XviD 1.1.3 contains a fix for a recently discovered security vulnerability. Note that this is the 1.1 series so there's no SMP support. Thanks to Koepi for the new build.

FAVC 1.01 can show a simple preview of the menus it creates and fixes a few bugs.

eac3to 1.9 can output separate WAV files for each channel, supports automatic DTS transcoding by using SurCode DTS and has a few more downsampling options.

DVDFab HD Decrypter 3.1.4.0 is a lot faster when analyzing certain DVDs, contains updated language files and fixes a few bugs.

Is the content industry going to like that? The latest RealPlayer can download non DRM'ed Flash, Real, Windowsmedia and Quicktime streams that play in your webbrowser.

Warner's combo HD DVD & Blu-ray disc - Total HD - has been delayed until early 2008. Could Warner be trying to add the second Blu-ray layer to those discs now that BD-50 releases have become more common?

Imagine a popular artist giving away free music - and for once it's not the RIAA screaming bloody murder but the retailers (you didn't expect nobody to scream, did you? Just imagine if artists actually owned their music and could do with it what they liked - a nightmare for the entire industry). I would assume that Prince's label still gets a significant amount of money for the 2 million discs that will ship with an edition of the UK's 'Mail on Sunday'.

You might recall certain DVD rags out there screaming terrorism when the first AACS decryption tools appeared. One of the touted reasons why these tools could well kill the fledgeling HD formats (history has since proven them wrong but what do you expect from people who compare the mass murder of innocent people with those that return your rights in the face of the DRM craze) is that 1080p is the last time studios could cash in on the same content. That argument is flawed on multiple levels: Not only was copyright never meant to guarantee a perpetual revenue stream and cash in again by selling the same thing over and over, but 1080p is hardly the end for high definition - it's just the beginning. Not so long ago, we heard about the plans of Japanese NTV to broadcast in a 7k resolution - and now we have news that studios are mastering films in 4K - or at 4 times the resolution of today's HDTVs. Thus, studios are already prepared for the next increase in screen resolution - many years before 1080p has become the standard.

Here's the shining example that big content will soon begin to cite as an exemplary ISP in terms of copyright enforcement: Australia's Exetel automatically purges any and all media files stored on their customer's personal websites on a daily basis, unless the account owner opts out from this policy. Okay, I guess we need to add automatic account termination and divulging subscriber data without those pesky court orders and filters on any download to the list to get the perfect RIAA/MPAA approved ISP, but it's a start, isn't it?

But for now, at least the MPAA has set their eyes on another target: they're going after YouTV and Peekvid - two sites that index available material on the Internet without actually hosting anything. The MPAA argues that since both sides rake in ad revenue, they are profiting off copyright infringement. In the end it comes down to the eternal question whether somebody can be held liable for the content they link to.

Last but not least, Rolling Stone offers some great insight into the music industry's decline. As one of the major reasons cited where the industry dropped the ball is Napster - anybody with half a business sense should've taken the opportunity to rake in a billion dollars a year by leaving Napster as it is, just charge 10 bucks a month to let people use it. Of course we all know what happened - they crushed Napster, and opened up Pandora's box and it came the way it had to come: people flocked off to other services, those were sued again, and there was another crop of even more distributed services. In the end, we'll have fully encrypted services that do not store more than a few samples of a song on a certain machine, which would really make things difficult if the RIAA remains intent on suing their own customers - it's hard to claim damages for a few samples of a song.

PgcEdit 8.4 contains some changes in the substitution patterns, creates the menubuttons.but file in the backup folder only when buttons or BOVs are found on a DVD, shows the application name and version number in the title bar and contains a few bugfixes.

DTScoreGUI is a GUI to facilitate the extraction of the DTS Core track from a DTS HD soundtrack found on HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs.

When the music industry whines about losses the next time, consider this: PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that people will spend more money on video games than music this year - and since money is a limited resource, consequently if you buy more games, you have to buy less music - hence declining music sales (and that's not equal to losses due to piracy dear studio execs).

Faced with a potential antitrust lawsuit, the DVD CCA's plans to squash Kaleidoscope have been postponed.

Just a few weeks ago, the first titles without DRM hit iTunes - and now the first numbers are in and they are promising. Just as anyone who holds back from buying DRM infested music would tell you, music without DRM is much more attractive, and we can only hope that the trend eventually convinced the remaining DRM lovers in the music industry, too.

The broadcast treaty appears to be dead. While one can hope that this marks the beginning of a trend in stopping consumer hostile copyright legislation, I have my doubts.

Has anybody gotten the specs yet? The latest scheme by the Blu-ray camp to prevent fair use - BD+ - has been finalized. While you may be able to copy your Blu-ray titles today, expect the fun to be over in a few months when the first discs hit the marketplace.

And speaking of Blu-ray, until a few days ago, going region free involved AnyDVD HD - now it appears you can also do it on your own using BDedit.

