News archive (4 / 2002)

Independent Webcasters plan to cut their music streams on Wednesday to protest a proposed royalty fee. The fee, proposed by Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP), would effectively force all Webcasters to shut down their services for good. The proposed rates are 0.14 cents per listener per song, and 0.07 cents per song for streaming a regular over-the-air broadcast on the Net. That is, however, much more than what the revenues for online music services currently are.

"Webcasters are angry that CARP would charge them on a per-stream basis, rather than as a percentage of revenues," said Susan Kevorkian, a research analyst at IDC, a Framingham, Mass.-based research firm. "The latter is generally thought to be more of a fair approach."

Currently the expenses for running a radio on the Net are easily greater than the advertising and/or subscription income, so there might be no revenues at all for some services.

Gateway and Vivendi-owned EMusic have joined forces to promote EMusic's MP3 subscription service.

Companies will jointly promote a trial where users get 30 days free usage and upto 100 free MP3s from EMusic's collection of more than 200,000 music files. Users are also allowed to keep their music, unlike in most of the rival subscription services where music is basically streamed from the Net instead of downloading the music physically to user's HDD.

Just recently Gateway launched a big advertisement campaign in the U.S. to oppose goverment's plans to introduce mandatory hardware copy-protection system for all digital devices sold in the U.S. On the other hand, music industry has been one of the biggest supporters of the proposed bill, which makes the joint promotion with Gateway and Vivendi kinda weird marriage.

According to Reuters, Fox Entertainment has decided to pull away from its joint online video venture, Movies.com, which it was planning with Walt Disney. Yet again studios fail to see the fact that users would pay, if the content would be available.

Fox says that its decision was made "after considering the potential regulatory process and logistical issues and carefully examining technological and marketplace developments."

Disney is now left all alone with its Movies.com site and company declined to comment will it carry on with its plan to start delivering movies to online users. Five other major Hollywood studios have announced that they will go ahead with their online venture, dubbed as MovieLink.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association wants the California Supreme Court to overturn a ruling by which an Indiana resident could be tried in California, even though the only contact the resident has had with California has been via the Internet. Matthew Pavlovich was sued by the DVD Copy Control Association for distributing the DeCSS code. According to DVD CCA the postings of Matheww Pavlovich, and dozens of other people also sued, violated the California's trade secret law.

"If allowed to stand, this decision would create universal jurisdiction in California for any person or company that publishes a Web site on the Internet," CCIA Chief Executive Ed Black said in a statement. CCIA has filed a brief supporting Pavlovich's cause. Pavlovich himself has also appealed earlier, arguing a violation of the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The world-wide nature of the Internet has put the current legislation into quite a test. We'll see what happens.

Do you remember the golden old days of vinyl LPs? Remember the rumours and claims that some LPs have hidden messages that you can hear if you rotate the album backwards. Well, it seems like that modern digitally recorded music brings these hidden messages to a whole new level.

It has been recently discovered that some Aphex Twin songs have hidden images that you can see by viewing the spectrogram of sound signal with a sound file editor/analyser software. Folks, this is a must see!

HydrogenAudio.org

Technology industry announced this week that they're almost completed tech specs for digital TV copy-protection mechanism. Basically the copy-protection mechanism adds a "broadcast flag" or a digitally inserted watermark to the video that DTV recorders would recognize and block the recording of the show if necessary.

Mechanism is similiar to the Macrovision signal found from almost all commercially sold VHS tapes and DVDs that recorders need to recognize and block the recording if available in the video signal.

Tech companies are going to introduce the mechanism for U.S. Congress committee in May 17th and are hopeful that their own efforts would eventually block the proposed government-controlled copy protection mechanism.

Australian-based KaZaA, owned by Sharman Networks, announced that it will offer a paid subscription model for users who want to use the software without seeing any ads. Meanwhile company also signed a deal with world's biggest ad network, DoubleClick, to sell their advertisement space through the ad giant.

