News written by Jari Ketola (June, 2003)

Although technically quite advanced and versatile, Nullsoft's Winamp 3 never gained the popularity of it's predecessor, Winamp 2. Winamp 3 was supposed to be as quick as the earlier version, but instead turned out to be quite bloated and slow. Many Winamp 2 users never switched to version 3. Some sticked to the old version while many started using eg. Microsoft's Windows Media Player.

AOL, the online giant which acquired Nullsoft in 1999, has discontinued supporting Winamp 3 Wasabi-plugins. According to the plan announced in March, Winamp 2 and Winamp 3 will merge in Winamp 5 (2+3=5), due out this summer.

It is obviously in AOL's intrest to produce an in-house multimedia application capable of providing an alternative to Windows Media Player, Apple Quicktime, and RealNetworks' RealOne.

Source:
News.com

321 Studios has released a new version of DVD X Copy XPRESS, which addresses the following issues:

 ·Chapter issue which caused many players like the Toshiba 2800 to not function properly.
 ·Improved the reading, this should decrease the occurrence of Error reading sectors and may help prevent the audio skipping seen with many apex players.
 ·Fixed issues with the audio language Ask Me option.
 ·Fixed a bug that caused only the first letter to be used as the volume label for the backed up disc.
 ·Fixed a bug that caused the subtitle selection screen to have no text.
 ·Fixed a bug that caused all the dialogs to contain no text if you installed 2.5.2 over top of 2.5.0, you can now install over top previous versions as intended.

Customers who have bought XPRESS can download the update from DVD X Copy home page. If you haven't bought one yet, check out the home page for current prices and rebates.

Please see XPRESS 2.5.2 Problems / Issues thread for known issues with the release. If you have problems yourself, that's the correct place for posting them. For more information, visit the DVD X Copy support forums.

Online DVD rental service Netflix has been granted a patent covering their entire process of renting movies online. The patent also covers music, video games and books.

The patent might cause problems to Wal-Mart, who recently introduced it's own service at prices lower than Netflix's. Netflix hasn't commented whether or not they are going to summon a lawsuit against Wal-Mart.

If you're a lawyer or plan to become one, you might enjoy reading the patent.

Source:
News.com

A new anti-piracy bill called Piracy Deterrence and Education Act of 2003 was introduced in Congress on Thursday. The bill would drag FBI into the fight against P2P piracy by instructing them to develop a program to deter online traffic of copyrighted material. They would also have to come up with a FBI warning for copyright holders to issue to suspected violators. Last but not least the bureau would encourage sharing of information on suspected copyright violations among law enforcement, copyright owners and ISPs.

Especially the fact that FBI could encourage (in other words tell) ISPs to hand out subscriber details is troubling. We've already seen that DMCA is a very powerful weapon for the RIAA. Passing the bill would be like handing an M16 to a trigger-happy lunatic holding a shotgun.

Additionally the bill calls for the Department of Justice to hire agents who are familiar with intellectual-property issues as well as computer hacking.

RIAA and MPAA obviously both welcomed the bill.

Source:
News.com

DVD movie rentals overtook VHS in numbers units rented last week. Three months ago DVD rental revenues surpassed VHS, but it took a while longer to do the same in units. Last week 28.2 million DVDs were rented against 27.3 million VHS tapes.

It's no wonder really. VHS is slowly, but surely, fading away. Especially in rental business VHS tapes are clumsy, and the picture and audio quality falls with each viewing. And I'm sure no-one likes rewinding tapes before returning them. DVD media has also made services like Netflix possible.

It took DVD only six years to outpace the 25-year-old VHS format.

Source:
The Washington Times

According to leading market information company The NPD Group DVD-RAM -based DVD-recorders hold a 70 percent share of the stand-alone recorder market in the United States.

DVD-RAM -based units are capable of offering digital video recorder types of functions, such as on-disc editing and pausing live TV. DVD+RW based recorders lack these functions. On the other hand recordings made on DVD-RAM recorders cannot be viewed on standard DVD-players.

Source:
PRNewswire

We suffered an outage of a couple of hours on Tuesday (from around 4PM to 5:40PM EDT) . The outage was limited to the main pages - forums did not seem to be affected.

The outage was caused by a database problem which was located and fixed. Everything should run smoothly again.

We're very sorry about the inconvenience!

-Jari Ketola
CTO, AfterDawn.com

MusicNet has announced it will be offering its entire music library in Microsoft Windows Media 9 -format. The service currently has a selection of over 350,000 songs available for permanent download, and CD burning in various formats.

It seems Real Networks' 40 percent share of the company did little to keep Microsoft out from MusicNet. Both MusicNet and Microsoft representatives praised the streaming capabilities of WMP9. According to Dave Fisher, general manager of the Windows Digital Media Division at Microsoft, WMP9 "offers consumers near instantaneous playback".

