HC 0.18 features an updated encoding engine, can apply pulldown to 23.976 fps sources, has an adaptive quantization matrix and contains some bugfixes in the GUI. Unfortunately, the SMP folks will have to wait until their CPUs can take full advantage of HC.

I don't know exactly what happened but Sourceforge sent out another DVDx notification today. I'm assuming the file has been changed but the release notes and version number have not changed so there cannot be much difference since the official release of DVDx 2.5 last week.

DVDFab Decrypter 2.9.7.7 fixes a couple of minor problems.

Nero 7.2 was released three days ago. Besides the usual fixes and minor improvements I guess the biggest change is that Nero now supports Blu-ray discs. And to go with that, Pioneer has launched their BDR-101A Blu-ray burner. Considering it doesn't support dual layer BD discs and only does 8x/4x DVD±R/W recording, it's a quite limited device though - and that for a whopping $995.

Sticking with HD news for a moment, Universal will join Warner in using Microsoft's VC-1 codec for their HD DVD releases. And Warner has announced the first hybrid DVD / HD DVD disc: the movie "Rumor has it" will be released on May 9th.

Poor RIAA: now only are they being screwed over by their own customers with P2P tools, now dead people are participating in copyright infringement. That's right, the RIAA is suing a women that has been dead for more than a year.

And while we're speaking of the RIAA, I'm sure you'll vividly recall how they are claiming to have only the best interest of the artists in mind. Well, those pesky Canadians are going against the RIAA again, this time a bunch of Canadian musicians have formed the "Canadian music creators coalition", which opposes P2P lawsuits and DRM. I wonder when they pull Avril and Co from MTV and VH1 for going against the industry.

And in another instance of not having the artist's best interest in mind, two rock bands are suing Sony for shortchanging them on royalties on downloaded songs. While the RIAA is trying to increase prices of music downloads to make more money, they are doing the same on the other end by subtracting money for all the things that are not part of the digital music chain: packaging, production of the physical media, restocking costs and breakage losses. Poor RIAA members can't even get a break when they cheat their own artists ;) And it makes a good point why online music is overpriced as it is.. there's a significant cut in production cost, but instead of making the product cheaper, the RIAA reaps higher benefits instead, and on top of that they devaluate the product by slapping DRM on it.

RIAA and MPAA are taking their anti P2P crusade to college campuses. They are asking colleges to police campus networks to prevent local P2P filesharing taking place within university networks.

And in yet another instance of industry sponsored lobbyism on capitol hill, the Perform Act of 2006 aims to crush streaming formats without DRM. On top of that, the bill also includes a passage that would force satellite radio operators to pay the music industry for giving subscribers tools to time-shift. It takes no genius to figure out who's really behind this law. It's time to speak to your Senators again. And if you live in California, please remind Diane that she's supposed to represent the people of the state of California, not the RIAA.

The Inquirer has put some great perspective on the IPPA (DMCA on steroids). Downloading music gets you 10 years in prison, that's 3 more than the 7 years you can get for downloading child porn, or aggravated assault (6 years). You decide if that makes any sense at all..

The EFF is collecting signatures in a petition to congress to give the customer a voice in any upcoming hearing on copyright law.

And in the last bit of news on the industry this wee, the Sidney Morning Herald has a piece on how the music industry is charging the Australian customers too much for digital music.

But conclude the day, Microsoft has entered the adware business. They're not exactly spying but a mandatory upgrade on Windowsupdate in several countries install an unkillable process that bombards the user with popups. Granted, it only happens if you have an unlicensed copy of Windows, but the tactic definitely resembles unwanted malware.

DivX 6.2.2 is out, but so far there's no changelog.

It appears Apple is keeping the upper hand in the online music price war. The NY Post reports that the RIAA is about to give up on the idea of flexible pricing for music downloads. So forget back catalog titles for $0.79, but more importantly you won't have to shell out $2.49 for a title that makes the top 50 in the charts. And I suspect that if flexible pricing would materialize, the average price of titles sold would effectively go up, so the $0.99 for all is effectively a good deal for the customer.

