According to a report by market research firm iSuppli, the Chinese Enhanced Versatile Disc (EVD) will be facing quite a few obstacles before turning into a high definition format to be reckon with.
Competing HD formats, such as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, are about to enter the market -- both of which will probably prove to be worthy players in the field. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are both backed by consumer electronics giants while EVD has no such backing. Then again EVD can easily survive on domestic markets alone.
Another problem EVD will face is obtaining a subtantial catalog of movies to offer to the markets. It's quite difficult selling players to a market with little content. It is also uncertain whether or not EVD players will support HD-TV output. A high definition format without HD output would be quite silly.
One of the grocery chains that has tested selling EZ-D discs, disposable DVDs that is, in a trial launched by Disney and EZ-D technology developer, FlexPlay, has decided to stop selling the discs.
According to the Texas grocery chain, H-E-B's representative, the reason for dropping the idea was simply the lack of interest from consumers. "It just wasn't a good fit for us," she said. "It didn't turn out to be an item that our customers were looking for."
This shouldn't surprise anyone -- priced between $6 and $7 per disc, it is far cheaper to rent a movie from Blockbusters and even pay the late fee, if feeling bit lazy.
Obviously environmentalists cheered the news and hailed H-E-B's decision to drop selling the discs that are, even as an idea, an environmental disaster. Disney hasn't decided yet whether it extends its current trials with EZ-D discs to nationwide distribution.
A rebel group that boycotts the major record labels has come up with a neat way of making something good out of the upcoming promotion campaign by Pepsi that will be launched on February 1st during the Super Bowl.
In the promotion, Pepsi will hand out 100 million promotional iTunes downloads -- each Pepsi cap sold in States after February 1st, will have a 1:3 chance of winning a free iTunes download. Unfortunately, says the team behind the idea of TuneRecycler.com, this means ultimately a $65 million to major record labels unless something is done about it.
The Tune Recycler campaign is aimed at people who don't have any intention whatsoever to install iTunes even should they win a free download (or a hundred free songs, if you need bit more caffeine :-) by purchasing a bottle of Pepsi. Tune Recycler urges these people to send their winning code to Tune Recycler, which will then use the code to purchase music from independent record labels that are well-known for treating their artists and fans well (unlike most of the major record labels do).
A short quote from their site: "Every week or so, we'll be choosing independent artists and an album of theirs which we will repeatedly purchase using the donated codes (if we buy enough copies of a single album, we might be able to move it up the charts-- it's not too hard these days). All the artists will be from independent labels with reputations for treating artists fairly. Once we get started on February 1st, we'll list the artists [on our site]."
Two major Hollywood studios have filed separate lawsuits against the Hollywood actor, who they claim has leaked so-called screener copies of their movies to Internet. Warner Bros., a subsdiary of TimeWarner, sued several people, including the accused source of screener leaks, Hollywood actor Carmine Caridi, for leaking its recent movies "The Last Samurai" and "Mystic River".
According to Warner's lawsuit, Caridi received the screener copies of the movies from Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as he is a long-time member of the organization, and then handed them to electrician from Illinois, Russell Sprague, who then made digital copies of the movies and placed them available on the Net.
In its separate lawsuit, Columbia, a subsdiary of Sony, has also sued Caridi for leaking its movies "Something's Gotta Give" and "Big Fish" to Net.
Consumer electronics organization, The Multiband OFDM Alliance, has announced that they expect to finish standards of Ultra Wideband technology by end of May and expect to deliver first products by early 2005.
The technology allows transmitting much, much larger amounts of data than technologies such as Wireless LAN (even more than WLAN's -- or WiFi's -- upcoming versions that push the bandwidth to over 100Mbps), but within smaller range. Technology is aimed to deliver full TV-quality video and other data wirelessly from consumer electronic products to other consumer electronic products. Typical example being a DVD player that can send video directly to TV without any cables connecting two devices. Such applications for PCs to connect to VGA monitors do exist already and they typically use heavy video compression and 802.11b or 802.11g WiFi technologies, but can't handle in all the circumstances the amount of data that DVD playback requires. And the requirements are much higher for transmitting HDTV quality video that Japan and United States are rapidly shifting to use.
The Multiband OFDM Alliance members include world's largest cell phone manufacturer, Finnish Nokia, Japanese electronics giant Matsushita and American chip maker Texas Instruments.
The Blu-ray group is being investigated by the DoJ. Not much information is available, but the source indicates that the investigations relate to the actions of the Blu-ray group members that were also members of the DVD Forum, which elected the competing HD-DVD format over Blue-ray to be the next generation optical media. It has been suggested that the members of the Blue-ray group might have been co-operating in the DVD Forum in order to stall the development process of the HD-DVD.
The investigation is looking to determine whether the group's members potentially acted in concert to impede the technical progress of the DVD Forum, which has a competing high definition DVD format called HD-DVD.
