If you thought HD DVD was big, think again: Last Monday, researchers from the London Imperial College have presented a disc having the same physical size as a DVD but which can store up to 1 Terabyte of Data (that's 1000 - or 1024 depending on if it's marketing people or computer science people writing down the numbers ;) GBs - quite a bit more than HD DVD and BluRay. The whole thing is called Multiplexed Optical Data Storage. However, it'll be a long long while until this technology is ready for the market: the inventors think it might happen in between 2010 and 2015.

The Pirate Act has taken the next hurdle: The law aimed to bring criminal prosecution against filesharer has just passed the House of Representatives and has been sent up to the Senate.

Now it's not only the DVD Forum: NEC, Sanyo, Toshiba and Memory-Tech have founded a group to promote HD DVD called the HD DVD Promotion Group. The organization is currently in preparatory status and will be officially founded in spring 2005, after which it'll be open for other members to join. And while there already are BluRay recorders on sale (at least in Japan), HD DVD recorders are still missing, but now NEC has announced an integrated chipset that would permit 2x HD DVD Recording / Reading. The plan is to have the first recorders out some time in 2005 so they seem to be on track..

And another thing we don't need: Japan's Taiyo Yuden is the first company to bring CPRM (a copy protection and management system) to DVD-Rs (so far it was limited to rewritable DVD discs).

A question often asked by people not using MPC and not having a commercial software DVD player installed is how to play DVDs using their favorite media player. You need MPEG-2/Dolby Digital decoding filters. The latest ffdshow builds can handle MPEG-1/2 content and ship with an audio decoder, another option would be gplmpgdec - also open source - and AC3filter.

While the large majority of the world is happy with DVD and sitting back and watching for a final decision for the next-gen format (there are two players: HD DVD and Blu-Ray - just as there were two players for today's digital video discs, eventually the two teams got together and created a single format now known as DVD), the video disc format battles are much more real in China and Taiwan. China's EVD, which so far didn't have much success, is now being attacked by HVD (High-definition Versatile Disc), a high def video disc format. HVD players are twice as expensive as EVD players (which in turn is 2.5 times as expensive as a DVD player), and about 10 new movies are released on HVD every week. One of the format's main promoters, Beijing K-City expects to shop 100'000 players in 94.

Yesterday I mentioned that the record industry reaps record benefits from online music sales. Other players are not as happy: Apple is complaining that the current cost structure doesn't really make an online music store profitable. I guess things would be different if the RIAA charged the same royalties they get for CDs ;)

That's going to sting: A New York judge threw out a court case about selling bootleg records as he believes the federal law against selling bootlegs grants "seemingly perpetual protection" to the original performances, and can therefore not stand. Needless to say that our friends from the RIAA are not very pleased - after all that's the kind of law they like - copyright protection forever and then some.

It was about time somebody picked up on it: UK's The Independent has a story on how record labels make more money on music from online stores than from CDs sold in stores - despite being a lesser product. In fact, the royalties studios get are almost twice as high, as what they get from CDs.

Last but not least, here's an interesting ad on the Induce Act. It seems that some conservatives finally realized that they're the guys who are all about less government.

Auto Gordian Knot 1.60 can launch AutoGK Assistant, now includes the FDecimate.dll with the installer and has a hidden file option that allows for better placement of burned-in subtitles.

If you've been wondering about the audio codecs that are to be used on upcoming high definition DVD formats, you should wonder no more: The DVD Forum Steering Committee has decided the following audio codecs are mandatory on HD DVD: Dolby Digital Plus, DTS Plus Plus, 2 channel MLP (lossless), and DTS++ lossless is optional. In addition, the 12x and 16x DVD-R specs have been finalized, along with the 6x DVD-RW specs. A dual layer DVD-R spec version has also been approved, but since no recording speed is known yet, it might not be the last until dual layer DVD-Rs actually start appearing (while we're at the subject: the 8x DVD+R DL specs should be finalized in January 05). Work is also progressing on HD DVD-RW and HD DVD-R, with the former already having reached version 1.0 status. Here's the full list of issues treated at the meeting.

DVD Rebuilder 0.62 has an option under the help menu that will display the versions of support versions being used and contains a fix for stuttering problems when using QuEnc as encoder.