KaZaA has added various "features" recently, including virus/trojan-like spyware bundles, advertising spyware and other nasty stuff which has lead CNet's Download.com to remove the software from its software archive where it used to gather millions of downloads monthly.

Annoyed by the spyware and other crap Sharman has added to the once-mighty KaZaA, bunch of hackers have created spyware-free version of the tool called KaZaA Lite which ultimately is the same software, just all the advertisement features removed from it. Now KaZaA says that they're preparing to send cease-and-desist letters to those sites distributing the software (we were suspecting something like this and refused to add the software to our site) which has so far gathered nice 100k+ downloads from the semi-official KaZaA Lite site.

RealNetworks is introducing on Wednesday a new version of its video compression technology that is aimed at improving choppy video broadcasts delivered over dial-up modems to the Internet.

RealVideo 9 is the latest iteration of RealNetworks' audio and video compression technology, used by Web publishers to store and send large files such as movie clips, newscasts or DVDs over the Internet to the PC. RealNetworks said the technology improves the compression rates of its RealVideo 8 technology by 30 percent, making it about 30 percent less expensive for Web publishers to deliver audio and video files.

The 30% increase in compression sounds quite optimistic, but Real’s product definitely needed an update. I am using a 512mb TV cable modem and I can’t say that my web video broadcast experiences have been that good. I really wonder who actually bothers to watch any video broadcasts with regular modem technology?

News.com

Small upstart company called 321 Studios filed a lawsuit in San Fransisco yesterday asking federal court to decide whether its software bundle DVD Copy Plus violates American DMCA law or not.

"This lawsuit involves the ability of a small Internet company to market and sell an instruction manual and bundled computer software that teaches legal owners of DVD movies to make legitimate backup copies of the contents of a DVD for their own personal use," the suit states.

According to the suit, MPAA has threatened to sue the company for violating DMCA law, so company is basically taking the first step in the game.

The case's moral is hard one for us, dear DVD enthustiasts, since what I've understood, company basically sells guide package bundled with free software such as freely available DVD rippers. I assume that company doesn't have asked any rights to distribute these tools. But then again, if the company wins its case, it means celebration for DVD freaks, free speech and consumer fair rights, because it would also legalize providing information and tools to backup your legally owned DVDs -- exactly what our site and plenty of other similiar sites do, freely.

In a response to last week's announcement from Microsoft to cut Xbox prices, Nintendo today announced they would alsobe be cutting the price of their rival console GameCube in Europe - even before it has hit the shelves!

The pre-launch cut was about twenty-five percent, which means a drop from 250€ to 199€. That makes the GameCube retail 100€ less than Xbox and Playstation 2.

Nintendo said the cut was made because of improved production economics, and a will to let the consumers take advantage of the reduced production costs. Its rather evident that Sony would be capable of a similar cut, since PS2 has been in production for quite a long time now, and has gone through several improvements in both chip design, and production efficiency.

Maybe we'll see PS2 at 250€ next week? Whatever happens, it's definitely nice to see that we, the consumers, get the best of both worlds in this duel - high-quality consoles at reasonable prices.

Source:
News.com

I just discovered a new and a very nice way to decode (watch) your DivX movies. It's a DirectShow filter FFDSHOW.

ffdshow is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DIVX movies. It uses libavcodec from ffmpeg project for video decompression, postprocessing code from mplayer to enhance visual quality of low bitrate movies, and is based on original DirectShow filter from XviD, which is GPL'ed educational implementation of MPEG4 encoder.
Features

- fast video decompression using optimized MMX, SSE and 3DNow! code
- support for different codecs: XviD and all DIVX versions
- image postprocessing for higher playback quality
- automatic quality control: automatically reduces postprocessing level when CPU load is high
- hue, saturation and luminance correction
- experimental sharpening filter
- noising (of course if you want it)
- presets
- completely free software: ffdshow is distributed under GPL

First of all, the FFDSHOW seems to consume less CPU power than original DivX codecs, even with maximum post-processing. At the same time the post-processing seems to give excellent quality results and allows more configuring than the original DivX 5 codec. It can even automaticly reduce post-processing if your CPU is getting overloaded. The noise filter adds a kind of a rasterising effect to the picture - might be useful in some cases.

