XviD 1.1 final fixes decoding of interlaced content, supports additional FourCCs and includes some small updates in the VfW front-end.

This new DivX browser plugin works in all major browser on Windows.

That one's bit older but you can still participate in the 128 kbit/s multiformat listening test.

The first Sony rootkit lawsuit has already been settled.

If the open copy protection questions can be settled, you should be able to buy recordable and rewriteable Blu-ray discs by the time the first burner will hit the market, as TDK is close to a launch. However, you will find another burner than the Pioneer one to burn the dual layer discs. That would be a first after the dual layer DVD fiasco: having the discs before the drives.

And speaking of Blu-ray, unlike on DVD, the Blu-ray region code 1 will not only be used in North America, but Japan as well (Japan is in region 2 as far as DVD is concerned).

And of course, happy new year :)

DVDFab Decrypter 2.9.6.6 has an improved copy engine that should make postprocessing with VobBlanker or FixVTS superfluous and compatibility with DVD Shrink has been improved.

Was yesterday's announcement of Pioneer's Blu-ray recorder premature? It appears that AACS is going to slow down Blu-ray as well as HD DVD, so the drive could be delayed unless the companies behind AACS get their act together (if I had to take a guess, I'd say they're still scheming for new evil ways to screw paying customers).

2006 promises good things for Australia, as their federal government plans to (finally) legalize personal recording of TV shows and ripping legally bought CDs so you can transfer the songs to your MP3 player. It remains to be seen how this measure jives with the US - Australia free trade agreement which introduces DMCA like legislation in Australia.

Pioneer announced its first Blu-ray drive yesterday. The BDR-101A will start shipping at the end of January and burns single layer BD-R and BD-RE (RE stands for REwriteable.. there's no BD-RW) at 1x, read BD-R/E/ROM discs at 2x. It also writes DVDs, but there's no support whatsoever for CDs, thus forcing you to get a second drive. That will especially please people with notebooks or barebones (I have one and love my combined CD/DVD Burner), and the HD DVD camp, which has drives that have no problems reading and writing to CDs.

Meanwhile, the Microsoft is pretty much fighting the battle for HD DVD on the PC front. And for once, I'm rooting for them. AACS is no good for consumers, but from a consumer's perspective, the less DRM the better, the cheaper (Sony claims it makes no difference but new and unproven technology has a tendency of being more expensive than you first think) the better for both consumers (cost of drives) and producers (cost of pressing discs), and finally a 3 format drive versus two drives.. I'm all in favor of HD DVD and thanks to AVC and VC-1 there's no need for the 50GB that Blu-ray offers.

BeHappy is an AviSynth based audio transcoding tool.

There's yet another release of the ProgDVB 4.70 test series: 4.70.3.

Last but not least, the RIAA is meddling with international politics again, this time trying to block Russia's entry to the WTO unless Russia does more to protect intellectual property. What I find only mildly amusing (because my work is protected by intellectual property), I'm sure many people working in different industries, or even the same as I but in a different capacity, would object to intellectual property being called the "greatest economic asset". Listen to the top 10 charts, and then can you honestly claim that this can be a country's greatest economic asset? If that's the case, we're in for a very rough ride..

I hope you all had a nice Christmas and got a new dual core CPU just in time to start using the SMP optimized winner of the final round in the 2005 codec comparison.

The music industry is under investigation for price fixing yet again as New York's Attorney General is investigating pricing of online downloads. Apple is likely to end up in his crosshairs as well since it's Apple that insists on a common price for all songs, but perhaps this will also reveal that studios reap significantly higher benefits per songs from downloaded music than from music sold in the retail channel.

Merry Christmas everyone.

YAMB 1.4 now uses mp4tags for tagging, converts track names, chapters and tagging content to UTF8 and fixes an error in the track parsing.

The French won't get their DMCA on steroids as an unwanted Christmas gift. After 3 days and 200 motions for changes, the debate has been interrupted and will resume on January 17th. So you still have some time to remind your elected representatives that they need to make the protection of our rights, not the ones of the media conglomerates, as their new year's resolution.

Sorry for the lack of news yesterday, I was busy working on the 2005 codec comparison. That's right, the results are out before Christmas this year, so after reading how many codecs have been SMP optimized, you can still rush out and buy that dual core CPU to get a serious boost in encoding speed ;) Keeping with the tradition of including more codecs, there's a whopping number of 16 codecs that I looked at during the qualification and main round, and there's at least one codec you have never heard of until today. That's right, another codec exclusive is waiting for you..

