News archive (5 / 2002)
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 31 May 2002 2:22
Very, very little information available on this one, but apparently some guys at XBoxHacker have built the first DivX player for XBox.
Currently the project is in extremely early alpha phase, doesn't support audio, only supports DivX ;-) 3.11 encoded content and definitely requires a modchip in order to work.
For more information, please visit here.
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 30 May 2002 3:22
According to Viant, a research company which specializes in Internet piracy, Net users download an estimated 400,000 to 600,000 pirate movie copies a day at the moment -- up by at least 20 per cent from last year's figures.
Company also points out that major releases, such as this summer's megahits Star Wars Episode II and Spiderman, will take the numbers even higher. Viant estimated that at one point, shortly after it was widely reported that both movies are available as an illegal copies in the Net, at least 10M users tried to download at least one of these movies. Funniest thing is that only two or three million users actually succeeded in their task :-)
It would be nice to know, what percentage of these users who downloaded, for example SWEp2, actually went to a movie theatre to see the movie and how many of them will purchase the DVD once it hits the stores. I bet that the number would be extremely high.
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 29 May 2002 2:09
Nineteen Taiwanese electronics companies have quietly decided to develop their own DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) standard, dubbed as EVD (Enhanced Versatile Disc). The new format will be compatible with similiar Chinese effort called AVD (Advanced Versatile Disc), but EVD's storage would be appx. 1GB higher for dual-layer discs.
Both standards' players would play regular DVD discs and would use similiar red-laser technology what DVD currently uses (instead of blue laser technology what upcoming Japanese Blu-Ray uses). Analysts estimate that Taiwanese and Chinese efforts will eventually merge as one competing standard to current DVD standard.
The reason behind the whole process is very simple -- money. Chinese DVD player manufacturers are refusing to pay licensing fees for their players to companies who own patents on DVD technology (which include Japanese Sony, Japanese Pioneer, European Philips, Dolby Labs, Thomson Multimedia, etc). Licensing fees are currently appx. 20 to 25 percent for $100 DVD player. Same thing happened in early 1990s, when companies who developed VideoCD format (Sony, Pioneer and Philips) which became an instant success in Far East, tried to get Chinese player manufacturers to pay for the patents -- Chinese government simply organized a joint venture which eventually developed royalty-free SuperVideoCD format.
Read more...
Written by Lasse Penttinen
@ 29 May 2002 1:35
Cdrinfo.com has posted most interesting news about the upcoming first Sanyo DVD recorder, the CRD-DV1
Product Specs:
CD Format:
Writing speeds: 4x, 8x, 12x, 16x, 20x (CLV), 24x (Zone-CLV) [CD], 12x (CLV) [1.3GB]
Re-writing Speeds: 4x, 10x, 12x (CLV)
Reading speed: 40x (CAV)
4MB Buffer
Burn-Proof technology
FlexSS-BP technology
Shock-BP technology
Safe-BP technology
DVD Format
Writing speeds: 1x, 2x, 4x (DVD-R)
Re-writing speeds: 1x, 2x (DVD-RW)
Reading: 16x (CAV)
Recently Sony announced it’s DDCD-format (Double Desity Compact Disc) which gives you 1.3GB storage capacity using special DDCD media and a compatible drive. Now Sanyo’s approach makes this almost obsolete as according to the source their drive does the same with regular CD-Rs: 1.3GB bytes on a 74min CD-R and 1.4GB when using a 80min media.
A very interesting but not very standard or compatible approach!
CDRInfo.com
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 28 May 2002 1:49
One of the most reliable music charts in the world, Gracenote's "High Tech Top 40", had a very surprising entry at number two position in last week -- Eminem's yet-to-be-released new album "The Eminem Show".
Gracenote, who owns CD database CDDB, tracks music listening behaviour based on wide range of software audio players. Basically if users use popular audio players like WinAMP to play their audio CDs (NOTE: not MP3s or other digital audio files), the player connects to CDDB database to retrieve album information (which audio CDs generally speaking don't have stored on the CD) based on the statistics the album has (exact length of tracks, number of tracks, etc). And Gracenote keeps track of these requests.
So, Eminem's new album was second most played album on the charts week before it was about to be released (last Sunday), providing a pretty solid proof that professional CD pirates had already received a copy of the album earlier and had started producing professional audio CD copies of the album for sale.
Full story from News.com
Written by Lasse Penttinen
@ 28 May 2002 12:57
Talk about déjà vu! It was in the May 2001 when were reading news about increasing CD-R prices. PC World even tried to scare us with tripling prices back in the 2001. And if I recollect correctly the summer 2001 wasn’t the first time that increasing CD-R prices were predicted.
I personally didn’t see anything significant happening to CD-R prices here in Finland and I don’t think that there were any drastic changes in other market areas either. Of course the price increases by the manufacturers may have affected the profit markets somewhere in the value chain, but the shop shelf prices have been steady or declining. I don’t think that there is need to stockpile at this time either.
Taiwan’s optical disc manufacturers are rolling out long-anticipated price increases in CD-R discs. Per-unit contract prices of blank discs for June are up by roughly US$0.02 at top-tier manufacturers, while those at the small-to-medium disc makers average US$0.015.
First-tier companies Ritek, CMC Magnetics and Prodisc Technology, which focus on high-speed disc products, have marked up June contract prices by US$0.02 to US$0.025, or a 5-10% rise. Unit quotes for their 40x and 48x CD-R discs currently range from US$0.18 to US$0.22
Read more...
