Hmm, did Halloween swallow yesterday's news? I could've sworn I wrote and uploaded something. Anyway, TDK has announced the Indi 840G dual format DVD burner, which offers the usual 8x/4x DVD+R/W and 4x/2x DVD-R/W and 40x/24x CD-R/W writing performance. The drive is already in stores and the suggested retail price is $279.

Then something for the your rights online section: Macrovision, maker of the analogue Macrovision video scrambling system and various digital protection systems for audio CDs and computer games was awarded the 2003 Software Industry Award for Best Security Initiative. However, I think that the price's name was not properly chosen. 2003 Software Industry Award for Most Consumer Unfriendly Technology would be much more suitable, don't you think?
And to stay close on the subject, the BSA is now attacking immoral students who don't feel too bad about copying software here and there. Having until recently been a student myself, I'm wondering if the BSA is even aware that in many countries, students have a hard time paying tuition, let alone thousands of dollars worth of software they might need during their academic career. That doesn't mean that copying without paying is right, but if software was available at the same prices school collaborators can acquire software for academic purposes (mind you we're not talking about any commercial use here), then maybe the BSA wouldn't have to gripe so much about (imaginary) losses.

CorePNG is a new lossless video codec based on PNG compression.

Then there's some news on the standalone market: CACMedia is about to release the Lafayette MediaReady 4000 player - a progressive scan DVD player based on embedded Linux, which not only supports MPEG-1/2 but also MPEG-4 and has an integrated harddisk to store digital content. And Aeon-Digital is about to release the Diva 489, a DVD recorder which not only records in MPEG-4 but also in WMV9 (and obviously WMV9 playback is also included). So far, prices and the exact release date are not known for both devices.

Last but not least something for the your rights online section: The Librarian of Congress, the institution responsible for watching over how the DMCA is implemented, has granted certain exceptions to the DMCA, but they are not going quite far enough. As the EFF is reporting, you still don't have the right to circumvent a copy protection scheme to make use of your fair use rights (or to play back something that cannot be played thanks to copy protection mechanisms), to remove user option prohibitions and to play DVDs from other zones. Maybe it would be better if a consumer protection agency was entrusted to overview laws that threaten the rights of people everywhere.

On2 has made their latest codec, VP6 available for personal use free of charge. Their website claims that VP6 is the best video codec on the market today, offering better image quality and faster decoding performance than WMV9, RV9, H.264 and Quicktime MPEG-4. If you're skeptical about those claims, just download the codec and see for yourself or wait for the next codec comparison..

While the DVD Forum plans for an enhanced DVD based on today's technology, there is a new standard under development in China, called EVD (Enhanced Versatile Disc), which promises higher capacity and better image quality (the article says something about five times the image quality but how can you even begin to quantify that?). The first EVD players should be available in China next year. but so far, the technical specs of the format have yet to be revealed. You might recall that this isn't the first time Chinese companies were pushing their own format - the last offensive on that territory lead to Chinese manufacturers getting reduced licensing fees for their DVD hardware.

The 2nd release candidate of Zoom Player has been released, and here's the changelog.

The MPAA is entering US classrooms with a lesson plan entitled "What's the Diff?: A Guide to Digital Citizenship". Sponsored by the MPAA and delivered by a company called Junior Achievement, a company whose goal is to "educate and inspire young people to value free enterprise, business and economics to improve the quality of their lives" (taken straight from their website). If you have a look at the program, it sounds more like an MPAA indoctrination lesson though, with gifts like DVD players, movies, movie tickets or trips to Hollywood if you write a good essay about the illegalities of file sharing. Teachers can also win prices for effectively teaching (I prefer the term indoctrinating, or brainwashing) children the message. Yahoo has the full scoop on this story.
Now I'm of course wondering if, provided I had the necessary money, I could launch my own indoctrination course to show our children why excessive copyright laws will eventually lead to a world very much like George Orwell has depicted it so many years ago, and why we should not allow media conglomerates to strip away our hard won rights to fair use (remember that only the supreme court's decision in the Sony vs. Universal case laid the foundation to use of copyrighted movie material outside the complete control of the copyright holders, a decision which the industry is trying to reverse with technology and legislation, to bring us back to where we're not even allowed to record a TV show to watch at some later point).

