NuMenu4u 2.0.15 contains slight alterations in the UpdateMPV routines as well as the Muxman routine to work with Muxman 0.15a.

MPEG2Schnitt 0.71 contains some minor changes in the main program, the German language file and the full movie template.

NuMenu4u 2.0.14 supports Muxman 0.15, has an option to select all assets in a format conversion regardless of the menu size, saves your settings when you press start, contains many bugfixes and some major improvements for the VIP users: button commands that link to removed items will be adapted, buttons that link to a removed item will be removed completely, compatibility with Scenaid has been improved, along with the assets removal. Furthermore there's an option to automatically load the VMG and/or every VTS on startup and you can disable and re-enable buttons as well as force them to auto-action in the VOB preview.

The BluRay camp has chosen their software partner for interactivity features as well: Sun's Java will be used.

They may have won a battle with the Supreme Court decision, but these services they hate so much often turn out to be valuable. Wired has the latest example of a TV series that may get a second life due to enough people downloading it.

MuxMan 0.15 is now available to all members of the mpucoder site. It supports up to 99 titlesets, up to 32'767 segments per titleset, an unlimited amount of segment definitions and multilingual audio / subtitles in the menu domain.

SubtitleCreator 1.8.7 contains a few bugfixes.

Blue screens on HD DVD players? Toshiba has teamed up with Microsoft to develop HD DVD players.

Last but not least, it was a sad day for all but Hollywood studios as the Supreme Court unanimously sided with the movie studios against the Grokster and Streamcast filesharing services. This may have very serious consequences on the entire consumer electronics and computing industry in the future. So far, those industries could market products without fear of being held liable for what their consumers do with the devices sold. The court settled on the idea that the two P2P operators promoted their software to infringe copyright.

SubRip 1.30 beta 10 has a font button in the subtitle window and fixed several bugs in hard-subbed video ripping.

SubtitleCreator 1.8.6 allows saving / deleting your current settings and saving them as profiles. The DVD authoring wizard allows you to add subtitles to simple DVDs (only menuless discs are currently supported) and there is a bunch of bugfixes as well.

DGMPGDec 1.4.0 RC4 fixes certain decoding parameters and supports a new format to specify input filenames via the commandline.

Haali's latest Media Splitter support AR correction for MPEG-4 ASP video and contains a bunch of bugfixes and small improvements.

No broadcast flag part two: the broadcast flag amendment wasn't even introduced in the Senate Appropriations committee. I wouldn't expect the MPAA to get the message, so I'll let you know if they make another attempt so that you can call up your senators and let them know how you feel about Hollywood's attempts to take away your rights.

ZoomPlayer 4.50 RC2 features an improved OSD navigation, enhanced skins and contains lots of bugfixes.

BSPlayer 1.31 partially supports unicode filenames, improves compatibility with the DivX6 Media Format (without supporting menus and it's other special features yet), can add all files in a directory to the playlist, files that are being played while downloading will be reopened at the end so that you can play them from beginning to end and there are some bugfixes as well.

SubRip 1.30 beta 9 supports unicode fonts and fixes a few bugs.

And the never-ending story has ended: BluRay and HD DVD won't unite.

On2 seems to be doing something about the speed of their codec. If you recall the results of the last codec comparison, while quality wise they were doing quite well, speed wise it was another picture entirely. Now they claim a 30 - 50% lead over WMV9, RV10 and most H.264 implementations. Looking at the numbers from my comparison again, that should put them firmly out of the red category.

Another one bits the dust: Canada got its own DMCA. I'm sure most Canadians that don't have any vested interests in record labels or movie studios will be very unhappy with their elected officials. I guess politicians will only wake up once the intellectual property industry (I'm toying with the idea of calling them some terms used in conjunction with organized crime) starts implementing thought control chips into our brains. After all, thinking about a certain song should be subject to fees as well, shouldn't it?

If you thought the Broadcast flag was dead, think again. In a typical sneaky way, they're trying to pass it through congress this time, attached to a bill that no politician will read before voting (that should get you really concerned.. would you trust the CEO of the company you work for if he made decisions by the cast of a dice?). Obviously, we shouldn't let them do that, so join the effort to prevent this from happening and call your senators now. Time is running out...

Back on the old continent, the different parts of the IP industry are trying to screw us over: The European patent directive passed the legal affairs committee largely unchanged. Writing software myself I dare wonder if politicians in support of this directive know anything other than the payoffs they're getting from the big players who'd profit a lot from software patents. The directive will no go to the full Parliament in two weeks' time.

ProgDVB 4.52.2 contains fixes in the broadcast client/server and other, unnamed areas.

The saga continues: With changes in management, the BluRay and HD DVD camps may resume talks on a format unification.

x264 revision 266 supports custom quantization matrices, another AVC High Profile feature.

