ProjectX 0.90.4 can decode mpa audio (to wav/aif) with optional fade-in/out, can demux pes, improves ttx demuxing, creates CutterMaran info files on request, it can export RDS data as well and there are some other minor changes and fixes.

Sony's PSP movie format UMD looks like it's about to die. Universal and Paramount have stopped releasing movie in that format, and one Universal exec went on to say that UMD is "another Sony bomb - like Blu-ray".

DVDSubEdit 1.3 can modify the IFO CLUT directly, can zoom in on frames, changes the display mode automatically when another stream is selected, offers case-sensitive searched on the OCR output, improves OCR detection of the hard to distinguish letter combinations like fl, ft and fi, saves all modifications in all subpictures and fixes a few bugs.

Apple is expanding iTunes yet again. This time it's music DVDs and season passes for ABC's most popular shows. While two bucks per episode make the whole thing cheaper then getting the DVD, the iPod display also make it very unattractive if you can get the DVD, rip it and play it on your notebook, PSP and iPod and whatever other portable device capable of playing digital video you may own.

After Sony, Universal is the second studio not to used forced HD content downscaling for analog outputs. Some might consider this good news, I'm waiting for DeAACS and mandatory managed copy (as in mandatory for the studios to give this away for free).

RIAA and MPAA must be salivating about the German legal process right now when German politicians go on record saying they want to make P2P downloads the same offense as shoplifting (to all RIAA and MPAA lawyers: see... it's currently not the same so stop feeding the world that BS story).

While HD DVD is just a few weeks off, Blu-ray will take longer and be more expensive. As if we didn't have enough proof already, Panasonic just announced their first Blu-ray player. The DMP-DB10 will be available in September and cost approximately $1500.

I'm back from the future now.. it was a great trip ;)

DVDx 2.4 has an updated file menu, links to the Guide, FAQ and support forum in the help menu, can check for new versions, no longer uses ASPI by default, has contextual help in various dialogs, does its work faster and contains the usual bugfixes.

AviSynth 2.57 alpha 1 supports multline subtitles, contains a bunch of FPS presets, no longer limits AVISource audio to two channels, and there are various more smaller changes and bugfixes.

MyTheatre 3.35.1 uses the latest SDK for TechnoTrend Budget and Hauppauge Nova cards which should improve compatibility with CAM modules, and it fixes a deadlock on some BDA drivers.

In the forum, you can find some juicy information about what's going to be added to DivX 6.2 before it goes final.

Philips has finalized the specification for DVD+RW DL. Now we're waiting for the media..

TGDaily has an interview with a senior Microsoft manager on the subject of 1080i output of the first generation of HD DVD players (versus Blu-ray which starts out at 1080p right away). He goes on to say that cost factors played a role in that decision but that it may be possible to upgrade the players to 1080p via firmware upgrade in the future (which kinda seems to contradict the cost statement, don't you think), and that he believes in the future displays would get the ability to undo the interlacing process.. much like we perform IVTC on NTSC DVDs today to get back the progressive original at the proper framerate.

DVDFab Decrypter 2.9.7.3 fixes a problem that would show up when opening ripped DVDs with DVD Shrink.

BSPlayer 1.40 contains a few small bugfixes related to the playback to captured/uncompressed files and other minor issues.

Is May 23rd the launch date for Blu-ray? DVDSoon.com lists a bunch of Blu-ray titles that are supposed to be released by that date.

Universal is entering the movie download biz: Starting on April 10th, you can buy a DVD and get a digital copy for your PC and one for a portable device. The offer is quite pricey at £19.99 (roughly $34.60), and naturally, DRM is being used. While the details are still unclear, I wouldn't bet a dime on being able to at least watch the movie on your second computer and you'll have to decide who gets the portable version: your son's PSP or your daughter's video iPod - then again, the list of supported players is not in yet. The service will start with 35 titles.

So what is it going to be now? The FCC chairman is flip-flopping like there's no tomorrow, on one hand pointing out that they can and will enforce net neutrality, on the other hand he supports providers who want to introduced a tiered Internet. In case you're not a regular reader, this is about ISPs charging customers on both ends (so subscribers, and companies running sites to which an ISP's subscriber want to get access) for preferential traffic treatment, and potentially degrading service to those unwilling to pay up. It's already happening with certain ISPs arbitrarily delaying VoIP traffic so that phone calls by competing providers become chopped and unusable. Imagine that in the phone business: you're calling a friend who is with another cellphone provider, so they arbitrarily degrade your signal... unimaginable from a paying customer's perspective, right? So why should it be any different with Internet access?

