ProgDVB 4.54's media server can broadcast all radio channels from the current transponder and media clients can receive a channel list from the server.

I'd take this with a grain of salt, as graphics card manufacturers have promised us the world before: The upcoming 80 series of nVidia's Detonator driver series will bring MPEG-4 AVC and WMV9 hardware acceleration.

Fox has joined the Blu-Ray form back in October, and has now announced that it will release its library of movies and TV programming to the Blu-Ray format.

Is your printer secretly marking every document you print? A number of today's printers place unique markings on each page you print, allowing them to be traced back to you. The EFF can help you find out if your printer does more than you want it to.

MeGUI 0.2.1.6 allows you to pause encoding, and can delete successfully completed jobs.

ffmpeg2theora allows Theora encoding with the full featureset Theora offers. If Theora sounds Chinese to you, it's the VP3 based open source and patent free video codec by Xiph - the makers of Ogg Vorbis.

This is for my Austrian readers: The Austrian Supreme court has ruled in favor of violating your privacy if MPAA/RIAA & Co ask for it, without having to provide a court order.

Speaking of privacy, since the deplorable London attacks, certain politicians are asking for widespread invasion of our privacy by legalizing widespread communication channel monitoring without having to get a warrant. I feel this is an unwarranted attack on our privacy, and will achieve nothing in fighting terrorism. If you feel the same way, please sign this petition. And if you think "If I have nothing to hide, why should I be concerned", here's some food for thought:

By visiting this site, according to the lawyers of entertainment company X, you are likely to infringe their copyright and thus will shortly receive a bill for the amount of $10'000 in losses caused by your illegal activity. If you don't pay up, you'll be dragged to court. If you really haven't done anything wrong, you still have to fight the legal onslaught and pay for your defense out of your own pocket. You can see where that leads by looking at the German IFPI's C&D policy: They are sending out C&D letters by the thousand for mentioning any software that allows you to make private copies (which is legal in Germany) by rendering copy protection mechanisms ineffective. If you sign the C&D letter, thus guaranteeing in written that you'll stop the "infringing" activity immediately and won't commit similar acts in the future, you "only" have to pay outrageous lawyer fees of a couple thousand Euros, and if you don't pay up, they drag you court and sue for a much higher amount. Most people on the receiving end of such a letter end up paying even though they might win in court - but they simply don't have the means to go all the way to prove their innocence.

And using the words of one of the Founding Fathers: Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.

Last but not least, not really ripping related, but since a large majority of the routers that drive the Internet come from the company in question, nonetheless interesting: What happens if you prove to the world that a security vulnerability in Cisco's routers is exploitable and could potentially be used to disrupt considerable parts of the Internet? You lose your job and get sued for theft of trade secrets. It is command practice for security researchers to deliver a proof of concept for a flaw, showing how critical a hole can be. Normally, software / hardware makers are given a certain time to fix the issue before the information is made pubic. If the company does not react, it is common practice to disclose the flaw and possible exploits. Naturally, companies like to be very quiet about their shortcomings, so public disclosure is the only legal way for researchers to apply some pressure.

I'm sorry for the lack of news updates for the past few days - there just was too much on my plate. I finally have my SN25P running somewhat stable by deactivating USB1.1. Shuttle, in the meantime, has also semiofficially acknowledged that there are issues with their latest AMD barebone and dual core chips. Once a fix has been found I'll let you know. Until then, I strongly recommend that you read my previous comments on this and visit the SFF Tech forums to get an overview of what problems lay ahead if you're considering buying this particular barebone PC.

Sticking to hardware, will we soon be locked out from our own harddisks? MPAA and RIAA are secretly plotting to DRM our harddisks. I urge all computer and consumer electronic manufacturers to say no to this nonsense from the getgo. We consumers pay good money for what we buy, and we should be allowed to to as we please, not do as MPAA/RIAA/BSA/put-your-favorite-copyright-cartel-here want us to.

And one more hardware bit, the new PSP firmware is out. It adds the rumored support for AVC video, but Sony is still heavily crippling the device. For instance, the device is still limited to a resolution of 320x240 even though the device can do more - but the full resolution is only available for videos on the proprietary UMD discs, which cannot be written to.

On the business: the latest MeGUI now supports Matroska and prevents you from accidentally closing while encoding.

On2's VP7 codec is now available free of charge for personal use.

In the Netherlands, the local anti piracy organization BREIN has won an injunction against sales of DVDXCopy - the main product of 321 Studios, a US based software maker that went bankrupt under the legal assault of MPAA and Macrovision last year. But that wasn't enough for them: now they're asking for all remaining copies in stock to be handed over, plus a list of all their clients.

Going from movies to music, a recent study shows that people that are into P2P music downloads often also spend quite a but of money on online music.