Gordian Knot 0.28.6.2 fixes a couple of bugs from the previous release, most notably the splitting of files, custom XviD matrix restoration and inability to open a DVD2AVI project, and it comes with the latest BeSweet release. OagMachine 0.1 is a BeSweet frontent for Ogg Vorbis and AAC audio transcoding.

Taiwanese company BTC has announced their own 8x DVD burner, the DRW 1008IM. Its specs look a lot like the Plextor dual format burner, most notably 8x/4x DVD+R/W and 4x/2x DVD-R/W burning, and 40x/24x CD-R/W burning. A customer support representative from the same company has also posted an interesting insight into DVD-R/W media. Bottom line: beware of cheap media.

Do you remember that the MPAA was to completely ban screener DVDs to stop movies from leaking to the Internet before the retail DVD is released? Now it appears they've made a step back and will continue to send out screener DVDs to member of the academy, but only to those, leaving out press, directors, actors, etc. The final compromise is set to be announced this weekend.

And while they're at it, why not make DVD obsolete? That may sound drastic, but a proposed solution by the movie industry to keep digital TV shows under their control. So far, technical details sound very sketchy and I'm skeptical as to their actual implementation (they're talking about a flag in the broadcast stream that would prevent machines incapable of recognizing that flag to play such content, and I don't see how a device that doesn't know about such a flag would know that it shouldn't play flagged content if the content is delivered in a format we know today), but we'll just have to wait and see. And while the industry is busy inventing new anti-piracy schemes, their lobby in congress has formed an anti-piracy group to strengthen intellectual property protection abroad. Cynics would say maybe that's how they plan to fix the budget deficit ;) And if you live in North, Central or South America, you might want to take a look at the IP Justice whitepaper on the Intellectual Property chapter of the FTAA (Free Trade of the Americas) and sign the petition to delete this chapter from the treaty, because it goes even further than the DMCA, and we all know how that law is used to circumcise the rights of consumers and researchers all over the US (and the same is now happening with the Euro DMCA in member states of the European Union). If you could be subject to this law, you should make a stand now before it is too late.

Another one that slipped the cracks (see guys, you're giving me too much to do and not enough to eat...): Gordian Knot 0.28.6.1 has a working exit menu on the tray icon, comes with a new BeSweet version that fixes the finalize error, the DivX5 defaults now keep the selected pass number, XviD custom matrices can now be used and DVD Decrypter 3.1.7.0 is included as well. The Codec pack has also been updated and now includes the latest AC3Filter and DivX5.1. Nero CD Speed is an interesting application that can be used to measure quality of burned discs by looking at how fast a disc can be read (the slower, the more errors there are on the disc - assuming that the drive doesn't have other limitations). The latest version can measure C1 errors if the recorders support it, which gives a much more accurate measurement of the quality of a burned disc.

Plextor has released a new firmware for the PX-708 burner: It fixes some problems with mounting and PCs hanging when dealing with RW discs, the list of supported media has been extended and the writing performance has been increased.

Formerly known as DVD Plus Identifier, the DVD Identifier 3.0 now supports DVD-R/W discs (hence the name change), supports disc polling for smooth disc initialization and contains various smaller improvements.

Sony's upcoming dual format DVD burner, the DRU530A, is now listed on the Sony website. It has the same technical data as the Plextor 8x burner, thus 8x burning for DVD+R, 4x for DVD+RW/-R and 2x for DVD-RW. CD-R/W can be written at 40x/24x. I was visiting ITU Telecom World fair this weekend and found something interesting at the Microsoft booth: In their Windows CE section, they had a couple of Windows CE.NET based devices capable of playing WMV9 video. Besides the Samsung DVD player with integrated WMV support, they had 7 settop boxes for VOD services. Most devices used a standard 733 MHz Celeron processor which limits their playback capabilities somewhat. In fact, those devices are designed for streams of 1.5 MBit/s or lower, and resolutions up to D1 (720x480/576). Prices are as of yet unknown, but the devices should be ready for field trials in Q4 2003. They also had a €35'000 hardware real-time WMV9 encoder by Tandberg on display, which could be used by VOD providers to encode content on the fly. The settop boxes also supported TV playback and interactive services via Microsoft TV, which seems to indicate in which direction Microsoft is going to conquer the living room.

