News archive (3 / 2002)

Seven companies have agreed to build a cable-box using standardized MPEG-4 video format. Companies aim to replace now-standard MPEG-2 in cable networks with MPEG-4 which takes less bandwidth with same quality. This would ultimately allow cable operators to offer more channels using their existing infrastructure.

The task is huge, since MPEG-2 is de facto industry standard among broadcasters and cable companies -- virtually all content editing, storage and delivery is done in MPEG-2. And digital TV is built on MPEG-2 as well, so companies would need to change the whole foodchain in order to replace MPEG-2 with MPEG-4.

Companies involved with the project are Pioneer, Sharp, National Semiconductor, Sigma Designs, CMC Magnetics, Modern VideoFilm and iVast. America's third biggest cable operator, Comcast Cable, has agreed to join the specifications negotiations and has also agreed to test the system once its ready.

Unicate BV announces the completion of the first phase of testing of a physical anti-piracy-anti-copy solution for DVD, CD and CD-ROM.

Using nano-technology, the 3-dimensional token has greater than 10 to the 36th power stochastic uniqueness. 3DAS low-cost micro-tokens are embedded into the disk providing a 3-D physical copy protection. The tokens are read by the standard drive optical reader with minor firmware modifications to the drive.

The read of the 3DAS token by the drive produces a bit string that is certified unique by TNO (The Dutch National Labs) to 10 to the 36th power. The bit string can either be authenticated in the drive, near-line, occasional certification or real-time. 3DAS tokens cannot be copied, replicated, removed or modified.

Four levels of security begin at off-line copy protection to on-line real-time cryptographic data access control.

The next phase of development is already underway. Unicate is working with a drive manufacturer to adapt CD and DVD drives for review by content owners like motion picture studios, music companies and software manufacturers. Unicate will also be presenting and demonstrating 3DAS anti-piracy technology to industry standards organizations.

MPEG LA, an organization which grants joint licenses to MPEG-2 patents compensating all patent holders, but requiring a licensee only to pay to MPEG LA, introduced a similiar licensing agreement for MPEG-4 earlier this year, but that proposal was a disaster, causing angry comments from possible licensees, such as Apple.

Now MPEG LA is trying to re-negotiate MPEG-4 licensing terms with its patent holders to get industry's approval for the licensing terms. Obviously, if no one licenses the technology because of the licensing terms, the patent holders are pretty much left with nothing. Negotiations are scheduled to end of April.

Shock-waves are hitting U.S. media companies' offices when Dutch appeals court overturned Dutch court's decision and declared that KaZaA can legally distribute its P2P program to users and that it is users' responsibility to decide how they use the program.

This is exactly what pro-P2P parties have argued since day one when Napster was sued back in 1999 -- it should be user's decision whether he/she downloads or shares copyrighted material or not. Major difference between KaZaA and Napster is the fact that KaZaA doesn't operate any central servers unlike Napster did, so the company can't control what users distribute in its network.

"We are stunned by the verdict," a Buma Stemra's, Dutch recording industry's association's, spokesman said after the decision. He also added that Buma Stemra can appeal the decision further to Dutch High Court (which compares to U.S. Supreme Court, it's decisions are final).

Unfortunately the decision came too late to save KaZaA -- company sold its assets to Australian Sharman Networks earlier this winter. However, FastTrack, whose technology KaZaA and other similiar P2P tools are based, continues to operate in Netherlands and licenses its technology to Grokster and KaZaA.

Monument Entertainment, company that distributes "unusual" movies (as their web site describes it) in DVD, VHS and now in VOD (video-on-demand).

Company's VOD rental service uses DivX format and DivXNetworks' DRM solution for securing the content. Five-day rental costs $4.99.

MonumentVideo.com

Ok, it's been forever since we last commented upcoming DVD releases, since there are just way too many DVDs coming out nowadays and there are totally different sites that focus on telling you about those. But one DVD definately worth of mentioning is the upcoming Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring DVD.

New Line Cinema revealed their DVD plans yesterday and they're going to roll out four separate versions of the movie. First two, set to hit the shelves in August, are pretty regular releases of the movie with pan&scan and anamorphic widescreen versions. Meanwhile the other two versions, scheduled on November, are more interesting. One is a "regular extended version", a four-disc package with R rating, four hours of special bonus material and 30min longer cut of the movie. Another one is the same version, but bundled with extra stuff like two bookend statuettes, National Geographic's "Beyond The Movie" DVD, etc.

