SubRip 1.30 beta 2 contains experimental unicode support

A reason to stay away from Intel chips in the future? Intel's latest chipset adds support for Microsoft's DRM format on a hardware level. Intel is not giving out any details, probably because they tried to sneak that one in without anyone noticing. As you may have heard, the software DRM can be circumvented (only if you have a valid license for the content though), but hardware is most likely going to be quite a bit tougher to get around.

The latest revision of the Haali Media Splitter supports AVI and MP4 on Mode2 CDs and registers the MP4 extension.

VirtualDub 1.6.6 can force sector alignment for uncompressed frames in AVI, which can resolve compatibility problems. An addition, a large number of bugs have been fixed.

As previously reported, the broadcast flag is been stopped in its tracks by a Federal Appeals Court. News.com has an opinion piece by Dan Glickman, CEO of the MPAA, on why the broadcast flag should go ahead. They also have an opposing opinion piece but I'd like to throw in my two cents as well: the MPAA argues that without protection, high definition content may not be broadcast over the air anymore, but only be available to subscription based services, which mostly implement certain copy protection mechanisms (due to self-interest and I'm sure it's part of their license agreement with the movie studios.. without copy protection they'd probably not be allowed to broadcast anything). So, less programming for those using a terrestrial antenna, and thus less choice for you.
However, less programming means less viewers means less advertising revenue, means TV stations having less money to buy programming, and that in turn means the MPAA members can sell less of their product and will make less money. So if the MPAA cuts off the supply of digital programming for terrestrial broadcasts, along with widespread customer outrage, the MPAA would lose a lot of money. And, just because cable and satellite broadcasts can be encrypted, that doesn't mean that you cannot capture the digital stream. I just happen to have access to the TS streams of several hundred TV channels, encrypted or not. In the end, the broadcast flag isn't so much ensuring that you get high definition digital content but that the MPAA can restrict what you do with that content.

DGMPGDec 1.3.1 beta 6 allows you to change the process priority while saving, supports .vro and .mpv input types and fixes two bugs.

MyTheatre 3.27 has an option for spectral inversion for the Nexus/SkyStar 1 cards and fixes a couple of bugs.

Remember the still largely inexistent MPEG-4 / WMV9 acceleration on NVidia cards? Now ATI has announced MPEG-4 AVC decoding acceleration on their Radeon cards. It is not yet available and it's likely that this acceleration will only be available to specific video players just as in the NVidia case.

ZoomPlayer 4.50 RC1 can be run directly from an USB flashdrive without any installation, improves DVD/Media automation and contains lots of bugfixes.

Confusion seems to reign in the HD DVD market: While Sony execs still see a small window to come to an agreement for a unified format, Toshiba (proponent of the HD DVD camp) seems to think a format battle is inevitable, but would be short-lived, and would result in an unified format eventually.

Good news for owners of the Pioneer A09 burner: the latest firmware upgrade adds 8x DVD+RW writing at no cost. Actually 8x DVD+RW discs have still to become widely available though.

More legal headaches for the entertainment industry in France: courts are not looking favorably upon widespread criminalization of personal filesharing. The head of the magistrate union has gone on record saying, that prosecution should be more geared towards counterfeiting rings and that Police has better thing to do than going after casual filesharers.

NuMenu4u 2.0.12 has an additional script for dummy assets, contains a workaround for when the first subpicture stream doesn't start at ID 20, disables video encoding when AviSynth is not installed and fixes a few bugs.

Here comes multi-session dual layer DVD burning: Starting in mid June, Nero will offer what they call layer-jump recording. Rather than first write data on one layer, then the other (and making sure you have the same amount of data on each layer), layer-jump recording alternates between layers during writing, thus enabling multiple writing sessions.

x264 now features ABR mode for both single pass and multi-pass encoding (old news for some of you obviously), and zones (e.g. for using a lower bitrate for the end credits).

QuEnc 0.61 fixes a bug in MPEG-1 system mux.

PgcEdit 0.5.7 beta 3 contains a bunch of bugfixes.

MenuShrink 2.2 has a more fine-grained progress bar, there's a button in the preview panel to keep a menu animated, the preview panel also displays the size of a menu cell, the engine supports preserving animated menus and there are some bugfixes as well.

The latest Haali Media Splitter release supports multiple sample descriptions for tx3g tracks, supports more Apple HD QuickTime trailers and maps the Matroska Artist tag to the DirectShow author field.

DGMPGDec 1.3.1 beta 5 fixes an issue that affected compatibility with the upcoming AviSynth 2.5.6 and some other errors.

This may mostly interest the small community of Linux users, but AviDemux is a cross platform video editor and encoder. You may be happy with VirtualDub (I am), but if you're considering Linux, this tool might help you ease the transition (and then of course there's Wine).

