News written by Rich Fiscus (December, 2009)

Warner Music Group (WMG) announced a deal with online video service Hulu to offer music videos, artist interviews & concerts from Atlantic Records, Rhino Records and Warner Bros. Records. This follows a deal with EMI, which brought that label's content to the service last month.

Hulu is in the process of launching pages for a variety of artists. One has already been established for the band Muse, and pages for Jason Mraz and Fueled have been announced.

More artist pages will be announced early next year.

Its nice to see Hulu continue to expand their offerings and music is certainly a logical step. Still, it's worth noting that as more content partners have come on board there has been increasing pressure on Hulu executives to control access more tightly.

It was this pressure which led to both TV.com and Boxee users losing the ability to stream videos from Hulu earlier this year.

Labels like WMG have a history of insisting on limiting online offerings to the point of devaluing them. If adding their content ultimately means tighter restrictions on how you can watch Hulu videos it's a step in the wrong direction.

Today LG Electronics announced a mew LCD TV panel which will be the world's thinnest, measuring just 2.6mm thick. The announcement was timed as a promotion for the company's exhibit at CES, where the new panels will be on display.

The reduction in panel thickness was made possible in part through the use of LED backlighting. This also improves image quality compared to older LCD panels

The panels also feature a 120Hz refresh rate and full HD (1080P) resolution.

Although not officially anounced yet, the date for next years Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference appears to have been chosen.Not surprisingly it will begin on June 28 to coincide with both the anniversary of the original iPhone's release and the expiration of AT&T's exclusive carrier deal.

With all the bad publicity and customer ill will generated by AT&T during their time as the ecxlusive iPhone partner you can be sure this will be more than just another iPhone launch. It will be Apple's chance to make a new start, either with a new US carrier deal or a completely open arrangement like Google is planning for their Nexus phone.

Assuming there is also an accompanying OS update, as their has been with each successive iPhone launch, it will also be the first time iPhone owners have been charged for it.

Thanks to the restrictions placed on them by the same accounting rules which have required them to charge iPod Touch owners for previous updates, they must charge for updates released more than three years after an iPhone is sold. Changes to these rules could mean Apple can offer free updates for the life of the device. They would also be able, for the first time ever, to immediately show the full amount of revenue generated from the next iPhone launch on their books.

As Blu-ray continues to grow in popularity, more and more people are considering the purchase of a BD-ROM drive. To date the biggest obstacle for many consumers has been the price, which until the last few months has consistently been over $100 for even a reader.

Earlier this year Lite-On introduced the iHOS104 BD-ROM drive. At around $60 for the OEM version and $70 for the retail model it's currently the least expensive Blu-ray reader you can buy.

We decided to pick up an OEM unit and try it out.

Last week three of the four major labels launched a new service in the US called Vevo. Vevo offers music videos from their acts, and features 100% professionally produced and officially sanctioned content.

First some history. Vevo is essentially the product of negotiations between Universal Music Group (UMG) and Google over content licensing for YouTube. Since it was announced two of the three remaining majors (EMI and Sony Music) have signed on, each taking a share of ownership in the company. The fourth major, Warner Music Group, has decided not to get involved just yet.

Although they run the servers and take a cut of ad revenue, Google doesn't share in ownership of Vevo.

The purpose of Vevo is fairly simple. Label executives were looking for a way to make monetize their content. If you didn't know that before visiting Vevo, it would become quickly apparent. When you watch a video there are often small ads which appear at the bottom of the video and links to one side for buying the music you're listening to. You are also given the option to link to a particular video or getting code to embed it in a webpage, both of which include ads which play before the video starts.

Yesterday Vevo, the online video partnership between Google and Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and EMI launched. Notably absent is content from Warner Music, the only one of the four major labels not participating.

Reportedly A2IM, which represents more than 200 independent labels is also in talks to provide content for the service.



Vevo was envisioned as a sort of premium YouTube, where content is provided solely by labels. Besides watching the videos on Vevo, you can create and share playlists, embed songs in web pages, and buy them from online stores like iTunes and Amazon.

Rather than being simply a distribution center for music videos, Vevo is intended to help sell artists with profile pages featuring interviews and other promotional content.

So far Vevo appears to be having a rough time keeping up with traffic. Once things calm down a little and they get the kinks worked out come back for our review of the service.

At a launch party in New York City last night Boxee representatives announced the beta version of their web-based media center program which runs on Windows, Linux, OS X, and AppleTV set-top boxes. The company also released additional details about the upcoming Boxee set-top box. It will be manufactured by D-Link and go on sale to the public next year.

Both the Boxee Box and the Boxee beta software will be on display at January's Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The software will be released to the general public at that time as well.

Before then access to the beta will be by invitation only, eventually opening to current users of the Boxee alpha version.

In addition to the new UI, the new Windows version of Boxee adds DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA), allowing you to take advantage of newer graphics cards' video decoding capabilities.

The Boxee Box will have both wireless (802.11N) and wired Ethernet to connect to your home network and the internet, as well as 2 USB ports and a SD Card slot to read files locally. Video and audio connections will include a HDMI port, S/PDIF connector, and 2 channel analog audio out.

In the past decade free video tools ranging from encoders to editors and authoring software have made a major mark on the digital video landscape. At one time those tools were primarily used by the hardcore power users willing to put in the hours necessary to grasp the technical details intimately.

More recently successors to tools like IfoEdit, DVD2SVCD, Gordian Knot and AutoGK have come a long way in terms of both useability and functionality. In fact MPEG-4 encoding seems to be dominated by these tools despite the availability of good consumer alternatives. We decided to take a look at some of the tools in use today and see how they stack up.

We chose five programs to review. Our criteria were that they should all encode to multiple formats, including MPEG-4 AVC/H.264. In fact all the tested programs encoded to both MPEG-4 AVC and MPEG-4 ASP (XviD). We also looked for programs which have been in development for a while. With one exception, every program was initially released at least three years ago and the last one is from an established encoder GUI developer. All are relatively mature products so they shouldn't have any big problems.

We ended up choosing SUPER, Handbrake, StaxRip, HDConvertToX and MeGUI.