So now HD DVD is a format without players and discs. Toshiba is delaying the release of their first players to coincide with the release of the first discs, presumably April 18th.

The first generation of both HD DVD and Blu-ray players won't support managed copy at all though. So even if a disc would allow you to make use of the feature, you can't because players don't support it. But think about it: with recordable CDs, Mini Disc, DAT tapes and DCC, "managed copy" (it's called SCMS in the audio world) was possible.. you could make as many copies as you want from the original, but not make any digital copies of the first generation of copies. Now you have to beg and scrape (managed copy can be fee based) to be allowed to make a copy.

Now it has started: Apple claims the new French copyright law will result in state-sponsored piracy. Of course, that may be true if you define piracy as taking something you legally own, and make use of it in a matter whomever sold the product to you does not approve of. Is this the new definition of piracy by online music stores that want to lock you to their hard and software, record labels and movie studios? How about the mantra that has proven to work for decades: the customer is king and always right? Technology is bringing us more and more creative ways to do things, but instead of getting more possibilities, the content industry is working hard to take those possibilities away from us, and giving them back in a restricted fashion that allows them to take our dime every time we try to make use of their product.

Didn't those that oppose state sponsored snooping in the EU warn that the collected data will be abused? Prior to the start of the wet dreams of big brothers all around, the abuse is already in preparation in Germany. In the second revision of copyright law in two years, and very much unlike France which imposes small fines for illegal downloading, the head of the German DOJ has thrown out a clause that would make small copyright infringement cases not punishable. If a criminal case were opened for each download, courts simply wouldn't have the resources to deal with real criminals, but under heavy pressure from the entertainment industry, that passage has now been canned. This leaves the door open of a flood of criminal cases which after some deliberation will mostly be thrown out of course again because damages are just too small. But it leaves the door open for a 3 year prison sentence for downloading a single song or movie. And on top of that, the entertainment industry will be provided access to the data resulting from the EU snooping initiative. Now you will vividly recall what Big Brother Clarke told us... it's all about terrorism. So I guess the next EU copyright direction will make downloaders terrorists.

Here's some juicy info for those living in countries that have yet to get a DMCA like legislation - this ought to come in handy when you talk to your elected representatives about why adopting anti-circumvention law is a disaster for all but the entertainment industry.

Last but not least, in the ongoing review of the DMCA, RIAA and MPAA are dead set against a circumvention exemption in cases DRM threatens critical infrastructure and potentially endanger lives. I know this is over the top thinking, but imagine nuclear meltdowns and critical equipment in hospitals failing..

Forget Sony's rootkit, Starforce shows you how it's done: hook into the Windows kernel, mess with all your drives, replace USB drivers, and reboot your machine if suspicious activity is detected. Now it just lacks a few components to be the RIAA/MPAA darling: open a socket on your machine that the content industry can access to see what you're doing. So you're playing an MP3? Dirty pirate.. down your PC goes (and the file mysteriously disappears). You have DVD Decrypter installed? Hell no, that scum software must go. You're playing a DivX movie? That can't be legal so let's delete it and reboot. And here's another idea: how about logging keystrokes so that the industry can directly access your bank account and charge you for playing content? Wouldn't that be awesome? Finally those dirty customers have to cough up money whenever they consume any copyrighted content.. that's how it should be.

France's revised copyright law has passed the lower house or parliament yesterday. The law allows circumvention of DRM for interoperability (let's keep in mind the DMCA also has an interoperability clause.. and look where it has gotten us) but it's a far cry from the consumer friendly amendments that have been proposed throughout the legislative process.

MyTheatre 3.35 supports the CI and DiSEqC of TechnoTrend Budget cards, supports DVB-S2 modulation, improves QAM settings for cable cards and enables LNB power control for cards based on the Conexant CX2388x chip, and last but not least the new release also fixes a few bugs.

In a BBC article on DRM, I found a very interesting tidbit of information (and thanks to a reader for reminding me as it had already slipped my mind again): we have Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corporation and thus the Fox TV channel and the 20th Century Fox movie study on record saying: A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it and very much as they want it. That's right Mr. Murdoch. We want to play our DVDs on standalones, PSPs, notebooks without DVD drives, DivX capable standalones, video iPods and game consoles. We want to record high def streams of 24 and covert them to more convenient formats. And if we missed the last episode of 24 last night but have access to the Fox channel via our TV subscription, how about making the episode available for download? You realize what customers want Mr. Murdoch, then why is your studio pushing for additional DRM on Blu-ray? How about living up to what you realize your customers want?

