DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 174

29 November, 2009

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

A very short WNR this week mainly thanks to what Americans call Thanksgiving. No idea what it means here in Australia, but apparently it's something to do with pilgrims, turkey eating and insane shoppers going crazy on "Black Friday". The other reason for the short blog is that I'm down with the cold or flu or whatever is it that is making me feel like crap and sneezing and coughing like a bastard.

There's basically only copyright news that I managed to find this week. Fox Studios loves the French style three-strikes system. They are lobbying the US government hard in order to get a similar system for the US. When Fox agrees with something the French did, you know you're in a world of trouble.

Reading the pleas of Fox Studios, it reminded me of something I had read earlier in the week in a news article about free music, and whether it was the better way to fight piracy than legal action. The article raises some interesting points, about whether lost profits are really lost profits if the people downloading illegal music have never and will never buy music, even if piracy has been wiped out. It also argues that perhaps the biggest downloaders of illegal music, the music lovers, are also buyers of music. I think I posted something here recently about a study or survey that showed exactly this, that people who download music illegally actually buy more music than people who have never downloaded illegal music. So instead of trying to stop piracy, which personally I believe is impossible, content owners like Fox Studios should be trying to work with the situation and find way to convert illegal downloads into legal downloads. Convert, not coerce. The studios tend to think that people are downloading illegally because it's available, whereas in many situations, people are downloading illegally because they can't afford to do so legally (the old "it would take $30,000 to fill an iPod" stat) or they can't do so easily. And it's not like the studios were that enthusiastic about the whole online music thing, other than their excitement over the DRM being used. The fact that the company that owns the world's largest online music store is a computer company and not a studio, shows what a missed opportunity it was for the music industry, while they were fretting over frivolous matters such as DRM. And thanks to the now DRM-free iTunes and other services, legal downloads are becoming easier to find and easier to pay for. But even with these improvements, the question of affordability hasn't really been addressed.

The latest services, like Spotify, offer free music in exchange for ads. Pretty much how radio stations work. Spotify also offers an ad-free subscription model, and other companies (again, none backed by studios) have gotten in on the act. Greed will ensure a battle between Spotify and studios over licensing fees at some stage, which could make the free model unworkable. But all Spotify does is try to bring music to more people, by making the price reasonable, and doing so using digital technology which has minimal costs and overheads and zero duplication costs, unlike a physical thing like a CD. If the studios are to be believed, then only 1 out of 10 people may be downloading music legally. Their plan is to wipe out illegal music, but without price reductions and other incentives, do they really think the 9 people will automatically switch to legal purchases even though they probably can't afford it. Or will it simply drive people away from music, the same people who now have a wide variety of digital entertainment to choose from. It is true that you will never get 10 out of 10 people to buy music, no matter how cheap it is (if they can't afford it, they can't afford it), but if you can get an additional 4 people to download out of 10, making it 5 out of 10, by dropping prices to a quarter of what they are today, wouldn't that be worth it – in this scenario, the studios are set to rake in a 25% increase in profits, and that's assuming the lower price *won't* make buyers buy more music, that they will simply still buy the same number of songs and albums by spending a quarter of their original amount (human psychology indicates this is highly unlikely, and what's more likely is that as songs get cheaper, people will buy more songs and may even spend more than they did originally). Another advantage of a digital library is that there will never be a case where albums are out of print, as cost prohibitive reasons for out of print titles no longer exist when it's simply a 100 MB file stored on a server somewhere that can be accessed if and when necessary. Just from sales of obscure albums and other out of print items, the studios are set to rake in huge amounts of money, and yet they prefer to throw away their money at politicians to get "three-strikes".

And governments are not the only people profiting from the studios lack of vision. As reported here before, anti-piracy agencies and the law firms they employ have made a science out of extracting funds from suspected pirates, and now know exactly who to go after and how to maximize profits. One such method I mentioned recently was to accuse people of illegally downloading porn (not to be confused with the much more serious act of downloading illegal porn), an embarrassing act that, even if the downloader is unaware of the act, is too afraid of it being brought up in court and subsequently pay the "fine", or the settlement fee. In other words, law firms are threatening to make public certain embarrassing facts, even if they may not be true, unless the individual in question pay up to make the thing go away. The most famous UK law firm to be involved in this, ACS:Law, is set to send out 15,000 of these notices soon. The fees in question are usually ten or more times more than the actual cost of the illegally downloaded content in question, and a large chunk of it does not go to the owners of the content at all. One anti-piracy agency has reportedly said that this is much more profitable than actually stopping piracy, and it's hard to argue against the economics.

While I've said that stopping piracy is impossible, content owners have at least had some success against torrent sites of late. Last week, The Pirate Bay's tracker went offline for the last time ever. This week, the entire illegal parts of Mininova was brought down, thus removing one of the best sources of illegal torrents on the Internet. But will piracy stop, or even be slowed down? I doubt it. Just like The Pirate Bay's lack of a tracker, the most important thing torrent sites offer is the organization and categorization of potential downloads – even the torrent file themselves are not too important, since all that's now needed is an URL to start a download (magnet links). And this respect, the closing of Mininova is a big victory for content owners. For it to be a lasting victory in the war against downloads, one has to assume that a new Mininova, itself invented to cope with the loss of Suprnova, doesn't spring up tomorrow, hosted in a country and by people that the RIAA or MPAA will find it hard to reach. If this happens, then the huge victory might turn into a huge defeat if all it resulted in is the creation of a more resilient enemy.

The Australian AFACT vs ISP iiNet court case concluded last week, after closing statements by iiNet. A summary of what went on can be found here. The judge is not expected to hand down a decision until next year though, so we won't know whether the AFACT's arguments that ISPs be held responsible for combating piracy will hold up against iiNet's arguments that it puts an unfair (and possibly illegal) burden on ISPs to act as copyright cops. If I had to guess a verdict, I would have to say that it will be a win for the AFACT. Too many government around the world have already made it clear that the legal and financial burden of anti-piracy lies with ISPs, and not content owners, and it will have to be a pretty brave or knowledgeable judge to not be influenced by the "money is no object" preparation of the case by the AFACT.

And as mentioned before, there's not much in terms of HD news or gaming news, other than the fact that I picked up a few bargains in your American Black Friday Blu-ray sales, some of the bargains are still available as I type (see here for links). My impression of this year's Black Friday sales, from Australia and looking at Amazon, is that it seemed a bit subdued. There were some good bargains, but nothing that screamed "must-have", although the focus on Blu-ray is much more intense than it was last year. All of this should have an affect on Blu-ray sales, and I can see one of these weeks Blu-ray breaking the 20% market share barrier thanks to one of the hit releases and sales. Does this mean Blu-ray is now mainstream? It's hard to define just what "mainstream" means, but I think Blu-ray is definitely no longer in the domain of early adopters and home theater enthusiasts, although it is still some way away from the same kind of mainstream popularity that DVDs enjoy.

See you next week.

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3. Weekly Software Roundup

November 29, 2009	TS-Packet-Viewer 0.87 Freeware
November 29, 2009	TS-Doctor 1.0.4 Beta Freeware
November 29, 2009	RipBot264 1.14.6 Freeware
November 29, 2009	Womble MPEG Video Wizard DVD 5.0.0.101
November 29, 2009	DVD slideshow GUI 0.9.3.1 Freeware
November 29, 2009	multiAVCHD 3.0 Build 718 Freeware
November 28, 2009	Mp3tag 2.45a Freeware
November 28, 2009	PlayClaw 1.7 build 699
November 28, 2009	Winclipdvb 3.0.1 Freeware
November 28, 2009	Preferred Filter Tweaker for Windows 7 2.2 Freeware
November 28, 2009	SmallDVD 2.1 Freeware
November 28, 2009	DeVeDe 3.15.0 Freeware
November 28, 2009	Windows 7 Codecs 2.1.9 Freeware
November 28, 2009	Vista Codec x64 Components 2.2.4 Freeware
November 28, 2009	Vista Codec Package 5.4.9.5 Freeware
November 28, 2009	x264 r1352 Freeware
November 27, 2009	Quick Media Converter 4.0.0.0 Freeware
November 27, 2009	ProgDVB 6.24.1 Freeware
November 27, 2009	ConvertXtoDVD 4.0.6.316
November 27, 2009	DGMPGDec 1.5.7 Freeware
November 27, 2009	MKVToolnix 2.9.9 Freeware
November 26, 2009	MPEG-2 Transport Stream packet analyser 2.1.0.1 Freeware
November 26, 2009	ffdshow Rev. 3136 Freeware
November 26, 2009	DivX Codec 7.2.2
November 26, 2009	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 2009.11.25
November 26, 2009	BurnAware Free Edition 2.4.2 Freeware
November 25, 2009	PopCorn MKV AudioConverter 1.79.5 Freeware
November 24, 2009	MKVtools 2.2.4 Freeware
November 24, 2009	WinMPG Video Convert 8.9.8.3
November 24, 2009	Collectorz.com Movie Collector For Mac OS X 3.3.1
November 24, 2009	Collectorz.com Movie Collector 6.5.1
November 24, 2009	VideoSpec 0.8.2 Freeware
November 24, 2009	OpenShot Video Editor 0.9.54 Developer Preview Freeware
November 24, 2009	Ut Video Codec Suite 7.0.2 Freeware
November 23, 2009	DVDStyler 1.8.0 beta 1 Freeware
November 23, 2009	XBMC media center Camelot XBMC 9.11 Beta1 Freeware
November 23, 2009	XviD4PSP 5.0.37.6 FCP Freeware
November 23, 2009	Fraps 3.0.3

======END OF LIVEUPDATE NEWSLETTER======

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 173

22 November, 2009

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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1. Introduction

• Womble EasyDVD Competition 
  

2. Weekly News Roundup

Just a reminder that our Womble EasyDVD competition is still open for entries. Since the competition was posted, Womble has actually released a new version of their MPEG Video Wizard DVD software, and the first prize of this competition include this latest version, which has basically combined the features of all of Womble's previous software titles (not including EasyDVD, of course) into the same package (so no more "DVD-less" version of MVW, and MPEG2VCR). Not a huge news week, but there were some follow-ups to previous news stories.

