For months now we've been hearing rumors about price breaking HD DVD players out of China. Yesterday, those rumors turned into fact, when Canada's Venturer Electronics announced the SDH7000 - a low cost HD DVD player with a $199 suggested retail price. The player is scheduled for release in the 4th quarter.

Sony is at it again - they're using rootkit stealth techniques for their fingerprint protected USB sticks. And Sony owned SecuRom is causing major headaches for owners of the recently released PC game BioShock. In fact, even if you just install the demo, you'll get the hard to get rid off DRM, too.

The Computer and Communications Industry Association is stepping up the fight against abusive copyright representation to squash down on legitimate dissemination of copyrighted content allowed under copyright law with the launch of the Defend Fair Use website.. They even have an "abuse of the week" section to give you a few helpful arguments to help make your point and you can sign their petition to the FTC.

Meanwhile, the copyright industry is stepping up their effort to enact more and more overbroad copyright laws - the latest proposal would turn your ISP into a copyright enforcer.

I figure that effort must have started a few days ago, as the RIAA must still be celebrating their victory in Atlantic v. Howell, where the courts bought the RIAA's argument that merely putting copyrighted content in your P2P share folder constitutes infringement. I wonder if the day will ever come when we require judges to be competent on technological matters before they're allowed to rule on a case that hinges squarely on technology - imagine putting up a sign in front of a record store that claims people can just walk in and take CDs - according to this ruling, that would be the same as actually going in and taking a CD without paying.

DivX 6.7 beta supports b-frames in interlaced content in the new 1080HD profile as well as custom PARs.

So here's how the movie industry thinks streaming recorded TV content in your own home is okay: if it's protected by DTCP-IP. Digital Transmission Copy Protection includes built-in revocation and allows content owners to flag content in order to prevent any copy from being made. While the technology has been around for a while, the CableLabs certification and Hollywood approval mean things can go ahead now.

While Blu-ray has taken the lead in numbers of discs sold, it seems things are evenly split in the rental domain - at least if you ask the largest rental chain in the US - Netflix.

Last but not least, I had a few hours over the weekend to finally complete my write-up on the HD format war. After having put it all together, I went back and changed the title to No Choice - I believe it best reflects where we're at at this point.

E-AC3 decoding is going open source with ffmpeg and mplayer being the first players to handle the new format found on HD DVD and Blu-ray discs.

In online music news, SoundExchange has reshuffled their offer for the new royalty scheme - online radio stations still don't like it but there's one good point at least - DRM is no longer part of any agreement.

The latest (industry sponsored?) study on piracy tallies the cost of piracy to the US economy at $13 billion. Arstechnica did a good job deconstructing the study so I don't have to :) There's just one issue that wasn't raised: What happens with the money "lost" due to people downloading rather than buying CDs? Do they have more money on their bank accounts? At least in the US, where spending of borrowed money is one of the driving forces of the economy, you can bet that it's not where that money ends up - rather people invest it elsewhere, and that has the same driving effect for the economy as spending it in the music business has.

While today's optical media reaches 50GB (and might go up to 200 GB by adding more layers), some are aiming higher: meet the 1 TB medium.

Last but not least, a dispute over legislation concerning online gambling between the US and the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda, could make the unthinkable happen - if the US continues to refuse to bow to the WTO ruling on the matter, the Caribbean nation asks not to be bound by international agreements concerning copyright law, and thus redistribute American music, movies and software without having to compensate the copyright holders. Expect, RIAA, MPAA and BSA stepping up the lobbying efforts in the near future.

As predicted, soon after I posted yesterday's news, the Blu-ray cheerleader squad woke up and gave is a hilarious look at where zealotry can get you. Here's some of the highlights: It is well established that Blu-ray has a 2:1 lead over HD DVD. However, that lead curiously was increased to 70/30, and even 75/25 in some places. It also did not take long for the accusation that Microsoft was paying off the two studios abandoning Blu-ray to creep up. Curiously, there never was so much as a whisper about the financial incentives that Sony is giving and has given retailers to only carry one format (note that I'm leaving out any financial incentives studios might have received to support Blu-ray or be Blu-ray exclusive.. we have the EU antitrust investigation for that- which has also been decried as a desperation move by the HD DVD camp by the Blu-ray fan faction). Another highlight is the claim that Sony's spending huge amounts of money on promoting Blu-ray is a good thing, whereas incentives towards HD DVD is evil.