Ok, we oppose MPAA, RIAA and their evil plans to restrict fair use of once sold immaterial such as movies and music, but then again -- good art is always good art, the problem is that supporting it also benefits the forces that try to take away your rights. Dilemma...

Pioneer announced yesterday that it will cut dramatically its blank DVD disc prices. Price for blank DVD-R disc will drop from $10 to $6 a piece and for DVD-RW from $20 to $10.

Pioneer's move is a clear signal that it is taking a threat from Philips-led DVD+RW consortium which has pushed to make DVD+RW a recordable DVD standard instead of competing DVD-R/RW format.

Pioneer also announced earlier this month that its upcoming A04 DVD burner which will replace existing A03 model, will cost $150 less than what A03 did cost when it came available.

DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW discs are not compatible which each others' burners -- so, you can't burn Pioneer's discs in your HP DVD+RW drive and you can't burn Philips' DVD+RW discs in your Pioneer A03/A04 drive. Both formats can be read with virtually any DVD drive, so DVD+RW writers can read DVD-RW discs and vice versa.

And just to add more spices to the alphabet soup, DVD-RAM discs don't work with neither of the standards. But luckily DVD-RAM is virtually dead standard by now, but be aware if you find cheap recordable DVD drives in markets -- DVD-RAM drives are virtually worthless, unless you just need to have one for data backup purposes.

The new joint licensing model for MPEG-4 AAC audio encoding technology that was introduced today received immediately praises from streaming industry's representative group ISMA and various technology companies like Apple.

Unlike its sister technology, MPEG-4 video, the audio licensing terms seem much more reasonable for licensees. Licensees would pay per "channel" or stream a $0.50 fee and the price would be capped at $250,000 per annum for encoder products and at $25,000 per annum for decoders (players).

MPEG LA which introduced its joint MPEG-4 video licensing model earlier this year raised strong opposition by setting fees based on the streamed/encoded length of the video.

It seems that MPEG-4 AAC might actually be an actual competitor for MP3 format and to Microsoft's WMA format. Ok, ok, there are tons of excellent quality audio encoding products already, most of them cheaper than AAC, but hey -- they don't have multi-billion dollar companies behind the formats. It will be interesting to see how AAC will compete with OGG Vorbis..

San Francisco, CA, March 26, 2002—Dolby Laboratories, a leader in multichannel sound, today announced the launch of a newly expanded MPEG-4 AAC licensing program. Joined by the co-licensors, Dolby is building on its successful MPEG-2 AAC program to address streaming, wireless, and multimedia applications.

Acting as the licensing administrator for patents held by AT&T, Dolby, Fraunhofer IIS-A, and Sony, Dolby is pleased to announce the addition of Nokia to the group of co-licensors. Dolby will immediately begin offering MPEG-4 AAC licenses worldwide under fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory terms. Furthermore, a convenient migration path for existing MPEG-2 AAC licensees will be made available.

aac-audio.com

In a decision which sounds pretty non-related to a current situation, U.S. appeals court decided that Judge Marilyn Patel's decision in last summer to keep Napster offline until it can filter out all copyright protected material from its system, was indeed correct one.

Napster appealed the decision and got an emergency stay to the decision from appeals court in July, but never resumed its operations anyway and has been developing its legal service after that.

Sportswear giant Nike announced that it will drop its existing co-branding agreement with SonicBlue in favour of Dutch electronics giant Philips.

Companies will brand Philips' consumer electronics products with Nike's logos and market those items specially in the U.S. where Philips market share isn't all too impressive if compared to the rest of the world. First products companies will unveil include Nike-branded digital audio players and portable CD players.

As the annual National Association of Broadcasters' convention is approaching, all major and bunch of hopeful new names are going to demonstrate their latest video encoding techniques to broadcasters hoping that their formats would gain interest, funding and clients from the event. Such companies include Microsoft, RealNetworks and DivXNetworks.

EETimes has an interesting article that covers various aspects of video encoding and the future plans of video encoding. While some companies are claiming that MPEG's block-encoding mechanism is nearing its end, some companies are still pursuing further improvements to the MPEG format (whether it is MPEG-2 or MPEG-4). One of the most interesting future plans is the joint process with MPEG team and ITU (International Telecommunication Union) to join their technologies and produce a new variant for MPEG-4, MPEG-4 part 10. Group claims that they get the standard ready by end of this year and that the standard would improve coding efficiency by 50 percent.

LockStream, a secure digital multimedia platform provider, has agreed to integrate DivXNetworks' DivX5/MPEG-4 to its Morphing Player.

