News written by Jari Ketola (October, 2002)

In a bit old, but interesting article, High Fidelity Review discusses the DVD-AR, recordable DVD-Audio, specifications they received from Bike H. Suzuki, the chairman of DVD Forum WG-4.

With DVD-AR users can record, edit, and replay audio content on writable discs. The format can be used for various purposes thanks to a wide variety of lossless and lossy compression schemes. There are two lossless formats (linear PCM and packed PCM) and six lossy formats (Dolby Digital, DTS, MPEG-1/2 Layer II, ATRAC-3, MP3PRO, and MPEG-2 AAC). There's no need to have a lossless PCM track on a disc, so it is possible to store hours and hours of multichannel audio on a single disc. Users can also store still pictures and text on DVD-AR.

4C who developed the content protection scheme used on DVD-Audio discs is developing a compatible system for DVD-AR. Unlike DVD-Video, DVD-Audio copy protection is, as far as I know, yet to be cracked.

The DVD-AR -format is a welcome addition to the DVD standards family. The news article doesn't discuss the DVD-AR media, but I think it's safe to assume it will not be compatible with DVD+R(W) or DVD-R(W). The final standard should be available this month.

A Delaware bankruptcy judge has approved a $200,000 loan to Napster to keep the company alive till the sale of its assets has been completed. The company behind the loan is Napco Acquisition, who at the same time signed a letter of intent to buy some of Napster's assets.

There has been alot of interest in the assets of the former music-swapping site, and acording to Rick Antonoff, attorney for Napster's creditors commitee, a final agreement to sell the assets could be reached in two weeks.

Source:
Reuters

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. (Panasonic) and Microsoft Corp. today unveiled a new technology they have co-developed that enables a dramatically improved method of storing, arranging and playing back personal digital photo, music and video collections on recordable discs such as CD-RW media. Called HighM.A.T. (TM) , which stands for High-performance Media Access Technology, this new technology is designed to significantly improve interoperability for digital media content between PCs and popular electronic devices such as CD players, car stereos and living room DVD devices. CDs created using the HighM.A.T. technology will be fully compatible with existing devices that play back recordable disc media. Panasonic, Microsoft and Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd. (Fujifilm) will adopt this new technology for use in their future products. The HighM.A.T. specification will also be available for easy licensing by other consumer electronics companies and software developers at http://www.HighMAT.com/.

"It's clear to us at Panasonic that PCs and consumer electronics products will continue to work more and more closely in the future. HighM.A.T. technology will set a new standard for exchanging digital media between such devices and will make it easier to play back personal music, photo and video collections in consumer AV products," said Fumio Ohtsubo, managing director of Matsushita Electric. "We are very pleased that Panasonic can contribute to realizing the dream of seamless digital convergence."

Our friends at DVDWriters.co.uk have released the world's first review of the upcoming Pioneer DVR-A05 DVD-burner. A05 takes the DVD-R(W) camp to a new level by offering a juicy 4x writing speed, at which you can burn a full 4.7GB DVD-R in 15 minutes. The drive also implements the new DVD forum standards.

"Pioneer has finally delivered on what we and most others wanted most in a DVD writer and that was an increase in DVD recording speeds. There is no disputing that the speed at which new DVD writers record to DVD-Rs at is light years ahead of the 1st generation drives - the A05 only needs 15mins to writes a whole 4.7GB of data.

We were slightly disappointed with the A05's CD writing ability, mainly its CD-R maximum writing speed of 16 X and its relatively slow re-write speed. It's interesting to note that the preliminary product specifications show that Pioneer had faster CD recordable features and higher DVD-ROM read speeds in mind but decided against implementing them.

We were pleased that Pioneer added support for writing in DAO-RAW mode - a useful feature used by Clone-CD for backing up games (in countries that permit it). This addition isn't all that it appears to be as its performance was so bad that it's pretty ineffective - it failed to backup any of our games and took long time to read them!"

Online movie distributor Intertainer will close down its service next week until they can work out a fair business model with the movie industry giants -- AOL Time Warner, Sony, and Universal.

Intertainer filed an anti-trust suit against the companies in Septembers claiming that they are deliberately hindering Intertainer's business by boycotting of licesing their movies to the online distributor. According to Intertainer CEO Jonathan Taplin the companies are just trying to buy time in launching their own, competing Movielink service.

"We promise to return when there is an environment in which the independent company such as ours is allowed to compete for your business," said Taplin. "Whether the current environment of increasing media concentration is good for our Democracy is of course, the ultimate question."

Source: Cnet News.com

321 Studios are about to release a new package for DVD copying. Their first product, DVD Copy Plus was intended for copying DVDs on CDs. They are now about to lauch DVD X Copy, which claims to make bit-to-bit copies of DVDs with a regular recordable DVD-drive.

As we reported in April, 321 Studios asked a San Francisco court to rule on the legitimacy of their product. According to DMCA the package, intended solely for backing up DVDs owned by the consumer, is illegal, because it uses a copyright circumvention algorithm to descramble the CSS encryption used on DVDs. However 321 Studios argue that the DMCA in this case is unconstitutional, because it prevents the fair use of a product. Consumers are allowed to make copies of VHS movies for personal use, but thanks to DMCA, it is impossible to do legally with DVDs.

Major movie studios, as well as the U.S. Department of Justice have asked the Californian court to dismiss the case altogether. Clearly a ruling in the case would have noticeable consequences -- if the software is deemed legal, then DMCA is invalid, and if it's ruled to be illegal, the court, in essence, rules that DMCA takes precedence over the United States constitution.

Cable network MTV on Wednesday announced it has gained the exclusive rights to the life story of the creator of Napster, Shawn Fanning.

"Anything is possible and the fact that he may star as himself hasn't been ruled out," said a spokeswoman for MTV, which is owned by Viacom Inc.

Should be rather interesting to see how the movie turns out, though quite frankly I'm pretty full of Napster already.

Sources:
Yahoo! News
CNet News.com