Speaking of the RIAA, they're once again up to their old tricks: suing people without computers for P2P downloads. @Update: it seems the story was updated shortly after the initial posting and soon thereafter disappeared and the family admitted to having a computer before and using it for P2P downloads. But the lawsuit alleges that the family continues to use P2P to distribute copyrighted material - even though the family in question hasn't owned a computer for over a year.

We all know that piracy is especially rampant in countries with low incomes. This drives the demand for cheap pirated DVDs and CDs. You can't really blame people for buying them - if a movie costs a month' salary and the pirate disc costs less than you make in a day, which one are you going to pick? So someone at Warner has finally come to the same realization and they have now begun to sell DVDs at $1.50. This is still up to 100% higher than pirated discs, but marks a major cut compared to what studios normally charge.

And sticking with the movie business, but another leg of it, the adult film industry has always been at the forefront of technology (some say smut is what really drives the Internet) and they're at it again: while the MPAA still tries to cripple online distribution, you can now buy adult titles online, download them and despite DRM burn them on a DVD so you can have life-size porn in your living room.. Think of the content what you want, but the business model is more customer friendly than the MPAA's.

Then some HD news: according to ABI Research, HD DVD will outsell Blu-ray 70 to 30 in 2006, and Microsoft, strong supporter of HD DVD, is already calling Blu-ray another Betamax format. For those who haven't been around to witness it (the writer of these lines included), there were initially three video tape formats: Sony's Betamax, Philips Video 2000 and JVC's VHS. VHS was the least technologically advanced but was hence cheaper and managed to win the market over.

Last but not least, get ready for the DMCA on steroids: While only MPAA paid lobbyists and members of congress still believe the DMCA is a good thing to have, we have those same people introducing the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2006 that makes the DMCA look tame. For instance, merely owning a tool that can circumvent copy protection can land you in jail, and up to 10 years at that. They can also seize equipment used to create unauthorized copies, even in civil cases, and there are snooping provisions. The legislation originated not by some MPAA lapdog in congress but the Bush administration itself and was just introduced by MPAA lapdog Lamar Smith (a Republican - conveniently forgetting about the idea of no government meddling with private business if it fits their major contributors)

DVDx 2.5 improves native DVD access, can dynamically detect framerate in real-time, supports adaptive framerates, handles DVDs with irregular telecine flags more gracefully, has an improved audio synchronization algorithm, then we have support for WMV9 output and some bugfixes as well.

AviSynth 2.5.7 alpha 3 contains the latest CVS sources. Being an alpha, it's only meant for tests, not productive environments.

Panasonic has announced their first Blu-ray burners. They burn both single layer and double layer discs at 2x speed, and write DVDs up to 8x and CDs up to 24x. There will be a regular ATAPI (hello? IDE is going away, the next Intel chipset will have no native IDE support anymore so it's high time all disc drives move to SATA) model, and two slim models for notebooks as well.

PgcEdit 0.7 has a considerable list of new smaller functions in existing workflows, contains a bunch of improvements in the burning area and fixes a few bugs.

DVD43 3.8.0 no longer has the bad sector error correction.

Here's one item that went under in the lengthy update last week: CoreAVC 1.0 is the currently most CPU efficient AVC decoder. Unfortunately, it's not free, but it got even more effective by supporting SMP setups, and it can also handle interlaced content now.

I've previously mentioned on how the RIAA is trying to sneak a broad expansion of copyright protection through the courts by suing people for merely offering a file for download. But did you know that by the mere letter of the law, if somebody offers for download and another person downloads, it's technically not illegal? That's because copyright law defines distribution as distribution of physical objects only - and while we have electrons at work, it's hardly what the lawmakers intended.