I completely forgot that GKnot 0.28.6 also contains a new version of Robot4Rip: Robot4Rip 0.5 supports DVD2AVIdg, ChapterXtractor is run before audio encoding and VobSub problems on Win98 should be resolved.

Universal is the first movie studio to use watermarking on a large scale. Starting in 2004 they will use a watermarking system developed by Verace on all their releases, starting from theatrical release to retail (VHS, DVD) and TV broadcasts. Verace also claims that their audio watermarking system has been adopted as worldwide standard by the music recording industry in 1999. Now, if the scheme works, it could help them track down leaks in the production process, leading to a movie being available on the Internet even before the DVD hits the retail shelves. For the end user, things essentially remain the same, as even if the Watermark is kept on a DVD rip, the watermark still has to be matched to a customer, and if you pick up a disc at your local Circuit City, who's going to know who got which disc. I'm also a bit skeptical about the audio watermarking. I'd think that if the claims were true, we'd have seen a lot of academic research into this scheme by now (and they'd possibly have to use the DMCA gag to prevent researchers from publishing how to defeat the scheme).

DVD Decrypter 3.1.7.0 implements proper Windows XP / 2003 autoplay functionality, has an extended debug mode, can read ADIP info from DVD+R/W discs, allows for a larger maximum buffer size and has better brute force CSS cracking. It also warns you if you're trying to write an ISO that's too large, supports the latest MDS file specification and ASCII list files, integrates into Windows Explorer, can remove PUOs from VOB files and it contains a bunch of bugfixes.

Apple has announced to support the DVD+R/W format in future releases of their operating systems. While certain MAC models have shipped with dual format burners that had the + burning part disabled, Apple now seems committed to support both formats although it has not yet announced updates for its DVD authoring applications.

In other news, the RIAA seems to have sued the wrong person yet again.

Gordian Knot 0.28.6 has a tray icon menu, improved auto & smart crop, the autosplit works with VDubMod 1.5.4.1 and later and DVD2AVI, VDubMod and BeSweet have been updated. CloneDVD 1.3.10.1 fixes block startcode errors and a lockout when writing the leadout on certain DVD burners.

On the subject of SafeDisc, you can find a detailed explanation of how it works in the forum.

Fair Use 0.32.9 fixes the drive not found and the freeze after the first XviD pass issues. Media Player Classic 6.4.6.7 fixes a Smacker decoding bug.

And an update on Macrovision's Fade system. It appears as if my initial announcement was incorrect. Fade is only a software component of the SafeDisc copy protection scheme used to protect computer games, and which has been around for a while. Now it appears as if they've added the "gradually disable game features" part into the copy protection and call this thing Fade. The idea behind Fade is in fact not new and has been used on a number of games released in the past year (maybe even longer, but I'm not an expert on copy protection for games so I don't have all the details). And I've gotten numerous questions from people wondering how SafeDVD works, but unfortunately I cannot answer this question as I'm not privy to that information and I could not find it anywhere. If you read my initial announcement again, you'll see that I myself am wondering how such a mechanism would work to begin with.

ReClock 1.2 has a new mode to detect the frame rate of a video clip, audio dropouts at the beginning of DVD playback should be fixed, the list of supported soundcards has been extended and the filter can be loaded instead of the standard audio output renderer, allowing players that don't like ReClock to still use the filter. BeSweet GUI 0.6 final has been released. The new BesweetNero features will be integrated in the upcoming 0.7 versions of the GUI. IfoEdit 0.96 fixes the negative audio delay bug, allows delay specification via PTS values and some issues with the chaptering support have been resolved. Media Player Classic 6.4.6.6 allows cutting of idx/sub files within the player, in DVD mode the auto hiding controls will only reappear if the cursor is moved to the bottom of the screen and the Smacker/Bink video format is supported. DVD2SVCD 1.2.1 build 3 fixes bugs in the forced subtitle, Scenarist and DVD CCE encoding area. VirtualDub 1.5.6 supports YV12 during fast recompress, the input video can be displayed in fast recompress for UYVY and YUY2 modes and there are a couple of bugfixes. And Nic has released a first version of his ReJig program. ReJig is a Windows GUI based MPEG-2 transcoding utility using compressed domain transcoding (as used in other one click tools). It is pretty fast and it's the first open source implementation available on the Windows platform.