MyTheatre 3.33.5 supports the ATSC version of the AirStar card and fixes a few bugs.

ProgDVB 4.70.2 has been released.

The music industry in France is hyperventilating, having heart attacks and throwing tantrums. Why? During the discussion for the new DMCA on steroids law (DADVSI), an amendment which would legalize private filesharing has been approved. To compensate the industry, a tax on Internet access has also been proposed. Is this the amendment that brings an overbroad and outright bad law to its knees? Even with this amendment, the law is still a nightmare, so I have another little proposal: throw the law out, keep the amendment. Now that's doing something for the people for a change.

Which interface will your next PC screen and TV need to have in order for you to connect all the latest digital devices to it? As if DVI (with or without HDCP), and HDMI (only with HDCP) weren't enough, now there's UDI (only with HDCP). How many more interfaces do we need?

MaestroSBT 2.6.0.0 scales the text to the same proportions as VobSub, writes the full path into SST files and uses TIFF files for SST rendering, fixes Pixel area parameters for Scenarist import, uses the minus2/3 rendering options automatically for Scenarist and Maestro output and it allows whitespaces between fields in SSA files as well.

As if painfully restrictive copy protection wasn't enough, we'll also see region codes on Blu-ray discs. The HD DVD camp hasn't decided yet..

MeGUI 0.2.1.1023d supports the Nero 7 audio encoder.

avi.NET 1.6 has been rewritten from scratch and now requires .NET 2.0. It also drops support for DivX 5.x

ProgDVB 4.70 supports multiple DVB cards on the same machine.

Plextor's PX-760A burner, delayed indefinitely due to problems with the writing quality, is back on schedule and Plextor now plans to release the device that offers 10x DVD+R DL and 18x DVD±R burning.

I've previously reported on the MPAA's scheme to extend DRM to the analogue world. Now they have made their move and introduced the whole thing under the name of Digital Transition Content Security Act of 2005 or DTCSA. It's time to start writing to Congress yet again...

Last but not least, I've created a poll about audio and containers in future codec comparisons and I'd appreciate your input. And speaking of the comparison, I discovered something interesting by reviewing XviD and the LMP4 codec using different playback filters. Even though I've been using ffdshow for decoding XviD content for quite a while now, it turns out that I actually like the results better when XviD is being decoded by its own filter. So especially when you're activating postprocessing you might want to give both decoders a shot and see which one you like best.

AVI .NET 1.5 has been released.

DVDFab Decrypter 2.9.6.5 supports more ARccOS titles.

Is the music industry taking a step back in their fight against sites offering song lyrics? Warner apologized to the developer of pearLyrics, and the service might come back to life.

After reading the Wall Street Journal's latest taken on how the music industry is doing this year, I expect another round of studios sponsored by the music industry to claim that they only lose out due to piracy, not all the other reasons like lack of good content and competition by DVDs, games and electronic gadgets.

Taiwan's WMV9 based FVD format may be making inroads to China according to a Digitimes article. It also mentions sales promotions in the US in Europe, but are there really any plans to introduce this format in those markets, especially in light of the two blue laser based disc formats that are suppose to be launched within the next few months?

Also, ATIs XCode utility does not seem to make use of hardware acceleration in its current state, and while you cannot launch the tool without an ATI 1xxx series card, you can still install it, and then use the DirectShow filters via Graphedit. More info on this can be found in the forum.

The full HC 0.16 release is now available. The GUI has been redone, and the package also contains the most up-to-date commandline encoder and manual.

Firingsquad has a preview of the upcoming new ATI Catalyst 5.13 driver, codename dominATIon. The new drivers, due next week, should finally make good on ATI's promise of HD video acceleration, and free of charge. And in what looks a little premature, ATI's Avivio encoding utility has been posted to a German PC mag site. Unfortunately I don't have an ATI card or I'd have extended the qualification to see how ATI performs in the video arena.

Hmm, somehow I missed a day in the news. Anyway..

DVDSubEdit allows you to make changes to visualize and make changes to subpictures on DVDs.