YAMB 1.6 has an abort/cancel option in the log tab, allows to set a process priority for all tasks, has a new tab for all tagging options, supports negative audio delays, splitting supports milliseconds (although: you can only split at I-frames anyway) and there's a chapter viewer/editor.

HD DVD started on schedule after all. Thedigitalbits has a quick review of the hardware and first titles. It seems Warner get the encoding part down at least, unlike the Japanese HD DVD start which was less than stellar.

A word on the forum: due to technical problems, the forum might not always be available in the next 24 hours.

We all know the annoying ads you can't skip on today's DVDs - and we probably all wonder why we don't get a serious rebate on the price for that annoyance, clearly it reduces the value of the disc as compared to another movie that doesn't force 10 minutes of trailers and ads upon you. Anyway, now Philips has the whole annoyance patented. Talk about a patent the world would be better off without..

I used the Easter weekend to try and catch up on some PC games I had bought a while back but never got around to play: Act of War and FEAR. Let me take FEAR as an example to outline what is fundamentally wrong with the copyright industry these days. After the usual installation process that fills up my HD, you try and run your game. First off you get an error message2.5 telling you you need the DVD in your drive. But didn't the setup just copy the contents of the entire DVD to my harddisk? Then why do I still need the DVD to play? The answer (as usual) is copy protection. FEAR uses a protection called Securom - or seen through the eyes of a legitimate customer, a company gets rich of being a pain in my butt - ain't that great? But that's just the usual inconvenience you have to live with these days. Now here comes the kicker: once the DVD was in the drive, I couldn't start playing - the game would stop with a message telling me an emulator/virtual drive software was detected and I had to remove it. What the heck? Who is Sierra to tell me what I can install on my own PC? As it turns out, their knowledgebase "solution" doesn't work and only removing Daemon Tools (which I use to mount ISOs I download from the Microsoft Developer Network.. it can't get any more legit than that) and a subsequent reboot finally did the trick.
So let's recapitulate: I paid good money, I need a DVD in the drive even though the game resides on my harddisk, and I have to uninstall software they don't like. Other softwares on the list they don't like are Alcohol 120%, CloneCD, and even Nero's virtual drive. As it so happens, I have a license for all these softwares, just didn't have them / the offending part of them installed. So, bottom line, the legitimate buyer gets not only inconvenienced but told what software he can / can't have installed on his PC. Or in other words, the customer is literally pissed on. It doesn't take an MBA to figure out that customers treated like that will start looking for alternatives. The great thing is, there's none. You can't buy game X from different publishers with different packaging, distribution mechanisms and copy protections. So, with that monopoly in the back, they do whatever they want, presuming customers will swallow everything. Now enter the warez groups. They offer a competitive alternative: free of charge, no hassle with the game DVD and no telling you what software you can't have installed. Considering the above, it is no surprise that they can't get rid of piracy. Here I am trying to do the right thing by paying for software that hopefully I'm going to enjoy, and then the company screws me over like that. You cannot blame a honest guy for not wishing to put up with this kinda crap. Oh, and I actually was still lucky because here's two more ways the copy protection manages to screw legitimate customers over: 1, 2.

So after looking at the gaming industry, let's have a look at the music and movie industry. Once again, we find the same kind of monopoly. Even though when online music is concerned there's some alternatives, it's still far from being a free market. The online retailers buy licenses at fixed prices from the labels, and the labels dictate what kind of products the retailers can offer. For instance, there are labels that only supply iTunes, others only the Microsoft based stores - there's no service that allows you to chose the codec except some Russian retailers that the RIAA would rather have shut down today than tomorrow - there's no service without DRM either and as far as the end user price goes, the studios would like more flexibility but in the end that would only come down to a hefty price increase on the top 100 titles. Perhaps on the average with hundreds of thousands of back catalog titles that hardly anybody buys, the average would go down but you can bet that the benefits of the studios would go up if the one price fits all scheme goes away. And finally we have the movies. Look at how many online delivery services we have and what kind of "freedom" they provide. The codec is set, the DRM is set, you can't burn the content on a DVD - in fact you can't process it at all unless you break the DRM - and naturally if you buy a spanking new HD DVD, you can't just make a DVD from it to play on your portable DVD player or notebook.