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 27 May 2002 10:46
In an interview IBM's HDD division's head Currie Munce told that IBM strongly believes that in future, PVRs are the technology that will create more demand for harddrives.
According to IBM, people simply don't need more HDD space in near future -- 500GB harddrives and bigger than that are most likely going to be used in PVR devices (Personal Video Recorder) like TiVo and in digital TVs. Actually he suggests that only low-end models within 5 years will have 200GB of HDD, most models will ship with 500GB or 1000GB HDDs.
Source: PCWorld.com
Written by Lasse Penttinen
@ 27 May 2002 10:02
Key2Audio and audio CD protection gimmicks have been a hot topic recently. The copy protection industry was humiliated by the so called felt pen trick which so easily defeats their state of the art protections. Now Macrovision (SafeDisc, SafeAudio) has published an annoncement regarding the felt-tip pen trick.
The felt-tip pen hack may work on audio copy protection products that rely on the single data index copy protection technique. Macrovision’s SAFEAUDIO™ V3 is resistant to this hack approach because we have implemented a tunable multi-layer security solution, which is based upon multiple patent-pending technologies.
It should be noted that using ink of any sort on the playing surface of the CD can cause loss of the entire contents of the CD. Introducing ink or foreign materials on the playing surface of a CD can also damage the CD player reading device. Consumers should be aware that any damaged media or corrupted media files caused by this hack may void any warranties for such media, the content contained thereon, or the playback or recording device.
Attempted use of this hack is also likely to prevent access to entertainment content (such as videos, photographs, lyrics, pre-compressed audio tracks for export to PCs and portable players, etc.) stored on the “second session” of multi-session CDs and protected by Macrovision’s SAFEAUTHENTICATE™ product. Macrovision strongly discourages consumers from attempting this hack on any CDs enabled by SAFEAUDIO and SAFEAUTHENTICATE.
Read more...
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 26 May 2002 2:25
I don't know about you guys, but my mailbox is getting pretty damn full of s*it from these commercial DVD copy companies and as we've warned you earlier, most of these companies are 100% scam artists who sell DVD ripping "scene"'s (i.e. AfterDawn.com, doom9, VCDHelp and DDigest) free manuals and freeware tools and charge you for those. We do approve selling self-made guides, like Expert-Guides does, or selling actual tools, like DUP-DVD does.
Anyway, to the actual point. One of the best-known guide contributers, Sefy, who mostly does guides for VCDHelp, announced at VCDHelp's forums that some morons who call themselves as "DVD Wizard" (their URL is http://www.easternisp.org/) are selling his guides as an eBook without his permission to do so.
So, just stick with the names you know (like the ones I listed) or with companies who have good and solid reputation in providing guides & tools. Basically by reading through various forums and seeing what companies sponsor DVD ripping and software sites should give you a good idea what to do.
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 25 May 2002 2:08
Nothing dramatical in the charts during the last week. Some re-entries from old-time favourites, like Blaze appearing at #7. Also on P2P sector, WinMX continues to climb higher as other P2P tools seem to be dying (just read our news section, will you?).
In MP3 charts, only new entry is from Wave, otherwise the chart seems pretty similiar to the previous ones. And the charts are here...
Hot programs
1.
SmartRipper v2.41
2.
Streambox VCR v1.0 beta 3.1
3.
DVD Decrypter v3.0.0.17
4.
cladDVD v2.0
5.
WinMX v3.1
6.
VirtualDub v1.4.10
7.
Blaze Media Pro 2002j
8.
AC3Dec v0.821
9.
DVD Decoder v0.3
10.
DV-Tool v0.31
Hot MP3s
1. Blind Lesbians of Uganda : "
Masturbating Is A Crime (Wankers Will Be Punished)"
2. Dj Quesito/Gettopoet : "
BIN LADEN vs BUSH CLUB EDIT"
3. Bryan Edman : "
Always On My Mind"
4. Loud Sound Disorder : "
Eminem Diss"
5. HOLOCHAUST : "
Losing My Religion (new REM cover!!)"
6. 2CoXX : "
Fantasy damage"
7. Adante : "
Sky World (Original Mix)"
8. Evermore : "
Frau eva"
9. HOLOCHAUST : "
Runaway Train"
10. Wave : "
Burning The Bridges"
Written by Lasse Penttinen
@ 24 May 2002 11:52
The developer of EAC annouced that a bug has slipped to the 0.9 beta 4 release and is now fixed. This information if from the EAC mailing list:
Please redownload 0.9b4 if you had already. I just removed one eported
small bug on creating 0 byte length profile files in the actual directory. The new executable
should be from the 24.5. 14:48...
Download EAC v0.9 beta 4
Written by Lasse Penttinen
@ 24 May 2002 11:01
User Pio2001 posted these interesting test results to our forum. It is translated from a ZDNet.fr article.
Key2audio has been tested in 27 drives with Céline Dion's CD
18 refused to read the CD, while 9 succeeded. For most of these, the CD appears like any unprotected CD, but with some others, it is not directly accessible from Windows, but needs a burning program like Nero or CDRWin in order to be read.
About those that can't read the CD, the sympoms are various, from not seeing the CD to freezing the machine through freezing the computer, like with CD-Rom Matsushita CD-ROM CR-594, DVD-Rom Hitachi DVD-ROM CG-7500 or DVD burner Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-104.