Now the retailers are entering the HD DVD format battle: US based Video Software Trade Association, representing the retailers of video products, is calling for a single high definition format.

And last but not least, considering the story behind the name of this site I just have to bring this: the first trailer for the upcoming Doom movie is now available. 8 more and there'll finally be a film about me ;)

BeLight 0.22 beta 5 supports negative q values for Vorbis output, has some updated AAC presets, presents some information in the hint when selecting a file in the input file list and fixes some bugs.

Remember the broadcast flag, the MPAA's attempt to lock us out from using digital broadcast the way we want? Their first two attempts to show that down our throats failed, but had they succeeded, we'd now have to deal with useless architectures like VCPS on DVD+R/W recorders. However, since they will undoubtedly try again, the link has some interesting information on what is used to enforce the broadcast flag on the encoding side.

Can you imagine watching a movie that has been filmed by a cellphone camera? You may be as stunned as I about this, but since some mobiles can record video, all cellphones will be collected at the Edinburgh film festival.

Another ridiculous software patent: Microsoft is trying to patent emoticons. Depending on how a court would interpret that patent, I could imagine that it could affect any software that uses emoticons, including our board software. I don't know a lot about US legislation on patents, but how can the standard for patentability be so low? Anybody with a major in CS can come up with this easily, and where I'm from the burden of patentability is just a tad bit higher than that.

There is currently an intensive battle going on inside the WIPO - the World Intellectual Property Organization, which graciously gave us the framework of what is now known as the DMCA around the globe. On one side, the US lead coalition of the wealthy countries, that want to extend intellectual property laws around the globe, on the other hand, the poorer nations that feel constrained by strict IP laws. Interestingly though, today's proponents for strong IP laws have not always been in the same boat. For a long time, English novels were being pirated in the US as US copyright law didn't cover foreign writers. IP Justice has the full gist on this. It would be interesting to see how IP laws developed in other countries as well.

DVDFab Decrypter 2.9.3.0 remembers the output folder settings, checks for new versions automatically and comes with updated language files.

Buy your next DVD player from Cisco? What sounds rather strange may become a reality as Cisco, via their Linksys division, has just bought up the Danish DVD player manufacturer KISS. You may remember KISS for being the first on the market with a DivX enabled DVD player, but also for huge delays in getting new products out.

Microsoft has revealed the name of the successor to Windows XP: Windows Vista. Coming in 2006, it'll bring even more eyecandy, and supposedly be faster and more secure. They also had plans to make the PC safe from you (otherwise known as locking you out from doing with your media files what you want, or DRM), but it appears they've put that controversial feature on ice for now.

Last but not least: As you may have read I got an AMD dual core CPU a few weeks back. However, that PC has spent most of its time at the shop as it keeps freezing and crashing with blue screens. It appears as if recent Shuttle barebones are having a lot of problems with recent AMD chips. The NForce3 based SN95G5 (my old machine) doesn't even properly support the E revision single core Chips (also known as Venice & San Diego), and if you have such a chip the entire mainboard has to be replaced. The NForce4 based SN25P seems to support single cores properly, but don't even think of putting a dual core chip into that barebone. Even though Shuttle claims full support, that is simply not true. Search in any SFF forum (e.g. the SFFTech forum) and you'll find a long list of people having major problems with the SN25P and AMD X2 combo. So, if you are in the market for a dual core AMD chip, do not even think of putting it into a Shuttle barebone PC or you'll enter a world of frustration and pain.

NuMenu4u 2.0.19 can remove temporary files upon completion, no longer crashes if a VOB is reused across different language units using a different substream, the start up/destination and working directory/drive can be set permanently and the SoftEncode path can be set properly now.

DGMPGDec 1.4.1 beta 2 enables DGDecode's fastMC option for 3DNow capable CPUs (AMD), fixes a scanning bug in reading D2V files, has two new IDCT implementations and allows demuxing of multiple tracks.

Zoom Player 4.51 RC1 contains a bunch of bugfixes and some optimizations.

To continue where I left off yesterday, I couldn't sleep and started thinking about how streaming could work for the video world. You might remember statistics about TV shows that are being downloaded from P2P services. Naturally, TV stations don't like that and for one specific reason: commercial stations rely on advertising money. But those copies you'll find on P2P networks don't have any ad breaks. Now imagine, with ADSL2+ and VDSL coming, streaming high quality TV becomes increasingly possible. So what if instead of suing filesharers, major US TV networks would stream their program. Many downloaders do not live in the US and mainly download because they cannot get the latest episode of their favorite series back at home (or only later, probably dubbed and otherwise crippled).