In response to yesterday's news about the EU snooping directive, a concerned reader pointed towards overzealous filtering. At his university in Chicago, they filter Bittorrent downloads according to MPAA keywords. And as so often, the filters catch stuff that is perfectly legitimate. Imagine a webfilter blocking a search for cocktail, because the word starts with... In fact, come to think of it, last month I took a course abroad and their Internet access terminals also had a filter, that effectively blocked me from accessing certain subforums on my own forum, as well as certain threads. I'm quote sure that there's nothing of inappropriate nature posted on my forum, yet they kept me from going there. I had to dampen the pain with a lot of local beer ;)

Last but not least, the codec comparison season has officially been opened. I changed a source and the whole mode of the comparison, and the first results are out now.

DivX 6.1 has been released. Both encoder and decoder have SMP capability, so they can take advantage of HyperThreading, dual core systems and dual processor systems. In addition, the extreme quality and insane quality modes have been sped up, the new high performance mode offers lightning fast encoding speeds, SSE2 optimization means more speed on CPUs supporting those extensions, the feedback window has been enhanced and there are other minor changes.

Now Microsoft has enter the rootkit debate by giving their latest version of the malicious software removal kit the ability to remove Sony's rootkit DRM. And meanwhile, the AG of Illinois is looking into Sony's DRM as well.

How should you be punished for leaving your wireless connection wide open? Paramount has put a price on it: $100'000 if somebody happens to use that connection to upload a movie to eDonkey. The Police found no evidence of the file in question on location, and the accused alleges somebody abused his wireless connection. That should be an easy one for the courts considering the US legal system is based on "innocent till proven otherwise", and a screenshot of eDonkey with an IP address and a filename can hardly tie the guy to the actual upload.

A free country means nobody keeps tabs on you unless you're stepping out of line, right? Wrong! Charles 'Big Brother' Clarke has done what many dictators are still dreaming about: keep track of all communications of your 'loyal' subjects. And the best thing is, you get to pay the bill for the state spying on you as well. Isn't it great to know your hard earned tax Euros go towards a good cause? I wonder how long it goes until MI5 comes knocking down your door because you just happened to make a phonecall from the same location and at the same time as a suspected terrorist. Or, throwing you in jail because you encrypt your Internet traffic. Oh wait, I should better give up working at home every now and then and travel to the office every day, because the only way I can connect to the office from home is a VPN connection, which hides traffic from prying eyes. With the amount of encrypted traffic that goes over my line, it's obvious that I'm trying to hide nasty things from prying eyes, isn't it?

And of course, MPAA, RIAA and BSA are already waiting in line to tap into this new resource.

YMB 1.3.3 supports track delay for concatenation, set the maximum filesize for file splitting to the filesize, asks you if you really want to quick when trying to exit, can extract chapters, properly imports tracknames and no longer breaks subtitles.

FixVTS 1.17 saves the log in your temp directory, no longer forgets to process files, renumbers VOB IDs and Cell IDs, checks for empty output VOBs and renames remaining ones accordingly and fixes a few bugs.

So much for HD DVD in 2005. Toshiba has to delay the launch of HD DVD in Japan because the AACS copy protection isn't finished yet. The AACS Licensing Authority plans to have the specs ready later this year (well, it can't get much later with the holidays just around the corner), but it's definitely too late to get any players out of the door.

Meanwhile, the Blu-ray camp rejoices at the news of TDK beginning to shipping Blu-ray recordable and rewriteable discs samples in high volume.

The RIAA is also celebrating as they won their first victory against a filesharer who didn't wish to settle. The judges mentioned that a downloaded song you keep is a substitute for a purchased copy. That may well be, but doesn't mean in the absence of the free alternative, the song would've been bought. It's quite convenient thought that the music industry doesn't have to prove actual damages (they only lose money if somebody willing to pay for a song downloads it instead without paying, and that money will then go to another company that is just as happy to get it - it's really a zero sum game).

Here's the latest in apple bashing: Now the competition is spreading stories that Apple is holding back the digital music business. Here's a hint Mr. Gorog: any iPod plays AAC and MP3 files, just not your DRM infested WMA stuff..

Auto Gordian Knot 2.26 fixes compatibility of the ESS option with the latest XviD build.

HDTVtoMPEG2 1.11.83 has a messagebox indicating that SD channels are not supported in the commercial scan, can include black frames before and after a program, indicates the real average TS rate, calculates the weighted average TS rate, has an option to increase the commercial scan rate and contains a few bugfixes.

Auto Gordian Knot 2.25 fixes all reported bugs and comes with the most up-to-date support applications.