The burner CD-RW from Iomega ejects the CD after 2 seconds.
N : can't read
Y : can read
CD ROM drives :
Aopen 48X CD-Rom Y
CD-ROM TW 120D N
Kenwood CD-Rom UCR-421 N
Lite-on LTN 486 48x Y
Matshita CD-Rom CR-585 N
Matshita CD-Rom CR-594 N
Pioneer CD-Rom DR-A12X N
Sony CD-Rom CDU711 Y
Sony CD-Rom CDU701 N
Teac CD-224E N
Torisan CD-Rom CDR-U241 N
DVD-ROM drives :
AOpen DVD-1040 Pro N
Hitachi DVD-Rom CG-7500 N
Pioneer DVD 105 N
Sony DVD-Rom DDV 1621 Y
Toshiba DVD-Rom SD-M1202 Y
Read more...
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 24 May 2002 3:55
RIAA has sued one of the oldest file-swapping services, AudioGalaxy, for copyright infringement.
AudioGalaxy started filtering copyrighted material in mid-2001 after Napster was forced to shut down. Now RIAA claims that company's filtering efforts haven't been effective -- the same claim that actually brought Napster offline for good.
Not very surprisingly, National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) and the Harry Fox Agency, which represents songwriters, joined RIAA in the lawsuit.
RIAA has currently pending legal action against Napster, AudioGalaxy, KaZaA BV (original developer of the KaZaA and FastTrack network), Streamcast Networks (operators of Morpheus), Madster (formerly known as Aimster), MP3Board.com (only non-P2P company of these) and Grokster. Madster and Napster are already virtually out of P2P business and rest of the P2P companies have indicated that their legal costs might actually fold at least some of the companies eventually.
Written by Lasse Penttinen
@ 24 May 2002 12:51
How to copy a Playstation CD? That is an old question but still very frequently asked.
The latest CloneCD introduced new user interface, one of the major improvements being the ability create profiles for various types of CDs to be backed up. CD-RW.ORG has previously published a guide (not online anymore) to backup PSX CDs with CloneCD 3 generation, so now it was time to update that. Note that we are talking about CDs for the original Playstation 1 and not the more recent PS2.
Read the full article!
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 23 May 2002 1:55
Electronic Frontier Foundation and First Amendment Project today filed briefs to Californian Supreme Court asking the court to uphold the appeals court's decision that distributing DeCSS code on the Internet doesn't violate Californian trade secrets laws.
EFF's briefs were a response to DVD CCA's briefs filed in March to Californian Supreme Court. DVD CCA obviously wants to overturn the decision made by appeals court in November.
DVD CCA's case at least looks weak, because they've based their legal action on Californian trade secrets laws and claiming that DeCSS violates these laws. But reverse engineering, which would have been normally the best method to build DeCSS-type of program, doesn't violate this law. Nor does the method how DeCSS actually was built -- by a mistake made by Xing Technologies. Xing simply forgot to encrypt the CSS encryption keys that were stored within their XingDVD software player and DeCSS uses those keys (which is also the reason why original DeCSS doesn't work with new DVD discs anymore -- DVD CCA has changed the encryption keys since beginning of 2000).
Anyway, the case, which was filed two years ago against Californian resident Andrew Bunner, is closely related to the other high-profile DeCSS case in New York, where movie studios have sued hacker mag 2600 over distributing DeCSS. Only real difference between cases is the fact that courts' decisions have been completely different in each coast -- recently appeals court in New York decided that posting DeCSS actually violates notorious DMCA law (which is the basis of the East Coast case, unlike in West Coast, where DVD CCA is using other legal arguments).
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 23 May 2002 11:23
Online DVD rental site, Netflix is one of the few high-profile hi-tech IPOs in this year. Company listed today at NASDAQ after its IPO which brought company a nice pile of cash to operate with, exactly $82.5M.
IPO price was set at $15 a share, but in today's trading stock price was hovering around $17. Company operates one of the most successful new video rental business models -- it offers unlimited DVD rentals for users who subscribe to its service for $19.95 a month. Users choose movies they want from online catalog of over 60,000 movies and after they've selected their movies, discs are sent out using first class mail.
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 23 May 2002 7:06
Ok, dirty and shameless plug.. I've been working with a new funny little project lately with AfterDawn.com's gfx'er and we're almost ready to launch the site, but wanted to ask some of our users to beta test it, give us feedback on what should be added/done to the site before we start promoting it to the public.
Basically its a site aimed towards newsjunkies, like me, who just don't have time to check out all their favourite sites for new articles. I know that there are tons of similiar sites available, but we have some neat ideas for the site's future that will be unveiled later in the future. Currently only the main page and some specific features work, but that is pretty much the whole site anyway :-)
If you're interested, please visit:
NewsfeedZ.com (note the Z :-)
Written by Lasse Penttinen
@ 22 May 2002 1:36
Peter, one of WinAmp developers, gives you a very good list why not to use mp3pro or WMA. Read and learn – the man knows what he is writing about. This is a short summary of his pointers. Read the complete article here
1.Patents / licenses.
-mp3pro support will be probably never bundled with winamp.
2. Closed source, no publicly available libraries.
-Still, there are NO available mp3pro decoders for OS's different than Windows.