First up in copyright news, a recent trend has seen companies take advantage of the one sided copyright laws around the world to make money from "stopping" piracy. It's actually not so much stopping, as that wouldn't be good for business, but rather, using legal threats to get people to cough up. I posted about companies like DigiProtect and DigiRights Solutions doing exactly this sort of thing, and refining their business down to a fine art in terms of who to threaten, based on their ability and willingness to pay up, for example.

The funny thing was that most of the information I found in regards to these organisations were from interviews and presentations that people from these companies gave, quite openly. Obviously, there are still large parts of what they do that these companies would still rather keep secret. But secrets have a way to become well known facts thanks to the Internet, and now we have leaked documents showing us the inner workings of such an operation. One thing revealed was that, due to bad publicity, one law firm has already pulled out of this business, but it appears most of their staff went to a new law firm that obviously didn't mind the bad publicity. Another thing revealed is the strategy to sue people who downloaded pirated porn, as the extra embarrassment and the instinct for most people to want to make the issue go away, whether they downloaded the porno or not, becomes extra incentive for people to pay the required amount. From everything that's been released, leaked or public confessions, it's clear that these companies prey on people's fears of lawsuits, or public embarrassment, in order to maximize profit. But if these companies are acting within the law, then there's nothing legally wrong with what they're doing, even if it feels like bullying. It's the laws themselves that allow for these things to happen, and it will continue to happen as long as these laws are biased towards one side.

And so the bullying goes on. Michael Fricklas, general cousel at Viacom,  has even admitted that suing downloaders is bullying. With the resources available to mega corporations like Viacom, suing individuals is the kind of one sided fight that really isn't a fight at all. "Terrorism", is what Mr. Fricklas called it. In the same candid discussion to a bunch of students at Yale, Mr. Fricklas also attacked DRM, at least the older kinds, as "really bad", preferring fair use as the way forward. It's all very nice to hear, but this is from the same company that is suing YouTube for people who upload videos that help to promote Viacom's content, so you'd have to take all of this with a grain of salt. Obviously suing YouTube/Google is a bit more challenging and less like bullying than suing an individual, but YouTube now allows for "fair use" with its profit sharing programs, so why hasn't Viacom dropped their lawsuit?

Speaking of lawsuits, the Australian AFACT vs iiNet trial continues, with closing statements by iiNet being made over last week. For those that haven't been keeping track, the lawsuit centers around movie studios wanting to make ISPs responsible for their customer's downloads, unless the ISPs act as copyright cops for the studios. The week 5 update thread for the trial is here. iiNet is at least making a stand, unlike ISPs in the US that have already bowed to the demands of the RIAA to pass on infringement notices to customers, the latest major ISP to do so is Verizon. The notices are designed to scare people enough so they stop downloading, but as such, Verizon and co have no plans to pass on customer details to the RIAA, and the RIAA has not indicated that they wish to pursue individual in court, something they've already said they would stop doing. So just how much fear these infringement notices will instill is debatable, unless the RIAA is really naive enough to think that some of the downloaders are actual unaware that what they're doing is illegal, and that these notices serve as a timely reminder.

Oh, and remember that Lily Allen story from a couple of months ago where the singer publicly came out to support the industry's attempts at copyright clampdown, and was subsequently, how would you kids say it, "pwned" in the process when it was revealed that she distributed pirated songs herself on her website? Anyway, the latest pearl of wisdom from Miss Allen is that she is absolutely fine with people downloading her songs illegally, as long as they burn the songs to CDs and then sell them on. Yes, that's right, it's not a typo. You see, if you sell these illegally obtained songs, and thus commit real piracy by profiting from it, you are actually just giving value to these songs, and so that's alright.

The latest update in The Pirate Bay saga (I still have no idea whether they've been sold or not) is that the tracker is now officially dead and won't be rising again. But thanks to the active pursuit of the RIAA and MPAA, new BitTorrent technology means that trackers are no longer really necessary, which means the decentralization of BitTorrent is approaching completion. When it does, BitTorrenting will be practically unstoppable. And with Magnet links, you don't even need .torrent files anymore, so really, sites like The Pirate Bay can now only need to provide a link consisting of what appears to be a random set of letters and numbers, and really, can they be sued for that?

In HD news, Warner has a new offer that allows you to trade in your old DVDs for Blu-ray movies. You don't get the Blu-ray movies for free, but they are discounted. It's a nice idea in theory, but only a small range of less than spectacular Blu-ray movies are available, and the discounts don't add up to much if you're already getting them cheaply from Amazon.

It appears that the studio's new weapon to promote Blu-ray is to try and kill of DVDs as soon as possible. The trade in offer is one thing, but Universal's plans to introduce Blu-ray/DVD combos, just like Disney, will probably do more wean people off DVDs especially if their plan to discontinue the DVD only versions of these movies is true. It's very likely though that these combos would come at a higher price than their DVD only cousins, and I'm not sure if that actually helps to put people onto Blu-ray or to put them onto piracy. It doesn't really seem fair to "tax" DVD owners for the sake of promoting Blu-ray.

And following YouTube's announcement that 1080p video is now available, and it is (hover your mouse over the HD icon and select between 720p and 1080p), there's more good news on this front. I talked about the performance implications, in that 50% of an Intel C2D E8500 is going to be kept busy decoding the 1080p video, but the good news is that now both Nvidia and ATI will offer GPU acceleration support for Flash video, which should see that 50% fall below 10%. All ATI Radeon HD 4000 series cards and the new 5700 and 5800 (and newer) cards will be supported, as well as most Nvidia cards since the 8000 series. While we're not talking about Blu-ray quality video, but it really is a significant step towards digital delivery of HD content. Once bandwidth becomes cheaper and connection speeds improve, there doesn't seem to be any reason why Blu-ray quality video can't be delivered online.

There's a bunch of PS3 news, some of it HD related, but I'll post them in the gaming section …

And lastly in gaming, PS3 firmware 3.10 has been released. This firmware adds Facebook support, which also came to the Xbox 360. But what's a PS3 firmware without a chorus of complains, and this one seems to be particularly nasty from reading posts on the PS3 boards. I haven't updated my firmware since 2.43, and don't plan to unless some must have Blu-ray update arrives, or that Sony finally owns up to the problem and come up with some sort of solution that everyone is satisfied with, because I'm not paying $250 to repair it if things goes badly, which I suspect it will.

One of the "must have Blu-ray updates" might be for the 3D feature, which Sony says that PS3s will be able to support via a "simple" firmware update. Of course, you'll still need a bunch of other equipment before you can have a 3D home theater experience, so it might be something to look out for if you're buying a new TV (look for specific support for 3D, or failing that, at least 120 Hz refresh).

Another new to Blu-ray feature is a new Digital Copy feature Sony plans to introduce that copies the movie straight off the Blu-ray disc to your PS3 and then onto your PSP. The previous method required a PC, with a special DVD-ROM and unlock codes. Still, all these are just temporary solutions until Managed Copy arrives for Blu-ray on December 4th. There's some confusion as to what December 4th means for Managed Copy, but the summary is that after this date, all new Blu-ray releases will have to support Managed Copy. What this means is a bit vague at the moment since the hardware (and software) for MC is not set to arrive until next year, but suffice to say that any movie released after December 4th should allow you to make a managed copy from them eventually. It is mandatory, meaning all discs must support it, and it took a fight to get MC being made as a mandatory requirement, so at least that's some of the confusion out of the way. The news post for all three of these PS3 stories, none of which has much to do with gaming mind, can be found here.

And that was the week that was. Have a nice one.