BeSweet 1.50 beta 30 can produce Dolby Digital WAV files at arbitrary bitrates, uses soundtouch 1.3.0 and fixes a rare quality bug.

HC 0.15 has better motion estimation, uses a compressed database, has a bias option to tweak the curve compression, has a shutdown command and fixes some bugs.

DGMPGDec 1.4.0 RC2 replaced the LumaFilter with the new LumaYV12 filter, has some minor cosmetic changes in DGIndex, and the integrated ParseD2V and FixD2V reject files using an obsolete format.

BatchCCEWs 0.9.1.6c supports HCEnc and CCE 2.7, has an option to use existing .vif files as well as an option to set the maximum GOP size and enable pan&scan, and some bugs have been fixed as well.

BeLight 0.22 beta 4 fixes some more bugs and contains some updates in the commandline generation.

DVDFab Express Free has a new name: DVDFab Decrypter. The latest version auto sets the RCE region based on the system language and no longer writes the output into a Disc1 folder but directly creates VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders.

x264 revision 264 and above now contain the lossless feature of the AVC High Profile. To activate it, just set the encoding mode to quantizer based and set the quantizer to 0.

Will you need a Mac to copy your audio CDs in the future? At least, Mac users are completely unaffected by Sony BMG's latest copy protection move.

Last but not least, Wired has a long interview with one of the few politicians on the hill that hasn't been bought by Hollywood yet: the father of the DMCRA (it's the R that makes it consumer friendly;), Rick Boucher.

DGMPGDec 1.4.0 RC1 no longer has YV12toYUY2 and YV12toRGB24 filters because they're available in AviSynth, and the LumaFilter default offset has been changed to 0.

BeLight 0.22 beta 3 fixes a few bugs.

After shutting down DVD Decrypter, Macrovision is suing again: The charge is patent and DMCA infringement. The companies concerned produce devices that permit analogue copies despite corrupt video signals (AKA video signals with the Macrovision signal). I guess the defendants will argue fair use exception, the courts will issue the injunction and the whole thing will be settled out of court as usual. And, the patent infringement charge sounds as bogus as always (any halfway skilled A/V technician knows how to replace the corrupt signal with a clean one, and it doesn't require knowledge of any patented technology). In fact, high end video recorder used to be unaffected for a long time, and I still have an old VHS set in the attic that is also completely oblivious to Macrovision's signal corruption.

DivX 6 is out. As previously announced, DivX 6 marks the introduction of the DivX media format, an extended AVI version with subtitles, multiple audio tracks, video tags, chapter points, menus and more. The standard addition now supports B-frames and both versions should deliver higher quality (by how much I leave up to you;) In addition, there is a PSNR optimized H.263 quantizer matrix, 4MV, multiple B-frames and there's an extreme and insane quality mode. Naturally, the DivX player has been updated to support the new version, and there's a new tool called DivX converter, which can convert videos to DivX by simply dragging a media file onto the application. For more info, visit the forum. And it doesn't end with DivX6, in fact a first test version, codename Helium, is already available at DivX Labs.

SubRip 1.30 beta 8 has an improved detection algorithm and fixes two bugs.

DVDFab Express Free Edition is a stripped down version of the commercial DVDFab Express (you may have used DVDFab to split DVDs when it was still a freeware project and available from this site) which can handle all copy protection mechanisms found on today's DVDs (and probably new ones with future releases.. DVDFab comes from the same people that constantly update the DVD REgion+CSS Free "on the fly" decryption layer).

Nero CD/DVD Speed 4.0 has an improved user interface, supports C1/C2 or PI/PO information to determine disc quality, and shows the quality of each track on audio CDs, chapter on DVD or file.

DGMPGDec 1.4.0 beta 8 fixes a bug in transport stream parsing.

PVAStrumento 2.1.0.15 contains another attempt to fix AC3 asynch issues and can ignore missing system headers in MPEG-2 program streams.

Last but not least a word of warning: they may look pretty official, may even have the word official in the title, but the official DVD Decrypter homepage is down and will stay down until further notice (you'll hear it here, don't trust any report unless it comes from a reputable news site). And there will be no new version of DVD Decrypter. Perhaps the software will be able to exist in another form once the legal dust has settled, but for now the version you can find on this site is the latest. If you try anything else, you run the risk of getting infected by viruses, trojans, or whatnot. So stay away from a site that a friend of a friend heard about...

PVAStrumento 2.1.0.14 fixes crashes due to corrupt TS files, fixes AC3 asynch and can add the audio delay to audio filenames.

MPEG2Schnitt 0.7 colors In and Out buttons red rather than disabling them, has a new chapterlist, there's a button to play the next 2 seconds of video starting at the current position, option tabs can be directly accessed from the menu, audio can be faded in/out at cut points, the cutpoint search has been improved and the tool is now available in Italian and French.