Ok, just after we announced that two very popular tools (Streambox VCR and TMPGEnc 12a) will be removed from our site, I have to announce more sad news to you, our dear users.

We have operated our MP3 player skin section for over three years now and it has been fairly successful project, gaining almost 400,000 downloads over three year period. Now, the method how we have added our skins, has raised anger among some skin authors and we have received some very annoying forum posts (like this one) and even more annoying emails from selected "members of skin community" demanding to take their skins off from our site.

And to be honest, I feel kinda sad because of this -- those "artists" hand out their skins for public domain and we add them to our site, selecting the best skins, which eventually gets additional exposure to their "talents" -- 600,000 additional eyeballs a month shouldn't be too bad. And now they demand explanations why we add their skins to our site. Geez.

So, the thing is this:

I'm personally fed up with these so-called artists who offer their work for public and when we offer more exposure to their work through our site without demanding any contribution or effort from them, still giving them proper credits next to each skin what we offer, they complain and threat our site with legal action.

After receiving tons of whiny letters from our users that pictures are overlapping the text in our articles and guides, I finally decided to solve this issue. The problem itself is not our fault, it's your browser's/screen settings fault, dear users -- no one seriously believes that you can do video editing work using 800x600 screen resolution. Seriously? The bug is that IE and NS4 don't render aligned images correctly when using small screen resolution and therefor parts of the text are covered with pictures.

Anyway, now each article has a link in top of it saying "click here if you have probs with pics" or something like that. Clicking it removes left and right borders from the page so that the article has more screen space to use.

Princeton, NJ - April 16, 2002 - The number of DVDs replicated in North America will surpass the one-billion mark later this year, marking the fastest time in which a recording media format went from introduction to one-billion units per year, according to data released today by the International Recording Media Association (IRMA), a trade group representing the world's media manufacturers and suppliers.


DVD's appeal has been almost instantaneous. Just two months after its introduction in 1997, more than 1-million units had been produced. By the end of that first year, more than 12-million units were replicated. By 2001, the number of DVDs produced neared the half-billion (460,000,000) mark. This year, IRMA projects DVD production to increase 120 percent over last year, pushing it over the one-billion-units-per-year milestone faster than any other format.

Recordingmedia.org

After an extremely slow start to the sales of the Xbox in Europe, Microsoft has decided to cut the price of the console dramatically.

"At 6.00am today, we'll be reducing the price of the Xbox to 299€, £199, effective from April 26," said Chris Lewis, UK divisional director for Xbox retail. "There are no announcements, or any plans to make price changes elsewhere. It is a European-only announcement at this stage."

The reduction is almost 50% from the current price of the Xbox. Already at the original price the consoles cost more for Microsoft to manufacture than what they get per unit sold. That only goes to show how eager Microsoft is in it's effort conquer the console markets before the third big name, Nintendo, introduces its Gamecube in Europe.

Those who have already bought the console at the higher price will, luckily, be compensated. Anyone who already has an Xbox, or buys one before April 25th, will receive two free games and a free controller. A very nice gesture from Microsoft which should keep the early supporters of Xbox happy.

Source:
Computer and Video Games

FullAudio finally managed to launch their long-anticipated online music subscription service today. FullAudio's music download service is available through Clear Channel's radio station websites.

Clear Channel is the biggest U.S. radio network, owning 1200 radio stations and syndicating content to additional 7800 radio stations across North America. FullAudio hopes that radio listeners stay faithful to their favorite radio station brand and join the subscription service as well.