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3. Weekly Software Roundup

November 22, 2009	StaxRip 1.1.2.1 Beta Freeware
November 22, 2009	FinalBurner Pro 2.15.0.206
November 22, 2009	FinalBurner Free 2.15.0.171 Freeware
November 21, 2009	ConvertXtoDVD 4.0.5.315
November 21, 2009	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 2009.11.20
November 21, 2009	ProgDVB 6.24 Freeware
November 21, 2009	Vista Codec x64 Components 2.2.3 Freeware
November 20, 2009	MOV Download Tool 1.2.1 Freeware
November 20, 2009	QuickTime Alternative (QT7) 3.1.0 Freeware
November 20, 2009	Plex Media Center 0.8.5 Freeware
November 19, 2009	Fraps 3.0.2
November 19, 2009	Windows 7 Codecs 2.1.5 Freeware
November 19, 2009	Vista Codec Package 5.4.9 Freeware
November 18, 2009	Womble MPEG Video Wizard DVD 5.0
November 18, 2009	Zoom Player Home Professional 7.00
November 18, 2009	Kantaris Media Player 0.6.4 Freeware
November 18, 2009	Subtitle Edit 2.8.3 Freeware
November 18, 2009	BD Rebuilder 0.31.02 Freeware
November 18, 2009	ffdshow Rev. 3133 (generic/x64) Freeware
November 17, 2009	VDownloader 1.12 Freeware
November 17, 2009	MediaCodeSpeedEdit 1.2.0.5 Freeware
November 17, 2009	TV Scheduler Pro Rev 158 Freeware
November 17, 2009	LiVES 1.0.6 Freeware
November 16, 2009	All My Movies 5.7 build 1288
November 16, 2009	BDSup2Sub 3.9.9 Freeware
November 16, 2009	x264 r1342 Freeware
November 15, 2009	FFCoder 0.98 Beta Freeware

======END OF LIVEUPDATE NEWSLETTER======

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 172

15 November, 2009

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Womble EasyDVD Competition

3. Weekly News Roundup

4. Weekly Software Roundup

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1. Introduction

• Game Consoles – October 2009 NPD Sales Figure Analysis 
• Womble EasyDVD DVD Authoring Guide 

2. Womble EasyDVD Competition

3. Weekly News Roundup

As expected, following last week's news blitz, this week has been relatively quiet. Which is a good thing because I managed to fill the gap with a new DVD authoring guide for Womble EasyDVD. Having played with the software for a week, I can say that it's very easy to use and mostly intuitive. There are a couple of missing features such as subtitle support and multiple audio support, which I hope Womble can fix in future releases (this being their first effort after all, so you can't have everything), but it's mostly what you would expect, and the menu creation offers a bit more flexibility than your average authoring suite, without ever going into the semi-pro territory (complete with the much steeper learning curve) of tools like DVD-lab Pro. The other thing that was available this week was the October NPD US video game sales stats, I wrote the analysis for it yesterday here. The PS3 didn't manage to sell over the Wii as it had in September, but it's the Xbox 360 that's the loser in terms of the recent price wars it seems, although it's doing fantastically in software (for now, thanks to its larger install base). The coming months should give us an even clearer picture of what's in store for 2010, and Microsoft will be hoping to see similar scenes as last year this time as people enthusiastically grab their cheaper holiday bundles. But I wouldn't bet on it. Anyway, onto this week's news.

In copyright related news, the BBC's proposal for adding DRM to their HD broadcasts has been denied by the British Office of Communications. But the idea isn't entirely dead and the proposed DRM scheme may appear later on, with existing hardware likely to support such a DRM scheme if it is ever introduced.

The MPAA are still of course campaigning vigorously in the US to try and get the FCC to allow them to introduce  Selectable Output Control. The old "pro consumer" argument was brought out, to argue for SOC's use in bringing new release movies faster to the home if the studios were more confident of its resistance to piracy. Many studios are already doing this without the fake security blanket that is SOC. But SOC is just a trojan horse for the MPAA, because once you can control one aspect of how someone watches TV, you can then control all aspects of it eventually. If the MPAA and their cohorts can get away with banning all  TV recordings, then does anyone really doubt that this is exactly what they would do? Pro consumer indeed.

Further prove that movie studios really don't give a crap about the people that are supposedly their customers – a free community Wi-Fi service that brings tremendous benefits to a huge number of people has been shut down all because of a single piracy complaint, from Sony (who else?). It's a case of the studios exploiting people's fear over lawsuits, and an innovation that helps the local economy, local law enforcement, small businesses and visitors is attacked and destroyed. Obviously the people who decided to shut down the network, as the cost of adding anti-piracy filters is excessive, must shoulder some of the blame for this over reaction, but the MPAA's reaction to the story shows the depth of their arrogance. Instead of calling for a reasoned approach and balanced response, that a single movie download does not constitute a widespread piracy operation, they used the occasion to further spread their anti-piracy propaganda. But that's what they are. They are an industry lobby group and they're paid to say and do these things. What is really wrong is politicians and others in power taking their word as gospel, and acting without taking into consideration the serious consequences  for issues like privacy, and the economic damage that would occur if the MPAA's wishes were turned into reality.

It's week 4 of the Australian AFACT vs iiNet trial, and it was closing statements time.  Once again, you can check out a summary of the week's events here, but the arguments from both side remain the same. The AFACT thinks iiNet is basically a piracy provider, even suggesting that  the ISP's use of phrases such as "happy downloading" was in fact an encouragement for people to download the latest Harry Potter movie. And even iiNet's attempt at promoting legal content, through their freezone service, was attacked. You would think the movie studios should be delighted that ISPs are providing quota-less downloads for legal content as a way to to provide further incentives to go the legal route, but you would be wrong. The argument is that because quota is not used, it leaves more free quota for downloading pirated movies. The same argument was made for iiNet increasing download quotas for their customers, as the AFACT assumes anyone who needs a large download quota must be a movie pirate. This "sky is falling" and "you're a pirate until proven otherwise" attitude that these lobby groups have adopted is working wonders in their political lobbying activities and have proved useful in the legal arena as well in the past. Our only hope is the judge can see through these exaggerated truth to balance the need for anti-piracy and the need to protect consumer rights, and the rights of ISPs to operate without being burdened by the responsibility to prevent piracy. Surely the industry that profits, often in record amounts, from the movies and TV shows that are being pirated should be the ones responsible, at least financially, for the anti-piracy operations, not the ISP or its subscribers. Either put up, or shut up.

Most independent game developers say that piracy is not a significant problem, at least for now, according to the latest survey. While most fear that it can become a big problem in the future, only 10% felt that it was a serious problem at the moment. One thing to note about  piracy, including games and movies, is that people who do have the ability to pay for content will usually do so. It is only those that never had any intention to pay for anything, some because they don't have the capability, that are the more dedicated when it comes to sourcing pirated content online, and these people were never likely to provide any sort of income for the content owners, now or in the future. So the key is to at the very least increase the number of people who have the capability to pay for content, and that can only be achieved through pricing changes. Digital distribution allows this to occur without the cost being a huge issue (certainly compared to physical media and the associated costs like packaging, shipping  …), and even more reasonable pricing can open up previously untapped markets, such as developing countries where piracy rates are even higher. Or the alternative is to fight against logic and try to stop all piracy through technology that has proved inconvenient at best, and completely unworkable at worst, or through ever harsher legislation that completely disregard some of society's basic principles in relation to justice and human rights.

Microsoft banning 1 million Xbox 360 accounts over suspected system modding (which allows for piracy) may seem excessive, but console piracy is actually not a huge problem and that's worth examining. The anti-piracy success is largely to do with technology, all games consoles carry some form of DRM for games and being closed systems, they are easier to enforce (unless somebody decides to mod their Xbox 360, that is). The DRM systems used are also fairly straight forward, usually just a DVD check, and with digital downloads being available, even the DVD check won't be necessary anymore. There are still many aspects of the DRM system that are inconvenient, such as when one needs to move from one console to another, but there are at least solutions and workarounds. And I guess more reasonable pricing comes into it. Games are expensive, but given the number of hours of entertainment they provide, it's still better value compared to your typical movie or MP3. Consoles are also now very good at providing demos for new games, thus eliminating the need for people to "play before they pay" (which I admit is often used as an excuse for piracy, and play doesn't always lead to pay). They certainly aren't going out there lobbying the government to throw people off the Internet for downloading games, or getting ISPs to work as their spies, or suing individuals for using pirated games.

HD news now. Not much on Blu-ray to report, but the holiday season is upon us and there will be a steady stream of big releases to give the format a big boost. But HD is more than just Blu-ray, and the future of HD may be SD.

Not SD, as in standard definition, but SD as in the memory storage format. Blockbuster is trialling a new way to rent movies by allowing customers to download them to their SD memory cards. These movies expire after 30 days if unwatched, or 48 hours after the first viewing. Obviously DRM is involved, but further details are a bit sketchy. If compatibility with hardware players, then the DRM used may be the SD card's own internal DRM system, CPRM. This would then allow the actual video file to be unencrypted, and playable in a wide variety of players, probably. The lack of DRM on your common USB stick may be why they didn't go with the more common format.

The other path for HD is digital distribution. The main stumbling block has always been bandwidth, and also processing power (many of the Netbooks you see today will struggle with 1080p content). But YouTube is not waiting around for things to catch up, and will roll out 1080p playback support next week. The link to the left has a couple of further links to test videos that you can already use to see if your system is fast enough for 1080p. On my Intel C2D E8500, I recorded 40 to 50% CPU usage, which is reasonable, but you can see why some Netbooks will struggle. With GPU assisted decoding (unfortunately Flash does not yet support ATI based solutions), the CPU usage can be greatly reduced. This was proven when I downloaded the YouTube 1080p video (about 100 MB for 4 minutes worth) and used PowerDVD 9 to play it back (as it supports GPU assisted decoding). CPU usage dropped to below 10%, and my ATI Radeon HD 4850 was hardly worked (about 5% usage) despite the CPU savings. So it seems for 1080p video delivered through YouTube, most modern computers should be able to handle it, some better than others depending on whether GPU assist is available or not now or in the future. The bandwidth usage is reasonable, roughly the same as downloading a DVD movie (so the 1080p quality isn't as good as say Blu-ray, not really close yet), but it will still use a large chunk of people's quotas.