You probably know some of Michael Crichton's books. So here's another good read by the same author: an op-ed piece in the New York Times on patent law entitled "This Essay Breaks the Law".

Media Player Classic 6.4.9.0 fixes a few bugs.

DVD Rebuilder 0.97 free uses up-to-date versions of supporting software (HC 0.17, EclPro 0.52, ReJig 0.5f), should be faster when ReJig is used and it fixes a number of bugs.

Yahoo has the rundown on the impending Blu-ray and HD DVD launches in terms of what hardware will be available when and at what price.

And they don't know what their doing: the latest P2P study in Canada has apparently not been vetted by the industry for data not compliant with their world view: it shows that those most likely to download songs are also most likely to buy and a variety of non P2P related issues leading to people buying less music.

Muxman 0.15P removes extra bytes after a sequence_end and fixes a few bugs.

ProgDVB 4.72.3 contains an updated module for SkyStar2/3 cards.

DGMPGDec 1.4.7 beta 5 can use only filenames rather than full paths in D2V file and exceptions now only abort decoding of the current picture, not the whole stream.

The HD format news keeps coming in. Sony's biggest hope in the format battle, their upcoming PS3 console, has been delayed until November. So much for beating any up-to-date PC at 3D games at launch time ;) Sony indicates copy protection as the reason for delay. However, the first of Sony's Blu-ray players will come in the summer. Meanwhile, some studios consider Blu-ray to be too expensive right now and will hold off from releasing any titles.

Meanwhile, Warner confirms the first three HD DVD titles are to be released on April 18 and cost $29 each, to be followed by 17 more shortly thereafter (Matrix in HD - right on).

The debate on the new French copyright law is over. The final draft still includes the passage that makes bypassing DRM for interoperability legal and allows private copying (in a yet to be determined number), but also includes a "Universal Vivendi" clause which introduces high fines for knowingly distribute software whose primary purpose it is to allow unauthorized access to protected works - needless to say that this industry sponsored paragraph is at odds with the more consumer friendly ones.

Last but not least, a little heads-up to all Gmail users: don't count on your deleted emails really being deleted...

Warner is now confirming that HD DVD will be late by a week or two, but that still makes it ahead of Blu-ray. Meanwhile, Disney, formerly firmly in the Blu-ray camp, is considering supporting HD DVD as well. Flashback to the early DVD days, Disney supported DVD but only lackluster and was fully committed to the later failed DIVX format. And Fujitsu has announced it will support both formats as well.

And sticking with HD, Sony, main proponent of the more restrictive Blu-ray format, has announced that they won't be making use of the forced downsizing of analogue outputs on Blu-ray players.

With the French vote on a new copyright law just a day way, there's a lot of late minute dealing in parliament. First, the P2P flatrate was reintroduced, then re-scrapped. Now, the current draft, cracking DRM for interoperability (so say play iTunes songs on your non iPod MP3 player), would be completely legal. Now, where's that EU snooping directive when you need it? Heck, that's the one chance to show its usefulness.. bug all MPs so we know all the dirty details about the deals they're making with the entertainment industry before this crucial vote.

Last but not least, Wired has a story on the one Bittorrent site on which the MPAA is biting its teeth out. And no matter where you stand on such downloads, I strongly believe mere links should never be illegal. We don't charge a knife maker for aiding in a murder committed by slicing somebody's throat, or sue car makers if their product has been used for vehicular manslaughter, put murder on gun makers, etc. But in copyright, the industry is trying to do just that via DMCA like laws that try to stop information resources from telling people on how to use their legitimately bought media. After all, you can't circumvent CSS or any other DRM unless you have a legit copy of the content. And, many DMCA like legislation contains a fair use loophole clause, but what good is that if nobody is allowed to tell you how to make use of that loophole by pointing you to the tools required and giving you instructions on how to use it?

ProgDVB 4.72.2 improves support for TechnoTrend Budget cards and SkyStar2 cards and includes some bugfixes as well.

How do you sell your copy protection technology? Starforce, maker if the infamous Starforce copy protection and the company that sues everybody who has something negative to say about them, leads the way by posting links to download pirated copies of games that have no copy protection - and conveniently forgetting that those who rather pirate Starforce protected games than to buy them, will not have to deal with any invasive copy protection. At the end of the day, those who want to get things for free will always find a way, and those that are willing to pay, will be impeded and their machines crippled.

After CD price fixing and bribing radio stations to play their songs, the RIAA may be in trouble yet again. After state attorneys looking into online prices, a class action suit has been launched as well.