And to stay with Hollywood, Ed Felten outlines how another piece of useless - for customers that is - piece of technology can be broken: Making and Breaking HDCP Handshakes.

DivX 6.2.1 has an improved B-frame decision algorithm, improves rate control for very high bitrates and fixes a few bugs.

DGMPGDec 1.4.7 beta 6 has an option to enable / disable DirectDraw overlay.

Bad news for the HD DVD camp: there's another delay looming and the launch may have to be delayed from next Tuesday.

Big Brother Clarke's Europe wide snooping has found so me too'ers in the US. Citing child pornography (makes it very easy to put any opposition into the sexual deviant camp) the current US administration is now considering federal data retention legislation as well. I'm sure it won't take long until terrorism is added to the list of reasons why spying on your own citizens is a must.

Here's a document that comes in handy for those living in yet DMCA uninfested countries. Make good use of it when you contact your elected representatives to ask them to oppose any attempt by the copyright cartels to introduce similar legislation. It's called unintended consequences and outlines how the DMCA is being abused for purposes never intended, and how this hurts consumers, the consumer electronics/computing industry and academic research.

Last but not least, I installed the DRM infested next generation Microsoft OS called Vista yesterday. Quick conclusion: I'm booting XP again. Long conclusion: the installation process has been streamlined but felt very slow (in the time I spent waiting I could've set up about 1.5 Windows XP's with all the reboots required for driver installation), but there's one major bonus: drivers can now come from floppy discs, and now praise the lord, CDs, DVDs and USB mass storage devices. I've been going without a floppy since Windows 2000 so that's just 3 generations of Microsoft operating systems (ME doesn't count.. it's a POS) lacked this absolutely crucial functionality, forcing people to get a floppy just for the installation process or adding drivers to their Windows CDs - a process which can be less than straightforward. Once started, the whole thing felt rather sluggish despite my high end hardware and after the installation of the latest GFX card driver resulted in a black screen, I gave up. This whole experience makes me recall Windows XP - which up to the release candidates had major issues on my machine and making me very scared to install the final version. Fortunately, XP turned out to work just fine. Perhaps of Microsoft spent more time really making the new OS worthwhile architecture wise (remember all the technologies that have since been removed), and not spend as much time to pander Hollywood's bosses by adding completely useless functionality like protected video and audio paths, the whole thing would've been finished earlier and be more stable and not require the major rewrite that is now adding further delays.

I'm back :) Here's what happened: when I got home from work on the 4th, loading a website would take minutes. I started making performance measurements and came to a whopping 20kbit/s average and first hop pings in the 1 second region - basically it was impossible to gather and upload news. The ISP didn't really care about my problem and just offered to terminate my subscription. So I'm now with another ISP and it turns out the slowdown was not caused by a technical problem but was done on purpose to get rid of customers that have more than a few hundred MBs of traffic each month.

DVDFab Decrypter 2.9.7.6 supports a few new disc corruption schemes, allows to ignore read errors when they are encountered and the enable DMA function has been fixed.

ImgBurn 1.3.0.0 has a new sector viewer feature, remembers the last folder in the save function of the log window, shows the UDF revision of UDF images, allows to deactivate the overburning warning, can perform a bunch of operations after burning (shut down, log off, etc.) and there are a few more minor things that have been added/adjusted.

DivX 6.2 has a new encoder preset option, contains various SMP improvements, includes an MMX optimized MPEG quantization method, has more psychovisual options, the free version now supports a wider variety of features whereas the Pro version can only be used for 15 days before you have to buy it. Last but not least, a few bugs have been fixed.

AVIMux GUI 1.17.5 can set stream names and language codes for MKV output, no longer has a separate stream window, generates stream sources from one file with a double click, can read script files from stdin and fixes a few bugs.