The Forum approved HD-DVD over Blu-ray as the next-generation format to succeed the DVD format. The DVD Forum is a consortium of consumer electronics firms that was created to help facilitate the DVD specification, and all of the participants in the Blu-ray effort are Forum members. HD-DVD was developed by Toshiba and NEC and was originally known as AOD, or advanced optical disc.
Jon Lech Johansen who was acquitted of all charges twice by Norwegian courts is now looking for compensation from the economic crime unit of Norwegian police, Økokrim. For his four year endeavour with the lawsuit, Johansen is asking a compensation of almost NOK 150,000 ($21,800).
The implications of the case must have been huge on Johansen's life and future, so the demands are absolutely reasonable. Økokrim has not yet commented on the demands.
Sharman Networks, the company behind Kazaa P2P software, and Altnet can go ahead suing US entertainment industry, after Judge Stephen Wilson refused to dismiss Sharman's antitrust claims. Last summer Judge Wilsom dismissed Sharman's antitrust claims.
In his ruling, Judge Wilson acknowledged that Sharman Networks has every right to pursue its claims that the record label and motion picture plaintiffs in the lawsuit have infringed Sharman's copyrights. Unlike the plaintiffs' claims that third parties are infringing their copyrights, the court has ruled that Sharman may pursue its claim that these plaintiffs directly and through their agents infringed Sharman's copyrights. In addition, Sharman Networks can now also pursue its claims that the industry plaintiffs breached the End User License Agreement (EULA) for the Kazaa software by:
Using the Kazaa software to transmit and download spoofed or corrupted files.
Violating state and federal personal privacy laws and the rights of individual computer users by hacking and exploring files located on their computers.
Using the Kazaa Software's instant messenger functionality to send threatening messages to other users of Kazaa software.
The Sharman Networks have updated Kazaa in order to protect users from the recent MyDoom virus. The virus spreads mostly via email but can also utilize P2P-networks (Kazaa) for self distribution.
"Users of latest versions of Kazaa are protected against MyDoom and other viruses, provided they have enabled the built-in BullGuard antivirus feature which is updated with the most recent virus definitions," says Phil Morle, Director of Technology, Sharman Networks. "The BullGuard software is free to Kazaa users and enabled automatically when the Kazaa software is downloaded. It provides advanced virus protection for peer-to-peer use."
Prevention is always better than cure and by using this feature, Kazaa users are playing a role in stopping the spread of all viruses. This has the benefit of protecting the Fasttrack peer-to-peer network, which is also licensed by several other file sharing applications.
Justin Frankel, the founder of Nullsoft, company who developed the de facto MP3 player, WinAMP, has resigned from AOL, the parent company of the Nullsoft. Frankel, announced his resignation last Thursday via his online journal.
Frankel sold Nullsoft, the company he found, to AOL back in 1999 when the MP3 craze peaked and he was just 20 years old. He reportedly got over $100 million from the deal. One of the deal's requirements was that Frankel had to continue working for Nullsoft. Apparently the agreed time limit that he must work for AOL expired a while ago, but he agreed to continue working for AOL until the Nullsoft's latest media player, WinAMP 5, was finished. The product was launched in late December, 2003.
Despite selling his company to AOL and continuing to work for the media giant, Frankel didn't really get adjusted to the "corporate culture" and ran into problems with his bosses over the years. Most controversial clash happened in March, 2000 when Frankel released a P2P application called Gnutella without blessing from AOL. This was obviously a Bad Thing(tm) as AOL was just closing a deal to purchase TimeWarner, which also owned one of the world's largest record labels, Warner Music. The project was immediately shut down, but cat was already out of bag -- thousands and thousands of copies of the original client found their ways to other developers, who reverse-engineered the Gnutella protocol and developed the application further. Nowadays most of the smaller P2P vendors base their applications on variations of original Gnutella network.
We have just finished updating our DVD Shrink guide to match the current development stage. No major changes have been made, but the text and screenshots correspond to what you see in version 3.1.
Comments and feedback are always welcome! If you wish to help us out, and provide us with a guide, you can use our guide submission tool to do that! Everyone who submits a guide that gets posted on our site will receive an amazingly cool AfterDawn T-shirt absolutely free!
Service provider America Online and video-on-demand service Movielink have teamed up, and are promoting a "Winter Movie Special", a five week program that lets AOL for Broadband members exclusively download and rent some of the year's biggest movie titles for as little as 99 cents or less for each title.
Among the special priced items are movies like Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. The movies are offered to AOL Broadband Members at 80 percent off the regular prices, $3.95 to $4.99, which means that the prices will fall between 79 and 99 cents.
The downloadable Movielink movies can be stored on hard disk for 30 days. After the movie is first viewed, it can be watched as many times as wanted during a 24-hour period.