FullAudio's service offers music from three major record labels, just like MusicNet and Pressplay -- major record label-backed subscription services -- do. FullAudio's service is slightly different from other subscription services (Pressplay, MusicNet and Listen.com's Rhapsody) which are all more or less focused on streaming the audio -- FullAudio's service is a download-based model, priced by the number of tracks users are allowed to download each month. 50-downloads-a-month service costs $7.49, but the tracks can't be burned to CD or transferred to portable digital music players.

Listen.com said that its online music service Rhapsody will soon allow users to burn certain amount of music to CD in addition to stream and download the music from the service.

Unfortunately the deal will only cover Rhapsody's classical music selection from Naxos -- the major record label content will be still out of reach for users who wish to burn that kind of music to CD legally from the Net. Listen.com says that it is negotiating with other record labels to add the CD burning option for those labels' music as well.

Rhapsody's main rivals are MusicNet, which doesn't allow music to be burned or transferred to digital audio players, and Pressplay, which allows limited amount of tracks a month to be burned to CD.

With millions of Internet users downloading all manners of music, from Abba to Eminem, on free rogue services, observers warn that teenagers and twenty-somethings are growing accustomed to seeking pirated versions before venturing into record shops. "You have an entire generation of people thinking content should be available for free, and that's just not a sustainable long-term business model for the labels," said Hank Forsyth, media analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.

The IFPI recently put a value of $4.2 billion on pirated music activities in 2001. In 2000, the industry was hit by the worst year on record when world sales of recorded music fell five percent to $37 billion.

Yahoo! News

Philips and BenQ today announced they will be working together on developing next-generation optical storage products. At first the co-operation will focus on DVD+RW technology.

The development process is broke down quite nicely between Philips and BenQ: while Philips focuses on developing new innovations and concepts, BenQ takes existing technologies and makes them better, faster, and cheaper to manufacture. You could say that Philips is the artist in the process, while BenQ is the code-slave doing all the dirty, but vital work.

For us, the consumers, there's much to cheer about in this deal. Who wouldn't mind seeing drives get faster sooner, and the prices dropping? Not me! Great things happen when companies can focus on doing what they are best at.

The Ogg Vorbis project to create a fully open, licence-free alternative to the MP3 format got a boost on Thursday with the release of the first Ogg player for a handheld device.

A firm called TheKompany, which makes Linux desktop tools and developer applications, released tkcPlayer for Sharp's Linux-based Zaurus handheld computer. TkcPlayer also handles MP3 files, and includes features like filtering by different song attributes and playlist management. The Zaurus will launch in the UK next week.

Source: ZDNet

Sony announced today that it will drop its lawsuit against Apex, small DVD manufacturer. Sony filed the suit in end of March and it was widely reported in public in this week.

Now Sony says that Apex and its parent company United Delta Inc. have agreed to pay $5 or 3.5% of the wholesale price per unit for Sony, Philips and Pioneer in DVD technology licensing fees.

During the last half of 2001, Apex gained an almost unbelievable 20 per cent share of the American DVD player market in terms of sold units. Sony claims that this was achieved by illegal means -- by not paying DVD technology licensing fees to the patent holders and therefore achieving a cheaper retail price.

In its on-going effort to cut costs, Napster announced another round of layoffs today. The company laid off 30 employees, or appx. 30 per cent of its workforce.

Last month the company postponed the launch its legal service -yet again - stating that it is still trying to negotiate with major record labels to achieve reasonable licensing deals with them.

Microsoft finally decided which recordable DVD format it will support in its next Windows version and announced that its choice for future recordable media is DVD+RW. DVD+RW is a format backed heavily by HP and Philips -- meanwhile its competitor, DVD-R/DVD-RW camp is backed by Compaq, Pioneer and Apple.

Definately Microsoft's decision is just hype in technical sense -- Windows doesn't "support" any blank recordable media now. What Microsoft's announcement means is that their next Windows version will have integrated DVD+RW burning application within the operating system. DVD-R and DVD+RW will both work just fine in all upcoming Windows versions.

Sony announced today that they have sued California-based DVD player manufacturer Apex over patent infringement. Sony holds joint licenses with Philips and Pioneer to DVD technology and has asked small DVD player manufacturers to pay licensing fees for their players.