I'd still much rather stick to my WMP6.4 and Media Player Classic

Source:
Yahoo!

Matsushita aka Panasonic will start licensing a new version of their MPEG-2 software encoder MPEG-2 Encoder5 on June 13th, 2003.

The encoder is produced by Panasonic Soft-Module Company and is a part of their MediaArtist codec series.

More (well actually very little) information can be found at Panasonic Soft-Module Company homepage. Unfortunately no pricing information is available.

Source:
CDR-Info

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Tuesday announced it will be cutting prices on their DVD rental service. The new price for two DVD rentals at a time is $15.54 per month (down 18% from $18.86/m). The fees for three and four DVDs at a time are $18.78/month and $21.94/month respectively.

With the new pricing Wal-Mart might turn out to be a noteworthy competitor to on-line DVD renter Netflix, even though Netflix currently holds a 95 percent share of the market. With stores practically everywhere, Wal-Mart can promote the rental service in volume and gain market share with competitive prices.

Source:
Reuters

Apple has confirmed that it has held a private briefing to some 150 representatives of independent record labels. Apple is seeking to increase the selection of music available at iTunes. So far only music from the five major record labels has been available.

According to Derek Sivers', founder of independent record distributor CD Baby, notes Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed at the briefing that Apple would not start offering a "pay-to-play" scheme to record labels. Instead they have an editorial staff that decides which music gets featured in the store.

Source:
CNET News.com Random Access

Recording industry has filed a new copyright infringement suit against Streamcast Networks, the makers of Morpheus file sharing application.

The new suit competes for the title of Most Ridiculous Lawsuit Ever. Streamcast had been preparing to launch a streaming radio service, but the service was never launched. However the company did buy thousands of CDs and transfered them to a database. Now the record labels are suing Streamcast Networks for copyright infringement, because they didn't have permissions from the copyright owners.

"This is another step in our ongoing litigation against Streamcast, a company that we believe is responsible for widespread copyright infringement," the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said.

In other words RIAA is trying to exhaust Streamcst Network's assets in frivolous lawsuits. Earlier this year RIAA lost its previous copyright lawsuit against Streamcast Networks, which lead Streamcast CEO Michael Weiss to call recording companies "sore losers" for pulling a stunt like this.

Source:
News.com

DVD-player software maker InterVideo Inc. has set pricing terms for an initial public offering. The company is planning to sell up to 2.65 million shares at $11-13 per share, which adds up to $34 million.

InterVideo withdrew its IPO last January, and now filed them again under new auditors -- KPMG LLP. American City Business Journals sees InterVideos move as a sign of the recovering IPO market. In year 2000 the markets suffered what is known as "dotcom crash" when investors realized that there's actually no profit to be made in, say, chatrooms. Internet companies could get no more funding through IPO and hundreds, if not thousands of sites went out of business, and tens of thousands of people lost their jobs. It has taken the investors years to turn their eyes back on the Net.

Source:
East Bay Business Times

Nokia and Warner Music today announced a marketing collaboration, which brings emerging artists to the upcoming Nokia 3300 music device.

The Nokia 3300 music device / mobile phone will include a 64MB MMC memory card with music clips, True tone ring tones, multimedia message templates, and color wallpapers from three Warner Music artists: A (www.a-communication.com), Harry (www.h-a-r-r-y.com) and Krezip (www.krezip.com). All the artists are clearly chosen with Nokia's target audience (youth) for 3300 in mind.

Nokia 3300 music device will operate on GSM 900/1800 bands, and will include: an MP3/AAC player, a stereo FM radio, a digital recorder, advanced ringtones, and MMS messaging. The phone is based on the Series 40 platform, so it will also support Java midlets. The sales package will include an USB cable for transfering digital music from the PC as well as an audio cable for recording from analog sources.

The device will start shipping in June.

Source:
Nokia press release

The representatives of DVD-CCA and Andrew Bunner presented their oral arguments at California's Supreme Court on Thursday. DVD-CCA repeated their point of view on DeCSS -- they see it as a tool designed for a specific task, and hence cannot be treated as pure speech, which would give it full protection under the First Amendment.

David Greene, representing Bunner on behalf of the non-profit First Amendment Project argued that computer programs, even though written in a language unfamiliar to most people, is still speech.

How is a computer program diffenret from, say, a detailed engineering manual. Let's say I have a manual which describes how to assemble a bookshelf. I write a program for a robot that will put the bookshelf together automatically, using just the manual I have as a reference. What's the difference between the manual and the program?

But DVD-CCA argues also that DeCSS used protected trade secrets, which means that I would have had to steal the manual from Ikea to begin with. However in Norway one is allowed to look for the manual more intensely than in the US.

We'll keep an eye on the case.

Source:
The Register