Seems managed language tools are finally taking off in the video world: There is ProjectX (Java), DVX, Cuttermaran, AutoAC, Mp4muxer, MeGUI and now avi.NET (all those tools use one of Microsoft's .NET languages and you can find them all in the forum).

If you are using Matroska, or plan to use it, you'll want to get the latest Matroska pack. It not only allows you to play back Matroska but contains decoders for a variety of video and audio formats (that can of course all be put into the Matroska container ;)

PgcEdit 0.5.7 beta 1 has an option to hide the hex codes in the main commands listbox, can go to trace mode automatically upon opening a DVD and fixes a bug from the previous release.

Oh, and the mail server has been back up since Monday :)

DGDecode 1.3.1 beta 4 fixes a decoding error caused by improper recovery from an MPEG-2 syntax error.

With the self-imposed deadline approaching quickly, Sony and Toshiba haven't yet managed to come to an agreement about the unification of the two HD formats. I wonder if they consider how many people actually would buy two devices in order to play all high definition movies. I think a format war would ensure that DVD remains the most popular format for a while to come.

Perhaps you've heard about the MPAA's latest move - this time against Internet portals that offer TV series for download. However, not everybody believes those portals do any damage - in fact, piracy of TV episodes has boosted the popularity of certain shows in the recent past. But quite obviously, rethinking their business models, or give in to viewers that want to have their show now, rather than when some studio exec decides it is ready, is about as likely to happen as life on Pluto ;)

Last but not least, we're currently experiencing problems with the server that handles our mail. So if you are not getting any replies it might just be because the mail isn't getting through right now.

Muxman 0.14e fixes a bug in closely timed highlights.

NuMenu4u 2.0.11 permits faster skipping of dummy assets and fixes a few bugs.

Brace yourself for DIVX2: A group of researchers at UCLA has come up with a way to embed RFID tags into DVDs and only allow playback of those discs on specific players.. playback also requires an online hookup where the player gets the authorization to play a movie. If that sound vaguely familiar, it's what DIVX was all about.

The first FVD players are about to hit the market in Taiwan. They are priced around $175 US, and the format will launch with 10 titles. It remains to be seen if this homegrown format will do any better than China's EVD.

While talks about merging HD DVD and BluRay are continuing, software and hardware makers are in the uncomfortable position to have to offer devices and software supporting the formats that are to be launched as early as Christmas 05. We've seen a bunch of announcements at CES already, now Nero has updated their CD/DVD Speed and Info Tool application to support BluRay discs.

Subrip 1.2 beta 13 contains some minor improvements for filling open areas.

YAMB 1.2 redirects the mp4box stdout output, can extract audio and video from AVI to raw or a new MP4, gives info about streams contained in a file, supports subtitle conversions, has an option to keep all MPEG-4 system info, allows manually edited commandlines and has an option to overwrite existing output files.

DVBPortal 1.4 contains some fixes for DVB-T, has an enhanced channel editor that also supports channel list export, no longer expires and comes with the latest version of SkyAVC.

PgcEdit 0.5.6 final is out. It has a new button to search for all occurrences of a search term, has some icons for Linux users and fixes a few bugs.

Likely as to put some pressure on the Blu-Ray camp in the current format unification discussions, Toshiba just announced 3 layered HD DVDs offering 45 GB capacity (15 GB on each layer). They also announced a hybrid disc offering two regular DVD layers and two HD DVD layers. With 45GB, they can finally come close to Blu-Rays 50 GB on two layer (but Sony and CO are also working on more than 2 layers - in fact at least 4 layers should be possible offering an amazing 100 GB on a single disc).

ProgDVB 4.52 now supports LiveView FlyDVB cards, has updated modules for the GeniaTech DigiStar and TwinHan cards and contains some small bugfixes as well.

DVD Rebuilder 0.89 will create a proper DVD structure even when DVD Decrypter has been used to remove structural protection from the disc, subpicture stream id collection has been adjusted to work with multi PGC sources, saves subpicture selections to the rbd file, prevents that multiple instances of the program are running concurrently and fixes a bunch of errors and issues.

A Japanese business paper reported that an unified HD DVD format is to be presented by next Monday. In the meantime, however, Toshiba denies that any final decision has been made in the matter. Though the Toshiba and Sony led camps have come to an agreement when it came to DVD, so they are certainly capable to come up with a unified format...

ProjectX 0.82.1.02 can create sup files from teletext streams, allows you to set the outline pixel number and font style of subtitles and there is a fix in CLI processing and demuxing of multiple audio tracks.

VobBlanker 2.0.0.2 has an option to disable overlay, can convert motion to still menus in the titles domain and in cell based mode, patches the next and prev SRI pointers in motion to still mode, asks for confirmation before exiting, title cutting has been improved and a couple of bugs have been fixed.