And lastly in gaming, not much to link to, except for the NPD analysis, which I've already linked to above. I think we finally have a proper console war on now, where there's not much between the three top consoles, the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3. The Wii has the superior hardware numbers, but is weak on games, especially third party ones and ones that appeal to hardcore gamers. The PS3 has only started to do well to suggest it may take top spot eventually, but there's still some catching up to do both in hardware and software. The Xbox 360 is enjoying software sales, at least in the US, for now, but it won't last forever if it the last two months becomes a trend and they continue to sell less consoles than the PS3. But they have a great multi-player community and that counts for more and more these days. And of course, Natal, which may be beaten to the punch, innovative software wise, by PS3 Eye Pet (a new category of games, using the buzz word "augmented reality") . But if Eye Pet is a success, then that may actually bode well for Natal, since it plans to offer similar things but in a more mainstream, and technologically advanced fashion. The only problem is the late release date, now semi confirmed as November 2010, which may be too late to help if things stay the way they are.

See you next week.

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4. Weekly Software Roundup

November 15, 2009	MakeInstantPlayer 1.36 Freeware
November 15, 2009	Comskip 0.80.027
November 15, 2009	AVStoDVD 2.2.4 Freeware
November 14, 2009	HyperCam 2.16.01
November 14, 2009	MediaInfo 0.7.25 Freeware
November 14, 2009	Video DVD Maker Pro 3.16.0.41
November 14, 2009	Video DVD Maker 3.22.0.53 Freeware
November 14, 2009	x264 r1336 Freeware
November 13, 2009	DVD PixPlay 5.04
November 13, 2009	MediaCoder 0.7.2 Build 4536 Freeware
November 13, 2009	XBMC media center Camelot 9.11 Alpha2 Freeware
November 13, 2009	ProgDVB 6.23.2 Freeware
November 12, 2009	Any Video Converter Free 2.79 Freeware
November 12, 2009	SolveigMM Video Splitter 2.2.911.12
November 12, 2009	SolveigMM AVI Trimmer 1.6.911.12 Freeware
November 12, 2009	WM Recorder 14
November 12, 2009	TFM Audio Tool 1.0.6.0 beta Freeware
November 12, 2009	VOB2MPG 3.0.122 Freeware
November 12, 2009	J. River Media Center 14.0.96
November 12, 2009	Net Transport 2.89
November 11, 2009	VideoInspector 2.2.3.122
November 10, 2009	K-Lite Codec Pack 64-Bit 2.9.4 Freeware
November 10, 2009	K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 5.4.4 Freeware
November 10, 2009	K-Lite Codec Pack 5.4.4 Freeware
November 10, 2009	FFCoder 0.97 Beta Freeware
November 10, 2009	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 2009.11.09
November 10, 2009	TMPGEnc Authoring Works 4.0.7.32
November 9, 2009	Fraps 3.0.1
November 9, 2009	GOM Encoder 1.0.0.23
November 9, 2009	VisualSubSync 0.9.21 Freeware
November 9, 2009	doubleTwist 2.5 Beta Freeware

======END OF LIVEUPDATE NEWSLETTER======

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 171

8 November, 2009

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

******************************************************************

1. Introduction

• WinDVD 2010 Review 

2. Weekly News Roundup

Some weeks you couldn't buy a news story, this week, there's enough for two weeks. Don't really know why, perhaps the MPAA is upping their lobbying efforts, or the courts have resumed their cases, and parliaments are reconvened to pass new legislations. Who knows. On my end, I finished the review for WinDVD 2010 as promised. A summary? Well, I'd rather you read the full review, but suffice to say there are things that I like about WinDVD, and there are some things that its competitors have done that it has not. Is it a great Blu-ray player? Yes it is. Can it be better, that's a yes too.

Copyright news first, and there are quite a few to go through. Right after my last WNR, news came that torrent tracker UK-T was shut down, and some kind of police action was involved, but as no anti-piracy agency had claimed responsibility at that time, nobody was really sure what went down. Still not really sure what happened, but from leaked reports, it suggest that the police had raided the homes of several of the site's admins. The database was wiped before the police could get their hands on it, and so the subscribers are safe. One tracker down, only 362,621 to go.

But while one torrent tracker was down, another came back up. Demonoid has been down for ages now, supposedly due to a database problem, but the tracker is at least up again, if not the main website. I've noticed that several torrent sites have experienced similar database problems recently, so it could be just a coincidence, or perhaps something more sinister? If it was just an accident, then these accidents have actually done more to stop torrent sites than all the legal actions. Take The Pirate Bay for example. The latest attempt to shut the site down, or at least prevent access to it in Norway, has failed. The entertainment lobby had asked the Norwegian court to get Norway's largest ISP Telenor to shut down access to the torrent site, but the court said "Nei" as they didn't think an ISP should be the one deciding which websites its customers get access to, and which it should block. And the implication of this ruling is that ISPs are not really responsible for what their customers get up to, since if they were, then the court would have told them to shut off access. To me, this is common sense,  and Telenor's spokesman's analogy of not being able to sue a ladder manufacturer because someone used the ladder to commit a burglary again seems to make sense to me. But common sense is in short supply these days when it comes to the copyright debate.

The failed attempt to shut down The Pirate Bay again deals another blow to the MPAA and their friends, but do they really want the torrent site to be shut down? According to a new study, they should be careful of what they wish for, because during the few days that The Pirate Bay was down, the number of torrent trackers and websites dramatically increased, and downloading continued. The way modern torrent clients work, even without a working tracker, downloads can continued thanks to a technology called DHT (Distributed Hashed Table), or so called trackerless downloads. The download speed is sometimes affected, but not always. And with TPB down, many sees it as an opportunity to become the new TPB, and so naturally, the number of torrent and trackers will surge during this period. It just shows how hard it is to actually try and stop file sharing, and I think it may actually be impossible. All the resources that have been spent on trying to stop file sharing seems like a big waste to me. And even more so when you consider the stats that show that people who download illegal songs actually spend more on music than those who don't. This again seems like common sense to me, because people who download music (legally, or illegally) are the ones that love music, and many are using free downloads as a way to search for new songs and artists. This "buy before you try" argument has been made for other content as well, like games, although the percentage that converts from try to buy is rather low, nevertheless, there is a percentage. Music especially I think is something that you do need to try before you buy, that's why we have radio stations that broadcast songs, for free. The music industry, and others, should be exploiting this phenomenon to their advantage instead of trying to shut it down. Spotify, the free online music service, seems to signal a possible future direction, basically taking the radio model online.

There's still more copyright news, we're barely half way through. The MPAA has been busy lobbying the FCC for various things. And as a concerted campaign, they had the US 60 Minutes broadcast a copyright propaganda film that tried to link file sharing with organized crime. There are links between counterfeit goods and physical media piracy with organized crime, but online file sharing that's mostly free? The downloading communism poster immediately springs to mind (see right). More propaganda as the MPAA says the Internet will die if piracy is not stopped. This is the same MPAA that has been trying to kill the Internet for ages now, that its members and supporters have publicly stated their wish that the Internet had never existed, so why are they so worried about its health now? And the MPAA is not just happy pushing their agenda on the US, they're going global as well. You can just see their dirty fingerprints over the proposed copyright treaty that will be discussed in South Korea this month. The worst part is that the treaty is being kept super top secret, even though it affects everyone. Of course, the Internet being the Internet, part of the discussions were leaked and it was indeed what we fear most. Three-strikes, global DMCA, ISP policing … are just some of the MPAA's favourite things, and all will be tabled at the secret discussions later this month. Sigh.

Three-strikes and ISP policing, very popular at the moment, but the EU has decided that something needs to be done to protect consumer rights, even if what they did was not nearly enough. But it's a start. The EU has decided that Internet access is a basic right, and as such, cutting people's connections off will require more than just an email from the MPAA. The EU has ruled that a fair process must be in place before bannings can occur, which is less than the full criminal trial that consumer and Internet advocates had first wanted. This all came after France wanted to introduce something that legalized their three-strikes plan (the original one that didn't require the judicial system, which their own constitutional council found to be, well, unconstitutional), and that angered pretty much everyone at the EU, and the battle has been fought ever since, leading to this latest compromise. Just what has happened to France, a country that I've always considered to be quite liberal and would usually be at the front lines fighting *against* the three-strikes nonsense, and not on the side of mega US corporations. Freedom and liberty is also another thing I associate with France, but they just seem to be one the wrong side of that as well because time and time again, it has been shown that copyright laws have been abused to stifle free speech and the critics of corporations. The Electronic Frontier Foundation even has a Hall of Shame for the companies and organizations that have abused copyright laws for their own (non copyright related) benefits. It just shows that when laws are so biased towards one side, they are prime candidates for abuse. And for me it's hard to digest the fact that a country like France is in there arguing to make these laws even more one sided, and even more open to abuse. But with a guy like Sarkozy at the helm, now using the nations divisions for his political gain, no one expect anything less really. Hall of shame indeed.

The global DMCA thing is particularly annoying, although not that much of an impact since most countries have adopted some draconian form of it. One country is Denmark, and one citizen is doing his unique way of protesting the illogical nature of the laws. Under the DMCA, or the Danish equivalent, any attempt (even unsuccessful) at breaking DRM is considered illegal. However, Danish law allows for DVDs to be ripped for legal home use, and so the two Danish laws actually conflict each other. This is why Henrik Andersen confessed his "crimes" of ripping hundreds of his legally purchased DVDs for use in his home theater setup, to a Danish anti-piracy agency. Under the DMCA, Mr Andersen is guilty and should be fined, if not jailed. But just whose interests has he actually hurt? Certainly not the movie studios that he purchased his DVDs from.

Still more copyright stuff, bear with me. The third week of the Australian AFACT vs iiNet trial continues, and please refer to my summary forum post to keep yourself updated on this rather important trial, possibly the most important in the world right now concerning the copyright issue, as it seeks to decide if ISPs should be turned into copyright cops.