MeGUI 0.2.3.1022 supports the new fast p-skip option, no longer supports adaptive quantization as this patch has been removed from Sharktooth's x264 builds, has a context sensitive view menu, allows resizing of the preview window, includes various improvements in the AviSynth script including support for AVI and VDR files, allows DGDecode.dll to be placed where you want it, speeds up the turbo mode by deactivating unnecessary options in the first pass and there are many more small improvements and bugfixes.

DivX6 is now also available for the Mac, and with it comes MacOS X 10.4 support.

China is making yet another attempt at developing its own disc format. The just approved AVS standard uses the same physical support as HD DVD, is MPEG-2 compatible and should offer similar quality to MPEG-4 AVC at lower complexity. They claim one of the bigger advantages is the use of an 8x8 transform block, but AVC also got that with the High Profile. So, before we see a working codec I'd suggest to wait for a working implementation and compare it to AVC..

In perfect harmony with the practice of taking a bad law and making it worse (see DMCA versus the various European implementations, with the French one being the worst so far), say hello to the Broadcast Flag Deluxe - European style. The Content Protection Copyright Management (CPCM) standard devices by the DVB forum, is way more than just a flag and would extend over virtually any content and stop you from using the content you own the way you want and instead only allowing what the content industry allows (and undoubtedly they'll charge you a hefty fee for every kind of use). In addition, it introduces revokable rights, so prepare to be locked out from watching Home Alone with your family on Christmas day because of a system failure/bill that you forgot to pay/mixup on the MPAA master server/your favorite technical disaster scenario.

Last but not least, in recent days the BSA has once again graced us with their latest "study" on how software piracy causes the loss of jobs and does a lot of harm to the economy as a whole. Since the subject of software development not only touches my hobby but also my job I cannot help but feel the need to refute some ridiculous claims. First of all the "piracy percentages". Who in their right mind is going to incriminate themselves by admitting they use non legitimate software? So, the BSA has to guess. And how do they guess? Every PC sold without a license of Windows and Office means one pirated copy? How about you buy a copy independent of hardware, and then swap out your PC more often than Microsoft releases a new OS or Office suite? And you end up selling your old PC to somebody else who also already has the license? What about people having multiple machines? There is still plenty of software that allows dual use on your office and home PC.
A little over 2 years ago I finished my studies. I have been more fortunate than others because my parents could afford to pay for everything. But there are plenty of students barely managing to scrape by, and while they need a PC, the money might just pay for the hardware. Now if you need a copy of Windows, Office, Matlab, JBuilder, Visual Studio, and whatever else software you might need for your studies, most students just can't afford that. And while university collaborators may have the opportunity to buy software for $10 per license, such discounts are often not offered to students. And if it's between paying the rent and tuition or software, guess which most people will chose. A similar argument applies to kids - they have a limited amount of money available, and you can't just have everything. You can use the same argumentation for the RIAA and MPAA as well, but with software we're talking about much higher amounts of money. Of course, that in no way should justify piracy, but in such cases you cannot consider an unpaid copy to be a sale lost - these people simply cannot afford to buy the software, so either you give it to them virtually for free, or they'll just take it without asking.
Bottom line: an unlicensed software is not necessarily a lost sale and I'd like to see the BSA account for that in their statistics for just once.

PgcEdit 0.6.3 beta 4 fixes an issue with McAfee antivirus (don't you hate these buggers, they fail to protect you from the real threats yet bitch about perfectly legit programs? I have a virus scanner at work that regularly wants to delete Windows components), and fixes issues in the kill PGC playback function.

FixVTS 1.12 remaps cell IDs, improves support of seamless branching and multi angle titles, displays the PGC duration properly even for multi angle DVDs and it updates the TMAP_TI table as well.

CutterMaran 1.66 has a new dynamic GUI, supports RGB24 and YV12 color spaces, has a new encoding provider to use QuEnc, contains a HDTV template for TMPG, can use DGIndex instead of DVD2AVI, has a new quickjump dialog, the mux provider can get chapter lists for authoring, multiple markers are supported as well as multiple selections in the cutlist, and finally there are a lot of bugfixes.

SubRip 1.50 beta 1 supports text formatting, has an improved GUI, can process the video more quickly when a stream contains empty frames and it contains some updated language files as well.

DVD43 3.7.0 supports a bunch of new corrupted discs (ArccOs, RipGuard).

The RIAA has discovered their next enemy: websites that host lyrics for songs. And they don't make an exception for software that allows you to search the web for Lyrics and display them in iTunes. I suppose search engine filters are not out of the question either, or are they?