Here it goes: You might remember when I reported about the music industry getting all weepy about the fact that certain still lucrative pieces of music would soon enter public domain in Europe, as their copyright protection is about to run out. Universal Music President John Kennedy, who is about to become head of the IFPI (the "world RIAA"), vows to fight to extend copyright protection in Europe beyond the 50 years. I guess overcharging us, then screwing paying customers from behind for 50 years isn't long enough ;)

Meanwhile, some organizations that still care about our rights as honest paying customers, have issued a declaration on the future of the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization). The last round of WIPO treaties, which ended up giving us such important and beneficial legislation as the DMCA, is to be followed up by even more restrictive intellectual property legislation once they meet again on September 30th.

DVD Rebuilder 0.61 fixes errors #0003 and 0004 (safe for those that are cased by invalid source files).

Ahead has released yet another set of Nero packages. There's no changelog yet, and package 2, which contains Recode, is still missing - some think that's a sign that NeroDigital with H.264 supports is imminent but I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Speaking of NeroDigital, ESS, one of the main chipset makers for DVD players that can handle MPEG-4 content, has just announced to support NeroDigital with their chipsets. So I guess that means ESS based players will be able to handle the MP4 container and 5.1 HE AAC in the future - though there's no new chipset on the horizon yet (and keep in mind that the current ESS chipsets aren't quite state of the art).

While dual layer DVD blanks are still in short supply, we'll get more layers with our next DVD format: Sony is about to demo 8 layer BluRay discs that will have a capacity of 200GB per disc. No plans have been made with regards to a possible commercialization, but Sony plans to release a 4 layer 100 GB version to the market in 2007.

DVD Rebuilder 0.60b fixes an error which resulted in CCE 2.67.0.27 trial users getting the wrong ECL settings.

ProgDVB 4.44 contains a few fixes (for which I could not find any more detailed explanation..)

DVD ReBuilder 0.60 corrects yet another error in the SCR/PTS computation that could cause audio dropouts and stutters as well as cause error #0003 and #0004, has improved CCE version checking and thus should now support all CCE SP retail versions, no longer processes filesets after a multiangle error has been received (DVD-RB still doesn't handle multiangle titles), and an error that could lead to the latest 40ms of audio missing at the end of a movie has been fixed.

NuMenu4u RC build2 now saves the logfile to the working directory, checks for corrupt IFO files, updates color palettes properly even if a cell is used in different PGCs, the default output directory can be set to any drive root or the my documents folder, stills can now be re-encoded, CCE is run in batches of 75 which increases encode time, the sub and button highlights are more accurate thanks to special versions of vsrip and vsconv, DVD Decrypter is no longer run twice, cells are removed if more than 50% of a video stream has dummy cells, SoftEncode (an AC3 encoder) is now supported for audio encoding, CRC errors in audio files can be fixed and the GUI includes a progress bar. There's also a list of bugfixes and changes and you can find the full changelog in the forum.

BSPlayer 1.02 fixes some bugs left over in v1.01.

Last but not least, it's been a while but has apparently gone quite unnoticed: The latest version of Nero Recode supports H.264 decoding (encoding is not quite done yet but one of the next versions of Recode will indeed include H.264 encoding, and a good encoder at that), has a new high quality mode, supports non DVD input (AVI, AVS, MPG, MOV, WMV, VOB), can set chapter marks for non DVD input, multiple audio and subtitle files in a NeroDigital file are now possible, NeroDigital files can be split at an arbitrary size and square pixel DAR is now supported as well.

Want to put a DivX video on your website and have people watch it without downloading it first? The DivX browser plugin, currently in beta test, does just that.

And those people looking to always squeeze a bit more data on a DVD-R might enjoy this: Korean disc manufacturer BeAll have announced their DVD-R EX (Extreme eXtended) DVD-R media, which offer 4.85GB of space, rather than the traditional 4.7GB. The new discs should hit the stores at the end of September.

PVAStrumento 2.1.0.11 clears all associated parameters when the composite display flag is cleared, and the make PS bug should be resolved.

While the DVD+ camp has had a huge headstart when it comes to dual layer media (the writer of this lines has a burner that can write DVD+R DL discs at up to 4x speed), DVD-R DL will be on the agenda of the DVD forum meeting next month. And Pioneer plans the release of 4x DVD-R DL capable A09 in December (but first the specs would have to be finalized, Pioneer has been holding back hardware until the specs were all settled before).

AutoGK 1.57 has better support for TS sources, supports the reduction of 60/50fps sources down to 24/25/30 fps, has a working threshold detection for small hybrid sources and fixes some small bugs and typos in the log file.

PgcEdit 0.3.4 has a new toolbar, can display calling commands for each PGC and give a list of all unreferenced PGCs, also comes as a standalone executable for Linux users and there are a lot more minor enhancements and bugfixes.