And in all this bad news, there's a glimmer of hope for a fair solution that everyone can live with. Google/YouTube is finding that their compromise solution to the copyright issue, of sharing revenue with content owners if they choose not to remove stuff from YouTube, might be working. And working well, as a third of all their YouTube revenue is coming from this trial program. And it's not just the extra revenue, the exposure on YouTube leads to more business opportunities for content owners, like the case of Mr Bean, the popular UK comedy series, in which the content owners decided to keep the user uploaded clips online, as opposed to removing it, and then found that it actually led to deals with TV stations countries that have never heard of Mr Bean before. So a bit of technical piracy actually led to a successful TV deal, and all while still making money from YouTube  profit sharing. And yet others, like Viacom, are still hell bent on suing YouTube into oblivion. Shorted sighted or what?

Well that was a big section wasn't it. On to HD news now, although it's still copyright related, I'm afraid. Managed Copy, the so called legal solution to movie ripping, will soon be upon us. December 4th marks the date that MC becomes a reality on Blu-ray.

I'm excited about MC, because it signals the first step that the movie industry has taken to legitimize the need for people to be able to separate the movie from the disc that it came on. With today's increasingly digital world and sophisticated home theater solutions, being able to have everything as pure digital data is increasingly useful. Imagine having all your DVD and Blu-ray movies stored digitally and accessible with a few clicks of your remote. It makes categorizing easier, searching even more so, and it will be faster as well, and quieter due to the lack of a spinning optical drive. But to make this reality requires you to break several laws at the moment, but MC might be just what is needed to solve this problem.

But while I'm excited, the movie studios are less so apparently, as there's just no support for MC despite the December 4th deadline. I suppose this is something whose success and popularity will only be apparent after it has been introduced, and just like the "Digital Copy" feature that the movie studios have only now grown to love, it's going to take a time before they overcome their fears. And this could be the feature to keep Blu-ray in the game when it eventually goes head to head with digital distribution  (with Best Buy the latest to get into the digital download market). Whether you get it from the Internet, or from a USB stick, or on a Blu-ray disc, in the end, it's the digital movie that's important, not the way it arrives to your home. And for HD content, Blu-ray disc (sent via the postal system) may still be the best solution, from a cost and even speed perspective (see pigeon test).

And lastly in gaming, Sony's losses from the PS3 have now topped $4.6 billion. But Sony is hoping to add perhaps a couple of more billions to this figure, as the more they lose, it means the more PS3 consoles they are selling, and that's a good thing for them in the long term, if extremely hurtful in the short. In the post I made there are also links to the losses being made by Nintendo and Microsoft. The amazing figures for Nintendo, in which they've been in profit every year since the stats were first available, shows that even though they've had a few failed consoles in between, their strategy of concentrating on fun first, and technology second, is still paying off.

And that's the news for this week. I'm willing to bet that next week will be super quiet as news sources regurgitate this week's news items in various flavours. Oh, I got my graphics card back from warranty (the first one, with the broken fan). It's now working great and the average temperature was about 10 degrees (Celsius) lower than when I first got the card, meaning that even when the fan was spinning, it was still overheating.

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3. Weekly Software Roundup

November 8, 2009	MiniCoder 1.3.3.0 Freeware
November 8, 2009	multiAVCHD 3.0 build 717 Freeware
November 7, 2009	MythTV 0.22 Freeware
November 7, 2009	DVD-Audio Solo 2.2
November 7, 2009	xVideoServiceThief 2.3 Freeware
November 7, 2009	XBMC media center Camelot 9.11 Alpha1 Freeware
November 7, 2009	Avanti 0.4.2 Freeware
November 6, 2009	Vista Codec x64 Components 2.2.2 Freeware
November 6, 2009	Fraps 3.0.0
November 6, 2009	VOB2MPG 3.0.120 Freeware
November 6, 2009	RAD Video Tools 1.9q Freeware
November 6, 2009	DGMPGDec 1.5.6 Freeware
November 6, 2009	Goldwave 5.55
November 6, 2009	ProgDVB 6.23.1 Freeware
November 5, 2009	GOM Player 2.1.21.4846 Freeware
November 5, 2009	Splash 1.0.5 Freeware
November 5, 2009	ConvertXtoDVD 4.0.3.313
November 5, 2009	DigitalVideo Converter 1.17.0.49 Freeware
November 5, 2009	K-Lite Codec Pack 64-Bit 2.9.0 Freeware
November 5, 2009	DVDtoBD Tool 1.0
November 5, 2009	K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 5.4.0 Freeware
November 5, 2009	K-Lite Codec Pack 5.4.0 Freeware
November 5, 2009	Ut Video Codec Suite 7.0.1 Freeware
November 5, 2009	Submerge 1.8.3
November 4, 2009	Quick AVI Creator 2.11.04.2009 Freeware
November 4, 2009	SmallDVD 2.0 Freeware
November 4, 2009	ffdshow Rev. 3124 (generic/x64) Freeware
November 4, 2009	Opti Drive Control 1.44
November 4, 2009	Moovida 1.0.8 Freeware
November 4, 2009	Kantaris Media Player 0.6.3 Freeware
November 3, 2009	winLAME 2009 beta 2 Freeware
November 3, 2009	QuickTime Alternative (QT7) 3.0.1 Freeware
November 3, 2009	CopyToDVD 4.3.1.5
November 3, 2009	Windows 7 Codecs 2.1.0 Freeware
November 3, 2009	Vista Codec Package 5.4.8 Freeware
November 3, 2009	VoltaicHD for Mac 2.0.1
November 2, 2009	BwgBurn 0.7.6 Freeware
November 2, 2009	CDBurnerXP 4.2.7.1801 Freeware
November 1, 2009	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 2009.11.1 Freeware
November 1, 2009	HCbatchGUI 14.9 Freeware
November 1, 2009	iPixSoft Flash Slideshow Creator 1.8.6

======END OF LIVEUPDATE NEWSLETTER======

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 170

1 November, 2009

******************************************************************

INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

******************************************************************

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

It's November already. 60 something days until 2010 is here, and not long to go until 2012, the end of the world. I'm talking about the movie of course, which is in cinemas in 2 weeks time and I already have the trailer made and ready for upload. Speaking of trailers, I've been uploading them with a bit more regularity recently, and I've ensured all of them are now 1080p resolution (H.264 video, AAC audio) – you can find them all in our movies section. I've also made sure they're all Xbox 360 and PS3 compatible, meaning they'll play on these consoles without the need for further conversion. This means limited audio (no 5.1 audio, and LC only), but the original source files for most of them come only with stereo tracks anyway. A pet peeve I still have is that many H.264/AAC files that you find on the Net are not PS3/Xbox 360 compatible without further processing – both consoles, the PS3 in particular, make excellent media centers without the complexity, and if more files are compatible without transcoding or editing, it makes the whole process a lot easier. Anyway, the news, not much going on again, but I'll turn up the rant knob to 11 and hopefully that will be enough.

Let's start with the copyright news. Anti-piracy or anti-terrorism? Which is more important? Now this might seem a fairly straightforward question to answer, but it isn't so in the UK.

The country's chief intelligence agency, MI5, has come out against the government's plan to implement a three-strikes anti-piracy legislation. And the police are siding with them as well. It's not so much that they're against the notion of anti-piracy, it's just that the means in which the government wants to pursue it will make their anti-crime and national security operations much much more difficult. The reason is that by making your average ISP a spying organisation, it also makes every Net enabled citizen the subject of spying, and it's not the secretive kind either, it's all out in the open. This will then force even the average Joe to adopt better security to overcome this spying, which effectively means encrypted Internet connections might become the norm. This thus makes police and intelligence agencies' work much harder, as even "listening" in on to characters of minor importance might mean an expensive and time consume decryption process. And of course, the encryption means that the anti-piracy operation will also fail. So the government has a choice to make, to either protect the country from real criminals or to go after kids who download three MP3s. The government, unfortunately, seems to have chosen the latter, and they plan to have the banning system up and running by 2011. I guess the anti-terrorism and crime lobby just doesn't have the pull of the pro-copyright one.

The immediate plan is to introduce a warning system in the UK, where ISPs spend huge amounts of money spying on its own customers and send those suspect of piracy warning letters. If this plan doesn't reduce piracy by 70% by April 2011, an impossible target (and possibly a deliberately chosen impossible one), then the banning penalty will be introduced. For those in the UK that plan on passively protesting this, might I suggest that you increase your piracy activities so that by April 2011, piracy will not only have not reduced, but have actually increased thanks to the warnings. Of course, I would never condone piracy, so delete those illegal files after you download them please, but this again highlights another flaw in the proposed system. Even if you do as I suggest and delete the pirated file immediately after download, you will have been recorded as having downloaded the illegal file, yet you did not use it and did not even intend to use it. Under the proposed system, intent appears to not matter, nor does actual usage of the pirated materials – the fact that you downloaded it is enough. Except it isn't, not under any fair legal system. Further reason to protest, so Britains, download away (and delete right afterwards, of course).