Sony has asked manufacturer to pay either 3,5% of the device's wholesale price or $5 per unit for licensing fees. The Japanese consumer electronics giant filed the case at the Southern New York district court on 26th of March. Sony says that it can still agree the case outside courtroom if Apex is willing to negotiate.

Source: Reuters

Japanese file-swapping service, File Rogue, got blocked by a Japanese court on Tuesday. Tokyo District Court said that the service is responsible for the files users swap through its service because company can administer the service on certain level.

Decision was a first one given in Japan that relates to P2P services. It is not known yet whether the company MMO Japan Ltd, who operates the service, will appeal the decision or not.

United States' fourth biggest PC manufacturer Gateway is campaigning against proposed copyright protection bill, dubbed as CBDTPA, which would ultimately restrict lots of legal usage of digital devices as well.

Gateway will launch a TV and radio ad campaign that will ask users to visit its website, download some free music from its site and learn more about the proposed bill. TV campaign will be shown on NBC's Nightly News and on NBC's youth-oriented shows.

A Gateway spokesman said that the company is about the restrictions it would place and fears that it would limit consumers' fair use rights. Obviously company is also worried that if the bill becomes a law, users would stick with their old computers which don't have hardware restrictions instead of upgrading their computer regularly like they do now.

"We feel like there's a lack of awareness about this pending legislation," said Brad Williams, director of communications at Gateway.

Whatever Gateway's reasons are, I suggest that you will show some support and visit their website gateway.com now.

New York-based On2 which develops its own video encoding routines has fired an attack against universal MPEG-4 licensing, organized by MPEG LA.

Company has sent letters to Department Of Justice to see if the joint licensing MPEG LA is proposing for MPEG-4 patents, is anti-competitive. Company basically fears that if the joint licensing is approved by industry giants like Apple, it will practically kill the company. If On2 manages to win its claims, it would eventually render MPEG-4 technology almost useless for most of the companies, because there are too many parties involved who own patents related to MPEG-4 technology.

MPEG LA is an organization which has been licensing MPEG-2 patents for companies who wish to include MPEG-2 encoding or decoding routines to their products. Such products include DVD players, software encoders, hardware encoders, DVD decoder cards, digital TV boxes, TV broadcasting equipment, etc.

Problem in MPEG technology licensing is really the fact that there are at least dozen companies holding key patents for MPEG-2 format and more than 20 who hold key patents for MPEG-4 (and even more who hold non-critical patents) -- MPEG LA has developed a one-stop licensing contract, so the licensees don't need to negotiate with each patent holder separately.

Everyone seems to be looking forward in seeing Microsoft actually fail, or outperformed by a competitor. The Register now speculates that Xbox may not reach it’s target sales of 4.5 – 6 million units world wide by the end of June.

If they're right, then Xbox is probably confirming to the classic Microsoft consumer sales profile. The company is generally extremely good at hyping a product at the start, and getting retailers fired-up and stuffed with stock, but tends not to be able to sustain the momentum achieved over the first couple of weeks. When it comes to Windows, of course, this is easily masked by 'sales' obtained via the OEM franchise, which is most of them.

The Register

American company, Integrated Information Systems Inc, has settled its legal problem with RIAA and has agreed to pay one million dollars in damages to RIAA.

Company had a dedicated fileserver for its employees to share and listen MP3s in its internal network. The server was never accessible outside company's own network, but it still violated copyright laws, allowing company employees without original copy of the music to listen the tracks.

"This sends a clear message that there are consequences if companies allow their resources to further copyright infringement," said Matt Oppenheim, RIAA Senior Vice President, Business and Legal Affairs.

A new batch of compact discs designed to defeat Napster-style piracy is coming soon to record-industry insiders. BMG, one of the world's five major labels, said on Monday it would start issuing promotional CDs -- the free discs distributed to critics, retailers and other insiders weeks before the official release -- with technological countermeasures to prevent copying.