LockStream licenses its digital rights management platform to various customers who then distribute Morphing Player to their customers to play the secured content. One of the LockStream's customers is Finnish emma.fm music service which is one of the cutting-edge test services major record labels are running at the moment.

"I've spoken to more developers and according to all of them, there is sad news. There will be no software able to make a 1:1 copy of Starforce (and Tages!?) protected CDs.

Because the Starforce protection seems to depend on the CD pressing technique used in the manufacturering plant, it will need special media to make a backup or it will only run with an emulator enabled."

CDFreaks.com

A well known CD-R software CDRWin is possibly sold to a German company.

Anonymous source reports at the CDFreaks.com that he would have been in contact with some CDRWin distributor at the CeBIT, who would have told that CDRWin is sold to a German company S.A.D.

The CDRWin has always used core routines obtained from elsewhere and there has been claims that the original author could not even program properly. CDRWin has been utilizing freeware CDRecord source code and now seems to be based on the Padus DiscJuggler's (good) core.

A German version of CDRWin 5.0 is available at the Padus FTP site.

American jazz magazine, Down Beat, is going to distribute and resell Listen.com's Rhapsody subscription service through its website.

Listen.com will create jazz-specific version of its service for Down Beat and the service will cost $7.50 a month for users.

RealNetworks' vice president David Richards testified in written form against Microsoft in Microsoft vs Nine States case where group of U.S. States are seeking to restrict Microsoft's anti-competitive behaviour in market place.

Richards testified that Microsoft witheld important technical information about Windows which caused Real's products to be more unstable under Windows than Microsoft's own Windows Media Player. He also said that as late as in August 2001, Microsoft's executives considered RealNetworks as a "threat" to Microsoft's monopoly.

Microsoft also hit back during the cross-examination pointing out that Real's RealPlayer is still the dominant multimedia player in Windows platform. Judge also dismissed parts of Richards' testimony stating those parts as "classic hearsay". One part of testimony which was rejected was an email from AOL TimeWarner's executive Barry Schuler where he said to RealNetworks' executives that "Microsoft wants to kill you guys so badly, it is ugly".

"I do not think there is any question that Microsoft has sought, and continues to seek, to restrict the distribution, promotion, use and interpretability of RealNetworks," Richards wrote.

Fraunhofer Institute, the legendary research institute in Germany which invented MP3 format back in early mid-90s, has set up a research team to develop a new methods to revolutionize movie industry. And no, we're not speaking of any consumer-end low-bitrate encoding like MPEG-2 or DivX/MPEG-4, but they're actually researching how to replace movie cameras and films with digital equipment.

"Our aim is to implement a complete digital processing chain for cinema, from the camera via production, post production, distribution and screening," the Fraunhofer Society's Dr Siegfried Foessel told BBC News Online at the CeBIT fair in Hanover.

One could think that "ok, digital cameras already exist, why not use hi-end models of them?". Wrong. Even the digital cameras designed for HDTV broadcasts can't capture the dyncamics of lighting and can't provide the same resolution that analog cinema film can capture (tip: much more than 640x480 ;-).

Institute is also researching methods to compress the data somehow, whether using JPEG2000 image compression format's lossless version or some other means. The problem is severe, even in current situation where storage media becomes cheaper almost daily; researchers estimate that excellent quality digital cinema would take appx. 5 gigabytes of data per second -- only for video.

German company flexstrom, a subsdiary of Bertelsmann Arvato, introduced a flexible CD at CeBIT yesterday. Flexible CD means that it is actually physically flexible, you can roll it up, etc. Disc is also lightweight, cheaper to produce than regular CD, faster to produce than regular CD and has the exact same storage features that regular CD has.

Only real nag that the flexCD has is the fact that it requires plastic adapter when played in regular CD player -- piece of plastic on top and under the flexCD. But I can easily imagine that the product will attract interest from direct marketing people -- imagine the savings AOL could achieve when they send out their weekly 100,000,000,000,000,000 promotional CDs to customers. Company also said that the technology can be extended to DVD discs as well, but didn't mention about any plans for flexDVD.

For more info, visit company's website:

http://www.flexstorm.com/english/

According to ZDNet, the MP3s might be potentially dangerous as carriers for viruses.

"We've recently been looking at how things embedded into MP3 files might become a problem,” Vincent Gullotto, vice president of AVERT -- the developer of McAffee anti-virus systems -- told ZDNet Australia. “There will soon be MP3s that will play the video clip at the same time as the music, and if you can embed movie files to MP3s you can embed Java and other languages that may contain malicious programming."