The charm offensive, if you can call it that (although I do call it "offensive"), has already started from the movie studios. This week, it's Sony Picture's CEO writing a blog about just how bad piracy is and how it hurts the poor multi-billion dollar corporations. Hurts them so much that, they might even make less movies. And they have made less movies, apparently. Yet they have still made record profits, even in an economic downturn, so what exactly is going on here? Perhaps they're making less crappy movies because the power of the Internet, a system designed for word of mouth type communications, has meant that crappy movies are spotted as such and flounder at the box office much faster than previously (see Bruno, and the tweets that might have savaged its box office earnings). There's much less room, and much less tolerance for crappy movies these days. And the alternative source for releasing them is straight to DVD/Blu-ray, which I'm not sure if the movie studio CEO counts as a produced movie. Then there's also the rising budget for movies, which leaves less for others to be made. And the credit crisis has meant that movie funding hasn't been as free flowing as in the past. Yeah, but let's blame it all on piracy shall we?

Of the various trials, many of them are on a break at the moment. The Pirate Bay trial, or appeals trial, has been delayed until next year as reported recently, but the movie studios aren't happy that The Pirate Bay will still be operational until then. So they have asked the Swedish court to fine the founders of the website if they do not close it. The only problem is that the founders have consistently denied any further involvement in the running of the website, and so the website will probably remain open, if the founders get fined.

Enough copyright stuff, let's move onto HD. If you don't have a Blu-ray player, but want one, then the upcoming holiday sales may be just what you need. Rumours suggest that Blu-ray players will be available for as low as $49 for this year's Black Friday sales.

Now I wouldn't recommend you buy these players. They're mostly superseded Profile 1.0 and 1.1 players – Profile 1.1 is still okay if you don't need the Internet features, or video streaming service support, but 1.0 players really shouldn't even exist on the market anymore.

But even the fully featured Profile 2.0 players can be had for less than $100, although those wanting to make their own Blu-ray movies or AVCHD/custom discs, might need to do a bit more research on just which cheap player is for them.

But if you have a bit more cash lying around, then you might consider a PS3, because Netflix will soon be available on the console. At first, it would be a (free) Blu-ray disc with a BD-Live connection to Netflix to drive the service, but eventually, a built-in service will be available. With the recent price drops, the PS3 still represents good value as a Blu-ray player and media center, especially compared to name brand players with comparable features. This is good news for supporters of the next generation of home video (the one after Blu-ray), which many believe to be digital distribution.

This move, obviously a way to play catch up on the digital distribution front that has been spearheaded by the Xbox 360 in terms of game consoles, may also signal Sony's reluctant move towards digital distribution. Sony will always prefer their own in house solution, using proprietary formats, and Netflix has made huge strides in the area, thanks to Blu-ray players and the Xbox 360, and Sony may not have any other choice other than to embrace a third party service. And while this won't really hurt Blu-ray, it has the potential to do so in the future. Netflix has already said so themselves that their streaming service is gaining at the expense of the disc rental side, and once HD streaming becomes a reality (mainly waiting on bandwidth, at the moment), then the good old optical disc (and the mechanical drives that read them) might then seem quite quaint.

There's not much gaming news that I found interesting, so I'll keep on going with this Netflix on PS3 thing. Many have come out to say that this is a huge blow to the Xbox 360, since Netflix has been exclusive on it up until now. And since the PS3 is a better media center, which I agree thanks to its low noise, this means that the Xbox 360 will lose or something. The only problem with this argument is that Netflix isn't exclusive to the Xbox 360, and has never been. Blu-ray players have it, your PC obviously supports it, and there were many ways to get Netflix streaming without having to use the Xbox 360. And just how many people have actually bought Xbox 360's because it had Netflix? This isn't a victory for the PS3 or a defeat for the Xbox 360, it's just simply a victory for Netflix and for digital distribution. And to further drive the point, the world's most popular home video game console doesn't even play DVDs, let alone have any sort of media center ambitions.

And the other interesting line I heard over the week is that the recent PS3 successes is good news for PS3 owners. I think it's good for Sony, but I'm not sure how well the PS3's success translates to being good news for PS3 owners, especially those who shelled out full price for the console a few months before the price drop. I guess in the short terms, there will be more users for the multiplayer games. And more buyers may mean cheaper games, but that's a highly questionable assumption. Will there be more games for the PS3? Or rather, would the PS3 have gotten less games if it had been less successful? Probably not, as the PS3 was never in danger of dying in the same way as the Sega Dreamcast. Will PS3 games be of higher quality? Possibly, but that's more to do with developers still learning to get the best out of the PS3, as opposed to not bothering to put in the effort. But it is good news for those invested in the phony console war, to have their decisions justified, even though they can justify it everyday themselves by using it and  having fun on it. Just like those who purchased and thoroughly enjoyed their Dreamcasts.

So on that note, have a great week, enjoy and appreciate every minute, because 2012 isn't that far away (not talking about the movie).

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3. Weekly Software Roundup

November 1, 2009	multiAVCHD 3.0 build 714 Freeware
November 1, 2009	MiniCoder 1.3.2.0 Freeware
November 1, 2009	CDBurnerXP 4.2.7.1794 Freeware
October 31, 2009	MKV2AC3 1.00.00 Beta 5 Freeware
October 31, 2009	PopCorn MKV AudioConverter 1.79.3 Freeware
October 31, 2009	MediaCodeSpeedEdit 1.2.0.3 Freeware
October 31, 2009	iPixSoft Flash ScreenSaver Maker 1.1.0
October 31, 2009	DAEMON Tools 4.35.5 Freeware
October 31, 2009	BD Rebuilder 0.31.01 Beta Freeware
October 31, 2009	MediaInfo 0.7.24 Freeware
October 31, 2009	VideoLAN (VLC) 1.0.3 Freeware
October 31, 2009	splitMKV 0.2 Freeware
October 31, 2009	Opti Drive Control 1.43
October 31, 2009	x264 r1318 Freeware
October 29, 2009	MediaCoder 0.7.2 Build 4530 Freeware
October 29, 2009	ProgDVB 6.23 Freeware
October 28, 2009	Vegas Pro 9.0c
October 28, 2009	ffdshow Rev. 3119 (generic/x64) Freeware
October 28, 2009	LiVES 1.0.5 Freeware
October 28, 2009	K-Lite Codec Pack 64-Bit 2.8.0 Freeware
October 28, 2009	K-Lite Codec Pack 5.3.0 Freeware
October 28, 2009	K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 5.3.0 Freeware
October 27, 2009	WinMPG Video Convert 8.9.8.2
October 27, 2009	VIDEOzilla 2.9
October 27, 2009	DVDRemaster Pro 5.2.3
October 27, 2009	DVDRemaster Standard 5.2.3
October 27, 2009	AsfBin 1.7.14 Freeware
October 27, 2009	StaxRip 1.2.0.0 Beta Freeware
October 27, 2009	Plex Media Center 0.8.3 Freeware
October 26, 2009	VoltaicHD for Mac 2.0.0
October 26, 2009	DivXLand Media Subtitler 2.0.7 Freeware
October 26, 2009	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.0.5.5
October 26, 2009	VSO PhotoDVD 3.1.0.2
October 26, 2009	MLC Lossless Codec 0.7 Freeware
October 26, 2009	AVStoDVD 2.2.3 Freeware
October 25, 2009	DV Scheduler 5.43 Freeware

======END OF LIVEUPDATE NEWSLETTER======

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 169

25 October, 2009

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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1. Introduction

• Game Consoles - September 2009 NPD Sales Figure Analysis 
  

2. Weekly News Roundup

Not a busy weeks in terms of news, but a busy for me in any case. I wrote up the NPD September 2009 video games sales analysis on Tuesday. A very big month for Sony as the PS3 becomes number one for the first time ever, although Microsoft will be happy to dominate total sales, especially with software. Nintendo will be concerned, and will hope that the PS3 numbers are at a temporary high due to the release of the new Slim SKU. But then later on in the week, my computer's graphic card's fan stopped working, and so I had to quickly buy a replacement while I wait for warranty service. A blessing in disguise perhaps since I was about 2 weeks away from the end of the warranty period. Anyway, I got Radeon 4550 as a temporary replacement which I can then use in a new home theater PC build sometime next year. The best thing about the card is that it's a passive one, no fans that will make noises and then break and force me to get a replacement. The computer is a bit more quieter than it was before, and sometimes I have to check twice just to make sure it is actually on. This card should work great in a home theater system, and I tested Blu-ray playback (see earlier test) and CPU usage was still very low, hovering at under 10% under PowerDVD 9. Gaming performance is average as you would expect, but still playable. Anyway, onto the news, which as I mentioned before, was few and far between due to various factors (such as the launch of Windows 7).

In copyright news, The Pirate Bay appeals trial should now be delayed until next year. This is because of the bias allegations that the TPB defence team has filed against two of the judges that were supposed to sit on the case. TPB had earlier requested a delay which was rejected, so they get what they want now anyway.

And believe it or not, this was pretty much all the news I managed to find. Sure, there were lots about MPAA's boss saying he will quit next year when his contract runs out, but that was sort of covered in last week's WNR in regards to the MPAA restructuring due to the studios' assertion that the MPAA has been too soft. A few others have already left as a result.

You can tell it's a quiet week piracy wise because when you search for piracy on Google News, most of the news stories were about the maritime kind. And maybe that's the way it is supposed to be. Copyright holders like to make a big fuss about online piracy, but compared to what's going on over in Somalia, I mean, it's pretty non consequential. When I think of the Somalian pirates, I think of the "you wouldn't steal a car" anti-piracy ads – heck, not only would they steal the car, they'll steal the cargo ship the car was being transported on as well, get the crew's DVD library, rip them, and upload them onto The Pirate Bay just for fun. Now that's piracy!