On the DVD drive side, Sony has released a new firmware for the DRU500A burner which improves reading and writing performance and reliability and reduces vibrations for unbalanced discs. I've also been mailed the link to the changelog for the latest Plextor PX708A firmware.

A few days ago I posted a link to an article explaining how the copy protection system on the first protected audio CD available in the US market can be circumvented. Since then, the company that developed the copy protection mechanism first decided to sue the author (a Ph.D. student at Princeton University) under the DMCA because of his disclosure of the software components used. This caused widespread outrage and disbelief, because it could mean that any tool capable of reading a CD can be used to commit DMCA infractions and would thus be illegal, plus since pressing the shift key was enough to circumvent the copy protection, people have already started to imagine how the world would look like without a shift key on our keyboards. In the meantime, the company concerned, SunnComm Technologies, has decided to take a step back and not sue. In any case, this little episode is once again a wakeup call that lawmakers need to hear. And in the meantime, SunnComm has announced a new feature to their protection technology which should cut down on "casual copying" of CDs (making a copy of an original). The idea is to only allow a limited number of copies to be made from the original. Now, while I do not have a problem with a system like SCMS used on DAT, MiniDisc and standalone CD recorders (that system permits digital copies from the original, but no digital copies can be made from a copy), I think that limiting the number of copies from the original cannot work without seriously putting the consumer's rights into peril. If the number of copies are to be counted, a software component has to be used, effectively tying a CD to a specific PC, which is always problematic because PCs tend to change. Microsoft's activation scheme already gave you a preview of what can happen, and the entire DRM approach is only going to make things a lot worse.
And not all music studios seem to be equally opposed to music downloads: Go-Kart Records is even offering full albums for free download, hoping that people who like the music might go out and buy the CD or use their Paypal account to get some money to the artists.

Optorite's DD0401 is a dual format DVD burner, writing DVD+R at 8x, 4x for DVD+RW/-R and 2x for DVD-RW. CD-R/Ws can be burned at 40x/24x. Blu-ray discs seem to be quite popular with Japanese manufacturers: Next year, 2x recording should be possible, and the format's supporters are looking into different ways to store more data on the discs, and how to work without the disc cartridge, making it cheaper for production.

Macrovision has tentatively announced that they are going to bring their Fade copy protection systems currently employed for computer games to DVD. Fade uses bad sectors on the disc which copy tools take for read errors and try to correct. If those sectors are changed, the game will gradually deteriorate until it becomes unplayable. The DVD variant, called SafeDVD, should use a similar technique and be released next year. While I understand how this can work for computer games, I wonder how this will work for DVDs since there is no software that could gradually turn a disc into a useless piece of plastic.

Last but not least, Parks Associates have an interesting study on digital music, entitled Thinking Outside the Disc - Piracy, Digital Music, and the Future of the Recording Industry. It comes to the conclusion that the music industry could face extinction if they don't challenge their traditional business model of selling the same thing over and over again, and they suggest radical policy changes as free music downloads in exchange for advertising, and some less pleasant scenarios (mandatory DRM).

Time to catch up with some things that slipped through the cracks. ZoomPlayer 3.2 RC1 has been released - the changelog is available in the Inmatrix forums. eXtreme Movie Manager 2.0 b2 contains updated scripts for movies and actors. The Premiere Video Server Plugin 1.0 can launch the encoding program directly, has a new frameserver mode, can write the audio to your HD as WAV right at the start of the encoding session, supports BeSweet as AC3 encoder and AviSynth 2.5x. There is also a special TMPG plugin pack.

