News written by Petteri Pyyny (June, 2003)

According to a thread on 3ivx.com the version of Apple Quicktime (6.4d37) bundled with WWDC Panther, has options for decoding 5.0 and 5.1 multi-channel AAC audio.

Indeed our sources have confirmed that the upcoming QuickTime will have multi-channel AAC support. Taking a look at the screenshot accompanied in the thread, there are three different channel profiles for both 5.0 and 5.1 audio (the difference being that 5.1 includes the LFE, or Low Frequency Encoding channel).

The different 5.1 configurations are:
· L R C LFE Ls Rs
· L R Ls Rs C LFE
· L C R Ls Rs LFE

The 5.0 configurations are the same excluding the LFE-channel. It is unknown whether or not the decoder will be able to detect the channel configuration automatically. It would be obviously quite frustrating finding out through trial and error, which configuration is correct for a specific video. Of course it's easy to notice if you've got the wrong profile active.

We just finished our first DVD Shrink guide and put it online. The guide goes through how to back up a DVD-9 movie, including all the menus and extras, to a single DVD-/+R disc.

DVD Shrink is the first freeware compressed domain transcoding tool and can compete pretty well with its commercial counterparts and we believe that this guide is useful for quite many of our users. We'd like to thank our user Oriphus for providing the original draft and ideas for the guide.

The guide is here:

https://www.afterdawn.com/articles/archive/dvd9_to_dvdr_with_dvd_shrink.cfm

PC manufacturer Gateway has launched several non-PC products during the last couple of months, trying desperately to turn the company profitable again. The company's latest consumer electronics product is a stand-alone DVD player that includes 802.11b compatible WLAN access.

Through 802.11b connection, the player can retrieve MP3s and images from the local wireless network, i.e. from desktop PC's shared directories. Unfortunately the current wireless technology makes the connection bit too slow for video usage and therefore the device doesn't contain an option to watch DVDs that are stored within the local network over the wireless connection. For MPEG-4, the 11Mbps (actually more like 5Mbps) that 802.11b provides, would be suitable, but the device doesn't have an MPEG-4 decoder (and those higher bitrate MPEG-4 movies wouldn't be able to stream realtime anyway if the network would have other traffic taking the bandwidth or have other performance issues).

I've personally promoted the fact that wireless Net connectivity will change virtually everything in the multimedia within next couple of years and see this device as a first baby-step towards "dummy devices" that simply connect to Net wherever user happens to be and streams the video or audio as it would come from radio or TV, just with global selection and without time schedules.

Kerry Gonzales has admitted of leaking the new blockbuster movie "Hulk" to the Internet two weeks before its U.S. premiere.

The New Jersey man can now face up to 3 years in prison and $250,000 fine -- although such penalties are highly unlikely to happen. Once the movie leaked to the Net, film's producer Vivendi Universal took quite rare steps to catch the source of the leaked movie and invited FBI to the investigation.

Gonzales obtained so-called screener copy of the movie in advance through his friend who works in the advertising company related to the movie's promotion process. He copied the movie to his computer and shared it with his IRC channel friends. He will by sentenced September 26th.

More information:

Yahoo! / Press release
News.com

Yahoo! has launched today customized European versions of its online music service Launch. Launch, originally an independent company that Yahoo! acquired in June, 2001, operates as Yahoo's music portal, offering music videos, interviews, fan pages and music news.

Yahoo's mission is to "become an MTV of the online world". Launch debuts in Europe with five different localized versions: UK/ROI, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. Company re-opened the Launch last year after a major revamp and, according to analysts and Yahoo's spokesperson, is making "good money" for the Net giant -- mostly by allowing record labels to promote their artists via various methods utilising multimedia content.

Source: The Guardian

Despite the whopping success of Apple's iTunes online music store, some popular artists have refused to sell their music in single track format.

Artists claim that the "get only what you want" model undermines their art, in this case, the concept of a full album (order of the songs and the "full picture" all the tracks on the album together create) and are also worried about the fact that selling all the material in single track format might have a negative effect on their album sales.

The monetary issue is, IMHO, rather ridiculous for most artists, since (as far as we've understood) they get almost the same amount for selling two tracks through iTunes as they would get for selling a one physical copy of their album. Anyway, some artists, such as Linkin Park, have pulled their single track selection from iTunes, but continue to offer full album downloads through the service.

Other artists with similiar issues include Madonna and Green Day among others.

Source: Billboard.com

The High Court of Hong Kong decided that a Hong Kong-based mail order company Lik-Sang to stop immediately selling devices that could be used to make backups of Nintendo Game Boy's console games.

The devices and tools, called Flash Cards and Flash Linkers, were used, according to Nintendo, to copy the game ROM images to PC and distrubute the ROM files over the Net and copy them to blank game cartridges, therefor causing monetary damages to Nintendo (who, as all console manufacturers nowadays, gets a share of each game sold to its console platforms) and its game publisher partners.