And then there's this story about Disney's new Keychest initiative. Upon the first read, it seems just like another pointless DRM exercise, but this one might lead to something interesting, maybe even revolutionary. When you buy a movie today, you are not actually buying anything other than the movie in a particular format. And unless you get a digital copy with it, it's pretty much locked to that format. Some argue you should be able to rip it and then convert it into another format, but if you read the license stuff and observe the US DMCA (or your country's equivalent), then ripping it would be very much illegal. So if the digital copy was not present or isn't iPod compatible, then to get an iPod version, you'll have to buy it through iTunes, despite the fact that you may already have purchased the movie on Blu-ray and DVD (very likely if you're buying a Disney Blu-ray, which usually comes with the DVD version now).

The idea behind Keychest is that instead of you buying a movie locked to a format, you simply buy a license to watch the movie, regardless of the format. Using this license, which can come in the form of a digital key or certificate, you can then download various versions of the movie for various formats. The key might come bundled with the Blu-ray/DVD version of the movie, allowing you to download the iPod version from the Internet. And, from what I've read, you can have multiple copies and each can be played simultaneously (obviously there would be some limit, as you don't want one key to be able to supply the entire world with access to the movie).

Why is this a good idea? I've always thought that buying a movie means you're buying the viewing rights anyway, and that you should be able to transcode it to another format. This holds true for CD to MP3 ripping, for example, but does not hold true for Blu-ray and DVD simply because there is copy protection mechanisms in the way. But buying a license technically means that regardless of where you sourced the movie, you have the right to view it since you've paid for it, even if the source may be of a less than legal kind. Of course, the license could limit you to downloading the movie from approved sources, for legal or commercial reasons, but you are again locked into buying formats, the only difference being that you have more choice over which format to get it on. But for a true revolution, it should mean that as long as you have a license, you can download it from anywhere, or perhaps even offer an exception that allows you to break the copy protection on discs to get the movie into the format you want. And it would all remain legal. Of course, the license may cost more than the cost of your average DVD, but such a license would also mean that you can supply your various devices and your immediate family's various devices with copies of the movie, a "home license" if you will, and that would be very convenient indeed. And to extend things further, how about a yearly license subscriptions that allows you to enjoy all Disney movies being released for the home video market for the year?

Buy why is it also a bad idea? In one word? Control. With Keychest, you may end up giving more control over to the studios as to how you watch movies. Because while a "home license" is a good thing, the opposite means that for those without this kind of license, or those who simply purchased the DVD version and not the Keychest license, then trying to do anything other than to watch the DVD in your DVD player could be illegal. Right now, you can argue that since there's no legal alternative, you have to rip the DVD and make a version for your portable media player. With Keychest being the legal alternative, you won't have this argument anymore. But that's not really a huge problem since ripping a DVD is already illegal anyway. The bigger problem is that Keychest is still another form of DRM, and that means while you may be given a huge amount of freedom with this new kind of licensing scheme, that freedom is still being "given" to you by the studios, and something given can be taken away. If Disney one day finds that Keychest is losing them a lot of money, then they can simply pull the authentication servers, and those with Keychest licenses will find them useless. This is the pitfall of all DRM schemes.

DRM free, monthly subscription, all you can download, unlimited viewing and access to all back catalogues through your set top box, game console, PC or iPod/iPhone. Now that's what I call real freedom.

Let's move onto high def news. I did the Blu-ray sales analysis last week, and Blu-ray sales were way up as expected. I deliberately chose not to look at the DVD sales numbers since I wanted to concentrate on how Blu-ray was doing, but when one does take into account the DVD numbers, the news isn't as rosy.

While Blu-ray sales are up 66% compared to a year ago, Blu-ray and DVD sales combined are actually down 13.9%. What has been observed is that the drop in DVD sales has been way faster than any growth on Blu-ray, and that the industry is still hemorrhaging. I theorized before that Blu-ray might actually be partially causing the decline in DVD sales, as people upgrade their equipment and buy more expensive movies leaves then with less cash to buy movies that are not what you would call "must have's", especially during these economic times. I for one have cut down my movie buying to a minimum, still buying Blu-ray's and the occasional $5 DVD movies, but I can't justify buying "meh" movies just because they're on sale anymore, not when I've just paid full price for a copy of Taken on Blu-ray. So even just looking at my own buying habits, Blu-ray sales (buys) are way up, and DVD sales are way down, and I probably end up spending less on movies as a result. Which is good, because I'd rather spend the money on video games anyway. And there in lies the problem.

And then there was the whole HD DVD disaster, which wasted the time, effort and money of a lot of people, although for simple movie viewing, it was a great time and it still is if you can grab some HD DVD movies for as low as $1. Some who supported HD DVD from the get go will have lost confidence in the home video industry that allowed this sort of thing to happen (again). Those who got into HD DVD after its fall to take advantage of the fire sales, like myself, are still somewhat satisfied, but certainly won't bother to re-buy those movies on Blu-ray again, especially when most of these movies were hardly the "must-have" variety. Either way, the whole thing a negative effect on Blu-ray and on DVD at time when it could least afford to lose more ground to video games and new forms of entertainment. But I bring up HD DVD again as it's near to Halloween, and it has risen from the grave, sort of, for one more time at least. A new movie is being released on the dead format, and suitably, it is a zombie movie. It's a limited collector's edition as well, numbered and comes with a certificate and everything. The movie, DeadLands 2, is not available on Blu-ray.

And speaking of rising from death, that old "Xbox 360's gonna have a Blu-ray drive, OGM LOL" rumour has surfaced again. This time after a misquote from Steve Ballmer, possibly taken out of context, where he was supposed to have said "you'll be able to get Blu-ray drives as accessories". But he was referring to the PC (in relation to Windows 7's launch), and not the Xbox 360, but it didn't take long for the Net to be filled with headlines of "Microsoft CEO: Xbox 360 definitely getting Blu-ray drive". Definitely!

Ballmer said in the same interview that "the future of movies is on-demand, actually, as opposed to distribution via physical media", which I think tells you all you need to know about Microsoft's strategy on movies. Downloads Yes. Discs, Blu-ray in particular, No. But Windows 7 supports Blu-ray burning out of the box (although you'll still need a software Blu-ray player to play Blu-ray movies, perhaps taking advantage of the 70% Off WinDVD Pro 2010 deal that's available right now – a deal that was leaked, but linked to the launch of Windows 7), so Microsoft is not abandoning the format in any way. It just doesn't see the Xbox 360 needing it.

I don't know why this rumour gets thrown about every couple of months. There's almost no demand from Xbox 360 users for a Blu-ray drive accessory, especially considering how cheap a standalone Blu-ray player is these days, not to mention how much better even a cheap standalone would be compared to playing movies on a game console (Sony PS3 is only acceptable with the remote add-on, but "serious" HT people still scoff at it's lack of bitstreaming of the original PS3, its looks and the lack of an LCD display). It seems there are certain segments of the public that would view having Blu-ray on the Xbox 360 as the ultimate concession of defeat by the HD DVD group (which no longer even exists, btw), and by Microsoft for supporting the ill fated format. Toshiba's indirect issue of a "mea culpa", by releasing their first Blu-ray player, wasn't enough apparently. And it's not just admitting defeat on the HD DVD front, but if Microsoft does go Blu, then it vindicates Sony's decision to include the Blu-ray drive in the PS3 at the cost of delays, huge losses, and slowed market penetration. Microsoft will point to their 2:1 sales lead (albeit a diminishing lead if September's video games sales results become a norm) as vindication that not giving a crap about a built-in HD movie disc player was the right decision. The funny thing is that nobody accosts Nintendo for not even including a DVD player in the Wii, despite it having a DVD drive. Where are the rumours that the Wii is getting a software update or a Wii Shop purchase that enables DVD playback, as that would be much more believable in my opinion.

And moving on finally to gaming, despite having moved into this area about two paragraphs ago, the PS3 firmware kills the Blu-ray drive story continues, not just in court, but also with some independent PS3 fans and developers/hackers wanting people's dead PS3s so they can do their stuff and determine just why they brick after a new firmware update.

They have already narrowed their suspicions down to a file that is part of the firmware package, which updates the Blu-ray drive's firmware. Firmware updates are dangerous. The frequency in which Sony releases firmware updates has always been a cause for concern, as is their strategy of "adding value to the PS3 through software". It's good in theory, but you better make damn sure you do enough beta testing, on all SKUs, and to put in safeguards to prevent a bad firmware update bricking the machine. But with the frequency of updates, and the jumble of hardware (even under the same SKU), I can't see a way for Sony to be able to ensure their firmware is 100% safe. And despite so many updates, none of them were even as big in sale (in terms of changes) as the New Xbox Experience update. The PS3 interface still looks pretty much the same as the one that came with the launch machine, except now some of these PS3s won't play any discs at all anymore. And it's also important to differentiate between a firmware update and a software update. With game consoles, the lines more blurred than compared to say Windows, since the hardware is much more specialised and linked with the software (hence the need for firmware). Software updates can be frequent, but firmware updates should be kept to a minimum.

It would be really interesting to know what the repair process is for this kind of problem at Sony tech support. If they're simply ripping out the drive and replacing it with a new one, then it's probably a hardware issue with the drive. And I've theorized before that the firmware simply detects faulty drives and turn them off to prevent further damage, so it's not a case where the firmware causes the drive to fail – the drives were already failing to begin with. Another theory is that the firmware update process is buggy on certain drive models, not the actual firmware itself. But if the repair process is simply some kind of low level hardware reset, and if they're charging people $150 (or $250 here in Australia) for that, then well, that's not very nice. Maybe this is the sort of thing that will be revealed in the court case, if it proceeds.