Italian court delivered the first major legal defeat to Sony by ruling that PS2(Playstation 2) modchips are legal in Italy. Modchips are hardware modifications made to the original console that allow it to play games from other regions (Sony's games are region coded, a bit like DVD movies, meaning that normally you cannot play Japanese import games on a European console, etc), allow it to play game backups, self-made programs -- and also pirated copies of PS2 games.
The court went further than just declaring modchips legal, it also said that Sony's restrictions are "absurd" and said "It's a little like Fiat marketing its cars while banning them from being driven by non-European citizens or outside towns".
The court also stated that as the product, Playstation game console, has been purchased by a consumer, Sony doesn't have any legal ways to state what consumers can or can not do with the device as the consumer owns the device, not Sony.
The decision might prove to be difficult for other console manufacturers as well -- the prime example is Microsoft who doesn't allow users with "modded" Xbox consoles to access its Xbox Live online gaming platform.
The DVD Copy Control Association has unexpectedly asked California Supreme Court to dismiss the case against Andrew Bunner. Bunner was sued by DVD-CCA for distributing the source code to DeCSS on his website.
DeCSS, the software that decrypts scrambled DVDs, has been in the headlines for well over four years now. Hackers were able to create DeCSS thanks to the fact that Xing Technology Corporation neglected to encrypt the CSS decryption key in their DVD player software. DeCSS opened a whole can of worms, and some of the lawsuits that emerged have drawn to a close only very recently (see related articles below).
Bunner's attorneys were obviously pleased by the surprising decision.
"I think that they are sick of losing," said Allonn Levy, one of several attorneys who had worked on the case on Bunner's behalf. "I think they have finally reached the conclusion that it is not a fight that they can win."
The case against Bunner was the last major DeCSS-related lawsuit still unsettled. The case against DeCSS author Jon Lech Johansen ended in January, when the Economic Crime Unit of the Norwegian police decided to drop the case.
Copy protection developers try to combine functionality with security. So far they have only been able to create crippled audio CDs with very little copy procteion. Macrovisions latest makes use of the Windows Media Digital Rights Management, developed of course by Microsoft.
Macrovision Corporation (Nasdaq: MVSN) announced today that it has released its latest music protection product - the CDS-300 multi-level protection and rights management solution for music CDs. CDS-300 provides the highest level of copy protection while offering a robust and seamless user experience with flexible usage rights.
CDS-300s dual session functionality provides consumers greater value with copy-protected CDs by offering a robust user experience that seamlessly creates playlists, exports to portable devices or makes authorized burns to a CD, and with one-click access to bonus content on the disc or premium content via web links. The product provides full playability of music CDs on audio CD/DVD players and PCs.
Online retailer CD Wow has settled with the British Phonographic Institute (BPI) to stop importing cheap Audio CDs from Asia. The company was able to offer cheaper CDs to its customers thanks to price differences between different regions -- CDs cost significantly less in Asia than in Western Europe.
Until now CD Wow has charged £8.99 for CDs, but the prices will be increased by £2. There's little doubt that this will hurt the company's sales quite severely.
In essence music labels are enforcing a policy similar to DVD region coding -- Europeans are willing to pay more for CDs than Asian consumers, so they are charged more. By using restrictive distribution contracts, record labels have managed to keep cheap imports from appearing in stores.
The Recording Industry Association of America continues its aggressive legal campaign against online file swappers. Today they have filed lawsuits against yet another 532, so far unnamed individuals. The new lawsuits bring the total number of sued people up to 914.
The Recording Industry Association of America launched its largest wave of file-swapping lawsuits Wednesday, filing new copyright infringement suits against 532 currently unnamed individuals.
The suits are the industry group's first since an appeals court in December blocked its original strategy of identifying alleged file swappers before filing lawsuits by sending subpoenas to their Internet service providers. As a result, Wednesday's legal actions target hundreds of unnamed or "John Doe" computer users, whose identities will be added to the suits only after a court process likely to take several weeks.
Even though the sales figures of On Demand Distribution, or OD2 are nowhere near those of iTunes and likes, a sales record of three million sold song downloads for 2003 is nothing to be ashamed of.
OD2's concept is different from those of its American counterparts, since it is only licensing its technology to third parties, who promote and sell the content on their pages. OD2 currently has 30 retail partners in Europe, including HMV and MSN.
European digital music market will change radically in 2004 as both Apple iTunes and Roxio Napster2 are expected to launch services in Europe by summer.
Microsoft's European division has settled a lawsuit filed against it by a small company called E-Data. E-Data filed its lawsuit against Microsoft's European division, alongside with British online music service OD2, ISP Tiscali and HMV, claiming that they violate its patent that covers downloading information to a "tangible object", such as CDR.
Music services operated by four sued companies all allow consumers to download music and burn it to CDR discs. Now Microsoft's decision to settle the case has given more validity to E-Data's patent claims. Microsoft has licensed E-Data's patent to be used worldwide, but companies didn't disclose financial terms of their agreement.