I have previously reported on the DVD CCA losing a case against Kaleidoscope - the maker of a movie jukebox that rips DVDs and stores them on an internal harddisk. Clearly not pleased by the court's verdict, the DVD CCA came up with another solution: change the CSS license so that any CSS protected content must only be played back when the disc is present at the time of playback and thus put the pesky company that found a loophole in your license out of business.

In an example on how we get copyright legislation that has us bend over and drop the soap, Michael Geist reports on how Hollywood with their allies on Congress Hill is pushing DMCA legislation in Canada.

Last but not least, since the HD DVD camp has decided to step up their PR efforts, it didn't take them long to come up with a response on Blockbuster's recent decision to roll out only Blu-ray titles throughout their stores.

TSremux 0.0.16 fixes a few bugs.

ProgDVB 5.09 has an updated skin engine and skin editor.

That guy is in a roll: after asking that we spend less money on traditional crime in order to spend more on copyright infringement, he wants ISPs to police what their subscribers do. Here's a hint for you Richard: if you started streaming all primetime content in HD quality and in a platform agnostic formats and no regional restrictions, I'd bet less people would download NBC shows off P2P networks ;)

Unless it gets overturned before the Supreme Court, your Email just got a little more private - a Federal Appeals Court recently upheld a decision that Email has the same privacy protection as a phone call.

PgcEdit 8.3 can generate the Celltimes.txt file using CCE compatible syntax, has two new help menu items on regular expressions, has better warning/info messages when cells cannot or need not be processed in the non hidden/BOV selection and there are various bugfixes as well.

Fans of excessive DRM (keep in mind that there's no saying whether you'll be able to make backups once the Blu-ray camp rolls out BD+ in full force) will rejoice over the news that Blockbuster is rolling out Blu-ray titles in all their stores. The current 250 locations to carry both HD discs will continue to offer a choice.

Telco execs won't be pleased that the State of Maine has passed net neutrality legislation - if this catches on, they can bury their plans on charging popular content providers extra for not arbitrarily slowing down access to such content.

TSremux 0.0.15 can adjust chapter lengths (actually that was introduced in 0.0.14) and creates PCRs from SCRs.

So, according to the copyright industry, our society spends way too many resources going after "regular" criminals like burglars, thieves or bank robbers. The industry claims hundreds of billions of losses each year due to piracy - a number that is so ridiculously overinflated, that dictionaries lack a proper word for it - and hence a refocus of law enforcement resources is in order. And here's the real kicker: the industry has waged a campaign to rebrand copyright infringement as thievery (even though in the eyes of the law the two are clearly not the same) - so I guess since they consider those who infringe copyright common thieves, we shouldn't spend any resources at tracking them down ;) So how about as a first step we get rid of the DMCA and all the other laws that put a heightened burden on our justice system to go after those pesky intellectual property thieves..

TSremux 0.0.14 can recreate PES headers for Blu-ray output - on top of that are some changes from 0.0.13: Blu-ray output is more stable (including fixes for sound issues when going from Transport Streams to Blu-ray.

FAVC 1.0 can autogenerate DVD menus for up to 8 titles.

If Sony can do it (no, not shut down programs that enable fair use this time, but a PR campaign lined with half truths and exaggerations), I guess Toshiba thought they could do it too, and report they're (or rather - HD DVD) kicking in Blu-ray's teeth and dominate the standalone player market. While the numbers do back that up, there's the matter of the HD DVD add-on for the Xbox 360 selling in much larger numbers, and the Blu-ray capable PS3 selling in even greater numbers.

And while the recent price cuts have given Toshiba a noticeable boost in HD DVD player sales, Toshiba still had to revise their target of selling 1.8 million HD DVD players in the US by the end of the year. The new target is now 1 million - which is less than DVD sold in its first two years on the market.

At Computex, many manufacturers presented their upcoming HD drives. Asus is going format neutral and offers a separate Blu-ray and HD DVD drive. Both drives serve as a regular CD/DVD burner with either Blu-ray or HD DVD playback facilitates added. Interestingly, the Blu-ray variant offers higher reading speed for Blu-ray media (5x versus the 2.4x for the HD DVD counterpart), but also costs $270 versus the $180 for the HD DVD drive. Hitachi's GGW-H20N is also pretty interesting: it's a SATA based Blu-ray burner (4x capable), which also does DVDs, CDs and reads HD DVDs.

Wanna know how the Canadian camcording bill really came to be? Thestar.com has the scoop.

It was Sony - the company that gave us such great things as audio CDs you cannot copy to your MiniDiscs, rootkits on our PCs, exploding notebook batteries and BD+, is also the culprit behind the takedown of RipIt4Me and FixVTS. While the proceedings appear to have been secret and the involved parties still cannot give any details, the Federal Court of Australia is keeping meticulous records. In looking through the documentation available online, we see that Sony filed a copyright lawsuit against Digital Digest on March 16th. 3 days after, the court granted the first search warrant. Looking through it reveals that they were after anything related to RipIt4Me - starting with its use, its users and ending with its development, and about circumventing Sony's ARccOS DVD corruption mechanism. Thereafter, we have orders that hint towards the secrecy of the proceedings (I'd be very interested if somebody living down there would go down to the registrar and asked to see all documentation related to the case - this cannot be done online and I live a tad bit too far away to try it myself), another search order against blutach. Then on the 30th of March, the court orders a fishing expedition on items seized at blutach's residence - looking for information on the development of RipIt4Me and any activities of anybody involved in RipIt4Me development. The order specifically mentions jeanl. Two days later, the RipIt4Me website is down an jeanl takes an extended time-out from visiting DVD backup related websites.

