Happy New Year everybody. May 2007 bring you all that you can expect from a new year, including plenty of software that allows you to exercise fair use and politicians that don't fall for the RIAA/MPAA/BSA taglines and try to send half the world's population to the slammer and snoop on their every step.

I'm back safe and sound from the longest vacation ever taken during the existence of this site, and it seems things have been plenty interesting while I was away. In the following, I'll try to summarize some of the most important developments but I won't attempt to give a full overview of everything that has happened during my holidays - it would just be too much. Many thanks to all the people who posted news in the news forum - I hope we can keep this going (it makes my job easier, too :)

At some point I managed to get ahold of BBC News - just in time to catch the RIAA's latest attempt to get rid of that pesky online music site that dares only pay the music creators, and not the labels (of course, the newsguy completely missed to point out that allofmp3 does pay royalties, they just don't license songs from the labels so all the money goes directly to artists with none to the labels - and it's quite understandable that you need your cut to buy the latest Benz). And as usual, the engineer in me wonders how a lawsuit filed in a country where a company doesn't even have a subsidiary makes any sense..

And sticking with the RIAA for a minute, here's your chance to impact one of their lawsuits. The lawyers for one of the defendants who decided to take matters to court are asking for opinions and suggestions on how to cross examine the RIAA's expert witness. The expert report already raises some issues, e.g. the whole public IP address argument (NAT anyone? in most protocols you never see so much as a private IP address because everything is NAT'ed).

In a development that almost brought down the forum, another piece of groundbreaking software has been posted just days ago. BackupHDDVD is a tool which decrypts HD DVD files. It is not a crack for AACS as widely reported, the software merely does what any HD DVD player does.. decrypt the content with a legitimate key. The challenge is getting that key. You may recall that the first DVD rip software used a player key extracted from the Xing DVD player software - a key that was later removed by the CSS licensing committee. Then came rippers that brute-forced a valid key (VobDec being the first one), and finally software like DVD Decrypter which can do pretty much what any software DVD player does to get the proper key. Considering AACS looks quite robust, brute-forcing keys is unlikely, but there might be other ways in the future. For now, getting a valid key will be the major challenge to enable access to HD DVD discs.

Speaking of the forum, there's a new Firefox toolbar for it.

DVDFab Decrypter 3.0.5.1 has an improved copy protection removal engine and fixes the crashes that would occur if there's no main movie source.

Just before 2007 hits, Haali has released another version of his splitter suite. It fixes issues with multiple screens, can show timestamps and there are various fixes.

x264 got another nice speedup while I was away. New multithreading code reduces the (already quite impercievable) quality loss and increases performance on SMP systems by a respectable amount.

Auto Gordian Knot 2.40 uses a new XviD CSV build.

PgcEdit 8.0 has reached RC1 status.

VobBlanker 2.1.2.0 has been released just in time for the new year. It remembers the most recently used files for DVDs and other project files, can split a cell into two, has buttons to go to cut points in preview mode, can create smart gaps, splits files at 1 GB in cell extraction, allows to configure default folders and there's quite a few improvements and the usual assortment of bugfixes.

Cuttermaran 1.68a fixes a tff field issue that was introduced in version 1.68.

Zoom Player 5.0 final has been released. It contains bugfixes and minor feature improvements.

DVBViewer 3.6.0 has a recording service, allows channel switching during recording by a simple click, shows the length of the recording session in the context menu, allows the selection of the EPG source in the channel editor and there are various other minor changes and bugfixes.

HDngn is an OpenGL based video player that can interpolate between frames to create a higher FPS video. Here's the forum thread for feedback & discussion.

Last but not least, just in time for the new year a new nightly ffdshow build has been made available on the official sourceforge site of the ffdshow project.

And here's the really last one before I'm off to celebrate the new year: Telco giant AT&T appears to be willing to make concessions for network neutrality to get their merger with BellSouth approved. I guess if it serves their own interest they're suddenly rather flexible..

DVD2One 2.1.0 supports batch processing (allowing up to 15 disk to be processed without user intervention) and it checks the filesystem of the destination drive to prevent the creation of files that are larger than the filesystem supports (e.g. FAT32 has a 4 GB limit).

DGMPGDec 1.4.9 beta 5 dumps PCR and SCR to timestamp dumps.

PgcEdit 8.0 beta 3 already has a considerable changelog and there's more coming..