Personally I really don't understand this point of view. This seems more like some anti-MP3 campaing, rather than a real issue. Currently I am not aware of any methods that one could use for implementing potentially dangerous code in MP3 files.

ZDNet.com

RealNetworks took a step into Microsoft's sacred lands by releasing RealONE Player for PocketPC today. Previously Real's mobile player version has been available to Symbian platform, most notably to Nokia's Communicator series.

Anyway, Real also announced a deal with Compaq to include Real's player to all of Compaq's iPaq PDAs. So, now we're just waiting Apple to release their player to Symbian and PocketPC and we have a nice little war going on -- or just merely entering in new territories.

RealONE Mobile

As our regular users have already noticed, we've added new software section to our site which includes CD-R tools and applications. This software area as well as upcoming CD-R related news are contributed by CD-RW.ORG.

We have formed a very non-formal partnership with CD-RW.ORG because we felt that our audiences have pretty good match while our content overlaps very rarely, so we decided to distribute our news and software selection from AfterDawn.com to CD-RW.ORG and vice versa.

Now CD-RW.ORG is also hosted on our servers and if you take a look at their site, it looks pretty familiar as well ;-) Their site is still slightly under construction, so there's really much to see right now, but they'll getting there.

CD-RW.ORG and AfterDawn.com have not merged and the co-op doesn't have any financial details either. Whole idea is to offer broader content from two Finnish "underground" multimedia sites.

CD-RW.ORG also uses AfterDawn.com's forum structure and we will add more technical MP3 and CD-R discussion boards very shortly to our forums, which ultimately benefits you, our users.

CD-RW.ORG has operated, at least in some form, since 1996 and is operated from Finland. AfterDawn.com has been online since March, 1999.

StreamCast Networks, a company who operates Morpheus P2P service, is moving towards a legal service model, pretty much like Napster has done.

Company is asking indie artists to distribute their music through Morpheus and is planning to roll out some kind of DRM (Digital Rights Management a.k.a. anti-piracy shield :-) system to its service later on. No details about this were disclosed, so we don't know will they even implement it at all.

The indie music plot is pretty clear -- they try to convince courts that their P2P network has legal usage as well which would keep it within "BetaMax-range" allowing the network continue as usual.

Sure, if the DRM will be added to Moprheus, it basically means death of Morpheus as we know it -- just like it did for Napster. But then again, its all about business; if you can make more money by having thousand users paying for your service than having million users watching ads that pay pennies, its really a no-brainer (nono, we're not rolling out subscription only AfterDawn.com... yet ;-).

Anyway, start looking around -- KaZaA and eDonkey are good alternatives..

MP3Newswire.net's article released today says that Aimster's CEO Johnny Deep has declared a personal bankruptcy. Deep's lawyer, George Carpinello, of Boies Schiller & Flexner LLP did tell the Albany Business Journal that Deep's bankruptcy filing "will result in an automatic stay of any cases he is involved in."

Deep's company Aimster has been in serious legal problems with AOL, RIAA, etc. It had to give up its domain name aimster.com to AOL in January and to rename the company to Madster. Also the legal process against RIAA where music industry claims that Aimster has violated its copyrights by allowing users to trade music freely over Aimster's P2P network, is still going on.

RealNetworks is shifting its focus even more rapidly towards mobile phones and PDAs. Company announced that its RealONE multimedia player will be available for Microsoft's PocketPC platform "very soon".

Company also strengthened its position in mobile phone sector when Nokia announced (at CEBIT in Hannover, Germany) that all of its Symbian-based and Series 60-based (Nokia's own propietary operating system) phones will have RealONE player included. Nokia also introduced series of new phones and the hi-end model, Nokia 9210i (which is basically just a slightly improved version of 9210 which Nokia released last year), already includes RealONE player. New phone also includes Opera browser, Flash support and other neat little features.

Liquid Audio announced that it has signed a contract with BMG to use BMG's content in its music download online store which it offers through its own website and through its partners.

BMG will make appx. 3,500 songs available through Liquid Audio. Tracks are encoded and protected by Liquid Audio's own Digital Rights Management system which it has developed over past couple of years.

Both parties in fierce fight over online radio royalty rates are appealling the Copyright Office's proposed royalty rate for webcasters. RIAA says that the proposed rate is too low and, unsurprisingly, webcasters say the opposite.

