StatsReader can show the bitrate distribution graph of XviD stats files and downscale the bitrate curve in a linear fashion for the 2nd pass. OggMux 0.9.2 supports variable splitting points and ScenChap 1.23 fixes the "can't add times with different fps" bug reported in the forum.

Mozilla 1.1 has been released. Unfortunately, the bugs I have complained about when v1.0 came out are still present..

No news on XviD so far, but Sigma is going to be discussing 2nd quarter results during a conference call at 4:45pm Eastern time, which could be a nice opportunity to throw in some critical questions. If you've been following the issue in the XviD forum you may have noticed that there's yet another potentially hot issue which is closely related to the XviD situation.

Since there's no new software it's time to have a look at the hardware world. Last week AMD released the AMD Athlon XP 2600+ and yesterday Intel released the P4 2.8GHz. If you're into the latest processor technology don't miss the review. And while we're at the subject the new ATI cards look pretty attractive, too (except for the price tag;) And yet another piece of interesting hardware is Abit's latest member of the MAX series, the AT7-MAX2 is Abit's latest AMD board featuring the KT400 chipset - including AGP 8x, USB2, Firewire, 6ch onboard and LAN onboard - and Serial ATA in a way that allows you to combine regular and new Serial ATA discs in a RAID setup. Unfortunately, the board really isn't legacy free by now as the PS2 ports have been reintroduced and the Floppy port is still there. And for all the Intel users out there the IT7-MAX2 is the equivalent board (also with PS2 connectors and Floppy port).

In other news NEC and Toshiba have presented their version of the DVD future, which, using a blue laser, can write up to 40GB per side and unlike Blu-ray won't need any cartridge. First PC drives should be out in 2003, standalone devices by 2004.

Another XviD update: There's a new statement up on the Sigma site basically saying that unbeknownst to management a Sigma employee had used some XviD routines and they had been communicating with the XviD team to resolve the situation. Now they have released the codec under the GPL and have adjusted the license you have to agree to when installing the codec. Most copyright notices have also been corrected but there are still some files where Sigma claims exclusive copyright. As for how much code was used, any programmer can download the source and see for himself. At first glance it appears that we're not talking about some routines but rather a significant portion of the whole codec that has been reused.

On the software side we have ZoomPlayer 2.80 RC1.

First an update on the XviD situation. The release of the Sigma source code does not mean it's all over, it's far from being over. The license agreement which you have to agree to before you can download, and install the codec is not compatible with the GPL. Furthermore, it can now clearly be seen (download the source code and have a look for yourself) that the Sigma codec is pretty much a copy of the XviD codec, but all the copyright notices of the original developers have been removed and replaced. This does not only violate the GPL but copyright laws - you can't just take a program, change a few lines and change the copyright statements, you only have copyright protection for the parts you wrote on your own. And related to this the Sigma codec also contains code taken from the OpenDivX project, the files were outfitted with 2 different copyright notices which is quite funny.

And now for some good news: AviSynth 2.05 has been released. It contains an enhanced compare filter, reordered function loading to give plugins precedence over filters, low and high pass filters, more plugins and plugin autoloading and last but not least various bugfixes.

XviD development has been stopped! The Sigma Designs REALMagic MPEG-4 Video Codec contains wide portions of code taken from the XviD project. Soon after the initial release of the REALMagic codec the XviD developers have contacted Sigma and informed them about the GPL violation (for those who don't know, XviD is distributed under the GNU Public License - GPL - which demands that if you modify a GPL program you have to release it under the GPL, which in this case means that the source code of the Sigma codec must be freely available). Sigma promised to replace the stolen code, but the new version of the codec which was released this month only disguises the stolen code, it was not actually removed. Sigma was once again contacted and asked to remove the offending code but until today nothing has happened. Therefore the XviD team is now turning to the public in the hope to receive wide public support in their efforts to convince Sigma Designs to respect the terms of the GPL. And until the matter has been resolved XviD development will not continue.

That being said I hope all the forum members who saw their threads about the Sigma Codecs being closed will understand our motivation now. Internally we already knew what was going on but since the XviD authors first wanted to try and resolve this internally we respected their wishes and kept quiet about the matter at hand.

[Update] Sigma has issued a press release announcing the availability of the source code of their MPEG-4 codec and it's already up for download. However, not a word was lost about the XviD issue and the press release makes one think that the Sigma codec was entirely developed by Sigma so we might be hearing more about this.