E-Data was granted the patent way back in 1985 and its been tested in U.S. courts successfully, when there can be proven a situation where a retailer specifically sells information to be transferred onto a physical media, most notably removable media (which is the case with various music download stores where users pay premium for the right to also burn the purchased track to a CDR). E-Data holds patents in United States and also in Germany, UK, France, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium and Sweden. However, company's patent expired in January, 2003 in States, but is still valid in various European countries.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has confirmed that it is investigating the case of DVD screener copies sent to Academy Award members being leaked and pirated.
Four films, "Something's Gotta Give," "The Last Samurai," "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" and "thirteen" are being looked into. According to studio sources the leaked movies have been traced to actor Carmine Caridi. Caridi is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the institution that hands out the Oscar awards.
FBI has only confirmed that they are looking into the case, but has not disclosed further details.
MPAA has wanted to ban screeners altogether, but later agreed to lift the ban on Oscar screeners, but maintained the ban on other awards. After being sued over the ban, a federal court ruled in December that MPAA cannot stop its members from distributing screener copies. Later MPAA announced it would appeal the ruling.
We've had it bad today. During the morning hours (GMT), our forum server had crashed and was down just under 2 hours before we managed to pull it back.
And this afternoon at 3pm (GMT), our ad server crashed, making pages to crawl as they tried to load ads from a server that was down. We're still having some problems with the ad serving and have therefor pulled all the ads from the site temporarily to allow the site to run normally.
We apologize for the inconvenience, but also realize that these types of problems are inevitable during the phase where our server farm has just been transferred to a new ISP. We are working overtime to get the system totally robust and to build a failover system that would allow the site to operate even when some of the servers would experience problems.
RareWares continues their series of public listening quality tests. This time they tackle the MP3 format at 128kbps, but also include Apple iTunes as a challenger. Another extremely interesting contender is the new LAME 3.95.1.
Even with the launch of several newer, more efficient audio encoding methods in the last few years, MP3 still is the winner format in popularity and support. Every computer operating system worth it's salt has at least an option for MP3 playback, often available "out of the box". MP3 can also be played on mini systems, portable players, car players, etc. No matter how better the newcomer formats are, MP3 already gained a lot of momentum and it'll be a long time until it is surpassed.
Being such a popular format and featuring an open specification, it's expected that a multitude of encoders are available for the end user's choice. The purpose of this test is to discover which of the most popular implementations offer highest encoding quality at an average bitrate of 128kbps.
After a six-month dip, caused by the massive legal action campaign by the RIAA, the number of P2P users in the US has risen again.
According to the study, number of US households using P2P networks rose 6% in October and another 7% in November, pushing the November's figures to 11M households, compared to 10M in September.
According to NPD who made the research, there are various things that might have caused the raising figures. For one, there is the usual boost in new album releases in run-up for Christmas. And also media is getting tired of RIAA's lawsuits and the media coverage of the manhunt has died down dramatically since the summer.
Figures are still way down from spring 2003, when the same survey found that 20 million users downloaded from P2P networks.
But of course this type of studies also attribute to the people's fears -- even if you're downloading your HDD full of music every single night, you aren't very likely to tell that to a person conducting such survey when you've just read from your local newspaper that "RIAA sued yet another gazillion teenagers, promises life in prison" type of stories. But once those headlines aren't as common as they were when the RIAA's legal team got its pay rise in beginning of summer, the "fear factor" is much smaller.
After an appeals court ruled that RIAA cannot get subscriber details from internet service providers without filing a lawsuit first, RIAA has been forced to look alternative means to fight piracy.
The organization has contacted ISPs asking them to issue warnings to users who are engaged in infringing activity. The service providers would not have to hand out subscriber details to RIAA -- just send a warning email to the subscriber using an IP address that RIAA provides.
"Specifically, when we determine the IP address of an infringer, we would like to send you the IP address along with a Notice of Infringement that you would forward directly to the subscriber matching that address," the RIAA wrote. "You would not identify the subscriber to us. However, we believe if you forward the Notice to them it will dramatically increase awareness and effectively discourage continued infringement."
It seems, however, that RIAA doesn't have too many friends among the ISPs, since not a single ISP has replied to RIAA's proposal. That is not to say that the ISPs will not respond, but obviously they are interested in exploring other alternatives as well.
British indie record label, Warp Records, has broken the ranks of music industry by dropping the idea of DRM restrictions on digitally sold music. Typically online music stores like iTunes have DRM restrictions on music which means that you can't transfer the tracks freely to anywhere you want and with majority of stores, you can't burn the tracks without paying a separate fee for that right.
Warp Records is the home for various well-known indie artists, including Aphex Twin. Company sells the MP3 tracks via its own web store for $1.39 per track, which is $0.40 higher than the "industry average" set by iTunes for DRM-restricted tracks.
