XviD development team announced on Tuesday that their very first public version of XviD libraries is out.
For Joe Average this doesn't mean actually very much, since there has been various binary builds of XviD available for a very long time, such as Koepi's Windows binary, but it means that now XviD developers are confident enough about their open-source MPEG-4 encoder that they've released it out in public.
CDCovers.cc, world's largest CD cover site, announced yesterday that they have been forced to take down all of their audio CD covers.
Quote from their site:
The money hungry people at the RIAA / IFPI have made it very clear that they don't want us to host audio covers anymore. It’s all about money folks and although we are a profit free organization that runs on voluntary basis those scumbags don’t give up and want to shut us down through threatening our host.
It’s been a great adventure but we cannot afford this anymore. Therefore we have decided to take the audio section offline for good. Thank you all for your support for the past 3 years.
Please don't mail us for any covers - we've deleted all the artwork. It's gone for good.
After months of negotiations, public outcries and protests from media companies, MPEG LA finally released its licensing contract for MPEG-4 video (including Simple Profile and Advanced Simple Profile).
The licensing contract is pretty much the same what consortium proposed in July after modifications were made to the original proposal introduced in spring that caused Apple to delay release of its latest QuickTime player and angry protests from various other technology and media companies.
The license has set fees for software and hardware encoders and decoders and MPEG-4 Industry Forum hopes that now when the licenses are available, companies would start using the technology more widely. The general public has used the MPEG-4 for a long time now -- DivX is basically just an MPEG-4 encoder and nothing else (and XviD is an MPEG-4 encoder as well) -- but now we will probably start seeing more advanced commercial usage for the technology.
Today slightly mixed information about new Laserlock products have been published. The Laserlock website gives information about Laserlock STAR-protection scheme.
Laserlock STAR is:
- uncrackable, with no Generic Cracks
- Virtually 100% resistant agaist the latest, advanced copying software and the devices of the global market
- the most compatible copy protection system worldwide (CD-Rom and DVD-Rom drives)
- Totally transparent to replicators and end-users, no passwords, no extra devices.
- Of low cost and hight efficiency.
But the CDFreaks also publish new information, appartently an email from the general director of Laserlock. The letter talks about Laserlock MARATHON and also makes a statement that Laserlock will enter the audio protection market.
Please be informed that on the 25th of November MLS Laserlock releases its NEW VERSION for CD-Rom protection called "MARATHON".
The new version is not only the strongest and most compatible in the market, but most effective against copying software like: Clone CD, Easy CD Creator, Nero, CD-R WIN, Win on CD, Blind Read Blind Write and others… too.
According to a CEO of Ritek, a blank media manufacturer, the demand of blank recordable DVD media will grow over 200% at 2003 from this year's appx. 100M units.
Ritek estimates that in 2003, there will be over 320 million blank discs sold worldwide, DVD-R being the leader with appx. 160 million units sold, while other formats; DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM; will sell appx. 40M units each.
Lik Sang today announced that Lik-Sang.com will be taken over by a fresh company in order to concentrate on winning the lawsuit against Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft.
"Just a few days after having received High Court Orders not allowing us to sell Mod Chip products for the Playstation 2 and Flash Linker products for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance, Lik Sang realized that the powers of those three multi-billion dollar corporations are simply infinite compared to the budgets and resources businesses like Lik Sang have available. Their legal actions have been hurting our customers and our business a lot in the last couple of weeks, so that we have finally decided to let somebody else take over Lik-Sang.com and solely concentrate on the lawsuit", says Alex Kampl, Director of Lik Sang International Limited. "By allowing the new international team to take over, Lik-Sang.com will remain the place you trusted before."
After Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft filed lawsuits against Lik Sang International Limited and it's Directors in the High Court of Hong Kong alleging Copyright Infringement (for selling so-called Mod Chips) by mid September, the situation is much clearer by now. Lik Sang has been working with international specialists and is about to file strong defense for a long trial. A detailed strategy will be announced in due course.
RIAA has filed a motion on this week asking the U.S. District Court to find that Madster is in comtempt of the court order which ordered Madster to filter all illegal songs from its P2P network.