[Update] I found a GPL notice in some of the source code files, but it also looks like Sigma placed their own copyright lines there and XviD doesn't get any credit in the source either. The GPL notice also collides with Sigma's Software Licensing Agreement that you have to sign before downloading codec or source. On on the same issue DivXNetworks said they'd fully support XviD in this issue and apparently DXn's relationship with Sigma didn't really work out either, as Sigma's Xcard is not as DivX compatible as it was advertised.

SubRip 1.033 can scan VOBs for available subtitle streams, can process lines from right to left, there are various improvements for Scenarist and Maestro output (including resolution and positioning for Scenarist) and ugly lines in the BMP output should no longer appear.

In the your rights online department there have been some interesting developments this week. Both Forrester Research and the Yankee Group come to a quite different conclusion about online music distribution. Basically they saw that DRM is useless since customers want to have certain liberties when they pay for content and that the losses the RIAA is always complaining about are not primarily due to online downloads but the music industry's own doing. And there's another startling development. In their fight against online piracy not only do they want to put a DRM chip in every device (I've reported about that earlier this year), hack into people's computers if they have reason to believe that the computer hosts illegal content but the next step is that the industry is now trying to ban access to certain websites by suing major ISPs. If you hold that thought for a bit you can easily imagine the next step.. ban access to all sites which have content that the industry doesn't like, including the one you're on right now. Combine that with DRM everywhere and the ability to hack into people's computers and disable them and we're not too far away from Orwell's 1984.

Media Player Classic 6.4.0.2 looks just like the good old WMP6.4 except that it supports XP themes, it can play DVDs when external decoder filters are installed, it can play Real Media files if RealOne is installed, it supports a variety of subtitles even if DVobSub is not installed, you can select external audio files, zoom, change the playback rate and there's easy access to all filter properties. SimpleResize 0.3.1.0 removes the horizontal size needs to be a multiple of 4 restriction (should solve the green line at the edge of the video problem). TomsMoComp is a deinterlace filter which uses motion compensation and adaptive processing. MPEG Mediator 1.4 now processes video data internally in YUV, can export video in YUV12 format, has an IVTC filter, an new OpenDML plugin and some speed and quality improvements. DubMan is a Nandub / VirtualDub script generator which gives you more flexibility in encoding options, file control and job ordering. abcAVI Tag Editor 1.4 allows you to edit all kinds of AVI tags starting with RIFF headers, Info tags, framerate and much more. AVIMux_GUI as a muxing tool to create multilanguage AVIs. It supports AC3 and MP3 (including VBR) and has a special mode to allow faster seeking.

Then there's a user submitted guide on how to remove certain streams from a VobSub file. Owners of ALI based Mainboards may find this IDE drivers useful as they improve ripping speed considerably.

Judging by the amount of news during the last few days you can imagine that today was something special. In fact, the guy who was supposed to handle the submission emails left me with about 50 messages which have arrived since July 22nd. Sorry for the inconvenience.

IfoEdit 0.931 fixes the PGC-commands in First Play PGC not being editable bug. OggMux 0.9.1 has reworked automatization support making it possible to start up OggMux just with a filename as parameter.

BeSweet 1.4RC6 adds support for Vorbis rehuff (optimizes the compression by about 3%). The new MPEG4IP tools v0.9.5.1 has some internal MP3/MP4 library updates and the player features much better MPEG1/2 playback. VobEdit 0.5 new allows you to edit values and there's a dialogue for editing menu buttons. Finally there's mp4UI v0.93 which has been updated to support the latest MPEG4IP version, supports batch conversions and export to AAC/AVI/MP4V/WAV.

After a long and painful preparation period (screenshots in particular, re-encoding for the other part) I've finished yet another codec comparison. This time I tested DivX5.02, SBC, XviD 20020727 and RealVideo9. The results were rather surprising..

BeSweet 1.4RC5 fixes a problem with mp2 input. I've also added the missing .ini file to the BeSweet GUI.

Some of you may have noticed that I'm once again working on a codec comparison. The only thing preventing me from publishing the results is a serious problem making screenshots of the correct frames in Real Video 9. If you have any ideas, don't hesitate to contact me, but please, only proven solutions which are not covered by the above thread.