Court awarded preliminary damages of HK$5 million to Nintendo. Lik-Sang also needs to pay Nintendo's legal bills. Lik-Sang dropped selling these devices in September 2002 when a lower court issued an injunction against the company.

Source: The Register/gi

Now once the EUCD legislation is starting to get implemented in various different European Union countries, people are beginning to wake up and oppose the changes. Unfortunately this is too late now. The EUCD, European Union Copyright Directive was approved by the EU parliament already in 2001 without virtually anyone noticing it.

EUCD simply states that all European Union member countries (and those joining to EU next year) need to implement the directive into their national laws. The original deadline for doing so was in December, 2002 but as always, all countries missed the deadline. Now, the EUCD legislation is active in handful of EU member countries -- and once again, most of those living in these countries don't even know about it. Some of the countries that have -- as far as we know -- implemented the legislation already are Germany and Denmark.

So, what EUCD requires? It very clearly states that all tools and software that allow circumventing copy protection mechanisms (whether built by programming or by mechanical means) will be banned within the European Union. The directive doesn't specifically make it illegal to use such tools, but makes it illegal to distribute, sell and advertise such tools. Prime example of such tools are DVD rippers. So, if a site is located within the European Union, it can't distribute DVD rippers (if its national country has already implemented the EUCD).

According to a survey released by 321 Studios, the maker of the DVDXCopy and XPRESS backup tools, found that most of the consumers hate the idea of self-destructing DVDs that Disney is planning to start selling in the U.S.

Disney's plan is to replace a middleman in the DVD renting business (==Blockbuster) by offering an option where user simply gets the DVD from any store for same price as Blockbuster charges for two-day rental, but don't have to return the disc ever since it becomes unusable after two days. However, according to the study 76 percent of respondents stated that they would not be interested in "renting" a self-destructing DVD.

Most of the people who took the survey, were also extremely worried about the environmental damage such idea would cause.

More information: 321 Studios' press release

RIAA has sued 18 American retailers, most of them small businesses, claiming that they were selling pirated CDs.

The businesses named in the suit included gas stations, small music stores and convenience stores. RIAA started its campaign against businesses selling pirated CDs "on the side" in December and sent notices to many companies asking them to agree with RIAA's terms for dropping the lawsuits. The 18 now named in the suit didn't comply with the request.

As much as most consumers disagree with some of the RIAA's ideas, I personally think that people who make pirated CDs to sell them for profit should be prosecuted. Not that artists would notice much of a difference in their salaries, but anyway..

Source: Reuters via Yahoo!

Sony has been the only major record label that hasn't been selling its music in digital format over the Net in Europe. Now this has changed since Sony licensed its music catalogue to British online music firm OD2.

Through OD2, which was founded by Peter Gabriel, Sony's music will be available through various British websites, including BT, Freeserve and MTV UK. OD2 is the only company in Europe who has managed to get music licenses from all five major record labels. But the deal with Sony has one big nag -- unlike rest of the labels, Sony wont allow distributing its material EU-wide, but insist limiting the distribution only to the UK. This might prove impossible, since AFAIK everything that is sold in any EU country over the Net, has to be available to other EU countries as well.

Source: Reuters

According to a market research by IDC, the worldwide market for (compressed) digital audio players (or as they're better-known, "MP3 players") might become one of the most successful areas for personal technology during the next couple of years.

IDC predicts that such market for MP3 players will be worth a whopping $44 billion by 2007. The figure seems awfully high, but it seems that IDC has included every single stand-alone device type in the world (excluding PCs, etc) that can play compressed audio formats, such as most modern DVD players.

Anyway, the prediction begs to ask what will happen to CDs if consumers have seriously adopted truly digital audio (CD contains digital audio as well, but is associated to the physical plastic product as well) and consider it to be their number one choice when planning to buy a new audio equipment.

Source: vnunet.com

Pioneer has signed a licensing agreement with TiVo to use TiVo's DVR (digital video recorder) technology in its products. TiVo's set-top boxes are basically units that use harddrives as storage media and can act as a VCR replacements or "freeze" live TV picture (i.e. the unit will start recording the TV channel immediately the TV is "paused" and once user hits play again, the playback continues from beginning of the recording while the unit is still recording the rest of the show).

Pioneer is the latest major video equipment manufacturer to sign a such contract -- other licensees include Sony and Toshiba. Pioneer is expected to roll out first TiVo-equipped units, most likely stand-alone DVD recorders, by end of the year.

More information: Pioneer press release

One of the most interesting open source video technologies (as MPEG-4 -based codecs such as XviD have their possible problems with licenses), Ogg Theora, has reached alpha 2 milestone.

Compared to the previous alpha 1, this milestone fixes virtually all bugs found in previous versions and includes various new features. Xiph.org that controls the Theora project, seems to have dropped the development of their other video codec, a wavelet-based Ogg Tarkin, in order to concentrate their efforts to Theora. This is kinda pity, since Theora is based on rather old VP3 codec from On2 and can't really compete with widespread MPEG-4 -based codecs, such as XviD and DivX.