Last but not least, in yet another example of the ever growing list why we need a major patent system overhaul, here's another trivial patent causing trouble, and what makes matters worse, where the plaintiff even has the government's support. I mean, buying goods for a fixed price is an idea that's been around for what, a couple millenia (or milleniae.. my high school Latin is more than rusty), and half the people ever participating in an auction will have thought about buying goods for a fixed price rather than going through the whole process at one time or another, so it really is nothing worthy of exclusive protection.

Sorry for the long news hiatus, there were some things I had to take care of..

Let's start with the latest news: VirtualDub 1.6.14 has been declared stable, allows the selection of different I/O modes, has a new option to prevent overwriting of existing files in capturing mode and fixes two bugs.

Media Player Classic 6.4.8.9 has been released without a changelog.

Auto Gordian Knot 2.27 supports DivX 6.1.x, respects DivX's hometheater profiles, comes bundled with the SMP capable XviD build and DGIndex 1.4.6.

DGPulldown 1.0.7 beta 1 has an option to modify the input file rather than creating a new output file.

DGMPGDec 1.4.7 beta 4 has an extended quantization matrix dialog and fixes two bugs.

HDTVtoMPEG2 1.11.87 can reorder the input file list via drag&drop.

Then some HD format news: first of all, the official launch date of Blu-ray in the US has been set to May 23rd. In Europe, it will take until the 4th quarter. HD DVD players have mysteriously disappeared from launch retailer sites, raising some doubts that HD DVD will launch on March 28th in the US but Toshiba insists on the launch date. The European launch of HD DVD is likely to take place earlier than the Blu-ray launch with first discs announced for June. The disc "The Ghost of Mae Nok" will be sold as a DVD - HD DVD combo. The HD disc features 1080p VC-1 content at 16 mbit/s and the disc will permit PSP-resolution managed copies without requiring Internet access. However, while not mandatory, only HDCP protected digital outputs will support the full 1080p resolution - those without HDCP or with an analog connection will be limited to 960x540. Now keep in mind that this isn't a major studio release but don't expect Hollywood to be more lenient when it comes to locking you out from your own content.

And on the hardware side, there's not much news, except that BenQ is showing their combined CD, DVD and Blu-ray burner DW1655 at CeBit. Scheduled for release in the second quarter, the first drives that don't force you to buy another DVD burner to support all commonly used disc formats is thus not so far off.

Last but not least, Amazon is considering the online movie business. What's interesting is that the service is supposed to allow you to burn downloaded content onto DVDs.

And as a late addendum, Forbes predicts that Sony may give up on ARccOS and either replace it with Macrovision's RipGuard (which has already been beaten) or abandon the additional protection altogether.

ProgDVB 4.72 supports the AverMedia A700 card and contains some bugfixes.

Will the upcoming HD formats reverse the situation of media and recorder availability? TDK has already begun to ship single layer Blu-ray discs (both BD-R and BD-RE) and will follow with dual layer versions next month. The prices are steep though, 15€ and 35€ for single respectively dual layer BD-R discs, and €20 / 45€ for dual layer BD-RE discs.

Sony will also start shipping single layer BD-RE discs this month, to be followed by BD-R discs in April. Sony will wait with dual layer discs until later this year.

Last but not least, the French government has pulled the proposed law, which got a P2P legalization addendum back in December and is about to defile another version without such drastic measures. The new text should be proposed for a vote on the 14th.

Are the first dual format high def DVD players coming before each format has really taken off? LG is rumored to cancel its upcoming Blu-ray player and instead produce a combined Blu-ray and HD DVD player.

Fox is the second major to consider a considerably shortened theatrical window for movies. Unlike Disney, they still plan on a 60 day window, after which the plan to offer HD versions for rental. The price point appears exorbitant though, $25 to $30. Compare this with the $30 to $40 they want for a Blu-ray disc (which is likely to fall if the format goes mainstream), it appears overly steep to me.

DGMPGDec 1.4.7 beta 3 prints the running time at the end of the parse D2V log.

Media Player Classic 6.4.8.8 V2 has improved support for Quicktime files, the DVD navigator no longer checks for a disc region code (your drive firmware will still block playback unless you have an RPC-1 firmware or are using an on-the-fly decryption layer that gets rid of region codes), the MPEG TS splitter can repack AVC in TS streams so that ffdshow and CoreAVC don't choke on those streams, the MP4 parser supports VobSub subtitles and there's a bunch of other minor improvements and fixes.

nVidia has released a first beta driver that supports MPEG-4 AVC acceleration. Unlike ATI, you have to buy the PureVideo software though to make use of the acceleration.