RIAA hopes that court appoints a compliance officer who would effectively shut down the P2P service for good. Madster continued to advertise its $4.95 monthly membership pass despite the court order earlier this year.
The trial against FastTrack-based P2P operators, MusicCity's Morpheus, Grokster and Sharman Networks' Kazaa was hit with a legal dilemma on this week. Sharman Network claims that U.S. companies can't sue it in U.S. courts because it doesn't have virtually any interests in the States.
Sharman Networks is incorporated in small island just outside Australia, called Vanuatu. Company itself operates from Australia and operates all of its servers in various countries, but not in the United States. Now the judge has to decide whether U.S. entertainment industry has any powers to even sue the company. The case might prove to be a useful example on how the international laws will be applied in the future -- it is clear that if judge allows U.S. companies to sue in the U.S., that other countries will adopt the system and will start sueing American companies in their own countries as well. Now, all American porn operators, please remember that virtually all muslim countries ban nudity -- you're gonna get sued. Or New York Times and their anti-communist ideas -- welcome to People's Republic of China, you've been just sued. Or any companies allowing to distribute Nazi memorabilia or show Nazi symbols -- you can be sued in France, Germany or various other European countries. Now, judge. Are you really, really sure you want to bow and give Big Companies the power in this particular case, hm?-)
Napster's remaining assets -- namely the physical valuables -- will be auctioned off in December by an auctioning company DoveBid.
Roxio who earlier this month agreed to buy Napster, only bought the intellectual property, not the remaining assets. Now there are desktop computers, servers and obviously tons of Napster memorabilia, such as caps, shirts, etc available for interested bidders. Dovebid has handled famous dotcom bust auctions earlier as well -- its clientele includes Excite@Home and Webvan.
The MPEG-4 organization will be voting in March on whether to make AACPlus part of the evolving MPEG-4 audio standard family. AACPlus is based on technology developed by Coding TechnologiesMP3Pro.
AAC is the latest accepted portion of the MPEG-4 standard family. AACPlus aims to accomplish the same level of quality as its counterpart, but in half the size. It is especially useful in mobile devices, such as cellular phones, where bandwidth is at premium.
World's largest record label, Universal Music Group, announced today that it will start offering downloadable tracks and albums from its music catalog through 25 online retailers.
Label, owned by French Vivendi Universal, will use Liquid Audio as its format and users who download tracks will be able to burn the music to CDs and transfer downloaded tracks to portable media players that support Liquid Audio (very few "MP3 players" support Liquid Audio..).
Each track will cost $0.99 and full albums will cost $9.99, making the downloaded version of a CD slightly cheaper than that bought as a physical CD. Universal said it was kicking off the initiative by making the new single from Mariah Carey available online before the release of her upcoming album.
DVD6C, a consortium that owns the key patents related to the DVD Forum approved technologies, such as DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM and DVD-Audio, announced yesterday that it expects to start global licensing for its patents by 1st of January, 2003.
Patent owners in the consortium are AOL TimeWarner, Hitachi, IBM, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Toshiba and JVC. DVD6C offers a one-stop licensing for companies willing to use the DVD patents owned by its member companies. Consortium also announced the licensing fees for various products.
The licensing price for DVD-R/RW/RAM media will be $0.075 per disc or 4% of the net selling price, whichever is greater. For DVD recorders -- both PC drives and stand-alone recorders -- the licensing fees will be 4% of the net selling price or $6.00, whichever is greater. The consortium also happens to hold the patents to DVD-Video and DVD-ROM discs and the licensing fees for these are $0.065 per disc.
DVD6C also set the new licensing fees for DVD-Video encoders and read-only DVD players and DVD-ROM drives -- all of those products are licensed by DVD6C. The group hopes that by clarifying the licensing fees it can finally crush the competition coming from the Philips-led DVD+RW Alliance.
I am sure that many of you have read articles about CD-Rs exploding at ultra-high speeds. As Maxell introduces their 48x, they also give a statement about 52x being too high - it's too risky with minimal benefits. Recently CD-R drive manufacturer Plextor gave similar opinions on the maximum CD-R speed.