MyTheatre 3.35.3 supports DiSEqC 1.2 with the standard SkyStar2 driver, supports multiple SkyStar2 devices and fixes a few bugs.

After software, here's the rundown on the high def formats: Blu-ray won't start in May. Samsung has delayed their $999 BD-P1000 to June 25th. The delays also affect the launch of Blu-ray burners which were also scheduled for May - but the discs will be available prior to the launch of the hardware as TDK has already started shipping the first single layer BD-R discs. The disc will retail for $25 a piece, the dual layer variety will cost $48 when it's launched later this year. And if you're wondering why Blu-ray players are so expensive, InStat has the scoop: Hardware and licensing cost already comes to about $400 per unit - and that goes for both HD formats.

And while we're looking at hardware, the DVD+RW DL specification has been finalized. It remains to see if this format will do any better than any previously finished dual layer format.

How about getting your favorite TV show online for free? Now, I'm not talking about P2P services, but MPAA member Disney. Starting next month, their popular series Lost, Alias and Desperate Housewives will be made available online, free of charge, one day after the episode has first aired. The drawback? There are ads that you can't skip. But if they keep the ad rhythm we know from TV, that still seems like a fair trade. I'm just wondering whether this option will also be available to those not living in the US - we mostly have to wait months of not years and then only get a dubbed version of these shows.

And speaking of alternative means for downloads, Warner has launched the P2P movie download portal in2movies in Germany. The service allows downloads to own of recent Warner releases as well as their back catalogue and TV series. The system uses Microsoft's DRM, there's no burning of the movies onto a DVD, and the video codec used is WMV9. A first glance reveals that studios can't get right what doesn't take more than reading a guide on this very page. The 2 GB movies look considerably worse than a home made 1.4 GB XviD rip - and just imagine if x264 were used.

Can these numbers be real? The RIAA's 2005 year-end statistics reveal something interesting: After a 5 year decline in units sold and revenue starting in 1999, the last two year marked a strong increase in units sold, particularly due to music sold online, and in 2005, they effectively sold more units than ever before - it's just that the revenue isn't as high as in the golden ages of the CD. And speaking of the RIAA, here's their solution if they sue a student that can't pay the bill: quit college.

After Apple's whining on the new copyright law in France, French trade minister Christine Lagarde is firing back, pointing out that if a company restricts competition in a market, it has to expect that regulatory action be taken.

Bad news may be looming for Internet usage in the US. The second attempt at a network 'neutrality' bill has been defeated before it even got out of committee.

The launch of the CRLA - Copyright Levies Reform Alliance - raises an old issue: The CRLA members want to get rid of levies on blank media and recording devices in Europe. Sounds good, right? Well, for starters, it would be rather blue-eyed to think if there are no levies prices would go down and that's it. There's no way of knowing if the industry is willing to give the price advantage to customers. For CE companies and media producers it's obvious that they'd rather do without levies. But the presence of the BSA in this group, and the studies they've published should have you concerned. As alternative to levies, the CRLA supports DRM - and what is DRM good for? To prevent what levies compensate the industry for: private copying. Make no mistake, it would be great for the copyright industry if levies went away. For starters, those levies are generally more favorable for smaller artists, composers and musicians and not the big industry players. Artists that have a multi million contract with a major label don't need the money that is distributed to artists - but those that play the instruments, write the songs, and those artists that have to live on the few cents they get per unit sold - those stand to gain quite a bit by the money collected via levies. And, levies are a driver for the right to make private copies - consumers can rightfully argue that they pay for the right to make private copies with each disc they buy. Taking that money away, it's "you didn't pay for it so why should we allow you to make a copy?". The end game for the copyright industry is this: the pay per use society, where you pay for everything you consume, whenever and wherever you do so. DRM, along with legislation that prohibits DRM circumvention, are the tools to reach that goal. While the MPAA and RIAA are no members of the CRLA, this article from Billboard magazine should tell you exactly just where they stand on this issue.

