OggMux 0.9.0 has automatisation support using the -f parameter on the commandline.

I'd like to apologize to all the people sending feedback these recent weeks, one guy handling the feedback is on holidays, the other has been very busy at work so there has been quite a backlog of mails. Just today I answered 50 feedback mails. Thanks to all the people sending their thoughts about document management and links to free surveys. Also thanks for all the offers to translate. Please note that you should use the translations forum to announce translation projects and find other volunteers. There's also some people with experience in these matters hanging around who can help you. Just now somebody has reported he'd be willing to start a Greek translation project. If you could help out with that, you know where to go now ;) Please don't use the feedback email for these offers anymore. Also note that ripping questions cannot be sent via email, we have a forum and an IRC channel for these kind of things. Thanks you.

We got some small fixes in the audio department of many guides today. The translators will not be very happy.. speaking of which especially the German team is looking for more translators. There's not many guides in the SVCD and DVD-R department that have been translated so far. If you're interested, just click on the German flag above.

On a follow-up to yesterday's story it seems that not everybody agrees on the proposed law, and particularly the MPAA is not too keen on people trying to hack them ;)

Not much going on in the ripping world these days. It seems as if summer holidays have finally kicked in. Too bad I have to start work today instead of going to a fancy place with nice beaches, cold drinks and parties all around.

I've been continuing work on DVD-R projects these recent days, I completed Swordfish and I'm currently working on The Matrix but there are some problems that I may know a way around but would make things a lot more complicating that doing the whole movie from scratch. I've also been testing standalone compatibility of cheap DVD-R discs but my Thomson player is not particularly forgiving and has only accepted Verbatim DVD-Rs so far :( I'll be posting a detailed report about the results in my DVD forum shortly.

On the software side we have the MPEG4IP tools v0.9.5 which includes an MPEG1/2 video codec, file playback and streaming in player, IPv6 integration, CELP audio plugin for player, the rendering engine has been split from the audio synch classes, interoperability with QT6 and RealOne/Envivio should be ensured, media aware track extraction has been added to mp4creator - including correct AAC extraction - and the mp4v2 library has been extended to provide some editing features. Of course there's also a new build of the player.

BeSweet 1.4RC4 fixes a bug when applying DPL2 downmix on 2ch AC3 streams and includes a workaround for 2ch AC3 streams in ac3enc.

Trilight has written two guides for us: One explaining how to use DVDMaestro to re-create DVDs much like in my Scenarist guides though only for one PGC at the moment and another one explaining how to use Photoshop to create your own DVD menus.

IfoUpdate 0.46 fixes the VTSM_VOBS = 0 bug and adds an option to copy the audio and subtitle tables from the new to original IFO. The guide has already been updated accordingly ;) ScenChap 1.11 detects the video type of the Scenarist script and uses the appropriate framecount automatically, supports both Drop Frame and Non-Drop Frame .scp times and also supports additional ChapterXtractor timeformat (in fact one is used in the guide I've published yesterday).

On the guide front I've finished another DVD-R project. This time the main movie was easy but the extras were complicated and even contained multiangles. The new guide is called DVD Extras in CCE.

Phew. After 2 days of work it has been done. I've completely rewritten the IfoEdit/CCE guide. Actually, it's not so much of an IfoEdit guide anymore as you can do without it if you want. But on the other hand I've taken a complicated WB title to illustrate how you handle DVDs that have multiple PGCs in the main VTS titleset, how to handle AC3 stream discrepancies, there's an alternative subtitle creation method and there are 2 DVD burning guides on site now as I was finally able to burn a DVD myself thanks to a reader who graciously donated a DVD burner. A word of advice though: If you're new to DVD-R better not start with that guide or you'll be tempted to return your burner right away as the procedure is pretty complex.

BeSplit 0.8 implements CRC error checking on all MPEG versions and layers and has a switch to demux a multichannel WAV into mono wave files.

BeSweet 1.4RC3 fixes a postgain problem in DS2 mode.

The final MPEG4 licensing terms have been published and it looks like Apple no longer has any objections since they've released QuickTime 6. And while we're at it NVIDIA has officially announced the nForce2 chipset. With dual channel DDR400 RAM, integrated GF4MX GFX card, AGP8x, USB2, Firewire, dual LAN and Dolby Digital en/decoding oboard the chipset sure looks tempting.

Also, does anybody know of a free online survey service? I'd like to get an idea about what you guys are thinking about this site, and where it should go in the future and for that polls in the forum are not quite good enough.

DivXManager 0.9 has a mass add feature, a loan history, a quicksearch function, quickimport from the web and can read information from MPEG files. SubRip 1.021 adds DVDMaestro output, improves I <-> 1 post OCR correction and better multicolor subtitle support.

On a different note, I'm looking for people with experience in distributed document management. As you can see so far everything on this site is done manually using a HTML editor. I have a working PHP/mysql backend for the news / software archive that just needs more testing but for all the guides there's still nothing. Eventually it would be great to have other people looking after certain sections of the site without interfering with each other. To make this even more complicated this site runs off multiple servers on 2 different continents so we'd need replication as well (currently done with lftp reverse mirroring) and not every server offers the same features (on some PHP and mysql are not an option for various reasons). I have no idea if there's an (affordable) existing solution to this or it would've to be created from scratch. Anyway, if you know something about this and or would want to help out (it would probably take a lot of time to create something from scratch.. right now I can't even give you the full specs of all the features I would need) let me know.

ZoomPlayer 2.70 final is out. While it says 7/14 on the left of this text I got the file on the 13th so it was released as promised. As usual the changelog is too long to even bother to try digesting it to a manageable format. BeSweet 1.4RC2 fixes a bug with shibatch.dll. AacMachine 0.45 supports Dolby Surround 2 downmix and delay assertion. And as an update to yesterday's announcement the program actually cuts the AC3 source which will save space as compared to cutting the WAV after AC3 decoding. The AacMachine guide has also been updated to correspond to the latest AacMachine release.

And while this is a bit outside the scope of this site a new set of DivX releasing rules (TDX2k2) has been released (and signed by 21 groups so far). For those of you who don't know TDX rules define how a "scene release" should look like. Without going into detail there are 2 things that I consider noteworthy: MP3 audio must be VBR (including ABR) and using the XviD codec is now allowed.

Nero 5.5.9.0 fixes a couple of DVD-R related bugs as treating empty directories as files, selecting the wrong disc format when using the wizard to create a DVD, the DVD-RW full erase works properly now and erase disc dialogue has been modified.

And for some industry news we have dicas has released mpegable X4, an MPEG-4 encoder / player solution.

DVD2AVI 1.77.3 automatically selects the appropriate language (Chinese/Japanese/English.. I wonder how many of my readers will use that feature since they don't want the English version..), contains P4 optimizations, the gain control in the luminance filter has been replaced with gamma correction, the clipping width has been extended to 512, the audio menu has been streamlined and now supports DTS demuxing, there's a minor fix in the overlay and as usual with new versions the d2v structure has changed so you have to regenerate your DVD2AVI projects. AviUtl 0.98b contains some fixes in the sound department, improved automatic IVTC, adds ITU-R.BT.601 TV -> PC scale conversion and some other stuff that I can't quite understand..

In other news, 2600.org withdraws the Supreme Court appeal in the DeCSS case.

trbarry has released a soften/sharpen filter for Avisynth called UnFilter.

There's also a new 3rd party guide online: Fixing synchronization problems using a video editor which explains how to synch a (S)VCD without recompressing the audio.