PVAStrumento 2.1.0.10 can clear the composite display flag, can handle Terratec DVB-T files and fixes a couple of bugs.

ProjectX 0.81.8.01 fixes a bug that would result in dreambox TS segments not being combined properly and probably a bunch of others but I seem to be unable to locate the release note of the previous builds.

DVD Rebuilder 0.59 allows you to enable the high quality mode and enable scene change detection in QuEnc and it fixes a bunch of bugs.

FairUse 0.93 should fix all drive detection issues.

BSPlayer 1.01 remembers EQ preamp values, has a font smoothing option for subtitles, has a boss button, supports VMR9 renderless mode, shortcuts can be defined globally, a new movie function has been added that will put the movie at the top, subtitles at the bottom and enables pan&scan if required. Finally, a bunch of bugs have also been eliminated.

Last but not least, if you speak Turkish and would like to see a Doom9 mirror in your native language, please volunteer now and help getting the Turkish mirror up and running.

AutoGK 1.56 allows you to blow up the movie (as in making the output resolution larger than the input), the DVD/File mode setting is saved upon exiting, the 45 minute timeout during indexing is no longer applied to the last element of an encoding queue, and the latest version of KernelDeInt is included.

Digitimes often reports tidbits on the DVD burner and disc market which I normally have a hard time putting into a story, yet they often contains interesting bits of information. For instance, one of their recent articles mentions OEM prices of DVD blanks by one of the major Taiwanese disc makers - CMC. It shows that the OEM price for a dual layer disc is 8 - 10 times as much as the price of a 8x DVD+R disc (which currently makes up 90% of their total production), and more than 5 times as much as 16x DVD+R discs.

DVD ReBuilder 0.58 fixes error 9 that can occur immediately at the start of an encode, supports all CCE SP 2.67 retail versions and fixes another issue that could cause audio/video problems on some standalone players. As usual, you can discuss this release in the forum.

DivX 5.2.1 and Dr. DivX 1.06 are out. The changelog is basically the same as for the beta release but now it's official.

Cuttermaran 1.60 - an MPEG-2 editing application for those who don't recognize the name - now supports PCM and DTS audio, can detect new program versions, supports a set of stream names in CLI mode and fixes a bug where the actual cut didn't match the preview.

Will the RIAA and Co. have to eat their own poison now? Their user tracking habits may infringe a patent by Altnet, that describes a means to identify content on P2P networks via fingerprint (hashes). I haven't seen the patent yet, and while there may be some ground to doubt the validity of this patent (after all hashing has been around for a while), wouldn't it be nice if the RIAA and its goons would be beaten at their own game? The lawsuit also covers companies who spam P2P networks with fake songs in an attempt to tire potential downloaders.

Meanwhile, efforts to make copyright infringement a criminal offense rather than a civil one (meaning the feds will have to come after you and the RIAA/MPAA can sit back and enjoy the show - and you as taxpayers even have to pay the bill for it all) has taken one step ahead and has been approved by the House Judiciary Committee. Do I even have to mention that the chairman of that committee is taking money from the RIAA?

Aren't they nice with us now? Sony, creator of the key2audio copy protection system (or, perhaps as Philips would unofficially put it: makers of a piece of plastic not worthy of a CD logo because it's as broken as it can get) has come up with a new way to "empower" buying customers. Under their key2audioXS scheme, you can once again make copies of audio CDs, but those copies are once again protected with the same system and those copies can no longer be duplicated. Now wait a tick, have you ever heard of SCMS? That's right, the system they enforced on all digital audio systems, and that only permits one generation of copies. It's been around since the DAT age, but the music industry has started dismantling that Imho perfectly fair system when they came up with their broken CDs (copy protected CDs) and at the same time set the SCMS flag to make your DAT/MiniDisc/CD recorder think your pristine original is in fact already a copy and may not be copies. So what they praise as giving customers more right is in fact only the return to the status and freedom we enjoyed before.

Last but not least, check out Stanford Law professor Mark Lemley paper on Intellectual property. He argues that there is a huge difference between physical and intellectual property, and that benefiting from other's intellectual property is often the best way to form a free and creative society.

VirtualDub 1.6 allows you to select YUV formats for en/decompression, contains preliminary DirectX9 display driver support as well as OpenGL support, frame seeking is now incremental which should prevent the application from hanging when preloading clips with long keyframe distances, the new position slider displays frame number markers and supports mouse wheel scrolling, JPEG image sequence input/output is now supported, a DV video decoder has been integrated, audio in DV type-1 files can now be decoded, there's a native AMD64 build and last but not least a bunch of bugs have been ironed out as well. The author considers this new release as experimental, so you may want to keep the old version just in case.

