News written by Jari Ketola (January, 2000)

DVD CCA are seeking an emergency ex parte motion to seal Hoy Exhibit B at Santa Clara County Courthouse in San Hose.
Hoy Exhibit B is essentially the DeCSS sourcecode for CSS descrambling from DVD CCA Reply Declaration of John J. Hoy. DVD CCA was looking to get rid of CSS descrambling, and then attached the CSS descrambling sourcecode with a public document.
Related links:
Hoy Exhibit B (Caution! It may be illegal for California and New York residents to download the file. Others need not worry. Atleast not for now.)

A Stanford University Senior has reverse-engineered the Napster Server Protocol. There's also an Open Source Napster Server called OpenNap in the making. It won't take long before we start seeing tons of new Napster servers.
Related stories:
Napster server protocol reverse-engineering info
Open Source Napster Server homepage with Napster clients for several platforms (MacOS, BeOS, Amiga, Java etc.)

Intel Corporation announced that Intel Software Integrity System will feature Lucent Technologies' ePAC (Enhanced Perceptual Audio Codec) audio compression algorithm.
Intel Software Integrity System is a solution that features Intel's patented tamper-resistant software technology, which hides critical code, keys and other secrets from observation and detects attempts to break security mechanisms.
ePAC is a new version of the Lucent Perceptual Audio Coder (PAC), an audio compression algorithm with the highest-quality audio at the lowest bit rates. At 128 kilobits per second, ePAC offers CD-transparent stereo sound.
More on topic:
Intel Press Release
More information on Intel Software Integrity System
Lucent Technologies

Rumour has it that the author of DeCSS, program designed to enable DVD playback on Linux platform, has been arrested by Norwegian police. However there's no confirmation to this as of yet.
What has happened is that Jon Johansen, the author of DeCSS, was taken in for questioning on Monday when the police raided his house. He is being charged with violation of copyright law.
Late last week a U.S. District Court ordered three people to remove DeCSS from their Web sites. You can still find DeCSS here, though.
Related stories:
Police Raids Teen Hacker's Home
U.S. Judge Orders DVD Hack Off Internet Sites
DeCSS v1.21b download

British music company EMI and American Time Warner Inc. announced today they would merge their music businesses, with combined revenues of $8 billion a year, to become the world's second-largest in the field (second only to Seagram's Universal Music).
It was only a while ago when Time Warner was acquired by America Online Inc. (AOL). Fusions seem to be today's trend.
Read the full story at Yahoo's Daily News

Michael Robertson, MP3.com CEO, has responded to the RIAA allegations in an open letter to RIAA.
In his response Michael Robertson questions RIAA's policy: "The RIAA decries that its copyrights have been violated. This is the rhetoric of a monopolist. Your organization says that it controls 90% of the off-line distribution of music. But the question is, to whom does the music belong? When a consumer buys a CD, does the industry get to tell the consumer where she can listen to her music? "
Read the full response at MP3.com

Millennium Bug has written a rather thorough article on digital video standards, DVD-ripping, Super VideoCDs, and pretty much everything else you need to know about digital home movies.
Read the full article.

The Digital Bits announced the first ever Bitsy Awards. The Bitsys are "handed out" to best and worst DVDs of 1999.
Check it out!

TheDigitalBits.com have completed their CES Coverage. Check out the huge picture gallery for a glimpse of some remarkable gagdets!

Manufacturers like Toshiba and Samsung are planning on releasing new generation DVD-players this quarter. The players will have some resemblence to both PCs and game consoles.
With the use of new chip designed by VM Labs it's possible to add graphics capabilities familiar from game consoles to DVD-players.
Read the full story at Yahoo's daily news.

DVD-Digest.com pages have been removed from the Web by the site's service provider. Apparently the ISP was contacted by MPAA lawyers, which scared the poop out of them.
Luckily there are mirrors of that page still available:
DVD Download Site
DVD Support Site
DVD Movie Zone
NVIDIA DVD Zone

Texas Instruments Incorporated and Fraunhofer IIS announced plans to develop the first MP3+AAC encoders for portable audio players. Combining Fraunhofer's software and TI's DSP manufacturers can add on-board AAC and MP3 encoding functionality to portable MP3 players. Consumers can then encode the songs directly from CD without the need for a PC. Brilliant!

Yup, that's right. One wouldn't think there would be any Y2K issues with MP3 playback, but apparently there was. Two MP3 devices from Visiosonic and Audio Box refused to co-operate after the turn of the century. Visiosonic's DLL expired at the end of 1999, and Audio Box's interface software used a buggy algorithm for counting dates. There's a patch available for the Audio Box software.

Grab the latest version of FlasK MPEG from the file-area. The new version fixes some problems with NTSC audio sync, and also has a built-in AC3 decoding! A perfect tool for those annoying DVD to VCD backups!

The International Standards Organization's JPEG2000 commitee has finalized specs for a new algorithm that compresses images up to 200 times with no appreciable degradation in quality.
The standard will become ISO 15444 when it's officially approved in 2001. So don't hold your breath just yet :-)
Read the full article and see the example!

MP3Lit.com has announced their most popular downloads for 1999. Some of the top names were: 1. Henry Rollins, 2. Dennis Miller, 3. Dylan Thomas, 4. Nicole Blackman, 5. Charles Bukowski, 6. Nick Cave, 7. P.J. O'Rourke, 8. David Sedaris, 9. Mumia Abu-Jamal, and 10. Ben Stiller & Janeane Garofalo.