War Records' FAQ states "At the moment labels have skirted around the whole issue of making their catalogue available, often introducing various poorly-supported formats and DRM (digital rights management) complications in the process. We wanted to be the first to take a big step in what we believe is a positive direction, and see what happens".
Microsoft's David Fester has given interesting comments about the recent Hewlett-Packard announcement that they will start selling a re-branded iPod. Microsoft thinks this might lead into the market dominance of iPod (which doesnt support Windows Media Audio) and hurt the consumer market.
General manager of Microsoft's Windows digital media division David Fester has suggested that iTunes' emerging dominance would be bad for consumers, because it would limit them to the iPod.
He told journalists at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas: "Windows is about choice - you can mix and match software and music player stuff. We believe you should have the same choice when it comes to music services."
Try re-reading Mr. Fester's first sentence and replace the word 'iTunes' with the word 'Microsoft' and the 'iPod' with 'Windows'. You can spice it up even more by substituting David Fester with Linus Torvalds :-)
Music publishers and songwriters have begun demanding double royalty payments for copy protected music CDs, that contain the audio tracks in two formats -- in crippled pseudo Audio-CD format and in compressed digital format. The reasoning behind the demands is quite simple -- since two copies of the song are being sold, the royalty payments should also be made for two copies.
"From a legal standpoint, the position of the music publishers is that these discs contain two separate (copies of each song)," said Cary Ramos, an attorney representing the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA). "The fact that they are the same recording doesn't mean that we should treat it as one."
NMPA is making a valid point, since even by RIAA's standards, an Audio CD and a digital MP3/WMA file are two separate products, even if the consumer owns the Audio CD in question. RIAA argued and pursued this point years ago in, for instance, the My.MP3.com case.
New digital distribution channels could mean greater revenue shares for recording artists, but they will have to make their case early, and make it strong.
Director of "British RIAA", the BPI(The British Phonographic Industry), warned British P2P users that it will start suing them if they keep on sharing their music via P2P networks.
"We want to increase consumer awareness of the legal implications of file-sharing. We want to introduce new legitimate (online download) services. If these are not working, then there has to be a degree of enforcement," said Andrew Yeates, director general of BPI.
He also said that BPI would follow the RIAA's lead and go after the users who share larger amounts of music online. Yeates also hinted that BPI -- and other European copyright organizations -- might wait until the legal music services, such as Apple's iTunes are available in Europe, before launching any larger scale legal attack against individual P2P users.
In most of the European countries, it is legal to download music from P2P networks, but not to distribute it (or as it states in various countries "to allow public to access the copyrighted works without permission from copyright owners") or share it via P2P networks.
The former P2P network, now a legal music service owned by Roxio, the Napster service is now available for Penn State university students for free.
The aim is to curb ever-growing illegal music sharing within university's network and also to curb the increasing external bandwidth requirements the school has to cope with as its students use broadband connections from their dorms to download music from P2P networks such Kazaa.
And apparently, the service has been quite a success. School reported that three days after its launch, service had generated over 100,000 downloads or streaming requests from the students and already 2,600 of school's 17,000 eligible students had registered with the service. School plans to make all of its 83,000 students eligible to the service by this fall.
Of course there's a catch in form of DRM. The deal between Penn State and Napster doesn't allow students to burn the music on CDRs, but need to pay a fee to do so.
Consumer electronic manufacturers are challenging the recent legislation introduced in Canada that would add as much as US $25 per player on top of the MP3 player price.
Canada, much like many European countries, has a "levy" system in use that makes it perfectly legal to download music and movies from Net, copy music from friends, libraries, etc, but on the other hand, copyright owners are being compensated by charging extra for blank recordable media (such as blank CDRs and DVDRs) and now for MP3 players. However, in Canada -- again, just like in many European countries as well -- uploading and sharing music via P2P networks is illegal.
Now the legislation is threatened from both sides. MP3 player and consumer electronic manufacturers, including Apple, HP and Dell argue that introducing a levy charge to MP3 players is illegal and plan to appeal the decision.
But also, the Canadian Recording Industry Association is planning to challenge the legislation -- of course not the levy part, but the downloads-are-legal part (one would assume that they would be more than happy to charge consumers the levy, but not to allow fair use rights to the music). CRIA's opinion is that downloading music is and should always be illegal. They also have hinted their plans to launch similar manhunt that CRIA's American counterpart, RIAA, has had going on during the last year or so.
A spin off company from Vivendi called TruSonic has acquired the 1.5 million song MP3.com music archive. However the music will not be made available to the general public.
TruSonic sells piped music to hotels, restaurants and other businesses. The 1.5 million MP3.com song archive is available only to the customers of TruSonic.