More information: Theora.org

Japanese electronics giant Matsushita (better known by its brand names, such as Panasonic) is trialing a DVD rental system that should be "pirate-proof". The technology combines physical DVD disc and file downloads from the Net.

The concept doesn't sound very user-friendly. The technology, which is developed by Matshushita and four other Japanese companies, forces (as far as we've understood) users to use their PCs to watch the movies instead of their existing stand-alone DVD players.

In trials, one of the participating companies, InterPia, will hand out "teaser" DVD discs that contain movie previews and trailers. Users can then purchase a full movie by inserting the disc to their PCs and downloading the movie from Net and paying for it. After the movie has been watched, it will delete itself -- viewing the movie again means that it has to be downloaded and paid again.

So, basically it sounds -- despite its "sexy" branding as "pirate-proof DVD" -- just like any other Net-based movie rental system, such as Movielink.

Source: ZDNet

Our little project, called AfterDawn.com, is now four years old. On 10th of June, 1999 our site went public for the very first time.

Since then, we've grown quite a bit. I was slightly shocked, when I yesterday took a look at my last year's birthday post and noticed that we've tripled our traffic within the last year.

For those of you, who are interested of this kind of stuff, here are some specs about our site. Our site contains three domains -- AfterDawn.com, Dawnload.net and MP3Lizard.com. Under these three domains we have various "sub-sites" -- all of the sites are available in English and in Finnish (all of our site's admins and owners are Finns). AfterDawn.com contains the main site itself, Finnish version of the main site, English and Finnish discussion forums and official DVDXCopy support forums.

Anyway, as a whole, our site has now 70,000 registered members and on monthly basis we have over 3 million visits to our site which generates appx. 10 million page impressions each month (and if you're stuck with the good olde 1990s thinking of "hits", this converts to around 150 million hits a month). People download over half a million tools and utilities from our site each month and the downloads and pages generate traffic of over 2 terabytes each month.

Verizon lost its case (or at least the major part of it)against RIAA couple of days ago when appeals court decided that it wont intervene to district court's ruling that Verizon has to hand out the names and personal details of its subscribers, that RIAA accuses of piracy, immediately to RIAA.

Despite the fact that now Verizon must give the names immediately, the case is still heading to appeals court's hearing in September. Obviously this wont do any good to the subscribers in question when their details have to be in RIAA's hands well before that deadline and RIAA can launch a legal action against these individuals meanwhile. Obviously Verizon's intention is to take the case as high as possible in the court system to prevent this happening again.

The whole case began when RIAA demanded, based on the controversial DMCA law, Verizon to hand out names and other personal details of four of its Internet customers to RIAA. RIAA claims that these people have distributed illegal music files over the P2P networks. Verizon agrees that it might have been the case, but Verizon's point is that RIAA should get the court order for each case before Verizon has to act, since otherwise -- Verizon and many other ISPs say -- RIAA gets a personal detail automaton that requires RIAA only to accuse someone of doing something illegal and wont have to prove it in any way.

World's third largest record label, British EMI, has sued German media giant Bertelsmann, the owner of world's fifth largest record label BMG. The suit follows the similiar lawsuit filed earlier this year by group of independent music publishers and later by world's largest record label, UMG (owned by French Vivendi).

The legal fight that includes all the parties mentioned, is seeking for more than $17 billion from Bertelsmann. UMG, BMG and the independent publishers have filed the lawsuit because they consider that Bertelsmann was deeply involved with large-scale copyright infringements by investing over $100M to now-defunct Napster, the mother of all P2P tools.

EMI's suit was filed, just like UMG's was, in District Court in New York. Previously these two record labels (UMG and EMI) have already sued the original Napster's investors, the venture capitalist company Hummer Winblad Venture Partners for same reasons that they're now suing Bertelsmann.

Remaining two of the Big Five record labels, Japanese Sony and the only major American label owner AOL TimeWarner, haven't commented whether they will be joining the lawsuit party in near future.

In a long fight over the royalty rates for webcasting (or audio streaming, however you want to call it) in the U.S., it finally seems that all parties have reached an agreement. Final obstacle was with the non-commercial college radio stations and they have now reached an agreement with RIAA.

Under the agreement, college radio stations pay a flat fee of $250 a year, applied retroactively from 1998. The fee will remain on this level until end of 2004 when the royalty rates need to be negotiated again. Other non-commercial Net radio stations reached an agreement earlier, paying $400 a year -- also retroactively from 1998 and until end of 2004.

The royalty rate debate has been a hot potatoe to the rather new industry, specially when the royalty rates originally were proposed. The original rates, stations said, would have killed virtually all hobbyist from the industry. Since then, there have been rulings, overrulings, back-stabbing, secret private deals and finally something that looks like a consensus over the rates.

Small, commercial webcasters pay a flat fee of $500 a year for their streaming rights and the bigger players pay appx. $0.01 per hour per listener.