Has Sony seen the light? They seem to be reevaluating the use of DRM, but considering how long they've been infecting PCs with rootkits, I have my doubts that will see a significant shift in attitude in the only industry that considers their customers their enemies. I think it will take a bunch more of scandals like this to really make a difference, and of course people buying those CDs don't really help.

PgcEdit 0.6.3 beta 2 has a new DVD burning interface and fixes a few bugs.

mkvtoolnix 1.6.5 can create directories when the output filename contains a directory that does not exist, supports limited edit lists in MP4 and Quicktime files, allows setting the names of attached files, supports Ogg Theora and Matroska's simpleblock. Finally, many bugs have been fixed as well.

FixVTS 1.01 fixes a few bugs that were in the initial release.

ratDVD 0.78 is much better integrated with Windows Media Player and includes a lot of fixes and smaller enhancements.

More video for the iPod: NBC, the Sci-Fi channel and USA network now also offer some of their lineup for the video iPod. And they may be looking into expanding their video lineup in the future.

Panasonic is the first to start a production line for dual layer Blu-ray discs, a move that will brighten the days of those studios sticking to the outdated MPEG-2 codec in the HD age.

I apologize to everyone who tried to sing the petition against the DADVSI, I suppose it's a pretty hard thing to do ;) However, reading a bit more French, the law is actually getting way beyond the DMCA by banning (in)voluntary dissemination of any information about tools that this directive would outlaw, even if it's of academic nature (so researchers are no longer allowed to tell people a product is unsafe because the encryption can be broken - next thing they can no longer tell you if the encryption your bank uses for online banking is unsafe and you'll only be the wiser when your bank account is empty). And it gets even better: DRM for online radio, a universal filtering system for all ISPs to filter out content the content industry doesn't want to be transmitted (you know how filters are, put anything you don't like in it and nobody will get it anymore - it's a slippery slope towards universal censorship), and any software that can be used to transmit copyrighted material could be forced to implement and recognize DRM. Any software implementing any protocol would be affected. And the last straw is an attempt to ban all free software altogether. I will spare you the collection of swearwords, but nobody in their sane mind could be for such a proposal.

Here's one for all French readers: You're about to enter the DMCA age as well as the government is trying to fast-track the French DMCA variety called DADVSI through parliament. But until the votes are cast, you can still do something about it, so head over to eucd.info, sign the petition and get in touch with your elected representatives today. They may not need you once they are in office and only cater to the ones that paid for their ad campaign, but come reelection time, they once again depend on you, so make them feel that..

UK's copyright law will get a closer examination in the coming 12 months as the Chancellor has ordered a review of IP laws. The scope of the review includes fair use rights, and since we as consumers are stakeholders as well, you have time to speak up now.

Why is there a tendency in Hollywood to favor Blu-ray over HD DVD? Fox Filmed Entertainment co-chairman James Gianopulos, in what probably wasn't meant to come out that way, spilled the beans: It isn't about size, it's not about cost, it's not about features, it's about even more restrictive DRM that Blu-ray "offers" (shackles you with would be a more appropriate description I think). Not that managed copy was nowhere near far enough to satisfy fair use, but keep in mind that on Blu-ray it's up to the studio to allow you to make only one heavily DRM'ed copy of content you're supposed to own and do with as you please.
Yahoo focuses on other aspects of essential the speech (or interview or whatever it was), and I feel the urge to comment on the "You can never compete with free" aspect. Free to air TV seems to work just fine, Internet radio seems to work just fine as well. And if you go to the bottom of it, I need to pay a certain fee to legally receive TV and radio broadcasts and a certain fee to get on the Internet, so when you get right down to it, even P2P downloads aren't free. And I still recall attempts to get an entire album on Napster. Sure it's possible, but if you have to invest time searching for tracks in matching quality, then rename files, add ID3 tags, it's suddenly not so convenient anymore. If you go to school, you may have that time to spend, but I found that getting out of university changed certain realities somewhat. I suddenly find myself paying for certain things I used to do on my own before, just because I'm unwilling to spend the time anymore, and I'm convinced I'm not the only one. I'd also pay for an 1080p x264 High Profile encoded episode of 24 - it's just a matter of how much and if I can play the file anywhere I like. Season 4 of 24 is available for $45.49 at Amazon. That's $1.875 per episode, plus you get packaging, physical discs and extras. So here's my pledge to Fox: I'll buy all 4 seasons for $2 an episode under the conditions previously mentioned (even though I already have the DVDs). I have no physical support, no extras, there's no manufacturing and packaging cost, no case designers, no photographs, just me spending days downloading and then having to buy my own DVD-Rs to burn the episodes. And how about offering episodes of season 5 a day after they first air? I might even be willing to pay a few cents more. But of course, if you want 5 bucks a pop, and with DRM... now why is nobody buying that? It's not about pay-product versus free, it's about how much effort you have to put into something and how much you get for it. Those of us who had DRM licenses revoked because of hardware failures (and subsequent changes) or snags in software had to find out the hard way just how much "value" a DRM release has.