Fair Use 0.92 is out. It fixes occasional hanging during preview navigation, comes bundled with XviD 1.0.2 and there's an option to allow any characters in the project/path name. As usual, you can't get an unlimited build from the official homepage, but you'll find that build in my forum.

And here's yet another MPEG-4 AVC / H.264 codec: Germany's Fraunhofer institute has released a 30 day evaluation version of their MPEG-4 video/audio toolkit. There's not only a video codec, but also a HE-AAC audio encoder, and a player to play the MP4 output their toolkit creates.

GPAC 0.2.0 is an MPEG-4 system toolkit that does a lot of stuff in the MPEG-4 specs you'll have a hard time finding anywhere else...

Guess we won't see cheap 16x and dual layer DVD blanks soon. While the discs are slowly making their way into the marketplace, so far only the major brand players have managed to get their discs certified and are thus ready for production. Many of the smaller players, those that actually drive prices down, have only just managed to get their 8x blanks certified, so it'll take them a while to catch up.

Last but not least, Bertelsmann, the world's 4th largest media company, has generated a huge profit in the first half of 2004. The driving factors behind the profit were their music and television businesses. Now perhaps you're as confused as I am, as Bertelsmann, through their RIAA associates, is feeding us all this "we're about to go bankrupt because everybody downloads music off P2P services rather than buying it" lines. How can they make more money if nobody buys their music?

So here it is, Koepi's XviD 1.0.2 binary.

VCDEasy 2.0.3 supports more CD burners, uses SPTI as default disc access method in WinNT/W2K/XP, supports chapter file drag&drop to create chapters (ChapterXtractor and SmartRipper chapter files are supported), and there are some bugfixes and minor tweaks as well.

One less to go: Starting next month, Spain will join the ranks of countries where your rights in the digital age no longer mean squat. On October 1st, Spain's implementation of the Euro Copyright Directive (AKA the Euro DMCA) goes into effect. Other EU countries will follow eventually. Just for the sake of argument, let's assume for a second that those laws be implemented by the letter and interpreted according to the will of RIAA/MPAA & CO and that every infringer gets the maximum sentence. I wonder what having half of Europe and the US in prison would do to the benefit of those beforementioned organizations. While you can't really buy too many entertainment products while in prison, I'm sure they'd come up with a reason to blame all this on the already incarcerated too ;)

AutoGK 1.54 comes bundled with XviD 1.0.2 and AviSynth 2.5.5, keeps 60fps sources at their original framerate or converts them to 24fps if it can be done properly, the resizing parameters have been tuned for highly compressible sources, stream comments are removed in file mode and the log file no longer contains most of the VDubMod logging unless a hidden file option is used to enable those log entries.

MyTheatre 3.19 RC3 can display subs in generic renderer mode, can capture raw streams using plugins, supports a bunch of new cards and contains a bunch of bugfixes as well.

So much about impending doom for the music industry: at least the BMI, an organization representing songwriters, composers and music publishers is reporting record revenues again (it's been going on like that for a decade). Of course, the yapping still continues. This time it's about software that allows you to record satellite radio. Certainly a good and reasonable thing for consumers, RIAA and Co. see it as a bunch of Imps and worse leading to their DOOM(TM;)

Last but not least, while DVD burners capable of writing discs at up to 16x speed are already available, the appropriate discs are not far behind. Verbatim has just announced their 16x disc offering - though it'll take some time for the disc to actually show up in stores. Verbatim expects the discs to become widely available only in November.

The Matroska folks have also been busy while I was on holidays: The Matroska Pack 1.0.3 comes with the latest ffdshow without any encoding functionality, includes filters for TTA encoding and decoding, the installer checks for the existence of a RealVideo decoder and offers to install one if none is present, and of course all the included filters are up-to-date.

mkvtoolnix - THE Matroska toolkit - has also been updated. Version 0.9.5 fixes many bugs, supports a few new Matroska flags, tries to guess the MIME type for an attachment based on the file extension (if no MIME type was given), processing is not started if the output filename is equal to one of the input filenames and chapters can be extracted as CUE sheets.

Most of you have probably not even noticed, but I was away on holidays since August 19th and just got back. Many thanks to Scipio and Swede for taking care of the site and forum during my absence. While there was not as much news as there could've been, we'll catch up right now. As for the emails and PMs that I still have to reply to, I hope to get that done shortly.