Imagine you can get a significant percentage of the people to watch those streams, or record them (no DRM please or it's not going to work... timeshifting is essential for TV). They'll get the ads, too. Since those people getting shows from P2P services are not about to generate any revenue for local stations (by watching their ads), the "home" networks can effectively reach more people with their advertising. And more viewers equals more money. And what to do with networks in other countries? They won't get the P2P downloaders to watch a delayed product anyway, so they can either continue to live with that, or strike a distribution deal that permits near simultaneous broadcast of new episodes, coupled with streaming of their own (with video, whether you stream halfway across the world or stay in your own country will often matter).

I'm sure studio execs will scream bloody murder about this idea, but hey: it works for online radio, so why should it be any different for TV broadcasts? I've never been an much of a radio listener, but with the possibilities that the Internet offers, I find myself increasingly drifting off my standard program of 5 hours worth of MP3s repeating over and over.

The latest Haali Media Splitter shows the first JPEG attachment as video if a file has no video track, fixes a bug leading to crashes in ffdshow when switching video tracks or segments and color ordering problems in the JPEG reader.

Nero is now offering their NeroDigital capable products separately from the Nero burning application for half the price of the full product suite. The new pack is called Nero Digital Pro (where Pro doesn't mean you get anything beyond what you get with the full burning package - most notably there is no MPEG-4 AVC high profile encoder yet - that one is still in beta).

Is skipping TV ads a copyright violation? The head of the Japanese association of commercial broadcasters seems to think so (article in German). I guess we need to ban remotes and channel up/down buttons on the actual sets as well to make sure.. and glue people to their seats so they can't go to the bathroom during a commercial break.

Here's yet another band worth supporting (those that don't go whining about online piracy and encourage unconventional use of their music).

And speaking of music, it may have taken me forever, but I've finally embraced online music. Specifically, streaming radio stations. I've long seen sick and tired of hearing the same top 30 songs during the 2.5+ hours I spend commuting every day. I've finally plunged into Shoutcast last weekend, and with very little effort found a large number of radio stations that are much more to my taste than the average mainstream the music industry is trying to force down our throats. And then I discovered StreamRipper. Even though I still have to bring the recorded streams to the car, I won't have to suffer through another 4+ times of the latest "hit" per day anymore. Any why bother with slow P2P, incomplete and badly labeled collections of often mediocre quality when you can have something much better and the RIAA can't come after you?

ScenAid 1.7.2 is out. There's no changelog so far.

Cuttermaran 1.65 fixes a handful of bugs.

NuMenu4u 2.0.18 accurately reproduces the JumpSS VTS0 command if you're using Muxman 0.15c or higher, allows automatic determination of the GOP size, pressing cancel now closes the recovery console and there's a long list of fixes as well.

DVDFab Decrypter 2.9.2.2 can now also be controlled via CLI switches and the output of its ArccOS stripping should be more compatible with one click tools..

Another example of how overreaching copyright legislation conflicts with common sense: A copyright law amendment currently under consideration in Canada, could make the use of search engines illegal.

Last but not least, I've been working on this tool for 6 months now and it has imho reached a stage where it could serve more than just the visitors of my AVC forum: MeGUI is a comprehensive MPEG-4 video and audio encoding application supporting x264, XviD and the libavcodec MPEG-4 ASP codec and offers both MP4 and AVI output. It takes AviSynth script input, but also has tools to create DGIndex projects and AviSynth scripts, and even a one click mode that requires just a set of VOB files and returns an MP4 file of the desired size (and even shuts down your PC after conversion).

Which company will the MPAA go after next? I have a likely candidate: German company spatz sells boxes that effectively circumvent HDCP. You simply connect your HDCP enabled device (e.g. a HD DVD player or a digital TV settop box) to one of the boxes spatz is selling, and get a non encrypted, or analogue high def signal at the other end so you can connect TVs that are HD capable but do not support HDCP. And there is no circumvention of any kind going on, as those boxes use the same chipsets used in HDCP enabled TVs. But I'm sure they'll throw the Euro DMCA at them anyway, perhaps mixed up with some patent infringement derivation, licensing violations and whatever else high paid entertainment industry lawyers can come up with.

ScenAid 1.7 improves forcing dummy audio and dummy audio checks, the IFO parsing routines have been updated to allow scripting of pre/post commands even in dummy PGCs and to allow poorly authored IFOs with improper information tables. In addition, there's a new VIP mode that fully supports Muxman 15, and which no longer requires BatchIfoUpdate in full automation mode.

Here's a free alternative to the commercial Link2 frameserver: the DebugMode Frameserver also supports frameserving over the network, and works in all major NLE programs.

The International Herald Tribute has an article on Hollywood's stance on the HD DVD format war. The studios are just as divided over the issue as the consumer electronic manufacturers and thus unlikely to force the hand of anyone just yet.

Last but not least, you may remember BBC's free classical music giveaway. While absolutely legal, the music industry is once again complaining. This time they denounce BBC for unfair competition and devaluating their product. While they haven't gone so far as to actually say it, the message is clear: legality hardly matters, they want to get their cut of every piece of music you listen to. If they don't get it, it's just as poisonous as if you illegally download something.