DVD-RAM is slowly catching up speed-wise to DVD±R. The latest DVD-RAM specs offer 12x DVD-RAM burning and the first drives and media will be shown at CeBit later this month. The new media will not be compatible to old drives though.

First there was the broadcast flag, now the RIAA has catched up to the pie and had their congress lapdogs introduce an audio broadcast flag legislation. Bottom line is that the RIAA doesn't want you record anything from online and satellite radio. At the same time though, they are trying to get as much as 30% of satellite radio station revenues because some services offer a software that lets you record content.

This week, we'll see an interesting vote in the French parliament on the subject of Internet access levies to legalize P2P filesharing. You can be sure that the content industry is pulling all the strings and whipping their representatives in parliament into shape to try and stop this.

And sticking with the subject of music once more, the US Justice Department has launched a probe in possible price fixing in online music downloads.

In Germany, you can currently sign a petition against the implementation of the EU data retention initiative (if you ask me, big brother initiative would be a more fitting name but politicians that are behind state sponsored snooping obviously don't like the negative connotation of that). Telepolis also has a nice interview with one of the state's officers in charge of data protection (the article is in German obviously).

You might remember me suggesting this before, now ABC is actually going for it: offer TV shows for free and generate revenue via advertising in between parts of the show - just like it's being done when you watch broadcast TV. Now if they just don't ruin it by requiring some proprietary software that spies on you and infects your computer with all kinds of malware, and if they don't cripple quality, this actually might be a good thing.

Finally, government and law enforcement desires notwithstanding, Microsoft seems to remain firm on keeping the encryption format of their next version of Windows secure. I guess that means we'll see the next hike in the amount of time Police can keep you without charges.. how about a couple of years until there are machines powerful enough to break 128 bit encryption? And if you're using 256 bit, I'm sorry, we're going to keep you for life as it's unlikely such powerful encryption is being broken anytime soon.

DVDSubEdit 1.1 allows you to move subpictures with the mouse, remembers directories for each open and save dialog, shows a progress percentage in the progress dialog, fixes the most common OCR mistakes as well as a few bugs, and there are many more improvements.

The DVD-R/W format is catching up speed-wise with the announcement of the 8x DVD-R DL specs. No discs or writers have been announced yet, but I'm sure those announcements will come soon, especially in light of CeBit starting shortly.

Lawmakers have taken a preemptive step against ISPs charging more for selectively improved service (or seen from another angle, slowing down certain traffic). A bill tentatively called the Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006 would prohibit ISPs from giving some content providers better service than others and block subscribers from accessing certain content (e.g. a VoIP service from a carrier not affiliated with your ISP). Every now and then, the people on the hill do get something right (but then again the DMCRA still needs to be passed to restore balance in the copyright arena).

Here's yet another disc format for you: VMD, or Versatile Multilayer Disc. Based on current red laser technology, the format aims at 40 GB per disc (more than a dual layer HD DVD and 10 GB lower than a dual layer Blu-ray disc). VMD is based on stacking DVD like layers on top of each other, with each layer offering around 5 GB of space. Considering the problems the first DVD players had with dual layer discs, the high number of layers might turn out to be problematic though. The format will be launched at CeBit mid-month, players will start at $150 but so far there's no Hollywood content in sight.

The latest test build of YAMB supports more accurate timestamps for splitting and has a new tab just for the tagging options.

Champagne is flowing today in the French MPAA subsidiary, as the ruling that would prevent movies from being sold with copy protection that makes private copying impossible has been overturned. One is tempted to say the MPAA finally found a court they could buy...

Just months before the launch of Blu-ray, Sony has decided to can the Professional Disc for Data (PDD), Blu-ray's professional cousin that has been on the market for not even two years. Drives can still be bought until the end of 2007, but who's going to buy into a dying format?

The RIAA has a new term for people who download songs from P2P networks: songlifters. Why does that sound so like shoplifter? It's obviously still incorrect because stealing (shoplifting) isn't quite the same as copyright infringement.

DGPulldown 1.0.6 final has been released.

Sony and Lions Gate have announced their lineup for the Blu-ray start on May 23rd. Sony will start with 8 titles, Lions Gate with 5, all priced at either 39.90 for new titles and 29.90 for catalog titles.

In yet another piece of copyright law running amok, the Australian Copyright Agency Limited is trying to charge schools for using Internet access in class. Let me get this straight: should you have to pay to read this news even though it's a free site (except for your ISP fees of course)? I think not (heck, I could make this a pay site if I thought you owed me money to read this and to download).

Last month's news can be found here.