuse to reboot to just watch a movie; but for just this once, I’ll allow it.

The application itself uses a standard MSI installer, and is easy to use and figure out. I had no problems installing it, and playback performed fine on my test system with no hiccups. On my 3mbps DSL, within 3 minutes the player was ready to play Osiris, and by 9 minutes (or about 6 minutes into the film) the video was finished downloading.

Osiris used about 220 megs, and was encoded with the VC-1 codec (as are all Unbox videos). Compared to mplayer playing straight from the DVD using -vf pp=ac for post-processing, the DVD is noticeably sharper and more detailed. Comparatively, you may not be able to notice this on a 480i/p TV, but you will notice this on a display that is at least 853×480 (a 720×480 16:9 DVD stretched to 1:1 pixel ratio), which includes virtually every computer monitor in use, and also 720p and 1080p TVs.

So, between the fact it won’t run on Linux, or Macs, or Video iPods, and only on Windows or handhelds that support Microsoft’s PlayForSure (which even Zunes don’t support), I cannot see an actual point to Unbox at this time. The TiVo integration is nifty, but just like Apple’s iTV and on-demand services provided by cable, satellite, and telephone companies, it is a very niche market.

At this time, I cannot recommend Unbox for use by any user, let alone Linux ones. I give Unbox a 0 out 10 ten for Linux and Mac users and 0 out of 10 for Windows users. Spend your money elsewhere, such as on the original discs, they’re well worth the money.

Which, at the currently listed price of $15.25, is a great deal, especially since those go for around $0.50 a peice around here, and theres 100 in the box.

Really smart. Gundam fandom DDOSing Amazon’s complaint email server in 3… 2… 1…

Well, I ordered them using the “FREE Super Saver Shipping”, and Amazon decided to ship two of the tanks through USPS, and the remaining one through UPS (due to it being out of stock, but ended up getting into stock a day after they shipped the USPS box).

So, we all know USPS takes forever, right? Here’s some empirical proof: the UPS package, even though shipped one day after the USPS package, got here one day before the USPS package.

UPS wins, fatality.

So what made me bother blogging about it today? Normally, for small items like, say, ink carts, it’s usually cheaper to hit some local joint. Around here, no company sells the ink carts for my i9900 except Walmart… and they sell them for $11.99 a peice. Eleven dollars and 99 fucking cents. Compared to Amazon, which is known for their decent-but-other-places-have-them-cheaper prices, they sell the better sellers for $8.52 (example: BCI-6PM Photo Magenta) and the rest for for $9.19 (example: BCI-6PC Photo Cyan, BCI-6Y Yellow).

Lets add up the math. I currently want to buy a Photo Magenta, a Photo Cyan, and a Yellow. By going to the local Walmart…

Walmart
11.99 Photo Magenta Cart
11.99 Photo Cyan Cart
11.99 Yellow Cart
1.80 Maine State Sales Tax (5%)
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37.77 Total

… I’d end up paying $37.77. With Amazon, qualifying for “FREE Super Saver Shipping”, and the A9 discount, I pay…

Amazon with Super Saver Shipping and A9 discount
8.52 Photo Magenta Cart
9.19 Photo Cyan Cart
9.19 Yellow Cart
0.00 Shipping
-0.42 A9 discount (π/2%)
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26.48 Total

… a total of $26.48. That is a $9.48 difference. In fact lets up the ante. Lets say I wanted to get things sooner, and I didn’t qualify for the A9 discount…

Amazon with Standard Shipping and no A9 discount
8.52 Photo Magenta Cart
9.19 Photo Cyan Cart
9.19 Yellow Cart
6.76 Shipping
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33.66 Total

Still a $4.11 difference! “Always low prices” is a load of bullshit. That said, I’m going to go buy three ink carts at an even lower price from Amazon.

I actually should start on my collection at some point, but I’ve been so busy with other things, that I haven’t had time to. Between my new camera and printer (mentioned in the post preceding this one), and my vastly upgraded computer (which I plan on talking about in a later post), I haven’t had much time for modeling.

That doesn’t stop me from wanting a Perfect Grade RX 78-2 Gundam either… Though, if I ever get a PG mobile suit, I have no clue where I can put it; at least with this one, its almost a foot tall. Damn you Yoshiyuki Tomino!

Update: Oh noes! Amazon is finally out of the GP-01fb. They still have Kaempfer in stock, so if you want one, you better grab one now, or be stuck buying one from Hobby Link Japan for $35.