NuMenu4u 2.0.17 has the "use original assets" settings in the encoder settings rather than the general settings and contains two bugfixes.

VirtualDub 1.6.9 fixes a couple of bugs.

Even if you have a HD capable display, it appears that even if your shiny new TV has a digital input, or an analogue component entry, you'll only get a picture resized to DVD dimensions unless you connect your HD DVD player to a HDMI capable digital input.

NuMenu4u 2.0.16 updates the VTS sector information automatically if all remaining files are copied, allows resizing of the VOB preview window and shows the size of the entire DVD in the same window, generates ISO images, has a help menu and fixes a couple of bugs.

DGIndex 1.4.0 RC7 decodes AC3 files again but doesn't have the audio processing options and can do a deep parse for pack headers.

The commandline version of x264 just got Matroska output.

Watch the latest episode of your favorite TV series before it's shown on TV? BBC is about to premiere certain series via online streaming.

Auto Gordian Knot 2.12 supports DivX6 output, MPEG-1 video input and MPA audio input, requires only one IFO file and one VOB set to be present in the input directory, comes with the latest DGIndex release candidate and removes some of the limitations on special characters in input/output filenames.

The Core Pocket Media Player is an excellent media player for your PocketPC.

PgcEdit 0.6.0 creates ISO files and burns DVDs, including dual layer discs where you can specify the layer break cell, has a new utility to remap title numbers as well as one to delete the last VTS, shows commands that jump to non existing PGCs or titles, displays PGC labels as text in the context menu of empty lines in the PGC selector and fixes a couple of bugs.

DVD Decrypter may no longer be under development, Sony keeps coming up with new versions of ArccOS and Slysoft keeps beating them: AnyDVD 5.2.7.2 handles Hitch R1.

I guess you've heard of it already: ratDVD is a tool to do full movie backups at very low sizes. I have to say though: don't expect any quality wonders at the filesize you're getting.

The RIAA has done it again: You may have read it here before it appeared in any of the major news sources, and they've done their usual lawyer dance to try and put the cat into the bag. Too bad the right to rip us off is backed up by a lot more money than the right to make use as we please with products we have paid for. That brings me to an interesting thought to conclude my day: what if all the consumers in the world one day stood up and told the IP cartels: we're not going to take this anymore. Or just "we are your customers and we will be treated as kings from this point on as we should be"...

ZoomPlayer 4.50 final is out. I've previously reported on betas and release candidates but here's the full changelog.

ProgDVB 3.53.1 contains updated modules for the Sky Star 2 and Twinhan cards and fixes a few issues.

Good news on the patent front: The EU patent directive is dead for now. But it'll only be a matter of time until the large players that are the only ones to profit from software patents will try again.

While DVD recording speeds haven't shifted much since the beginning of this year, the DVD+RW camp is currently working on something new: they plan both 16x DVD+RW discs and DVD+RW DL discs to be ready by the end of the year.

VirtualDub 1.6.8 fixes a long list of bugs.

DGMPGDec 1.4.0 RC6 uses normal parsing depth unless deep parsing is activated and fixes long file opening times.

MediaInfo is a software to get a lot of info from a lot of different video and audio types.

ProgDVB 4.52.3 no longer has the StreamRouter module, PIP device and broadcast client/server. Their function is now carried out by the Media server/client.

VideoLan 0.82 contains major improvements in the playlist area and preferences, is compatible with Mac OS X Tiger and Pocket PC, comes with a brand new ActiveX plugin for Internet Explorer, and a lot more.

Another one falls into line: Sweden has just outlawed downloading of copyrighted material for personal use.

Last but not least, I recently got a new PC featuring a shiny new dual core Athlon processor. If you're interested in dual core chips, you've probably seen many benchmarks already, but this one might interest you: I've compared my old Athlon and the new one against each other and tested the effect of x264's SMP optimization. Naturally, these are not full fledged benchmarks as I'm not equipped for that, but it should give you an idea what you can expect when you go dual core.

AVIMuxGUI 1.17 supports ffmpeg's Vorbis in AVI files, adds CRC checks for Matroska files, supports editions (which can be used to create playlists and thus chapters), supports AVI files with junk before the headers, unicode filenames and Matroska's pixelcrop. In addition, opening Matroska files has been sped up and a couple of bugs have been fixed.

DGMPGDec 1.4.0 RC5 removes audio decoding functionality (demuxing of course remains unaffected), checks the format when loading a D2V file, has improved LPCM audio support and fixes a few bugs.

SSRC, probably mostly used in BeSweet to convert sampling rates, is available in a new version 1.30. It fixes a few long standing bugs.

Last month's news can be found here.