CEATEC continues to make headlines: Yesterday, Pioneer announced an A/V multichannel receiver that supports Windows Media Audio and TDK demo'ed a Blu-ray recorder that uses quadruple layer media, achieving up to 100GB of data on a single Blu-ray disc. However, that technology is currently far from entering production stage.

The CEATEC fair in Japan seems to be a good place to be if you're interested in DVD recording. Apparently, manufacturers like NEC and Sony are demonstrating their upcoming 8x DVD burners and disc manufacturers are showing their 8x DVD media while Mitsubishi and Rico are showcasing dual layer DVD+R media which can be written on a recorder shown by Philips. Dual layer DVD+R products are expected to hit the marketplace in spring 2004. The Blu-ray disc also seems to be gaining support, with Panasonic even showing dual layer Blu-ray discs, capable of holding up to 50 GB of data while the Blu-ray competition has AOD recorders and media on display.

In the area of consumer rights, US cable company Charter is challenging the RIAAs attempt to subpoena subscriber data (bravo!), a German court granting a temporary injunction banning the sale of Macrovision circumvention devices on grounds of the new German copyright directive (AKA DMCA written in German, in other words the law is just as consumer hostile as the original), and the first copy protected audio CD in the US isn't as protected as the industry thought.

CloneDVD 1.3.9.8 allows you to select the DVD writing speed, deselected titles can be removed completely, the IO system has been optimized (could mean improved speed), and some bugs have been fixed. IfoEdit is alive! Derrow has just announced a new beta version but which at this time is only available to the usual beta testers. And he'd like you to know that the tool known as CopiesAnything is an unauthorized distribution of his freeware software, so you should not give the company distributing it any money.

Then we have some DVD burner news: There is a new firmware for the Plextor PX-708A burner, currently without a changelog. Accesstek, a Taiwanese drive manufacturer announced an 8x/4x/4x/2x (DVD+R/W/-R/-RW) burner, which also supports Sanyo's high density recording mode for regular CD-Rs (HD-BURN). MSI is the majority owner of Accesstek, so we might see some MSI burners manufacturer by Accesstek in the near future. Nu Universe Tech has announced two DVD burners of their own. The DDW-081 is a half height DVD+R/W drive capable at writing DVD+R/W at 8x/4x, and CD-R/W at 40x/24x. The DDW-061 writes DVD+R at 6x, DVD+RW at 4x and CD-R/W at 40x/10x respectively. And now we have it officially, Pioneer has announced that they have developed dual layer DVD-R recording. Pioneer says the technology is ready to be commercialized, but wants to propose the technology as a new disc format to the DVD forum after further improving performance, so it might take a while until we see a product in stores.

Last but not least, you might recall that the MPAA is trying to ban screener DVDs. According to DVD-Recordable.net, studios themselves are also working on technologies to track screeners, together with DVD authoring companies. It remains to be seen if we'll see DVD screeners (or regular retail DVDs?) that contain effective watermarks. If I remember correctly, so far every Watermark scheme has been proven to be ineffective or crackable, so it will be interesting to see if the industry has come up with something that can hold up against academic researchers, or if they just use the DMCA to silence any such research, as has been done in the past when the RIAA put out watermarked audio files, and a US professor managed to beat the watermarking system, but was gagged via the DMCA.

VirtualDub 1.5.5 contains partial unicode support and a chroma smoother filter, allows single stream cut & paste, has an improved AVI parser, allows for audio filter plugins, has a new MPG-1 video core and the AVI2 indexing restrictions have been somewhat relaxed. Since this release uses a new way to display, the author has marked it as experimental. Pending final approvment I'll keep the old version in the download archive but you can still download the new version directly at sourceforge. BeSweet 1.5b22 now ships with the Nero AAC encoder plugin, allowing direct MPx/AC3 -> AAC encoding using the regular BeSweet syntax. An upcoming AAC machine should also support this functionality. Fair Use 0.32.8 has a more accurate file size prediction and an option to not use all the available CPU power. I also had an extended look at the new A/V containers discussion in my forum and noted some interesting developments in the Matroska container: The cross platform, commandline Matroska tools, mkvtoolnix have gotten a GUI, allowing you to easily access all the tool's functionality (and there's plenty of that), making it an interesting alternative to VirtualDubMod since it seems to offer the entire set of Matroska features. There is also a Matroska DirectShow filter allowing on-the-fly encryption and decryption of Matroska streams, and a Matroska Stream editor, allowing you to edit streams within Matroska files.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a report about the DMCA entitled Unintended Consequences: Five Years under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which outlines how the DMCA is abused by powerful organizations to serve their own goals and how it has a chilling effect on our society.