MP3.com has been a piece on the board of Internet music game for quite some time now. After being acquired by Vivendi Universal, the My.MP3.com service was used as a platform for PressPlay music store. It was the My.MP3.com service that run MP3.com into trouble in the first place, since RIAA decided to sue MP3.com over the Beam-IT service at My.MP3.com. Using Beam-IT MP3.com users were able to access their CDs online without actually encoding them to MP3 format and transferring them to the service.
U.S. Supreme Court decided yesterday without explanation that it wont take the Madster's case to its reconsideration. This decision closes the first P2P case that had reached the gates of U.S. Supreme Court.
The lawsuit by RIAA against Aimster, that later changed its name, was brought against the P2P service in May, 2001 claiming that the company intentionally violated RIAA's members' copyrights by allowing its users to share illegal music via its network. Later on, in separate lawsuit, AOLsued the company over trademark violations that eventually forced Aimster to change its name in January, 2002.
A new version of LAME MP3 encoder has landed with a stable version status. It includes the significant modifications already demonstrated in the 3.94. Even though this version is advertised as stable, it has not gone through the extensive user testing that has been done for the older 3.93.1 version. Therefore caution and testing is recommended before using this encoder for archival purposes.
LAME 3.95.1 January 12 2004
fixed a crash when using vbr-new
changed ReplayGain reference level to 89dB
LAME 3.95 January 11 2004
fixed lowpass values when using vbr with mono files
faster quantization loops
faster count_bits
fixed a buffer requirement error in ACM codec
fixed mpglib and other decoding support code to prevent the crash when invalid mp3 input
removed Layer I decoding support
use FastLog and IEEE 754 hack on PowerPC too (approx. 10 percent faster)
According to a Japanese A/V news site, Pioneer has demonstrated dual-layer DVD-R burning at the CES expo in Las Vegas, using the existing single-layer DVDR drive, Pioneer A06.
According to the article, Pioneer used only a modified firmware to achieve the dual-layer burning with no needs to modify the hardware itself at all. But only time will tell whether the company actually decides that it is such a great idea to allow consumers to upgrade their drives to dual-layer by simply switching the firmware and not buying a new drive..
There's a war between the Linux open-source multimedia player project, MPlayer, and the Danish DVD player manufacturer, KISS Technology.
MPlayer team claims that KISS's DVD players firmware code includes parts of MPlayer's GPL-licensed code. This means that KISS is violating the GPL license, which states that any product that includes parts from a GPL program, must be GPL as well. And KISS hasn't released its firmware as a GPL or shown its source code to public anyway.
Now, the managing director of KISS claims that MPlayer team is lying and suggests that MPlayer team might have actually stolen code from KISS's firmware, not the vice versa.
Apple and world's second largest computer manufacturer HP announced this week a rather surprising alliance. According to companies, HP will start selling Apple's hugely successful iPod digital music player as HP-branded version.
HP will also bundle Apple's iTunes music-player-turned-music-store to all of its consumer PCs, taking Apple's online music store potentially to millions of new users. Since its introduction in spring 2003, Apple has sold well over 30 million songs through its online music store and currently sells almost 2M songs per week. In addition to those figures, Pepsi will launch a promotion that will give away 100M iTunes songs in States in February.
HP's upcoming re-branded iPod will also look different from the original sleek white Apple-branded culture icon and the device is expected to be available for consumers in summer 2004.
RealNetworks and IBM have decided to start offering a complete multimedia management software (and most likely hawrdware as well) solution by joining their multimedia streaming and management products into one huge commercial bundle.
According to the deal, Real's server products, such as Helix Universal Server, will ship with IBM's middleware stack. By joining their product selection into one larger offering provides a complete media management, streaming and digital rights management platform that should be able to compete better with rivals, such as products from Microsoft.
"Together we will enable our global customers to quickly offer secure and high-quality media services to their consumers whenever they want it and wherever they want it -- at their TV, their PC, in their car, or with their phone," said Real's CEO, Rob Glaser.
The Blu-Ray Disc Founders(BDF) consortium vowed to support the blue-laser optical storage format against the competing formats, such as AOD and EVD and also set various milestones for rolling out finalized standards for Blu-Ray's development.
First out of the pipeline will be BD-ROM format which has been jointly developed between BDF consortium and Hollywood studios and is expected to get finalized "early 2004", allowing mainstream commercial products to enter the market by end of 2005. Once-writable BD-R will be finalized mid-2004 and the push for already-existing BD-RE(rewritable Blu-Ray format) will get harder during the 2004.
The consortium also cheered a decision from two PC mega corporations, Dell and HP. Both companies announced officially that they will support Blu-Ray as the format of choice in their products in future over the competing blue-laser products. "HP believes Blu-ray Disc is the most consumer-friendly technology choice for the next generation of removable storage," said John Romano, Senior Vice President, Consumer PC Organization, from HP.
Sony is happy about the reception that the PSX received on the Japanese market. The high-end product has sold 100.000 units on the first week, with a price tag around $941. The product was released on December 13.