Copyright Office proposed a royalty rate that would set the fee at $1.40 per thousand listeners for Internet-only stations and at $0.70 for radio stations who send their radio programming over the web as well as regular airwaves. The Librarian of Congress is due to rule on the appeals and set the rates by 20th of May.

Napster announced today that it has laid off 10 per cent of its workforce in order to cut costs while it is still negotiating with major record labels in order to license their content to its legal subscription service. Napster launched its legal service's beta test in beginning of this year, but the service only has content from various indie labels.

Napster's CEO Konrad Hilbers told that company intends to fill the positions that it now cut, once it gets the full service launched. Napster hasn't settled its copyright infrigement cases with major record labels yet, but federal judge Patel, who has handled the case since 1999, has put some extra pressure on labels which would cause an earlier-than-expected settlement between Napster and "Big Five" and would ultimately open ports for Napster to license labels' music as well.

FoxNews.com has an excellent article about proposed SSSCA law in U.S. that explains in understandable terms what the law means and how it would effect to You as a consumer in U.S.

I recommend reading this:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,47296,00.html

MPAA's CEO and president Jack Valenti told during ShoWest, an annual movie theatre operators' gathering, that 2001 was Hollywood's most successful year since 1959 in terms of moviegoers and best year ever in movie ticket profits.

20 films reached "magic" $100M mark and five films reached $200M mark in movie ticket sales in last year. Valenti called last year the "greatest box office year in film history," with total receipts of $8.41 billion.

Now, this is obviously great for movie industry, but it makes one to wonder why MPAA and studios it represents whines to congress, media and U.S. senate how movie piracy is killing the industry? Companies such as Disney are trying to push hardware-level restrictions for content copying which ultimately would limit so-called fair use terms dramatically in U.S.

Israeli Midbar Tech announced that its audio CD copy protection, dubbed as Cactus Data Shield, will be used by Japanese record label Avex in appx. 1M CDs sold in Japan.

According to label, only some of the songs in each CD will be protected by the technology and all the albums will carry a sticker that says that CD contains tracks protected by Midbar's technology.

Midbar's Cactus has been used in Europe and in the U.S. by various labels in few CDs, but most of the CDs protected by this technology, have caused huge opposition by consumers and consumer groups in each country. Two weeks ago, BMG Finland announced that it will pull all Cactus-protected CDs from Finland's markets after consumer complaints (read the story from here).

Yesterday we heard first arguments in a case that will most likely take forever, when U.S. federal judge decided that software vendors offering FastTrack-powered P2P clients will face a trial and denied companies' request for summary judgment.

StreamCast Networks, which operates Morpheus P2P client, argued that its software can be used for various other tasks other than distributing illegal copies of movies, music and software and asked judge to dismiss the case. Judge didn't agree.

Other plaintiffs in the case are Grokster and KaZaA who both operate similiar P2P client as StreamCast does -- even that now StreamCast's client is based on Gnutella, but the suit filed by American movie industry (MPAA & co.) was filed before last week's changes to the service.

All three companies have claimed that they don't have power over their networks because they don't run centralized indexing services like Napster did and therefor they don't know what their users use their P2P clients for.

Judge set the trial to begin at 30th September, 2002.

Although the DVD Forum isn't really united behind this issue, it still seems that MPEG-4 will be the technology that is used in next generation DVD-Video discs. Opposition in DVD Forum wants to use existing MPEG-2 as a compression technology, but use upcoming Blu-Ray, bluelight laser DVDs, as a storage media. The proposed MPEG-4 usage means that the discs will stay in exact same format as they're now, using red light laser and 9GB / side (dual layer) DVD discs.

Even that DVD Forum decided that MPEG-4 w/ red laser is the standard for HD-DVD, its not sure that it will be also in "real life". If Blu-Ray devices gain enough popularity and achieve big portion of the markets before we see even a single MPEG-4 capable traditional DVD player, it is pretty clear that Blu-Ray has to be taken seriously also in read-only world (Blu-Ray is originally intended for recording markets).

CenterSpan Communications tols this week that it has signed an agreement with Sony to use Sony's content in its P2P music network. CenterSpan agreed to pay $2M in cash plus 283,556 shares to Sony for the licensing. Sony also has an option to purchase more shares later.

CenterSpan's P2P network is based on assets it bought from bancrupt Scour, including Scour's Scour Exchange P2P network, back in 2000. Its P2P network only allows distribution of legal files and CenterSpan has tried to find ISPs and other partners who would start offering its service for their customers.