With its 48X product introduction, Maxell is joining with other CD industry leaders such as Sony, Yamaha and Plextor in adopting 48X as the new high-speed standard, as opposed to the 52X benchmark, because of reliability concerns at the higher speed. Maxell engineers determined that the minimal speed advantage offered by 52X drives is outweighed by the performance and safety issues of operating CD-R media in excess of 10,000 rpm. Research has shown that naturally occurring minute defects or cracks in the CD-R hub area can quickly expand when exposed to the physical stresses of 52X operations. These small, virtually undetectable defects can easily cause discs to break apart at 52X speed, destroying not only critical data stored on the CD-R media, but potentially damaging or destroying the CD drive.
"The 48X standard offers customers outstanding performance without the risks associated with 52X speeds," said Dawn Wortman, senior marketing manager at Maxell. "Our 48X media is the latest example of Maxell's commitment to increasing customer value with continual leading-edge product enhancements for CD-R, DVD and mid-range tape applications, while maintaining the utmost in reliability."
With there release of Robbie Williams' new album Escapology about to hit the stores, people are turning their eyes to Peer-To-Peer networks, such as KaZaA, to get their hands on the music before it's released. The album can be found quite easily, but the contents of the tracks might not be what the listeners are looking for.
Many of the tracks found appear, infact, to be decoys. The songs start to play as you'd expect them to, but after awhile to song fades to silence. And since people often share music without listening to the tracks first, the broken songs are spread to thousands of users.
Record labels have been planting P2P networks with bogus tracks for quite some time now. They are hoping to discourage people from downloading music. According to their reasoning, if people can't download the tracks, they will buy the album.
No representative from EMI, Williams' record label, could be reached for comments.
AOL launched today its latest multimedia service, called Broadband Radio@AOL, which as its name suggests, provides high-quality net radio to AOL's broadband users.
The launch itself, which aims to boost AOL's broadband userbase, is not as important as the technology that the service uses. AOL has been in the past one of the biggest customers of RealNetworks and continues to use Real's servers to deliver its narrowband Radio@AOL service and various other multimedia products. But the new service uses technology that has been dubbed as Ultravox and has been developed by AOL's own programmers, including the humble guys of Nullsoft(developers of WinAMP and ShoutCast). According to industry rumours, the Ultravox technology offers massive increase in number of streams it can deliver from one server compared to any other commercial product.
There has been alot of discussion and speculation on the future of both magnetic and optical storage media in the recent years. Researchers are continuosly looking for new ways to store more data in smaller space. One of the most promising concepts has been so called 3D optical storage. Dual layer DVDs are sort of a 3D storage medium already - you can access two different data from one point on the disc by adjusting the focus of the laser beam. Imagine how much more data you could store, if you could had, say, 20 layers on one DVD.
Researchers at Boston College's Eugene F. Merkert Chemistry Center have done just that. They have developed a material on which they have been able to write several layers of data by modifying the intensity of the laser beam used for reading and writing. Using this method they have managed to create a CD-sized disk capable of storing 87 gigabytes of data - that's nineteen times more than a regular DVD-R holds (4.7GB).
"This all began when we were trying to do something completely different with the materials," said John Fourkas, a chemistry professor who led the research at Boston College's Eugene F. Merkert Chemistry Center. "It was by accident."
Roxio, the company behind Easy CD Creator, announced today that it will buy all Napster's assets for appx. $5.3M. Company will pay $5M in cash and appx. $350,000 in stock for Napster's assets that include Napster's domain name and trademarks.
Deal is still subject to U.S. bankruptcy court's approval which may delay the deal, but Roxio's reps said that both parties have agreed on price, so there shouldn't be any nasty surprises left. Roxio will buy all the assets, but is not assuming any of Napster's liabilities, including pending litigation.
Roxio's motivations are still slightly unclear, but the company has taken various steps towards media distribution during the last year or so. One such example is the fact that Roxio is one of the resellers of Pressplay, an online music subscription service. So, wild guess would be that Roxio will use Napster's name and domain to create a legal media distribution site based on its partners' media offerings.