The final order from May 3rd also explains why there are no DVD backup forums at Digital Digest anymore - the admin has effectively been barred from providing support for any website that helps people copy DVDs.

So far so good, a few questions remain though: The case is listed in the copyright section - so how exactly can RipIt4Me infringe Sony's copyright (note that it's the arm of Sony that makes ARccOS that filed the suit, not the movie studio arm)? Towards that end, access to any filed documentation would be really useful.

Then there's the matter of any proceedings in the United States. Unlike the original case, a few minutes of searching didn't yield anything yet, but I'm not a 100% sure where to look either (admittedly, finding the proper court was a stroke of luck that Google made possible) - whether it would be in California District court, or in a district court of one of the two Sony DADC offices in the US, or Federal court (and in which circuit). If you're familiar with copyright lawsuits in the US, I'd be very interested in a chat.

TSremux 0.0.12 contains a few bugfixes.

DVDFab HD Decrypter 3.1.3.2 is better at handling authoring errors found on certain DVDs.

Besides the massive increase in royalties that the RIAA's extended arm SoundExchange is likely to get unless Congress gets in the way, they also collect a $500 administrative fee per channel. What might be adequate for small radio stations, would effectively amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in administrative fees for large companies like Real, Yahoo, Pandora and Live365.

This is a good one: a recently bill in Canada basically would create a lobby organization for the movie industry in parliament.

AC3Filter 1.45b includes an ACM codec in the package, contains some localization improvements and fixes a few bugs.

TSremux 0.0.11 can remux Blu-ray titles and contains some bugfixes.

Do you still remember the 3ivx MPEG-4 codec? After a long while, the 5.0 version has finally been released.

HDTVtoMPEG-2 1.11.93 only shows the filename in the input listbox instead of the full path.

With Sony's Trojan Blu-ray horse - the PS3 - being the sole device that matters in terms of Blu-ray players, Toshiba figured they could play the same game and start selling all their notebooks with a HD DVD drive. It'll be interesting to see how a few million HD DVD capable notebooks can influence the format balance.

DGAVCDec 1.0.0 alpha 6 uses 3 digits after the decimal point to indicate FPS, popups up a finished window at the end of a project creation, only requires a single external DLL and fixes a few issues.

eac3to now has a GUI and it supports PCM input.

mp42ts is a new tool in the GPAC framework allowing to remux an MP4 into a Transport Stream.

DecryptHD is a real-time HD DVD decryption and streaming tool. Currently only running under Linux, it allows you to watch HD DVD movies in mplayer (or to dump them to a directory).

DVDFab HD decrypter 3.1.2.8 beta can now also handle HD discs with the new set of AACS keys.

VirtualDub 1.6.19 fixes a few bugs.

After intense lobbying by Hollywood and their proxies in the US government, the Canadian Prime minister Stephen Harper has apparently buckled under the pressure and is about to introduce anti camcording legislation.

And speaking of pressure, money usually goes a lot farther so here's a list of all the current members of the US congress who have taken money from the RIAA.

It shouldn't take you more than a couple of seconds to debunk the IFPI's "Ten inconvenient truths about file swapping" so I'll leave it up to you ;)

Apparently impressed by how good a sub $300 HD DVD player can sell, Sony is cutting the price of their upcoming second generation Blu-ray player before it's even released. With a $499 list price, the BDP-S300 is now officially the cheapest Blu-ray player on the horizon.

AC3Filter 1.40b supports localization, preserves the LFE channels loudness when mixing it into several channels and fixes an audio skipping bug as well as the user manual.

Toshiba apparently managed to shake up the high def market quite a bit with their recent rebates. When their low end HD DVD player started selling below $250, sales went up as much as tenfold.

The global market is a great thing, right? You can get into any marketplace and have a chance to compete without high barriers to protect the local economy, yet, the RIAA is proving once again that the trade highways are by no means open to everyone: When they sell their content in any country, they not only ask for copyright legislation to be adapted to US standard, but also for a ban on imports of their product unless authorized by them - so buying a legitimate product cheap in one country, then selling it in another is a no go. Of course, as usual it's all about the artists - but wait, do they royalties really vary according to the price of an album in every country?

It seems to be the time to sue Sony - first it was about materials used in Blu-ray discs, now it's about the encryption on Blu-ray and i.LINK. However, if they're going after Sony for AACS, then I guess the other companies behind AACS (including HD DVD champions Toshiba and Microsoft) can't be too far off.

Last but not least, in older news Businessweek brings up an argument not often heard in the mainstream media that explains why CD sales are down. Well, I've been saying that for a long while, I just didn't have the numbers.

Last month's news can be found here.