Cuttermaran 1.64 beta supports field encoding, can pause/resume processing, has a resizeable preview, supports PCM files larger than 2 GB, writes out the minimum/maximum/average bitrate of the video stream, has cut parameters in the options screen, can recalculate the bitrate of the source video and automatically adapts the GUI depending on your DPI settings. You need to be a member of this German board to get the beta though.

VirtualDub 1.6.7 supports cast expressions in the scripting language and direct stream processing treats drop frames as non essential. There are also a bunch of bugfixes.

SubtitleCreator 1.8.5 can (un)select all subtitles and remove line breaks via the listView's context menu, supports the 2.21:1 aspect ratio, has a search function in the SUP manipulation window, can auto-adjust the SUP position and fixes a few bugs.

x264 revision 260A brings the VfW interface up-to-date.

The latest Haali media splitter release fixes a subtitle selection bug, unifies native MPEG-4 ASP parsers and no longer has an AVI compatibility transform in the MP4 parser. The splitter can also handle AVC high profile since last week.

DGMPGDec 1.4.0 beta 7 fixes some bugs in the D2V parser and properly shows the effect of field operations.

I've previously reported on FilmShrink, the one click tool to create RealVideo from DVDs. Now there's a 3rd party trying to make off money off the project. They've renamed the software to DVD2Real and are selling it for $24.99. Needless to say that you better visit the original project site and download the software for free.

And another piece of the puzzle has fallen into place for the HD DVD camp: they've managed to produce a HD DVD-R using standard DVD production lines (article in German I'm afraid). Production is a big issue for upcoming formats because naturally production plants would like to change as little as possible in their existing production lines.

Last week I reported on Intel implementing DRM into their next chipset. You may have read halfhearted dementing from Intel in the meantime, and one of my readers contacted Intel about the issue as well. The response, which he forwarded to me, claims that the 945 Chipset family "does not include unannounced embedded DRM technology". It goes on mentioning that "Intel does support various content protection technologies including DTCP-IP technology, which is publicly offered by a number of companies in the industry and an important element in enabling protected transport of content within the home network." But if you look up DTCP-IP, it's definitely DRM, plus there's the various content protection technologies bit. So it's not like they really are coming clean.

Finally, since I was "blessed" by an official information email that the company that shut down DVD Decrypter development demanded be sent, I can let the cat out of the bag: it's not the MPAA, it's not Sony as initially rumored. It's Macrovision - the company that has given the world video signal corruption since the 1980's. The email states that we're dealing with a case of copyright infringement, which I find hard to believe. On a DVD, there is no Macrovision signal. There is a flag in the bitstream that tells your player to turn on the signal that screws the automatic gain control on your VHS recorder, and DVD Decrypter can remove that. But it's not like DVD Decrypter is the only program to do that, there are a great many programs out there, some of which cannot even decrypt DVDs, that can remove the Macrovision flag. And it's not like the flag matters when you make digital copies, you could simply keep it. For instance if you're creating a DVD±R from a store bought DVD, if you don't touch the flag, you couldn't make a VHS copy of your DVD copy.
I'm unaware the DVD Decrypter would be able to add the Macrovision flag to a ripped video. That would be something else since in order to use Macrovision ACP, you have to pay a license fee, and without paying it, you'd be committing some sort of violation (likely a patent violation since ACP is patented). And Macrovision has sued at least one other company over this issue in the past: 321 Studios. That case didn't go to trial because 321 Studios eventually shut down operations under pressure from a previous lawsuit by the MPAA. And as far as the DMCA is concerned, a simple bit in a stream cannot possibly be considered an effective copy protection mechanism as defined under the DMCA, unless you have no idea about technology (obviously most lawyers fall into that category). This is even more laughable than using ROT-13 "encryption" (and still, ROT-13 was used as "encryption" by Adobe).

Sorry for the lack of news during the past couple of days. I was out of the country and with inadequate Internet access to properly operate the site.

First of all an update on the DVD Decrypter situation: Unfortunately the reports are all true. So in case of future ArccOS versions, DVD Decrypter will no longer be able to offer an out-of-the-box mechanism. However, a while back, PSL lists were introduced, and it just takes the proper PSL file to beat future versions of "structure protection" (from an engineering point of view we're not dealing with protection but perversion of the specs). Unfortunately, that only leaves DVD43 (which isn't updated very often), and the commercial AnyDVD and DVD Region+CSS Free. In both cases, legal action against them is unlikely due to their geographical location.
Since the domain dvddecrypter.com was turned over to the company that issued the cease and desist order, I strongly suggest that if you are using DVD Decrypter, go into the settings, click on the Events tab and uncheck "Check For Program Update" at your earliest convenience as the current owner might collect IP addresses for nasty purposes.