Pressplay became the second online subscription service to have licensing deals with all five major record labels when it signed a licensing contract with Warner Music today.
First such service to get all five labels under its wraps was Listen.com's Rhapsody. Now the other major record label-owned subscription service, MusicNet, is losing the ground in the licensing competition -- it is missing licensing deals with two major labels (Pressplay's owners, Sony and Vivendi Universal..). Also, the second independent subscription service, FullAudio, is still missing one major record label.
Smaller and less known brands are now pushing DivX to out livingrooms. Earlier we saw the KiSS Techology's announcement of a such player, and now there is another one by a small start-up.
The device, dubbed Maestro DVX-1201, will operate like a standard home entertainment DVD player, except that it can also play computer file formats such as DivX and MPEG-4 for movies, MP3 and WMA (Windows Media Audio) for music and JPEG for images.
It will be the first product from start-up Neuston, a Singapore-based firm, and will be among the first DivX/MPEG-4-compatible players available anywhere. It is expected to be launched in January for under $350, said its marketing director
MusicMatch, company which is a developer of a well-known media player software of same name, has plans to launch an online music subscription service in December that would rival Pressplay, Rhapsody and MusicNet.
MusicMatch announced today that it has signed licensing deals with four (out of five) major record labels in order to use their material in its upcoming subscription service, dubbed as Artist On Demand. Company signed deals with BMG, TimeWarner, EMI and Vivendi Universal and is now only missing a deal with Sony.
The service will work -- at least in its initial phase -- only as a streaming service, with no option for downloads. The cost of the service will be $6.95 a month or $59.40 annually.
TDK announced that it will start shipping its new dual-format DVD writer, TDK Indi AID+040212, in December. Drive will be capable of burning both, DVD+R/W and DVD-R/W discs.
Drive will record DVD+R discs at 4x speed, DVD-R and DVD-RW discs at 2X speed and DVD+RW discs at 2.4X speed. Estimated retail price will be $349. Drive will compete against similiar products from Sony and NEC.
In a rather surprising move, DVD Forum(the authority which controls the development of the DVD standards), has chosen a technology by NEC and Toshiba to work as a blueprint for next generation blue-laser DVDs.
This is big setback for a Blu-Ray Consortium, a group of nine big consumer electronic companies, who launched their blue-laser specs earlier this year hoping that by uniting their forces they could avoid current situation where markets have two competing red-laser technologies, the "minus" and the "plus" formats. But now it seems that this will be exactly the same story with blue-laser recordable standards as well.
NEC-Toshiba model users 0.6mm cover layer disk system, similiar to those used currently in red-laser DVD discs, while Blu-Ray uses 0.1mm cover layer. Blu-Ray can store upto 27GB of data per side, but the NEC-Toshiba disc can hold only appx. 20GB per side.
Much delayed and anticipated launch of first commercial major movie studio-backed online movie service, Movielink, was finally launched today. Service offers pay-per-view type of movie rentals for U.S. broadband users who are willing to download the movie and watch it using their PCs.
Currently the service is really restricted to U.S. customers only, their website just gives an annoying apology if you access outside U.S. stating "Thank you for your interest in Movielink. We want you to take part in the powerful Internet movie rental experience that Movielink delivers, but it is presently unavailable to users outside of the United States."
Obviously the geographical limitation was relatively easy to circumvent by using anonymous proxies inside U.S. Next step what the site does is that it checks for user's configuration and tries to find either RealPlayer or Windows Media Player v7.1 or higher -- if this fails, site gives an error and offers download links for players. Service is also limited to Windows operating systems and requires IE5.0 or later as a webbrowser.
One movie rental costs between $2.99 and $4.99, depends on the movie and currently the site features appx. 200 movies, including some relatively big hits such as Resident Evil and Collateral Damage, but the big blockbusters that are being released on DVD right now, are still missing. Once the movie is downloaded (yes, it is not a streaming service), users have 30 days time to decide when they want to watch the movie. But once user decides to hit the play button, the timelimit shrinks to 24h window during which time they're allowed to watch the movie as many times as they want to.