3. DRM encryption in WMA.
-You can't give them to your friends; you might be unable to play them after reinstalling Windows on the same computer.
4. Converting to other formats.
-Someday, you might want to convert your music files to WAV format for burning on CD. WMA format doesn't allow that.
5. Quality.
-Currently, Ogg Vorbis outperforms both WMA and mp3pro at any bitrate. Modern MP3 encoders (LAME) totally outperform WMA at 128kbps and above.
6. Alternatives.
- OGG Vorbis
- LAME MP3 Encoder
- MusePack
Read more...
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 21 May 2002 3:18
Librarian of Congress rejected today Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel's recommendations for webcasting royalty rates.
Librarian of Congress based its rejection on recommendation from Register of Copyrights. Now the U.S. law states that LoC has to issue its final determination by 20th of June, 2001 about the issue.
Currently we don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing for webcasters -- the proposed royalty rate was too high, webcasters say, and would have killed vast majority of webcasters. But LoC could've rejected the proposal also because it felt it was too low, as RIAA suggested.
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 21 May 2002 2:32
Phew, yet another KaZaA-related article for this week.. Getting hectic... Anyway, it appears that world's first KaZaA-targeted worm has been found.
The small worm poses itself as a pirated software/movie/track and if user downloads it and tries to open the file, it creates tons of replicas of itself in users harddrive, with various tempting names and finally sets the directory as one of the KaZaA's shared directories, allowing other network users to find and download the files as well.
Worm can also infect other Fasttrack-based clients, including Grokster and extremely unofficial KaZaA Lite.
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 21 May 2002 2:21
KaZaA will face yet another legal fight in Netherlands, according to Dutch website Nu.nl.
Despite the fact that KaZaA was sold to Australia earlier this year, Dutch music copyright organization BUMA/STEMRA is determined to take the case which it lost in court already, to Dutch Supreme Court. The case is still valid, since they're sueing KaZaA for the copyright violations that took place before the company was sold to Australian Sharman Networks.
Dutch court decided earlier this year that P2P network is not responsible for the content users transfer in its network, but that the users themselves are responsible.
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 20 May 2002 12:06
According to analyst study published on last week, RealNetworks is on its way to reach "magic" number of 1M subscribers with its premium-rate subscription service.
Real's subscription service, which has been rebranded various times and currently is dubbed as "SuperPass", costs anywhere between $9.95 and $19.95 a month and includes premium rate content from NBA, Major League Baseball, CNN as well as music content from MusicNet.
According to report, a whopping 85% of all streaming media content available on the Web currently is encoded and delivered using Real's RealAudio and RealVideo technology. This is remarkable specially because all of us, video freaks, know "good" their widely-used video and audio codecs are in terms of quality.
Written by Lasse Penttinen
@ 20 May 2002 2:08
Paid content will invade the Kazaa file-swapping network Monday in a major commercial test of a service that until now has lured millions of people with free music, video and other digital files.
As it was previously reporterted, the Kazaa file sharing software carries also the technology of another peer-to-peer network that can and will be used for commercial purposes. The search keywords the user feeds to Kazaa will also be sent to Altnet and Altnet will give the user paid advertising that matches the search as a result.
Along with finding search results that point to unfettered MP3s, Kazaa users will begin to see links to songs for sale from record labels and advertisements linked to keyword searches.
The move is fraught with controversy as the first application of Altnet, a service from Kazaa partner Brilliant Digital Entertainment that came to light amid a Web privacy storm last month. Some Kazaa users reacted with outrage when they discovered that bits of Altnet had been quietly installed on their computers with the potential to turn their machines into drones at the beck of a little-known company whose ambitions were unknown.
News.com
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 18 May 2002 3:56
Some interesting changes in software charts happened in last week compared to previous week. DVD2AVI dropped out of the charts and we saw DV-Tool to appear first time in our top 10 for a very loong time. Also WinMX made its debut on our software charts, which indicates that people are still shopping around for that "One Perfect P2P Tool".
In MP3 charts, our old-time favourite AEON made its way back to top 10 first time for a very long time -- AEON was one of the first bands ever to join our site's promo service back in 1999. Otherwise, familiar names on the charts, just slightly different order than earlier.
Anyway, the charts are here...
Hot programs
1.
SmartRipper v2.41
2.
Streambox VCR v1.0 beta 3.1
3.
DVD Decrypter v3.0.0.17
4. cladDVD v2.0
5.
VirtualDub v1.4.10
6.
AC3Dec v0.821
7.
WinMX v3.1
8.
CDEx v1.50 beta 3
9. DVD Decoder v0.3
10.
DV-Tool v0.31
Hot MP3s
1. Blind Lesbians of Uganda : "
Masturbating Is A Crime (Wankers Will Be Punished)"
2. Dj Quesito/Gettopoet : "
BIN LADEN vs BUSH CLUB EDIT"
3. Bryan Edman : "
Always On My Mind"
4. 2CoXX : "
Fantasy damage"
5. AEON : "
Matrix Paradox"
6. HOLOCHAUST : "
Losing My Religion (new REM cover!!)"
7. HOLOCHAUST : "
Runaway Train"
8. Adante : "
Sky World (Original Mix)"
9. Loud Sound Disorder : "
Eminem Diss"
10. ATOPICA : "
Destiny's Child"
Written by Lasse Penttinen
@ 18 May 2002 2:48
Emedialive has published and interesting article about using the DVD format as a storage space form compressed audio. They see great demand and use for such audio format, but also bring up the point that none of the current DVD players are up for the task. If a DVD is inserted, the players assume it’s a video disc even though they might support MP3s on CD-Rs or CD-RWs.