The major labels, which include Vivendi Universal, Sony Music, EMI Group, AOL Time Warner's Warner Music and Bertelsmann AG's BMG, hope that copy protection measures will prevent users from "ripping," or copying the music into the easily traded MP3 format.

"The first benefit of doing promos and advances is to get feedback on the technology," said Kevin Clement, BMG's senior director of new media. "And we would hope this technology will stop the records from leaking early to the public."

BMG says that they ship the protected CDs to industry insiders in order to get feedback. At the same time they talk about releases which have leaked to the Internet before the official release. Where are these pre-release MP3s coming from? You guessed right – they must originate from the insiders. Perhaps BMG is tryig to block their leaks rather than get feedback.

As it was recently discovered, the Kazaa Peer-To-Peer (P2P) file sharing application has for some time carried the core of another stealth P2P, without informing the user about it’s existence.

The file-swapping program and its parent company, Sharman Networks, say file-traders' machines could be used to host and distribute other companies' content. But some Kazaa users are concerned that the added software will violate their privacy.

Distribute other companies’ content? Sounds like spyware to me. The CEO of Kazaa/Sharman Networks defends their new stealthy technology with compensations to end users.

Bermeister said in an interview Monday that Altnet would get people's permission before using their computers. When the network is activated, a pop-up box will appear and ask if the computer user wants to participate. Those who do participate will be compensated, possibly with gift certificates or free videos, he said.

News.com follows the issue closely and has a great roundup on the events so far, including a video interview of the Kazaa CEO. They also have a guide to uninstalling the hidden technology within Kazaa.

News.com Kazaa roundup

In an interview published in Die Welt on Friday Bertelsmann's chief executive officer Thomas Middelhoff commented about buying out Napster completely. "We are looking into completely taking over Napster," Middelhoff said. "We want to buy out the original shareholders, and have made them an offer, because we believe that our strategy is the right one for the future of the company."

What exactly that strategy is, remains to be seen. Whatever it is, it's something Shawn Fanning, the founder of Napster, as well as the other original shareholders, are against.

Source:
Die Welt

WriteCD-RW!(TM) Pro v3.0 for MS Windows supports Mt. Rainier class CD-RW drives with a drag & drop interface, defect management, background formatting, disk repair, file recovery, and a reader for CD-ROM, DVD-ROM and CD-RW drives.

Software Architects, Inc. (SAI) announced today the release of WriteCD-RW! Pro(TM) version 3.0 for MS Windows(TM)XP. WriteCD-RW! Pro is the first software in the world that formats, reads and writes discs in the new ``Mt. Rainier'' Format (also called ``Easy Write'' format) drives. The software also provides ``drive letter access'' read/write support for standard CD-RW drives.

Mt. Rainier specification CD-RW drives are now shipping from several manufacturers. This new specification is expected to be adopted by most PC manufacturers during 2002.

Yahoo!

CenDyne, Inc. today introduces its new ground-breaking DVD/CD Burner for recording any type of video, photography, music or data onto DVD-R, DVD-RW, CD-R and CD-RW media. The fast, highly reliable new drive is the most complete choice for consumers who want a single-source solution for recording. Plus, the drive burns discs that are compatible with standard DVD formats, so that movies and photography stored on DVD media can be viewed on a wide range of home DVD players and other DVD burners.

The drive will come with Sonic MyDVD software and the suggested manufacturer's retail price will be 499$.

Yahoo!Finance

Bloomberg have picked up on what we all suspected already, reporting that the Xbox has fallen short of its sales targets in both Europe and Japan. Sales in Japan slumped to around 10,000 units a week by its third week on sale there, meaning that the initial shipment of 250,000 Xboxes which were sent to Japan on February 22nd almost certainly haven't all been sold yet, a month on from the console's launch. And while European numbers still aren't being given out, it is obvious that things haven't gone as well as Microsoft had hoped in many countries on this side of the pond.

Eurogamer.net