Our contact at Yamaha informed us that they will be joining the DVD+RW alliance in the near future. According to our source Yamaha is about to introduce their DVD+RW drive in the next CeBIT, or atleast they hope to do so. The technical specifications of the drive have not been released yet.
NewScientist has an article, which makes us all video and DVD freaks cry because of its misuse of technical terms, but it has some interesting details about Macrovision usage in new DVD discs.
Several movie studios seem to push new DVD series out, dubbed as SuperBit, which seems to be rather ridiculous marketing method. Basically these discs are regular DVDs, just without all the goodies, such as extras, etc. Instead of the extras, discs were encoded using slightly higher bitrate, generally ranging between 4 and 8 MBit/sec (maximum videostream bitrate allowed on DVD specs is around 9.8MBit/sec). And how does this differ from regular DVD releases that generally speaking have average bitrate of 5-6MBit/sec? I have absolutely no idea.
But anyway, the point in here is the fact that these "SuperBit" discs don't have Macrovision copy protection. Macrovision is basically a dummy analog copy-protection that prevents VCR recording of the movie. All discs still contain all the other copy-protection methods, including the CSS (and those other copy-protection methods cannot be copied by normal humans, but they do require hackers -- according to the article ;-)).
CDRInfo.com has a review of Pioneer's latest DVD writer, Pioneer A05.
Their review findings weren't very surprising, only real cons in the drive were in copy-protected audio extraction and replication, which shouldn't be a big deal for most of the users anyway.
Only real annoyance is the fact that is happening secretly around the world nowadays -- virtually all new DVD drives, manufactured in 2002, are capped so that the DVD ripping can be done only at max 2x speed. Thanks to MPAA.. This holds true for virtually all major brand drives built in this year -- so, if you go and buy a DVD writer, don't throw your good olde DVD-ROM out of the window just yet, if you don't want to spend half an hour ripping a movie. But the drive itself seems to be rather nice, supporting 4x DVD-R burning (that's around 15mins per full DVD-R disc for you, who don't know anything about DVD writing speeds) and 2x DVD-RW burning.
The price of the retail package should be around €349 in Europe. The retail package includes one blank 4X DVD-R disc, one blank 2x DVD-RW disc, Sonic MyDVD, CinePlayer, VOB Instant CD/DVD v6.5, manuals and cables. The OEM price will be slightly lower (==just the drive).
Consumer privacy group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center(EPIC), has attacked against RIAA's and MPAA's intentions to force colleges and universities to monitor P2P usage.
Both, MPAA and RIAA, have sent letters out to American universities during the last couple of months, warning about illegal file trading of their students and demanding universities to monitor and block P2P use in their networks.
EPIC has sent its own letter to major universities warning about the monitoring, saying that monitoring students will chill the critical thinking and exploration.
According to EPIC, copyright owners' plans would "shift the burden to colleges and universities to devote scarce resources to monitoring online communications and to identifying and 'prosecuting' individuals suspected of using P2P networks to commit copyright violations."
Faced with adverse publicity to copy protection on CDs, a year ago Bertelsmann Music Group bravely gave in and promised to replace a clutch of Natalie Imbruglia CDs which were protected by Midbar's Cactus Data Shield. But a year is a long time, BMG is at it again, this time apparently set on applying copy protection to all its music products.
...
This is a clear commitment to 100 per cent copy protection, and once implemented will no doubt ease the workload of the various 'corrupt CD' identification sites considerably. Ah, but what if you have a problem playing the CD? "If you can't play the BMG product on your player please contact your dealer or the responsible person at BMG under (email address of the responsible person)."
We're sure it makes more sense in German. If you fill in the form and send it off to who knows where, this is what you get from the BMG Kopierschutz Team (typos left in):
"we are sorry you have troubles with our copy protection technology. The copy protection reacts on the special new technology that is build in in burners. Unfortunately htis technics was built in many new CD players, even if they can't copy a cd.
The copy protection yet does not recognize wheather that burner technics is build in a cd player or in a burner. That's why the cd playern might not play a copy protected CD. Since burner technics are also built in car radios, this may be the reason, why you can't listen to a copyprotected cd in your car.