It’s true that MP3 DVDs would make gigantic jukebox audio sources. On the other hand, I really see no point in damaging the audio quality with lossy compression (such as MP3) when there is such a large capacity available. In my opinion the way to go could be lossless compression, which could squeeze the music roughly 30-50% without affecting the quality. But there are no global standards is lossless compression. Instead there are many independent software titles available, like Monkey’s Audio or WavPack.
Also, I have to correct one thing about this article:
One compressed CD-R/RW disc holds as much as 20 ordinary CDs and can transform a single, compact, and only slightly modified player into the equivalent of a multi-disc changer.
Currently 1:20 compression is definitely not possible in Hi-Fi quality. Using high quality MP3s one can achieve compression around 1:8 and other formats like MusePack or OGG aren’t much different.
Read more...
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 18 May 2002 9:00
We added two very, very short guides to our article section today. First guide covers how to split MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 files using DV-Tool and another guide tells you how to join multiple MPEG-1/2 files together using DV-Tool.
Links to new guides are:
https://www.afterdawn.com/articles/archive/mpeg_splitting.cfm
https://www.afterdawn.com/articles/archive/mpeg_merging.cfm
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 17 May 2002 1:14
In last week everything seemed to collapse at headquarters of Napster; board of directors had rejected Bertelsmann acquisition offer and CEO Konrad Hilbers decided to leave the company -- later also six other executives announced that they will leave the company, including Napster's founder, Shawn Fanning.
Now Napster's board of directors have made a full U-turn and have decided to approve Bertelsmann new offer -- which is 50% lower than the previous offer :-)
So, story of Napster as an independent company finally ends. Bertelsmann acquires all shares of the company for $8M which will be paid to company's creditors. Acquisition opens the door for Napster to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Both Konrad Hilbers and Shawn Fanning will stay at the company.
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 17 May 2002 12:29
In yet another setback, 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reconsider 2600's ban to distribute DeCSS code through its website.
Decision is a major loss for free speech advocates, researchers and journalists who have strongly lobbied against a controversial law that we all know as DMCA.
Now 2600's last chance is to appeal directly to U.S. Supreme Court. EFF who has defended 2600 in court, says that it is still considering this option. The case is about DeCSS code which was the first known piece of software to decrypt copy-protection mechanism found on DVD movie discs.
Written by Jari Ketola
@ 17 May 2002 7:32
Collectorz.com has released version 2.0 of their Movie Collector software. The new version features lots of nice improvements, such as retrieval of both the front and back cover images.
A great tool for everyone with even a small DVD collection. Download the new version here!
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 17 May 2002 2:28
DivXNetworks guys have been pretty busy tweaking their codec lately and this new version, DivX 5.02, definately fixes some serious issues that DivX5 used to have.
Mostly all tweaks are related to playback optimization -- with my P3/500 you just _couldn't_ watch DivX5 encoded videos with DivX5 codec when the bitrate and the resolution were high enough. Now the codec offers quite a nice range of settings you can turn on and off to see how it effects to your DivX playback performance. DivXNetworks says that now P3/466 should be able to play 640x480 video which uses GMC and B-frames while using 80% of the CPU power, which is a significant improvement over 5.01.
Anyway, you can download the ad-free version from here:
DivX 5.02
...and the ad-sponsored version, suitable specially for DivX encoders, from here:
DivX 5.02 Pro
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 16 May 2002 3:07
Highly unlikely alliance formed between KaZaA, the notorious P2P software company (owned by Australian Sharman Networks), and American telecom giant Verizon (former Bell Atlantic) is determined to force Washington to change one of the biggest issues surrounding digital media and rights to it.
Companies are pushing Congress to force record companies and other media owners for something that's dubbed as "compulsory licensing". Currently the situation is that unless company's specific needs for content aren't covered by existing contracts (like radio royalties), company has to negotiate with each and every content owner separately to get the content and set the price for the content.
Now KaZaA and Verizon are pushing something that would change this, forcing companies to license and forcing Copyright Office or someone else to set the royalty rates for each and every use there is for the content.
Verizon's main concern is probably the fact that P2P networks are one of the main things that pull users towards broadband connections which are Verizon's bread/butter business at the moment.
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 15 May 2002 3:23
As of today, we have implemented a method to block users who are using so-called "ad blockers" from entering our site. At all.
This is due the fact that by using ad blockers, you're getting content for free, without compensating us, publishers. We can't provide this content for free -- our server costs for two dedicated servers are extremely high with hundreds of gigabytes of traffic a month. And this is paid by our advertisers -- however annoying their ads might be (we have blocked 99.9% of popup requests from our advertisers and have only allowed popunders -- and even allowing popunders took 2.5 years to decide), those ads pay our server hosting bills.
If you can't tolerate this decision, feel free to find the content and software from other sites. Only thing what I ask from you, is to understand our situation -- we don't like ads either, but they're necessary for us to survive.
-Petteri 'dRD' Pyyny, webmaster
Written by Jari Ketola
@ 15 May 2002 1:46
Microsoft slashed prices for its Xbox console Wednesday - this time in the U.S. The announcement came only two days after Sony announced price cuts for Playstation 2.
