It's not exactly new, but interesting nonetheless: CDR-Info has conducted a rather extensive DVD recordable compatibility test. DVD-R/W comes off as a little more compatible than DVD+R/W. But while we're on the subject, I was in a CD/DVD manufacturing plant last week and was given a tour by their chief of technology. On the subject of the two DVD formats, he told me that he'd be glad if DVD-R/W disappeared, as it's more complicated (and thus expensive) to manufacture, while at the same time, competition leads to lower prices than for DVD+R/W media.

And some RIAA members have been found fixing prices once again.

Now we just need the discs (the recorder has already been announced): Philips and their DVD+R/W partners have released the latest DVD+R specs which define 8x capable discs.

There's a new Button over video guide written by Influenza. It explains the basics of how such title works and how they can be reconstructed using Scenarist and IfoEdit in great detail, and is a welcome addition to the existing Matrix guide.

DVDFab lives on. The author of DVDIdle has licensed the code and will continue to develop it. Unfortunately, this means that the tool is no longer freeware. At this point it is yet not known whether registered customers will get a free upgrade to the new commercial versions. v0.17.1 is already out but contains no changes except for the license change. eXtreme Movie Manager 1.7b1 features direct printing of your movie list, thumbnail creation can be stopped, the multi change function has been extended, the rebuild database function will clear spaces at the end of fields and there are some bugfixes.

I'm also proud to present the 10th Doom9 mirror in (Brazilian) Portuguese. As usual, volunteers are more than welcome.

DVDFab 0.17.0 also comes in Italian, is nag screen free and does no longer require a VIDEO_TS.VOB when doing a full split. It's also going to be the last version of DVDFab as the author is retiring out of fear from criminal prosecution under the upcoming new German Copyright law (which is essentially the same as the US DMCA, so I personally don't see any problems). DVD2One 1.2.3 solves the memory allocation problem the previous version had.

And the RIAA/MPAA law madness continues, with industry lobbyists John Conyers and Howard Berman introducing the Author, Consumer and Computer Owner Protection and Security Act (ACCOPS). Should the bill pass, then putting any copyrighted work in a publicly accessible place without the copyright owner's consent, is considered as illegal distribution of a work worth at least $2500, during a 180-day period. It also assumes that at least 10 copies would be made of the work (or maybe I'm getting this wrong and it's 10 copies a day, with the $150'000 per infraction they've come up earlier that would make a ton of money). What's most interesting, is that this bill would criminalize even the accidental placement of a work that you legally own. So for instance, people who have cable Internet here are usually directly connected to the Internet. If they forget to disable file and printer sharing, other people using the same ISP can access other customer's shared resources. Now imagine accidentally placing and MP3 you've made from a CD you own, or an MP3 that you bought online, into a shared directory because you'd like to access it from another computer on your network. This would become a very costly mistake.

Yesterday I reported about the latest Toshiba burner, today we advance to a whole new area: 8x DVD burning! Plextor's PX-708A is not only the first 8x burner, but also Plextor's first dual format drive. It writes DVD+R at 8x (apparently the +R fraction has finished their specs before the competition this time - just like with the 4x RW discs), DVD+RW and DVD-R at 4x, DVD-RW at 2x, CD-R at 40x, CD-RW at 24x, and the drive also is a 12x/40x DVD/CD-ROM. There's also an external version of the drive offering USB2 and Firewire connectors: the PX-708UF. The drives should be on the shelves at the end of August (internal) and September (external) respectively.

In other news, the source code for the Ogg DirectShow (OGM) framework have been added to the Xiph CVS - in other words they're now open source. More about this in the forum. DVD2One 1.2.2 is less resource greedy and should properly run in the background now (meaning you can work while DVD2One is crunching), and it should be somewhat faster as well. Microsoft has also released the final version of their WMV9 VCM codec (the one you can use in VirtualDub). There's also a thread about this release in the forum. ImgTool 1.00.5 displays the completion percentage in the titlebar, supports CLI parameters, displays only supported devices, uses UDF filesystem as default and contains some bugfixes. For those who prefer to safer way of creating an image first or don't have Nero installed, ImgTool Classic 0.90 build 5 comes with the latest mkisofs and displays the completion percentage in the titlebar.

Last but not least, BBC has reported on a survey on P2P users, which found that music swapping actually helps album sales (but hurts single sales - who needs 5 versions of the same track anyway?). Confronted with the results, the music industry admitted that there's an element of truth to this, but pointed to a study of their own which points out that most people download because it's free - which of course makes a lot of sense since paying before trying makes no sense whatsoever. When you go to a store, you can listen to entire tracks, even entire albums of the owner doesn't kick you out. On the net, you will only get very short and low quality samples of a track... go figure.

Yesterday, DivXNetworks finally released details on their DivX certification program for hardware DivX playback devices. As previously discussed in the forum, there's no certification for the full MPEG-4 advanced simple profile (meaning GMC and QPel support - B-frames are a requirement though), and exotic container formats are also not on the menu. As for XviD, support is suggested but not mandatory. Interestingly, the document mentions something about DivX profile support in the upcoming XviD 1.0 release - using such a profile should pretty much guarantee that your XviD content can be played without any problems on any certified device. While we're at the subject, the first DivX certified chipset has also been released and products based on it should be released in the 2nd half of the year. And still on the subject, the Sigma Designs chipsets currently used in available devices are not certified (yet).

In the DVD recordable arena, Toshiba has announced a new burner. The SD-R5112 is a single format burner based on the DVD-R/W format and offering the usual 4x -R, 2x -RW, 16x CD-R, 10x CD-RW writing speeds. DVD-Video discs and recordable DVDs can be read up to 4.8x speed. And for DVD+R/W folks: Verbatim has just started shipping 4x DVD+RW discs.

DivX labs have released yet another DivX codec: Kauehi has a faster decoder, automatic postprocessing adaptation to prevent slowdowns and framedrops and more control over postprocessing. On the encoder side there have been some bugfixes, quality improvements with B-frames and a new psychovisual mode.

On the standalone side, KISS Technology has released firmware updates claiming better DivX3 support and fixes in the subtitle department, though there's still a note on that firmware page mentioning dropouts in high bitrate scenes and since I have no such device I cannot verify how good DivX3 support really is, but I know it's not great on my elta player.

Happy 4th of July to all American visitors.

eXtreme Movie Manager 1.7b1 has a new HTML database, includes an option to set the title of a movie to the original title (I presume this relates to foreign language movies), the number of movies listed is shown on top of every list and there are some updates in the script editor and programmer's guide as well.

ZoomPlayer 3.10.1 is out. As usual you can find the changelog in the Inmatrix forums. DVD2One 1.2.1 fixes a font problem and has a setting to select the start screen.