Let's face it, in an ideal world, there'd be but one format. The blame for having two formats falls squarely on paranoid studio execs (Fox being the prime example), and the Sony and Toshiba not being able to get their act together and settle for one format. In a less than ideal but still fair world, we wouldn't have any incentive created exclusiveness (meaning Universal, Fox, Disney and Paramount/Dreamworks would all be neutral), and we wouldn't have one company abusing its grip on the console market to push millions of heavily subsidized players into people's homes (by now there are about 4.5 million PS3 consoles in homes worldwide, most of them having been bought as gaming consoles and a majority of buyers not too happy about having to pay extra for a disc drive they don't need for gaming). However, it is what it is, and I have yet to see any proof that the HD camp has put even remotely the amount of money into incentives and hardware subsidies than the Blu-ray camp - I guess the HD camp finally decided to play Sony's game and it's funny to see the reactions you can when the the playing field doesn't continue to tilt towards one side.

By the way, BetaNews presents quite a different picture of Microsoft - they don't appear to be near as one sided as the Blu-ray fanbase is decrying right now. Imagine Sony showing off HD DVDs.. unthinkable. The article has one flaw though - the (HD)DVD hybrids are a dying breed.

Interestingly, just hours after the news on the Paramount/Dreamworks deal broke, Fox released a press release of their own, announcing that they're getting back in the Blu-ray game. The timing being rather particular, I suppose Fox has been ready for a while and it was a strategic move to break the silence right now as to even out the score - and it certainly did work. I guess we'll finally figure out whether BD+ is indeed fair use's death or if it's just another nuisance.

Meanwhile, on the music front, Wal-Mart is about to give iTunes a run for the money in the DRM free online music market - they've signed up with EMI and Universal to sell DRM-free MP3 music for $0.94 a song or $9.22 per album.

Last but not least, Universal has also scored an interesting deal with French ISP Cegetel - offering ADSL Internet access with a music flatrate. There's but one catch - if you change to another ISP, the songs won't work anymore.

This will get us a load of hilariously funny spin stories in the - starting with a call for antitrust investigations: Paramount and Dreamworks are the first studios to go from neutral to HD DVD exclusive in the HD format war. While Paramount, a former HD DVD exclusive, has gone neutral for a while, they're now back exclusively in the HD DVD camp. Dreamworks, a late entry in the HD game, started out neutral and has gone a way, no Blu-ray fan could imagine possible. By the way, my first impression was "can't be" but if it were a hoax, it sure made it through a lot of major news outlets.

DVDFab HD Decrypter 3.1.7.0 supports yet another incarnation of the infamous ARccOS and fixes a few issues.

And I just cannot resist - the company behind ARccOS, the company that killed RipIt4Me, the company with the exploding notebook batteries and rootkits is also the company behind BD+ and Blu-ray - make sure you consider that before buying Sony.

Daemon Tools 4.10 contains an updated SPTD driver and some bugfixes.

Online video service Veoh appears to be the latest site to come in front of Universal's crosshairs - the company has filed a preemptive suit that seeks protection from any legal action Universal might take against them.

AC3Filter 1.46 allows you to adjust the AC3 encoder bitrate, is available in Korean and fixes a few bugs. There's also a set of commandline tools for audio manipulation and an Adobe Audition plugin.

DVDFab HD Decrypter 3.1.6.5 supports yet another corruption scheme the industry came up to prevent you from making legitimate copies, has an autoplay handler for Windows Vista, shows the actual DVD size, contains updated language files and fixes a few bugs.

While Universal is driving HD DVD, especially in terms of extra features, Disney is the studio to step up to the Blu-ray plate. While the release is a long time off (and that makes the announcement at this point somewhat puzzling), Disney has announced the first titles to make use of the Blu-ray 2.0 specification (that's the complete spec with everything up until Internet content, plus the release of their first major animation titles, all scheduled for release in between spring and fall 2008.

And it appears that the Matroska container has scored its first victory on the hardware front, with the TviX HD M-4100SH & 5100SH being the first standalone players to handle content in the Matroska container. It also support MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1 outside of a Blu-ray or HD DVD disc.

In yet another example of copyright madness, members of US congress are looking at extending copyright law to extend fashion design, and potentially cripple an industry thriving on creating derivative works (and let's not forget that unlike music or movie, fashion designers can and do make use of patent law to come after knock offs).

And speaking of patent law, if you're still not convinced the system is broken, have a look at this - in order to get some kind of plausible deniability when the question arises whether a competing company willfully infringed a patent, companies are asking their employees not to read patent applications by their competition. This is the exact opposite of what the patent system was supposed to achieve.

If you've always wanted to put elementary VC-1 streams into the AVI container, the VC-1 ES to AVI Muxer will get you there.

The HD half year numbers are in, and they reflect what we've seen earlier: with a significantly larger installed base (most PS3 gaming consoles), Blu-ray has a 2:1 lead over HD DVD since each format's inception, and in 2007 as well.

H264TS_Cutter 105 contains small bugfixes in the TS export function, has a PID filter, can merge TS files and uses the DirectX 9 DLLs for video playback.