Now the consoles are again equally priced at $200. According to Microsoft the price cut was backed by the boost in sales in both Europe and Australia after the price was cut there.
Nintendo still has no plans to cut the price of their Gamecube console.
Written by Lasse Penttinen
@ 14 May 2002 2:08
The people of BusinessWeek have realised something that smart burners have known for ages. The significance of speed improvements has decreased as writing speeds have increased. We already discussed about this earlier when the news of a 60x chipset by Sharp was announced.
Once upon a time, a big jump in CD-R write speed ratings for CD-Rewritable drives meant that new drives could reduce the time needed to write a disc by as much as one-third. We tested two shipping models of the new 40X generation--CenDyne's Lightning III 40x12x48 and Plextor's PlexWriter 40/12/40A--and found that they cut only about 16 seconds off the average time that a 32X drive needs to burn a 650MB disc.
And as always with the latest ultra-fast writers, there are the media issues, possible burn quality issues and the fact that can you take full advantage of the speed with on-the-fly copying?
BusinessWeek
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 14 May 2002 1:55
Napster's CEO, Konrad Hilbers, has announced that he will quit the company after Napster's board rejected the proposed deal to sell the company to Bertelsmann.
The management team "has put together what I consider to be a valid and beneficial deal for Napster over the last weeks," Hilbers said in the e-mail, News.com reported. "Unfortunately, the board has chosen to not pursue the deal...I am convinced that not pursuing the offer is a mistake, and it will lead the company to a place where I don't want to lead it."
Read more from News.com
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 14 May 2002 11:15
Sony has delivered a DMCA takedown notice to game company Blizzard to stop distributing Sony's copyrighted music tracks over P2P networks. Allegedly some of the Blizzard's employees have been running P2P tools on their work computers and sharing copyrighted music to their peers.
Blizzard's memo to employees states: "Unauthorized distribution of copyrighted audio, video, graphics, software and/or any other files (e.g., commercial recordings, films, or software) is illegal. Providing these files over the Company network through peer-to-peer file-sharing programs (ie. Kazaa, Morpheus, EDonkey, Gnutella, and similar programs) or by other means puts both the user and Blizzard in jeopardy of being held liable for copyright infringement. As you can imagine, this risk is not one that the company is willing to take."
Written by Lasse Penttinen
@ 14 May 2002 12:36
Chip.de has a most interesting article about new methods for bypassing audio CD protections. These methods should apply to Cactus Data Shield (100/200) and Key2Audio protections. The idea of these methods is to blank out the last track of the CD, by covering parts of the outer edge of the disc. Chips.de demonstrates two methods: Using a felt tip pen or a Post-It note to cover parts of the CD.
Seems too simple and kind of funny, but the article looks serious and is from a good source.
Chip.de (in German only)
Babelfish language translation tool
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 13 May 2002 1:43
Boeing has announced that it will launch digital cinema at 22 theatres in U.S. and at one in the UK in this month. This means first real push to finally replace the old distribution model of movies where actual film rolls are transferred from studios to each and every movie theatre physically.
Boeing Digital Cinema has its cost -- the equipment which includes satellite dish, server, digital projector and wiring is appx. $150,000 per theatre. It is believed that Boeing has given radical discounts or has offered revenue-sharing schemes for theatres.
By using digital cinema equipment, studios can transfer the movies over the satellite or fiber-optic cable connections directly to theatres over a connection which is heavily encrypted in order to prevent piracy. Theatres can run digital copies virtually forever, while regular film has to be replaced relatively often since it tends to gets worse after number of viewings.
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 13 May 2002 12:48
Other Chinese DVD player manufacturers are about to follow the path laid out by Apex earlier this year, when it agreed to pay technology licensing royalties to companies who own key patents to DVD technology (such companies include Sony and Philips).
One of the main reasons for this surprising development is China's entry to WTO. China must comply with WTO's rules over globally recognized patents, etc and this legislation seems to make Beijing government to actually force certain companies to pay the royalties to foreign companies.
To read more about the issue, visit Yahoo! Finance.
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 11 May 2002 2:16
Nothing serious stuff in there, really, but first DVD-R guide in AfterDawn.com anyway. The guide describes step-by-step how to backup a DVD-Video disc which is smaller than 4.36GB to a DVD-R (or DVD-RW or DVD+RW or DVD+R) disc with DVD Decrypter.
The article can be found here:
https://www.afterdawn.com/articles/archive/small_dvd_2_dvdr.cfm
Written by Jari Ketola
@ 11 May 2002 2:03
Last week's download charts. Streambox VCR continues to top the software charts. No wonder really. DVD-rippers, TMPGEnc, and Morpheus make up the top ten.
On the MP3 chart the Blind Lesbians of Uganda grabs nr. 1 spot from Dj Quesito/Gettopoet. Holochaust hits the chart with three songs this week - quite impressive! Our old band of the month, Evermore sneaks in at tenth.
Here are the complete charts.
Hot programs
1.
Streambox VCR v1.0 beta 3.1
2.
SmartRipper v2.41
3.
DVD Decrypter v3.0.0.17
4.
DVD2AVI v1.86
5.
TMPGEnc v2.53.37.135
6. MusicCity Morpheus v1.3.3.1 (Preview Edition 4)
7.