XviD 1.02 is available. It fixes a memory leak in the VFW front-end, fixes broken b-frame decoding, has better motion vector clipping for broken streams and fixes a thread safety problem in the C iDCT implementation. The usual Koepi binary is not available yet, but for those who cannot / do not want to make their own binary, you can find a binary by celtic druid.

AutoGK 1.53 displays hidden options used and files that are being processed in the log, the file mode supports 24fps sources, a new hidden file option has been added to override audio stream selection in file mode and TS sources are handled more properly.

DVD Rebuilder 0.57a supports QuEnc 0.52 and later, has a modified SCR algorithm to more accurately reproduce the structure of the original disc and it can log to files in addition to logging to the log window.

DivXNetworks has released a beta version of their upcoming DivX 5.2.1 release. The new beta fixes problems with Windows XP Service Pack 2, allows to install (or not) a generic MPEG-4 playback component upon installation and it fixes a series of bugs in both encoder and decoder.

AviSynth 2.5.5 can serve videos over a LAN, can change the speed of an audio channel without changing the pitch, comes with a huge number of color presets, contains a bunch of optimizations for many functions and fixes many bugs. For a full list of changes, please visit the forum.

QuEnc 0.54 properly supports aspect ratios, the bad parameter window now tells you which parameter is not supported and the libavcodec DLL is the officially suggested one. Speaking of libavcodec, there's a modified DLL available that has an improved quantizer scaling routines (more constant quality), resolves buffer underflow problems, adheres better to the bitrate set, supports three pass encoding and fixes the pulsating picture problem. Not all of those points are 100% implemented yet, but you can get a work in progress DLL in the forum. The DLL also works with QuEnc 0.54.

Scenaid 1.0 prerelease 7 fully supports button over video, logs more information to help diagnose problems, assets will no longer be encoded if they already exist (this allows a speedy restart if processing has been aborted at some point), and Scenarist import is now fully automatic.

VOB Blanker 1.4.0.1 comes with a help file, can process a PGC using a cell based selection, can convert pre commands into post ones, the IFO processing is now being logged and audio in the IFO is deactivated if an audio stream is being stripped. There are also a lot of bugfixes.

Microsoft has released the final version of their Windows Media Player 10. It comes with the full version of the Fraunhofer MP3 encoder, thus allowing you to encode MP3s at bitrates up to 320kbit/s (prior releases of WMP only supported low quality bitrates). The player also introduces the Multimedia Transfer Protocol to enable the player to communicate with portable music players. MTP is Janus enabled (Janus is MS' next gen DRM system) and will be heavily used in the upcoming MS online music store.

The BluRay disc association, following the path of the HD DVD supporters, has now approved both H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC and Microsoft's VC-1 (AKA WMV-HD - I'm not sure what the difference between VC-9 and VC-1 is though) as video codecs for their prerecorded discs. I guess a statement by Microsoft saying their future Windows versions will fully support BluRay discs is forthcoming then ;)

Pinnacle has released an update for their InstantCopy 8 product. Version 8.3.0.4 fixes many issues, displays the progress during the analyzation phase, supports dual layer DVD recordable discs, can shut down the PC after processing, runs in idle priority mode when minimized, allows access to hidden options by pressing Ctrl-Shift-F12 in the advanced DVD settings and it supports AC3 encoding. You can find the full changelog in the forum.

Ateme, makers of the MPEG-4 codec used in Nero's Recode application, has started a semi-public beta test of their upcoming H.264 encoder (which will be integrated in future versions of Nero Recode). For more info on the codec and how to sign up, visit the forum. Please note that only experienced testers will be approved.

DVBPortal 1.2 has an alphablended OSD, a video mixer, can display EPG current/next information, has an extended MDAPI interface, an improved automation interface and ships with the latest SkyAVC filter.

A while back (just before I left for my holiday, so the message only reached me now), I mentioned the NCTU-AAC encoder. The audio pros from Hydrogenaudio have done their own testing and do not agree at all with the quality assessment made by the creators of this codec.

Last but not least, iFree is yet another tool to remove the DRM restrictions from tunes bought at Apple's iTunes store.

In response to much opposition to the Induce Act, including the launch of a Don't Induce Act by electronic manufacturers, the US Copyright Office is now proposing a slightly less drastic version of the Induce Act, but that still goes too far. And since when is it the task of a governmental agency to propose laws to help the entertainment industry? I thought in a democracy it was up to the legislative organ (thus the US congress in this case) to propose laws.

Last month's news can be found here.