Sony PSX is an up-tuned version of the PS2 console. Its key features are a digital receiver, digital video recorder and a recordable DVD-R drive.
Sony is banking on 2004 being a better year than 2003, which was marred by the "Sony shock" -- a $1 billion quarterly loss announced in April -- and restructuring announced in October that calls for a 13 percent cut in its global work force in the next three years.
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It hopes to improve its fortunes by rolling out cutting-edge products, such as PSX, an entertainment system that includes a hard disk drive (HDD) and DVD recorder plus a PS2 game machine.
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"We sold 100,000 PSXs in the first week. It sells for almost 100,000 yen ($941) and it still sold out. There are no products out there that can say that," said Kutaragi.
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The machine, powered by the same microprocessor at the heart of the PS2 console, went on sale on December 13 in Japan amid a flurry of media attention.
Consumer electronics giant Sony Electronics has announced that it will be opening an online music service in United States during the spring 2004. The specifications of the service sound quite familiar -- half a million songs at 99 cents per song, $9.99 per album.
The Connect online service will at first work only with Sony portable devices, such as the Mini Disc player. The songs will be available in Sony's ATRAC3 format. Support for devices by other manufacturers will be introduced later on.
In addition to Connect, Sony also unveiled a new high-capacity Mini Disc player Hi-MD Walkman. The Hi-MD discs allow a capacity of up to 45 hours per disc. Sony also plans to introduce several products with "combined functionality". For example a home theatre system connected to the Connect -service.
"Our role is to create new and exciting markets and whereas other companies are playing up the commoditization of products and driving cost, we think there are new ways to create entertainment experiences," said Tim Baxter, head of home entertainment products for Sony Electronics USA.
Macrovision, the company who develops copy protection mechanisms found on most of the DVD-Video discs and commercial VHS tapes, has sued 321 Studios, software company who has developed various DVD backup tools, most notably DVD X Copy series.
Macrovision charges that 321 Studios' DVD X Copy tools infringe with Macrovision's patented copy-protection technology and also violates the DMCA law. The charge under DMCA legislation is interesting as DMCA states that circumventing "effective" copy protection measures is illegal. But when most of the world is buying perfectly legally (not U.S. though) "modded" DVD players that circumvent Macrovision's bit code copy protection (and of course region codes as well, but they don't relate to this lawsuit) and virtually every school kid knows how to use any freely-distributed DVD ripper to get rid of the Macrovision, the claim that their weak bit setting copy protection mechanism could be considered "effective" is bit misleading.
"321 Studios infringes Macrovision's intellectual property by offering products that enable users to make unauthorized copies that contain our patented process and sometimes illegally bypass our copy protection system," says Macrovision CEO Bill Krepick.
RealNetworks has launched a new version of its widely-spread multimedia player, RealPlayer. The new version, RealPlayer 10 includes support for AAC audio and for Real's latest video codec, RealVideo 10.
But the biggest news is definitely the fact that now Real is competing directly against Apple; RealPlayer 10 has integrated music store built into it, exactly like Apple's iTunes has. RealPlayer Music Store(very original, as Apple's music store is called iTunes Music Store) offers a selection of 300,000 songs for $0.99 each. RealPlayer also supports variety of formats and is capable of playing iTunes' tracks as well (after all, they're DRM-equipped AAC tracks as well).
So, nothing dramatic really, but all the signs are telling us that by the end of the year 2004, we'll see some winners and tons of losers in this legal music download hoobla that has quite clear resemblance to the dotcom bubble years in late 1990s.
According to a survey by Pew Internet and American Life Project the number of Americans downloading music over the internet has dropped by over 50 per cent in six months. In May, 2003 29 per cent of Americans were downloading music from the net. In December, the number had dropped to 14 per cent.
"We have never seen another internet activity drop off to this degree," said Lee Rainie, director of Pew. "The drop-off was just striking, particularly since overall internet activity goes up and up."
Of course the truth is that the number of people who lie has increased by 50 per cent. No one in their right mind would admit to downloading music with RIAA pointing a shotgun at everyone whistling a top ten tune.
As mainstreaqm consumers around the world are rapidly moving towards recordable DVD standards, the fight for the next generation optical disc winner is already getting more heated than the good olde DVD-R vs DVD+R ever.
We already have Blu-Ray drives in Japanese markets. DVD Forum decided to use AOD in its HD-DVD specs. Then Chinese government-backed royalty evasion scheme EVD was unveiled by group of Chinese consumer electronics companies (who currently dominate most of the DVD player markets around the world, most notably American markets). Now, Taiwanese government-backed standard has been released. FVD or Finalized Versatile Disc has been developed by Taiwanese Opto-electronics & Systems Laboratories and uses Microsoft's Windows Media Video 9(WMV9) and Windows Media Audio 9(WMA9) formats to store the video on a disc. News sources don't mention whether the disc will use red or blue laser technology, but the fact that it uses Microsoft's codecs is a significant one as it is likely that Microsoft will start pushing the standard heavily into living rooms, at least in Asia.