It looks like we're in for another epic battle between the copyright industry and a P2P network as StreamCast has decided to go for a trial.

Last but not least, we have the record industry hiding behind their acts to extend copyright law in Europe to the same insane lengths already in place in the US.

Here's a late April's fool: what would happen if the MPAA and RIAA would merge? We'd have the Music And Film Association of America, or MAFIA for short. Now you'll have a good laugh, then think for a moment about charges brought against those organizations in the past. The RICO act has been created with the mob in mind..

Movie downloads to own are now available in the US. Movielink and CinemaNow will offer downloads of major studio releases in parallel to the DVD release. However, considering that the downloads will be more expensive than the DVD, I can't imagine that this business model will work out. On top of being more expensive, you'll have, tada, DRM (what did you expect?). Of course, playback is restricted to Windows PCs, so that 30" Dell will come in handy to watch those movies. Either way, I'll reiterate what a good movie download offer should entail: significantly cheaper than DVD since the studios' costs are significantly lower, an even heftier cut off the price in case DRM is used and you need a PC to play the thing. Or, I have another option: 1080p release using a high quality AVC codec (and not the mess we've seen on the first HD DVD discs.. will studios ever get it right what hobbyist have been capable of doing for years), no DRM and a price that will never go beyond the corresponding DVD. But since they're downloads, an individual watermark would imho be acceptable. If you think about it, fair use never means you can share your movies on P2P networks - but as long as it stays within the family, it's okay and you get to convert the movie to whichever format you like. And if you share and your friend uploads it to a P2P network.. you have a problem. Just like you have a problem if you loan somebody your car and the driver gets a speeding or parking ticket - or gets into an accident and the driver is no designated driver on your car insurance.

And on and on it goes. As if we're not being screwed over enough by the DMCA and similar legislation, here's the next move sanctioned by the the copyright industry and big media conglomerates: exclusive rights on any recording of their content. The goal is clear, let's get rid of the pesky time shifting rights introduced in Universal vs. Sony (incidentally Sony is now very much in the reverse position today). Bottom line: if you missed it, we'll be happy to sell you the content again via DVD, VOD or anything else.. we just want your money. And if you want to hear/watch it again, it's time to pay some more. Now what did I say about racketeering?

And to round off the day, here's the software patent off the day: Philips was granted a patent on having a popup menu upon right clicking in a software, back in 1987. We should consider ourselves lucky that it was never enforced.

HD DVD was launched early. Yesterday, the first HD DVD players were being sold in Japan and a reader managed to grab one and two discs, and he was not pleased. I haven't managed to get any details yet as to which codec was used and if the disc was single layer or double layer, but 1080i content encoded with MPEG-2 to a single layer HD DVD would indeed be a disaster.. two times the space for 4 times the amount of pixels - you do the math.

8x DVD-R DL discs are coming. Mitsubishi has announced that the first discs will hit the retail market at the end of the month. Obviously, if prices are going to remain where they are now, dual layer DVD-R DL is going to remain a niche market, just like DVD+R DL.

And instead of coming up with a funny story consider the date today, I'm just going to list a few things that aren't going to happen anytime soon: RIAA allowing their members to sell unprotected songs online, RIAA giving up on copy protection and instead focusing of hunting downs that make illegitimate gains from selling their music, MPAA allowing us to make unlimited copies of movies for mobile devices (notebook down to cellphones), MPAA giving up on region codes and stop the practice of releasing movies months late in other markets than the home market, companies trying to use the DMCA to squash competition, rampant abuse of the patent system to squash / hinder competition, governments snooping on their own citizens without due cause, RIAA and MPAA wanting to get access to that snooping data to sue you, Windows Vista coming out before schedule, Microsoft abandoning "trusted" computing and protected video paths and all the other DRM crap built into Vista... and I could go on and on and on. So just remember: if it sounds really good today, it's probably one of those stories you'll hear that time of the year.

Last month's news can be found here.