ZoomPlayer 5.50 beta 1 contains fixes to improve Vista compatibility, has an improved auto-configuration and a new fullscreen navigation style.

EAC3toGUI 1.25 supports the allowDrc and keepDialnorm options.

Is this the beginning of the end of On2's line of proprietary VPx codecs? At least On2 just announced H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC) support for their flagship encoder product.

If interactive features aren't all the rage as Blu-ray fans keep repeating these days in the face of their format lacking behind HD DVD in terms of disc features (and in principle I agree, many people would do just fine with a barebone release, plus most people buy a disc for the movie it contains, not the extras), then what's Disney's fuss about the upcoming release of Cars on Blu-ray? Either way, the title promises to be a good benchmark of existing Blu-ray players and perhaps the start of more complex, BD-J based titles becoming more common.

Speaking of Blu-ray, the hardware price cuts, and the available number of players including the store presentation that a larger number of models guarantees, appears to have an impact on standalone player sales - combined over all available devices, Blu-ray hardware is now beginning to overtake HD DVD player sales in certain stores.

However, for how long remains to be seen, as the first non Toshiba HD DVD player finally appears on the horizon. Onkyo is the first to jump in the HD DVD boat with the surprisingly expensive DV-HD805.

And one last bit of HD news - High-def Digest has an interesting piece on the merits of HDMI 1.3 - apparently it's not such a must have thing after all.

Today marks the end of Google video - and gives yet another good example why legal DRM circumvention needs to be enshrined in copyright law: even if you bought videos from Google rather than just rented them, the termination of this service effectively means that any movies you bought will stop working today.

BBC recently launched the iPlayer - a means to stream their TV content to your PC (at least if you have Windows). It didn't take long for ISPs to note the increased bandwidth by their users, and they've started demanding that the BBC pays ISPs in order for them to deliver the content to their users. Now you might wonder.. BBC pays for their uplink, you pay to have access to any material on the Internet, why should anybody pay extra? Enter network neutrality - just as the proponents of network neutrality have predicted, this is what access providers are really about in their opposition to a neutral net: not only do they want to charge you extra for fast access to your favorite content, they also want to charge content providers extra for a service that has already been paid for. It also goes to show just how much today's Internet uplink speeds are largely a scam by ISPs: ISPs are not capable of delivering even a fraction of the bandwidth they sell to us.. but instead of taking our money and invest it to keep up with growing bandwidth demands, they spend it on expensive execs that come up with ridiculous ideas like the rest of the world having to pay extra to be allowed to keep serving content that consumes more than a few bits/second of bandwidth.

TsRemux 0.0.18 contains some changes in the BDMV output.

DVDFab HD Decrypter 3.1.6.0 contains code that should prevent the software from interfering with Windows' DEP, contains updated language files and fixes problems with several discs.

Another one caves: Universal Music will start selling a considerable portion of their catalog without DRM through various online retail outlets for the coming months. Under the new offer - which is temporary for now - , you'll get DRM free content for $0.99 a song - unless you're shopping at iTunes. Universal, which doesn't like Apple's dominance in the music market, has decided to only offer DRM free music via alternative services, leaving out the largest online retailer (at least for now).

FAVC 1.04 improves upon the predictive quantization algorithm for HC, contains Vista compatibility fixes as well as some minor GUI fixes.

3ivX 5.01 features faster decoding along with lower memory use during decoding and increased compatibility in decoding non 3ivX content.

TSremux 0.0.17 supports MKV input and fixes some bugs.

The RIAA's "evidence gathering" is under attack yet again - once again the issue is whether an IP address is enough to uniquely identify an individual, and as an added bonus, the lawyer for the defense already has a victory notch against the RIAA on his belt.

So where does all that money that SoundExchange gets (and wants) go to? While their list of artists they pay is somewhat less than comprehensive, they're spending money on lobbying campaigns - despite the law being rather specific about what to do with the royalties collected (and guess what, lobbying for stricter copyright laws ain't on the menu). And SoundExchange is also coming under fire in the US senate, where the backers of the Internet Radio Equality act have warned the RIAA organization about forcing the DRM issue.

What a surprise - take your average music consumer and ask them about online music and DRM - the result? Only DRM free music is worth buying. Care to venture any bets when the RIAA will finally wake up?

I've always wondered how you can actually measure the damage inflicted to the RIAA/MPAA members when a song / movie is uploaded via P2P or other tool - so how about we ask the MPAA about it as they have a rather particular way of accounting: according to one of their lawsuits, making 3 movies available via P2P causes "great and irreparable injury that cannot fully be compensated or measured in money". Hmm.. I always thought you'd have to multiply the cost of the movie by the number of downloads multiplied by the percentage of people that would've bought the movie if it weren't available for free - and you can most definitely put a dollar value on that (although I'm sure the MPAA would set that percentage at 100% even if that's completely illusory).