The Economic Crime Unit of the Norwegian police, Økokrim confirmed Monday that it will not appeal the recent ruling in favor of Jon Lech Johansen.
Økokrim, backed by MPAA, has been after Johansen for years, seeking a ruling that would convict him of copyright infringement. According to Økokrim and MPAA DeCSS software, which Johansen helped to develop, made it possible to pirate DVD movies. However they failed twice to convince the Norwegian courts who ruled that Johansen cannot be held responsible for the possible illegal applications of DeCSS.
While the decision to drop the case was not expected, it wasn't all that surprising either. After failing to change the ruling in appeals court, it was highly unlikely that Økokrim would be able to come up with new evidence or arguments against Johansen.
Belgian consumer watchdog, Test-Achats, has sued four out of five world's largest record labels in Belgium. The lawsuit is filed against the EMI, Sony, BMG and Universal because these companies have released so-called copy protected audio CDs in Belgium that fail to work in various CD players, including many leading-brand car stereos and home PCs.
Group says that consumers acting in good faith were victims of an ill-designed attempt by the big record labels to stop piracy. Virtually all CD copy-protection mechanisms function in the same way -- they "break" the standard CD audio disc by artificially manufactured "scratches" or other similiar mechanisms. Regular home CD players typically ignore such "problems" with the disc, since their purpose is to produce music out of audio CDs, not to read the CD 100 percent exactly. But the problems start piling up with computer CD-ROM drives that are meant for totally different purpose; to read 1:1 the data that is stored on the disc -- everybody knows that programs or data files stored on CDs have to be read exactly right in order for them to work. But the problem is that for many consumers, PC is a multimedia device, just like a home stereo, that is meant to play movies and audio CDs correctly. And to make things worse, many "stand-alone" CD player manufactures use nowadays same parts that are used in CD-ROM drives and therefor such CD players aren't capable of handling these "copy protected" discs either.
AfterDawn.com, forums.AfterDawn.com, and cd-rw.org have been relocated on our new server cluster. You should see the change as a considerable decrease in the loading time of the pages. Also the database related problems that have haunted us since the launch of v3 should now be gone.
Other domains, including DVD X Copy discussion forums, our Finnish site, MP3Lizard.com, Dawnload.net etc. will be moved later on.
In the process of relocating our servers we did much more than just move them to another ISP -- most of the backend structure of the site has been renewed. We're currently using five P4-2.8GHz servers to run the site. Actually right now we are occupying servers on three ISPs, and using a total of ten separate machines to power various parts of our sites. But by the time we are finished relocating our domains, everything will run on the five P4 servers.
Glitches and small problems are, of course, possible, and even probable. Please bear with us while we iron out the bugs! If you do spot a problem, we would be glad if you could notify us via our feedback form.
Next week most of the companies will get back to business and we'll start seeing new headlines popping up as they always do. But before that, maybe we should take a look back and see what happened in digital multimedia during the year 2003.
RIAA manhunt
Probably the most significant single event in the P2P world was the court order in June that forced Verizon to hand out its subscriber's personal details to RIAA who accused that the particular user had shared copyrighted music over the P2P networks. The decision was significant because it allowed RIAA to get personal details of Net users without suing them first (and with no requirement to sue them after the details were handed over either).
This decision sparked a massive legal action by RIAA against individual P2P users (read: music consumers, RIAA's own customers). Hundreds and hundreds of personal details were handed to RIAA which settled most of the cases out of court, but also sued several users. The manhunt was then stopped or at least limped by another court order just before Christmas that decided that RIAA has to sue the users before it can get the personal details from ISPs. This decision means that RIAA has to be much more careful in its actions, as it has to take the cases to court rather than just threaten the users to settle their cases out of court.
Happy new year from the AfterDawn.com staff! What better way to start the year than by announcing the winners from our v3 launch draw.
Without further ado, here are the winners: Eza, hoppers, j2huggar, rosedog, Greengo1, OAKside24, Idis, cdcoaster, angus1953, and Sam42. Congratulations everyone!
All winners have been contacted via email with further details on how to receive the shirt. If you see your name up there but haven't received the email, we don't have your correct email address on file. In that case, please check your details, and then send me a private message.
If you didn't win this time, don't worry. You will definitely get a chance to win something atleast almost as cool as an AfterDawn.com T-shirt!
According to a report by market research firm iSuppli, the Chinese Enhanced Versatile Disc (EVD) will be facing quite a few obstacles before turning into a high definition format to be reckon with.
A rebel group that boycotts the major record labels has come up with a neat way of making something good out of the upcoming promotion campaign by Pepsi that will be launched on February 1st during the Super Bowl.