DGMPGDec 1.4.0 beta 6's DGParse can show the GOP structure of a video, and there are a couple of bugfixes as well.

Subrip 1.30 beta 6 contains some GUI improvements and fixes a bug when saving subtitles in unicode format.

Warner is making yet another step in an attempt to curb the number of illegitimate DVD releases in China: They have released the first movie (Sisterhood of the traveling pants) on DVD the same day it debuted in theaters in the US. While this might not be the ideal movie to test a measure like this (I'd have picked a major blockbuster), it is at least good to see some studios looking beyond the "we are being robbed" screaming, and look at some of the root causes why people do not buy official DVDs: price and availability.

While the last word on a format unification isn't in yet, both HD DVD and BluRay camps are making steps towards mass production. This week marked the announcement of technology to enable mass production of HD DVD-R discs, as well as BD-R (BlurayDisc-Recordable).

The record labels are trying to bump up copyright protection for music in Europe to 100 years. Their argument: bring US and EU legislation in synch. But, the reason why the extent of protection was increased in the US was that the protection period was longer in the EU. So I guess the bottom line is this: if you have enough money, common sense does no longer matter. And I'm taking bets right now as to what will happen in 50 years time. If this extension succeeds, we'll see another attempt for an extension, especially if some of the music (like Beatles songs) that are scheduled to be turned over to public domain in a short while, will still be good moneymakers.

Just like Alexander Noe and his PxScan/PxView (Slashdot article), Lightning UK! has received a Cease and Desist letter demanding him to cease the development of Dvd Decrypter.

In case of PxScan (and the linux port), Plextor is trying to stop other people from using the capabilities of their drives to the fullest extent, so that only their own software (which you normally have to buy extra) can offer certain features. In case of DVD Decrypter, it is more about circumventing copy protection mechanisms, though at this point nobody except for the author of DVD Decrypter knows the actual charges.

DGMPGDec 1.4.0 beta 3 supports MPA audio in MPEG-1 program streams, supports multiple VFAPI instantiations and DGVFapi now supports AviSynth scripts as well as DGIndex projects.

x264 is the first open source AVC high profile encoder. The latest build adds support for the 8x8 transform. Currently, this feature is not exposed in the VfW Interface, so you'll have to use the commandline version, or get a bleeding edge mencoder build and use it with MeGUI.

DGMPGDec's version number has been bumped up so version 1.4.0 beta 1 is the next beta after 1.3.1 beta 9.

PgcEdit 0.5.7 shows angles in the PgcEditor, can remove the current LU from the IFO, can export cell times, hide hex codes in the main commands listbox, toggles breakpoints on a PGC by shift-clicking on it, can go into trace mode automatically when a DVD is opened, contains a bunch of new tooltips, comes with the latest preview version and fixes a bunch of bugs.

tranzcode is a multichannel audio decoder that can separate the channels of both multichannel WAV and DTS sources.

SubRip 1.30 beta 5 has experimental support for delays in VobSub files.

Here's one that doesn't have the entertainment industry thrilled: now they'll actually have to prove that people offering stuff on P2P network are distributing the content they're offering and thus contributing to copyright infringement. In other words, we're back to innocent till proven guilty, which is, after all, the basis of our legal system.

You may have heard of the World Intellectual Property Organization before. It's the organization that does the entertainment industry's bidding (they have a few critical voices, all from countries that realize they can simply not afford to bow to the will of the industry). Since June 1st, they are asking for third party input on where copyright should go. They may not give a hoot about your opinion, but make sure to voice it anyway, because the more speak their mind, the harder it becomes to ignore critical voices.

DGMPGDec 1.3.1 beta 9 supports MPEG-1 program streams.

DVD Rebuilder 0.93 autodetects VIDEO_TS subdirectories, uses a different output directory format and fixes some bugs.

DGMPGDec 1.3.1 beta 8 contains preliminary support for MPEG-1 video sources.

Auto Gordian Knot 2.09 no longer uses packed bitstream in XviD mode, has an improved input file analysis that detects more audio stream with long delays, allows the use of the same audio track as primary and secondary audio source and it fixes the broken ESS compatibility mode.

With the launch of HD DVD only 6 months away, and no agreement yet on a common HD format, the more consumer oriented software makers are now gearing up for the next generation of DVD. Intervideo and Ulead have announced their upcoming HD DVD and Blu Ray authoring tools just in time for the Computex fair in Taiwan.

Computex also marks the official launch of the consumer line dual core Athlon X2. Such CPUs will come in very handy for SMP optimized codecs like the latest x264 revision.

Last but not least, after announcing accelerated MPEG-4 AVC decoding for their graphics cards, ATI is catching up to NVidia by offering a dual card GPU solution called Crossfire. Unfortunately, all that computing power is only useful for games and remains unused while your CPU is working hard encoding your latest movie ;)

Last month's news can be found here.