VCD Galaxy DVDRip ComboPack v2.7
8.
cladDVD v2.0
9. Easydivx v0.81
10. cladMdec v1.6
Hot MP3s
1. Blind Lesbians of Uganda : "
Masturbating Is A Crime (Wankers Will Be Punished)"
2. Dj Quesito/Gettopoet : "
BIN LADEN vs BUSH CLUB EDIT"
3. Bryan Edman : "
Always On My Mind"
4. HOLOCHAUST : "
Losing My Religion (new REM cover!!)"
5. 2CoXX : "
Fantasy damage"
6. HOLOCHAUST : "
Runaway Train"
7. Adante : "
Sky World (Original Mix)"
8. HOLOCHAUST : "
Valley of Misery"
9. Gerry. : "
Get Ready"
10. Evermore : "
Frau eva"
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 10 May 2002 2:26
As most of you probably already know, bootleg copies of popular movies tend to appear almost immediately on the Net after their U.S. theatre premiere, but now the trend seems to be that movies get released on the Net before they hit the big screen.
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the clones can already be found from the Net in VideoCD format, as a "telesync". Meaning that the movie has been shot using hi-quality digital camcorder and direct line-in audio giving it relatively good overall quality.
And the movie will debut in the U.S. movie theatres within a week :-) For some screenshots and the original article, please visit this site.
Written by Lasse Penttinen
@ 10 May 2002 7:08
The G1000 is the world's FIRST DirectX 9 compliant Graphics Immersion Unit! Utilizing the eight-pipe matrox Deferred Rendering Engine, it achieves over twice the performance of any other graphics solution in it's class.
Recently a screen grab revealing the specs of G1000 appeared online at Technation. The specs are supposed to be captured from the Matrox website, where they apparently published by accident.
At The Register there is quite a bit of hype about the G1000:It destroys the Geforce 4 completely. We've seen it in action already.
Matrox is an old and respected graphics card manufacturer. Many people think that the picture (signal) quality of Matrox cards is the best available, and is favoured by people who seek good 2D-performance and maximum quality. With the G1000 Matrox seems to be re-entering to the top line of the 3D-markets and competition is usually only a positive thing for the consumers.
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 09 May 2002 12:41
Group of webcasting companies, more than twenty of them, are going to speak to the members of the U.S. Congress today and tomorrow trying to make their point of view heard in the dispute over webcasting royalties.
Webcasters' have raised their opinions earlier as well, last time was in last week when numerous net radio stations turned their streaming off for 24 hours to protest against U.S. Copyright Office's proposed royalty rates for webcasts.
Webcasters say that the proposed rate of $0.0014/listener/song would kill most of the webcasters immediately, because for most, that rate is appx. 2 times higher than their revenues are from one song/listener.
Librarian of Congress is required to set the royalty rates for webcasters by 21st of May.
Written by Lasse Penttinen
@ 07 May 2002 11:41
Oh boy, are the people pissed by the Creative Labs customer service and for a reason. For quite some time Creative’s ability provide support and drivers for their products has been very low, or should I say unprofessional. And we are talking about the biggest soundcard manufacturer here. Now is a chance to step-up and sign the petition for getting better service by Creative Labs. As a SB Live! owner, I will sign up and I ask everyone else to do the same.
To: Creative Technology Ltd.
WE ask that Creative (www.creative.com) add more support and customer care for all their products, mainly including the Sound Blaster LIVE! and AUDIGY products. We ask for all driver AND software support to be avalible for download on their website.. not just an order form for a shipped cd that WE will have to order again when a new update is out (ex. Live Ware 3.0), more windows xp support, better compatiblity with other hardware, NO MORE SPYWARE (ex. newsupd.exe), and the options to install the "HIDDEN" files... no hidden installations (ex. Creative EAX, Disc Detector, etc.)
Sign this petition!
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 07 May 2002 3:46
In last couple of days there has been an enormous hype and speculation going on on the Net over claimed XBox copy protection hack.
We don't claim to know any better than anyone else, but let you judge by yourselves. To mention, the claimed "mod chip" is not in production yet, just first successful attempts have been reported all over the Net and certain never-heard-before pirate groups, namely ProjectX, have released tons of XBox games in newgroups and dedicated FTP sites.
Anyway, I suggest that you read this article -- if their server is up :-)
http://www.headliner.nl/index.php?c=us&p=headliner&storyid=6
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 07 May 2002 1:44
One of the oldest MP3 players still alive is for sale. C-4 MP3 Multimedia Player's developers posted a message that they're going to sell the source code, the website and the domain name (c4player.com) of their product at eBay.
Bids start at $30,000 and the auction ends at 14th of May, 2002. If you're interested to buy your own piece of multimedia software with all the rights to distribute and continue its development, please visit this URL:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2022790024
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 07 May 2002 12:24
Despite the mounting licensing issues surrounding the MPEG-4 technology, Apple has announced that it will ship next major version of its QuickTime by end of this summer.
New QuickTime 6 was delayed already in February, when Apple announced that it, among group of other technology companies, disagrees with MPEG LA's proposed MPEG-4 licensing model.
According to Apple, MPEG LA has progressed with its licensing terms and that Apple is "hopeful" to see the licensing issue to be solved before the launch.
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 06 May 2002 5:51
Ok, one of the most requested features has been added to our site. Now you can post your opinions to our news articles and other users see those comments immediately just below the article itself.