ImgBurn 1.1.0.0 has a verify mode for both CDs and DVDs, has a discovery mode that allows you to test if a given disc can handle a certain capacity without needing an image file, allows multiple burns of the same source, supports image drag/drop, can display and extract graph data from previous burns, supports Blu-Ray and HD DVD drives (that code is untested though since the drives are not available yet) and there's a whole lot more.

The DivX Media format SDK allows you to create DivX files with all the advanced options DivX6 introduced, including menus, multiple audio and subtitle tracks, chapters and metadata. They have also released their Dr. DivX encoding application as open source.

ProgDVB 4.62.5 contains some small fixes and updates.

PgcEdit 0.6.2 has been released. It allows to modify the access restricted and VOBU still flag in the cells type flag editor, prompts the user on all operations to remove the access restricted flag on cells of the current PGC, has some tooltips on the cell command number fields to show the current cell commands, includes some burning improvements for dual layer discs and fixes a few bugs.

With DVD burners having reached the max speed the specs offer, and with the blue laser formats still a bit away, burner manufacturers are turning towards increasing the speed beyond the specs again. Plextor's PX-755 series writes the usual formats at the usual speeds except for DVD+R DL discs, which can be written at 10x. The previously announced PX-760 series, that also offers 18x writing speed, has been delayed until further notice. What sounds especially appealing to me is that Plextor is still pretty much the only company to also offer an SATA version. With modern PCs having at least 4 SATA connectors, there's really no need for clunky IDE cables throughout your PC anymore.

Will Disney be using MPEG-2 for their Blu-Ray discs as well? Quick math seems to suggest that: Assume that instead of the 20-odd MBit/s bitrate currently used for HDTV broadcasts, discs were to use MPEG-4 AVC at 10 MBit/s. A 3 hour movie with a 1.5 MBit/s audio track would only need about 15 GB, leaving 10 more GB for extras, which should be plenty. However, Disney is concerned about the fact that dual layer Blu-Ray discs will not be available from the launch date. Doing the math with 20 MBit/s, the same movie suddenly takes 27 GB, which is more than single layer Blu-Ray offers, and even dual layer HD DVD would be hard stretched as it only offers 30 GB. And 3 GB for HD extras isn't a lot.. But then again, since MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1 are mandatory and every HD DVD and BluRay player needs to be able to play both at the highest resolution, why use MPEG-2 at all?

FixVTS is a tool to process DVDs and increase their specs compliance so that they can be opened in DVDShrink or VobBlanker. This comes in handy for those crippled pieces of plastic that have a DVD logo like discs with ArccOs.

A new area in audio encoding may be looming ahead: With BeSweet development pretty much at a stop, audio encoding via AviSynth may suddenly become a reality. There is already a number of audio processing options in AviSynth, and thanks to tools like avs2wav and BeHappy, we might well be looking at a whole different kind of audio processing in the future. What makes it particularly interesting is that thanks to AviSynth, you can trim any part of the video and won't have to worry about your audio getting out of synch, and thus operations like cutting away ads from material you captured from digital TV will become a breeze.

It is definitely not a good year for Sony as New York's Attorney General is also considering suing, and apparently Sony knew very well what they were doing as antivirus company F-Secure informed them about the rootkit a month before the news first broke, and they decided to keep quiet about it. Then again, they still think they did nothing wrong so why do anything?

The BluRay camp is gearing up for a launch in Spring 06, as HP is backing away from the format since managed copy is still not in the specs and there's no chance in the interactivity software on the horizon either.

Meanwhile, Taiwan's home-brew FVD format, based on Microsoft's WMV9 codec has entered mass production.

How long will it take in France, where the first chamber of parliament just ratified a one year data retention for communication data, until the RIAA comes on knocking asking for access to all that data so they can sue you?

Last month's news can be found here.