NuMenu4u 2.0.10a fixes a syntax error in VMG creation in Muxman mode.

Last but not least, the AMD Athlon64 X2 (dual core chip) is no longer under NDA, and it's a great performer when it comes to video compression. I especially like the multitasking results as I can never stay away from the PC long enough for a whole movie to be compressed.

Muxman 0.14d fixes parsing of MaestroSBT's sst files.

Subrip 1.2 beta 11 contains many bugfixes and improvements.

DGMPGDec 1.3.1 beta 3 supports program streams with video stream IDs other than 0xE0, the preview info box now shows the audio type of all audio tracks, there is a fix for rarely occurring picture decoding errors and DGDecode.dll has been made more accessible for Visual Basic programmers.

NuMenu4u 2.0.10 has extended copy functions, has most of the default options in the main screen dropdown menus, there are many improvements for using Muxman to multiplex and a couple of bugfixes as well.

Scenaid 1.6 can create D2V and AVS files using DGIndex, can script Pre/Post and cell commands and replace audio streams with dummy audio streams even when demuxing by VOB ID, there is additional logging and checking on irregular assets and a couple of fixes as well.

AviSynth 2.5.6 beta 3 is out. It contains some optimizations and bugfixes and has a handful of new and extended methods.

And here's a chance if you live down under: The Australian government is correctly revamping copyright law and is considering a fair use exemption. They are currently accepting feedback from the public until July 1st - so make your voice heard.

Auto Gordian Knot 2.08 uses a special XviD compile that better supports MediaTek and Sigma based standalone players, force deinterlace and IVTC have been made mutually exclusive, DGIndex has been updated to version 1.3.0 and a few bugs have been fixed.

Digital TV recording devices won't have to support the broadcast flag after all. The D.C. Court of Appeals concluded that the FCC overstepped its mandate by trying to force consumer electronic manufacturers to support the broadcast flag (an anti-copy mechanism that the MPAA and TV stations would like to stop you from making digital recordings).

If you live in the US, the EFF is currently hosting an effort to get your elected representatives on Capitol Hill to support the DMCRA. It would restore balance to copyright law by making copy protection circumvention legal if no copyright infringement was committed (in other words, making a copy of what you own will be legal beyond a doubt - like it used to be before the DMCA, and as it should be obviously). I hope many of you will participate.

How about backing up PSP (Playstation Portable) movies? The first step - extracting the data on the proprietary UMD discs - has just been made.

NuMenu4u 2.0.9 has an option to not recreate mxp files and fixes incorrect button end times in mxp scripts.

YAMB 1.1 has additional video and audio import functions, supports start and end option for splitting and can extract raw audio and video from AVI files.

Officially 4x certified dual layer DVD-Rs are about to arrive in stores. Verbatim has just completed testing of its latest disc product and expects the discs to be available shortly.

AVI-Mux GUI 1.17 beta can handle Vorbis audio in the AVI container created by ffmpeg and has some major improvements for chaptering.

Muxman 0.15 is not available yet, but there's an interesting tidbit about it: it will support multiple VTS sets and title sets on a DVD.

The latest Haali Media Splitter release improves ordered chapter support in Matroska, supports MPEG-4 Audio in QT and fixes a bug where the wrong frames were left in the queue when opening files.

YAMB is another GUI for MP4Box, supporting MP4 muxing, splitting, joining and in the future will also support stream extraction.

This one's a good read: in response to the RIAAs attack on Universities regarding actions taken to combat piracy on the Internet2 (a high speed academic research network), CMU professor Roger Dannenberg's rebuttal shows the RIAA in a less than favorable light. Not that we didn't know that, but it's always nice to be backed up by well documented history.

DVD Rebuilder 0.86 is no longer as susceptible to buffer overflow errors as previous versions, should be better with small segments being encoded in CCE, has a contents option in the help menu and reads reduce by 50% properly from rbd files.

Subrip 1.2 beta 9 supports AVI files and fills the character matrix automatically after the user selects a font.

Muxman 0.14c corrects subpicture stream display.

PgcEdit 0.5.6 beta 6 adds a popup menu to audio and subpicture streams labels to allow copying and pasting of stream assignments, can skip preview of short cells, comes with a semi-automatic "Jump to PGC upon DVD insert" macro and can swap or copy PGC parameters from one PGC to another.

History repeats itself: The HD DVD and BluRay camp have come to an agreement that a unified format would be best for the consumer and the industry, and they are now working out the details of the upcoming format. You might recall that this has happened before the launch of the DVD format as well, and the main proponents this time (Sony: BluRay, Toshiba: HD DVD) were in opposing camps then as well. Considering that it worked out to create the most successful media format in history, I guess they thought why not do it again.

Last month's news can be found here.