With MP4 gaining more momentum this is rather interesting: DSPGuru has released a new application combining BeSweet and nencode, the command line AAC encoder using Nero's built-in high quality AAC encoder into a single pass MPx/AC3 -> AAC encoder.

Do you remember EZ-D, the DVD that turns unreadable after 48 hours? According to Video Business, the format isn't doing too well in test markets (article requires free subscription). In other news, DivX maker DivXNetworks is apparently having some success in striking deals with the movie industry. They have apparently succeeded in winning 20th Century Fox as a partner for an online movie rental system, and airlines seem to be showing interest in DivX media players as well. In the opposite camp, it appears as if Samsung were to release a WMV capable DVD player in early 2004.

The latest version of the Deamon Tools supports external plugins to support 3rd party image formats, multiple language files and PDI image files (Instant Copy, Instant CD/DVD).

Now this could be a major one: Philips announced yesterday that it has developed dual layer DVD+R discs, which can hold as much data as a regular dual layer DVD-9 disc, or 8.5 GB. The joint venture between Philips and Mitsubishi Media will demonstrate the dual layer burning technology at the CREATEC Japan 2003 exhibitions from October 7 to 11. First recorders are expected some time in 2004. Maybe that explains the recent industry tendency towards the plus format. For fairness' sake I also have to mention that CDR-Info had an (imho very inconclusive and not supported by any source) article on Pioneer testing dual layer DVD-R recording.

Last but not least some news from the legal side: US Senator Coleman announced that he'll push for lower fines for P2P users and legislation that requires the RIAA to get a court order to get ISP subscriber data. Noble idea, let's hope the good senator sees this through when he's looking for contributors for his next campaign.

Now Pioneer has announced the specs of their latest DVD burner, the A07. There are no surprises in the DVD burning department: it writes DVD±R at 8x and DVD±RW at 4x, CD-R/W at 24x (now that's interesting.. most drives feature faster -R burning than -RW), and up to 12x DVD reading. Ahead has updated their Nero packages, containing both a new version of the main burning program and Nero Recode but unfortunately I was unable to find a changelog. There is a new version of DVDFab as well. As you might know, the application was sold, and now it reappears as a commercial software. The new beta version should be able to handle episodic DVDs and it costs 40 bucks. And what do you do if consumer hostile laws force software manufacturers to remove CSS decryption from their software? Offer a patch :)

Last but not least, the MPAA will no longer be sending out screener DVDs to members of the the academy who get screener DVDs to vote for movie awards (like the Oscars for instance). The official reason for this move is to crack down on piracy, however, independent studios think it's more about trying to drive them out of business. As jurors now have to watch the movies in a theater, movies that are only shown in a limited number of theaters (usually lower budget films - independent studios don't have that much money to start a movie in thousands of theaters at the same time) have a reduced chance of actually being noted.

It looks like the next 9 months will have quite some changes in stores for us: Samsung announced yesterday to release an 8x DVD burner, the SR-P80B, in December. It is a dual burner, writing DVD+R at 8x and DVD-R at 4x. Samsung also tends to release a 16x DVD burner as early as July 2004, and they intend to drop support for the DVD-RAM format, which is quite popular in Asia. Around the same timeframe, Samsung also plans to switch out the standard IDE interface for Serial-ATA, finally bringing S-ATA to other devices than harddisks.

DVD-Recordable also has a news story on BenQ, which seems to indicate that BenQ believes that the DVD+ format would dominate the market in the near future. This agrees with a report published by a German magazine last months, and Samsung's own statements on this issue.

Last but not least, I'm gearing up for a complete section of one click tool guides, so here's a guide on Nero Recode and elby's CloneDVD. Stay tuned for more...