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.
Source: XviD.org
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.
Bankruptcy court OK's the sale of Napster's intellectual property to Roxio, ending the long story of the P2P pioneer.
Next step is to court to set up a trustee to plan how to distribute the $5.3M Roxio paid for the bankrupt company to the company's creditors.
Source: ABCNews
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.
Source: News.com
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.
Source: Digitimes
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.
Source: Associated Press via Yahoo!
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.
More info: Dovebid
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.
Source: San Fransisco Chronicle
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.
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.
More info:
InternetNews
News.com
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.
Source: Reuters
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.
Source: Forbes
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.
Source: News.com
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.
Source: TDK Press release
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.
Source: EETimes
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.
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."
Source: ZDNet UK
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).
Source: News.com
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.
Source: Yahoo!
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.
Source: The Register