Philips continues its efforts to make the "plus" format the dominant recordable DVD format over the "minus" camp (which is currently doing well with Pioneer's almost-legendary A03, A04 and A05 models).
Company has released reference design for PC DVD+RW drives that allows third party manufacturers to license the technology and -- if they wish -- basically just to copy the reference drive and put their own branding on it.
Philips released similiar reference player for home stand-alone DVD recorders in last month. Drive manufacturers are locked in a bitter fight over standards, where Philips, HP and Dell are supporting the "plus" drives (DVD+R and DVD+RW) and Pioneer, Apple and the official DVD Forum are supporting the "minus" standard (DVD-R and DVD-RW).
Two leading copy-protection technology companies announced Tuesday that they are merging, in a deal that could help speed the move of controversial copy-proof music CDs to market.
Macrovision, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based company, said it will acquire Israeli company Midbar Tech, with the intention of joining the rival anti-copying technologies from the two companies. Both companies' products have met resistance from consumers and record labels, and together they hope to overcome market skepticism, they say.
Analysts said the deal would likely help smooth some of the bumps in the path toward general acceptance of anti-piracy technology for music CDs, although the consolidation fell far short of a guarantee of success for the industry sector.
...
Over the last two years, at least four companies--Macrovision, Midbar Tech, Sony and start-up SunnComm--have tried to persuade record labels to add various flavors of anti-copying technology onto ordinary CDs. But after an initial flurry of excitement, consumer backlash and stories of technological incompatibilities with some CD players and computers have kept sightings of copy-protected discs few and far between.
...
Macrovision and Midbar say the merger will help address those worries. By melding the two companies' products, they hope to be able to improve compatibility with computers. The companies also promise that by next year CDs using their joint copy-protection technology will include two versions of songs--one for ordinary CD players, and one that can be loaded onto computer hard drives in much the same way that MP3s can be "ripped" or copied onto computers today. Listeners will not be able to make unrestricted copies of these alternate digital files, but the songs will be able to be transferred to mobile devices such as MP3 players and even burned onto CDs in a limited way, company executives said.
Listen.com signed a licensing agreement with German Bertelsmann Music Group today that allows Listen.com-owned Rhapsody's users to burn their downloaded tracks to CDRs.
The licensing agreement extends Rhapsody's number of tracks that users can burn to CDRs. Unfortunately the burning is not included in Rhapsody's monthly fees, but costs $0.99 a track making it only slightly cheaper than buying an actual CD.
The major Hollywood movie studios are finally getting serious about delivering movies over the Internet, but their performances still could end up on the cutting-room floor.Read more about movies online
Movielink--a joint venture among MGM, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros.--last week announced technology partnerships with Microsoft and RealNetworks to help power its movie-rental service on the Net, set to launch by December. The deals represent crucial final edits to a venture long overdue, and they lend credence to promises that the movie studios will open film vaults to widespread Internet distribution.
By offering a legal service, Movielink could also thwart online piracy of movies and help Hollywood evade "Napsterization"--that is, tumult like that which file-swapping site Napster let loose in the music business.
Definitely positive about this is that the movie industry seems to have learned something from the struggles in the music industry. Interesting though is that movie industry is avoiding napsterization even though swapping movies has been the next big thing for quite some time. Well, not in the extent of Napster, but that is due to bandwith limitations more than anything else.
According a study published by Business Software Alliance, Mississippi has the worst record of American states in software piracy in business. Nearly half (48.7 percent) of all business software used in the state is pirated.
New York tops the charts by being the "cleanest" state, BSA estimates that 11.9 percent of business software is pirated in there. BSA claims (and we all know that these claims are slightly boosted, whether it is software, movies or music) that pirated business software -- 25 percent of all business software used in the U.S. -- costs American economy $1.8 billion in retail sales and costs more than 100,000 jobs.
CDCovers.cc, world's largest CD cover site, announced yesterday that they have been forced to take down all of their audio CD covers.
Bankruptcy court OK's the sale of Napster's intellectual property to Roxio, ending the long story of the P2P pioneer.