Note: As usual, this feature is in beta test phase and there might be some kind of weird errors. Please help us to solve those and send feedback if you experience anything weird.
Written by Jari Ketola
@ 04 May 2002 2:26
Here's a look at last week's most popular downloads.
Streambox VCR keeps the number one spot, and the top ten is exactly the same as last week apart from one exception - DivX v5.01 slips out and gives way to the TMPGEnc v0.11.20.98 English patch. We no longer carry TMPGEnc 12a, so there's not much point in downloading the patch, either.
The MP3 charts are also pretty much the same as last week. A couple of climbers in the top five - 2CoXX and Bryan Edman.
Here are the complete charts:
Hot programs
1.
Streambox VCR v1.0 beta 3.1
2.
DVD Decrypter v3.0.0.17
3.
SmartRipper v2.41
4.
DVD2AVI v1.86
5. TMPGEnc v0.11.20.98 (12a)
6. MusicCity Morpheus v1.3.3.1 (Preview Edition 4)
7. VCD Galaxy DVDRip ComboPack v2.7
8.
ForceASPI 1.7
9.
TMPGEnc v2.53.37.135
10. TMPGEnc v0.11.20.98 English patch
Hot MP3s
1. Dj Quesito/Gettopoet : "
BIN LADEN vs BUSH CLUB EDIT"
2. Blind Lesbians of Uganda : "
Masturbating Is A Crime (Wankers Will Be Punished)"
3. Bryan Edman : "
Always On My Mind"
4. 2CoXX : "
Fantasy damage"
5. HOLOCHAUST : "
Losing My Religion (new REM cover!!)"
6. Supergoat : "
Coliseum"
7. HOLOCHAUST : "
Runaway Train"
8. AEON : "
Matrix Paradox"
9. Adante : "
Sky World (Original Mix)"
10. DJ NoBeat : "
Song 2002 (cheesy club remix)"
Hot skins
1. Angela_01
2. Pimpin beta 2.00ZXR
3. Blue Dawn v1.1
4. 062-AZD v1.0
5. kenwood rack
6. - Salma by Sliver -
7. Illusion v1.0
8. Alley by Sliver
9. Black Dawn v1.0
10. Zorg v2.1
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 04 May 2002 9:21
Jupiter Media Metrix survey found the fact that most of us already knew -- use P2P tools and you're more likely to buy more music.
34% of P2P networks' users said that they're increased the amount they spend on music CDs because of the P2P usage. 15% said that they spend less money now when they use P2P networks and 51% said that they spend the same amount as before P2P.
This is compared to people who didn't use P2P networks -- only 19% said that they've increased the amount they spend on music CDs annually. Other technologies, such as CD writers or MP3 players, didn't impact on music spending at all.
Only problem is just to get courts to understand this...
Written by Petteri Pyyny
@ 04 May 2002 9:06
Ok, ok.. Really, extremely off-topic, but I just had to post this link:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20020428
Enjoy :-)
Written by Lasse Penttinen
@ 03 May 2002 1:26
As you may have seen on some websites, the Doom9 people have created a neat trick of storing more data to a regular CD-R. The trick is to store data inside a container multimedia file and then write file to the CD-R with Mode 2. The Mode 2 is used for example by the Video CD standard it has a weaker error protection coding so that more space is available for the actual data. The penalty of this process is that the written data is more vulnerable to disc damage such as dirt & scratches. This can be at least partially out worked by implementing some extra error correction coding to the container file. The 800 meg storage capacity might come very handy for writing large Divx movies to a CD-R with a writer that doesn't support 90/99 minute CD-R media.
The people at Doom9 are now calling this new CD format as XCD and they have some experimental software available for testing purposes. The XCD is NOT ready for daily use yet, but I am sure that the developers appreciate feedback, so go ahead geeks.
Doom9.org
Written by Lasse Penttinen
@ 03 May 2002 6:40
The new Mt.Rainier standard is currently making it's way to CD-RW hardware and software. It is pushed by major players like Microsoft, Philips, Sony & Compaq. Our partners at the CDFreaks have done a nice job explaining this new format - worth a good look.
The idea with the Mt. Rainier format is to enable native operating system (OS) support of CD-RW drives and background formatting. This will ensure greater compatibility, eliminate users' dependence on proprietary read drivers, and make the technology easier to use.
CDFreaks.com
Written by Jari Ketola
@ 02 May 2002 2:03
Apple Computer has filed a lawsuit against the streaming video research and development company Sorenson Media for licencing technology to Macromedia for use in their Flash MX player. Apple has licensed a similar, low bandwidth video technology from Sorenson earlier.
According to the lawsuit Sorenson has "intentionally disrupted the economic advantage that Apple expected to gain from its exclusive rights under the agreement." The technology licensed to Macromedia was Sorenson Spark while the technology licensed exclusively to Apple's Quicktime product line was Sorenson Video.
"We are greatly surprised by the presumptive filing of this suit without prior discussions or understandings between the parties," Jim Sorenson, chief executive of Sorenson Media, said in a statement. "As is usual practice, we are always willing to discuss and work to resolve issues."
Apple sees that Sorenson has broken the license agreement by licensing similar technology to a competing third party developer. They are seeking damages and injunction against Sorenson to stop from licensing it's technology to Macromedia.
Macromedia has stated that although the Flash MX player is capable of playing video, it is not in direct competition with Quicktime, since the streaming-video market is focused on the server software sales.