Sorry for the lack of news these recent days but I needed a little summer time-out.

eac3to 1.11 has new switches to enable DNR for Nero's audio decoder and to disable the removal of E-AC3 dialnorm information.

Yamb 2.0.0.7 supports a few more input types, is available in French and English, can save templates, can select the previous/next checked track , has dedicated options for streaming, device compatibility and extract all streams at once, supports Windows Vista, muxes x264 AVI files directly and there are various other improvements and bugfixes. Speaking of Vista, reading about all the data that Microsoft collects should really make you wonder whether Windows is still the right platform to use.

H264TS_Cutter contains completely revamped internal TS processing code, supports multiple audio tracks, has some new options and fixes audio problems at cut points.

FAVC 1.03 has a new HC based encoding mode.

DVDx 2.10 has a shutdown countdown, supports WMV volume splitting and chaptering and contains some bugfixes.

Version 1.0 of WMVMuxer supports 2 pass encoding, contains predefined profiles for 2 pass encoding, no longer expires and fixes the bitrate controller.

Will this be the end of the annoying FBI warnings and anti-piracy ads on DVDs and before movies in the theater? The Computer and Communication Industry Association has filed a complaint with the FTC against content owners for intentionally misrepresenting the reach of copyright law. It alleges that the industry's recent "outreach programs" to "teach" children and students about copyright laws and the abovementioned warnings are deliberately formed in a way to give people a wrong impression about what copyright law really forbids.

I'm sure the industry's reply will cite the latest studies that find that P2P music downloads have reached an all time high. Of course, so have legal repercussion and the industry is still following down the same path instead of trying to figure out what people really want from music. Then again, they'll probably try to downplay their own admission that lawsuits alone are not the solution and that those lawsuits haven't really made a dent into online piracy.

This has the German arm of the IFPI fuming: public prosecutors may no longer process the industry's requests for ISP subscriber information so that those subscribers can be sued. According to recent rulings, the offense is too petty to warrant the involvement of criminal prosecutors.

Why is the RIAA so intent in hiking of royalties for online radio stations? I previously suggested that the hike might just have been a feint (plus the RIAA even admits that today the recording of streaming radio is not a significant problem to them) to roll out DRM - techdirt has another potential explanation: it's the content that online radio plays. While traditional radio devotes as much as 87% of its airtime to music from the major labels, major online radio stations only device 44% of their "airtime" to RIAA music.

The crackdown on the use of camcorders in movie theatres has finally encountered some backfire: a woman in Quebec is suing Quebec's largest movie chain for an abusive search (for camcording equipment).

Meet the latest industry sponsored attempt to turn copyright law even more against us - the Intellectual Property Enhanced Criminal Enforcement Act of 2007. It would create whole new classes of copyright infringement: attempted copyright infringement (Minority Report anyone?) and conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. It would also raise the maximum jail sentences for copyright infringement from 6 to 20 years.

I guess they needed something new when their attempt to sneak an amendment that would force universities to adopt anti P2P technology into a bill funding higher education has failed when the concerned parties found out about it and made their voices heard.

Back on the old continent, the industry is screaming about being disowned by the government, when the UK decided that 50 years of copyright protection is enough (recall that the optimal duration of protection would be 14 years). It seems that the entire industry has forgotten why copyright law was created in the first place and what it's supposed to do: give creators a temporary!!!! monopoly on the use of their work to encourage the release of new creations. It's not a perpetual mobile to print money. And there are are many compelling reasons why today's system has gone completely overboard.

Following the Swiss example, Canada may well be on its way to get a levy on iPod like devices as well. Naturally, the industry is taking no steps to torpedo an additional source of income even though they usually take on the "DRM over levy" line - but why not have it both ways?

By the way, if there ever was a reason to distrust the industry's "evidence gathering", Germany's c't recently found out that due to no fault of your own, somebody else connected to the same exchange might use your Internet connection. In one case, this even went as far as somebody's Internet link being used to peddle kiddie porn - fortunately for the person whose line was being abused, he figured out what was going on an alerted the authorities.

Finally, some news from the front of the war that's already over (c): As studios supporting HD DVD begin to roll out the last remaining features like web content, one title has widely been picked up to illustrate the feature disparity between HD DVD and Blu-ray: Warner's 300 contains a lot more features on the HD DVD edition than the Blu-ray one, thanks to the Blu-ray's rushing to the market with a half finished spec (the BD 1.0 spec that current players are based on, which doesn't include such features as PiP, additional local storage and network connectivity)

VideoBusiness sums up the past weeks in HD news: Sony is once again scoring points on the PR front with more or less insignificant (or dangerously close to false claims) wins - and concludes that for a battle that's already over, Sony sure does a lot on the PR front.

Last month's news can be found here.