Avidemux 2.3 - the Virtualdub for alternative containers (and more) supports DV content in the MOV and MP4 container, uses an almost up-to-date x264 version and fixes a couple of bugs.

China is making another attempt to replace DVD with EVD in the home market. By now, prices are on the same level, and there are plans to phase out DVD players in favor of EVD by 2008.

Last but not least, in about 12 hours I'll board a plane, destination halfway around the world. Unfortunately, I have not found a suitable replacement to bring you the latest news on a daily basis, which is one of the main drivers I created the news forum where everybody can be part of the news process. If you see a new version of your favorite software, or another one of the RIAA/MPAA's shenanigans, please take a few minutes to let the rest of the world know.. we have a team of more than 50 dedicated individuals reviewing your submissions and making them visible at the earliest possible moment. And being part of the forum there's already a place where you can discuss the news, too.

I'll be gone during Christmas, so have a Merry Christmas. And while in the mood for Christmas presents, ateme decided to stop hosting our forum come early 2007 so if you have the horsepower and bandwidth to support the community.. you know whom to contact (although I will be away for the next three weeks, but you can always contact my co-admin Swede).

The Australian copyright reform, based on DMCA-like impositions from the US-Australia free trade agreement, appears to be nearing passage, after some controversial passages have been rewritten. Unfortunately, the Sydney Morning Herald doesn't outline the changes - I'd expect to find a rundown at the Electronic Frontiers Australia site but it appears to be down :(

The Financial Times has an interesting outlook at the upcoming battle between Universal and MySpace and how the DMCA plays into the whole issue.

Zoom Player 5 RC2 gives you a lot of control over many navigation interface options and contains a few bugfixes.

Here's some irony for you: even kids of RIAA label CEOs download music from P2P services. Too bad that doesn't get those people to reconsider if perhaps some form of P2P flatfee licensing would be a more consumer friendly way of getting paid for music, let alone in the end more profitable. I still think if the labels really went ahead with what was planned for Napster after its initial shutdown (a monthly flatfee.. let people share, pay not a single dime in advertising and distribution cost, but get paid a certain amount for every download), digital music would've developed into something that would satisfy both consumers and the record labels.

DVDx 2.6 has been moved to Visual Studio 2005 and no longer silently crashes when exiting the Input Settings dialog with 44.1KHz or 48.0KHz selected.

DGMPGDec 1.4.9 beta 4 fixes a random access problem that would creep up in the presence of RFF flags.

RipIt4Me 1.6.0.0 is better at dealing with multiple button sets in a menu and DVDs that have a large number of menus and prevents access to the Next button in the first step if no valid DVD is present.

Cuttermaran 1.68 shows cut areas in the scroll bar, allows dragging and dropping of multiple items concurrently, allows patching of the aspect ratio in the destination stream, indicates the frame type for the frame at the the beginning of a cut, allows linking of the in and out frame of a cut, inserts missing audio samples and fixes a few bugs.

What's the most efficient ways to gather information about other people and access information you're not supposed to access? It's not really hacking, it's a very old technique called social engineering.. you pose as somebody else in order to ambush unsuspecting individuals into divulging information they're not supposed to (social security numbers, bank account numbers, passwords, etc.). So, in order to keep access to protected systems safer, and to make identity theft more difficult, it would be a good thing to throw a couple bricks into the wheels of social engineering, right? Well, the MPAA managed to kill such a bill in California because they want to snoop into your personal affairs as part of anti piracy investigations. Would you want the MPAA snooping through your personal stuff?

With blue laser players and recorders not quite taking off yet (they have since launched in Europe too, but my latest visit to one of the largest retailers in the region yielded a less than impressive number of devices and discs in stock), DVD appears to have a few more years left, and so the DVD forum is moving forward: They've just ratified 10x and 12x DVD-R DL recording, and burnable CSS encryption is definitely coming our way in the form of "CSS Managed Recording". That might be just in time for Warner's plans to offer download to burn content next year.

And here's one for our German readers: Throw a wrench into the government's plan to snoop into your phone and Internet traffic by signing up for a constitutional complaint against the proposed law on communication surveillance.

Last but not least, we've opened a new section in the forum, called News. The idea is that this fully moderated forum (all posts first have to be approved by a moderator) can be used as a news submission line - and instead of one person we have the entire forum moderation team looking into and approving news. On top of that, whenever there's nobody present to post news to these pages, you can still get your dose of daily news.

Last month's news can be found here.