And that's it for the week. Thanks for reading, but no need for burning afterwards though. It's bad the for environment!

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3. Weekly Software Roundup

October 25, 2009	x264 r1302 Freeware
October 24, 2009	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 2009.10.19 Freeware
October 24, 2009	Splash 1.0.4 Freeware
October 24, 2009	HC 0.24 Beta (2009-10-20) Freeware
October 24, 2009	ChrisTV Professional 5.41
October 24, 2009	ChrisTV Standard 5.41
October 24, 2009	ChrisTV Lite 5.41 Freeware
October 24, 2009	Cuttermaran 1.70 Freeware
October 23, 2009	BSplayer Pro 2.50
October 23, 2009	BSplayer 2.50 Freeware
October 23, 2009	VideoLAN (VLC) 1.0.3 RC Freeware
October 23, 2009	ffdshow Rev. 3111 Freeware
October 23, 2009	DVRMSToolbox 1.2.1.9 Freeware
October 22, 2009	MemoriesOnTV Pro 4.1.2
October 22, 2009	MemoriesOnTV Home 4.1.2
October 22, 2009	TV Scheduler Pro Rev 148 Freeware
October 22, 2009	VSO PhotoDVD 3.1.0.0
October 22, 2009	Womble EasyDVD 1.0.1.20
October 22, 2009	ProgDVB 6.22.1 Freeware
October 22, 2009	FinalBurner Pro 2.13.0.203
October 22, 2009	FinalBurner Free 2.14.0.164 Freeware
October 22, 2009	multiAVCHD 3.0 build 711 Freeware
October 22, 2009	LameXP 3.13 R2 Freeware
October 20, 2009	CopyToDVD 4.3.1.3
October 20, 2009	Windows 7 Codecs 2.0.5 Freeware
October 20, 2009	Vista Codec x64 Components 2.2.0 Freeware
October 19, 2009	Miro 2.5.3 Freeware
October 19, 2009	VirtualDub 1.9.7 (Build 32661) Freeware
October 19, 2009	PS3 Media Server 1.11 r363 Beta Freeware
October 19, 2009	Clown_BD 0.75 Freeware
October 19, 2009	Subtitle Edit 2.8.2 Freeware
October 19, 2009	Comskip 0.80.026
October 18, 2009	doubleTwist 2.4 Beta Freeware
October 18, 2009	Roxio Popcorn 4.0.1

======END OF LIVEUPDATE NEWSLETTER======

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 168

18 October, 2009

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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1. Introduction

• Blu-ray: The State of Play – October 2009

2. Weekly News Roundup

It's been a busy week news wise, so there's no problem at all filling up the 2,000 odd words required, I mean necessary, for this edition of the Weekly News Roundup. However, as I was feeling quite the stats nerd during the week, I decided to get out the spreadsheet software and then tabulate and graph the Blu-ray sales that I've been gathering since May 2008, you know, just for fun. The analysis doesn't contain too many surprises, but for those who want to know just how much Blu-ray sales have increased, it may be worth a read. Anyway, on to the news, of which there's quite a few.

Starting with copyright news, anti-piracy has become a real business, that's not too surprising. But has the business of fighting piracy become more profitable than actually stopping piracy?

That's what one anti-piracy firm thinks, and it even made a presentation showing just how more profitable it can be, for them and content owners alike, to allow piracy to continue and to make money off it by suing people, or threatening to sue them, for copyright infringement. They estimate that a quarter of all people they scare pay the penalty that they've arbitrarily set, and each successful claim is worth hundreds of legitimate downloads in terms of profit. This follows a rather candid interview that was given by a similar anti-piracy outfit not too long ago, where they revealed that they've put out content on P2P networks to lure people in, and they'll only go after the people who they can make a good profit from. Stopping piracy, seems to be a distant second objective to making a bundle of cash by exploiting people's fears about going to court, people's lack of knowledge of the law, and the anti-piracy crusade that content owners are hell bent on pursuing. And your government is not only allowing it, but probably helping and profiting from it as well. Is this really acceptable?

Speaking of governments and unacceptable practices, have you heard about the proposed anti-counterfeiting/piracy treaty, that will be discussed in South Korea next month by several leading countries. The plans that could cause your iPod or laptop to be searched at the airport for suspect pirated content, or make file sharing illegal, or use legislation to turn ISPs into copyright cops? You haven't heard of it? Well, that's no surprising, because the US government is making sure nobody knows about the proposals until they've been passed, citing "national security" reasons. Only a handful of selected individuals were privy to what's on the agenda, and even they had to sign non-disclosure agreements beforehand. Has counterfeiting and piracy, and not even the kind that takes place on the seas, become such a major issue that it's being treated in the way as the war against terrorism or the war against drugs, and no public discussion is even allowed on the subject? Incidentally both of the wars I've mentioned just now seems to be the never ending types of which winning is all but a distant dream at the moment – a glimpse into the future of the war against downloads perhaps.

But before the governments can agree on how long to lock people up in Gitmo for downloading the latest Miley Cyrus album or a screener of Zombieland, the RIAA and MPAA have to do things the hard way. One method they've tried before is to attack BitTorrent networks, using techniques such as "piece attack" and "connection attack", both of which designed to frustrate the downloading experience for other users. However, a study has shown that despite the millions of dollars given to anti-piracy firms to implement these methods, they do not work, and at best, they are a minor annoyance to downloads for only a couple of minutes. More millions down the drain, millions that could have been used to give people what they want, which is cheap, accessible music and movies. Instead, they're doing things like trying to get royalties from ringtones, or to charge people to listen to the 30 second previews on iTunes. This, and many other claims, are being rejected even by the copyright friendly courts, as the ASCAP found out this week. The content owners, and the people who have been profiting from royalties, are doing everything they can to hold on, even asking Congress to make it a law so that they never lose their cash cow. Instead of embracing change, they're fighting it, and you wonder how long they can go on doing the same thing. The longer that legitimate and comparable alternatives to illegal downloads are not implemented, the more likely that illegal downloads will be accepted as acceptable practice by the general public.

And many things that have been adopted as common practice, such as recording TV shows to your VCR/DVR or ripping your CDs to MP3, are now considered legal. But they won't be legal if the Canadian group Access Copyright have anything to do with it, and they propose that any of these acts should carry a fee that goes toward the content owners, or at least the people who profit from giving out licenses, such as Access Copyright. It seems that the copyright debate has gone all the way back to pre Universal vs Betamax times, and the content owners are still trying to fight innovation, even if that particular innovation (the ability to record stuff) is a couple of decades old already.

This anti innovation drive has a lot of people angry, and has given agencies such as the MPAA quite a bit of bad PR. So what do they do about it? Instead of calling it "anti-piracy", anti-piracy is now called "content protection". Protecting the content from those pesky and annoying people called customers, perhaps, and also protecting profits again innovation. The studios are also unhappy at the MPAA's approach, calling it not aggressive enough. The shift in strategy will mean that the MPAA will now go after ISPs and network operators, to clamp down on the spread of information from a higher level. Yes, this should make them more popular. And this brings us quite nicely into the iiNet trial, the landmark "studio versus ISP" case that could determine the future of the Internet. It's the second week of the trial, and you can read the summary in the linked post. Suffice to say, if ISPs are to become copyright cops with the power to kick people off the Internet, then you have to wonder, due to the ever increasing importance of the Internet to people's way of life (and work), whether this infringes on people's rights in a democratic society. Finland has just made 1 Mb broadband a basic legal right for anyone who lives in the country, and they will up the speed to 100 Mb by 2015. This seems to be the direction many countries are going towards, making Internet a basic utility just like power or water. But if the Internet is a basic utility, then how does the three-strikes system (or as in the iiNet case the "one-strike" system) affect this basic legal right. Can you be denied water or electricity because you're a suspected criminal? Can the government deny anyone the ability to make a phone call, and even so, is it something they can enforce at all unless that person is in prison, or under house arrest. And in the end, will any of this actually protect the profits of billion dollar movie and music studios, or will kicking people off this brand new global distribution platform actually hurt profits in the long term. And why is the government doing anything to protect profits of private companies anyway, especially at the tax payer's expense?

But let's end this section on a slightly happier, and sane, note. Danny Boyle, director of Slumdog Millionaire and 28 Days Later says that perhaps the best way to fight piracy is to cut movie prices, because the cinema still has something unique to offer in terms of the viewing experience, compared to a poor quality screener. It's a crazy suggestion, so it might just work. Or we can just ban the cinema, so nobody can bring a camera into the cinema and record it. Problem solved!

In high definition news, the CEO of Netflix says that DVDs may be on the way out. But instead of Blu-ray replacing the format, it will actually be streaming. Of course, he's referring to movie rental, not sale-through, and his director of corporate communications had to soften the statement by saying that growth is positive on all the formats.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings based his opinions on the fact that more and more people are opting for the cheapest DVD rental plan, while still keeping the most fully featured streaming option. I think the convenience of streaming, instant access, no need to wait for the disc in the mail and post it back, might be the reason for this shift. But until HD streaming becomes an affordable reality for everyone, which means bandwidth speed and allowance will have to increase, Blu-ray is still the only show in town if you want the best quality HD movies.

What may be not so good for Blu-ray, or actually Blu-ray owners, is the news that 50+ GB discs may not be compatible with current players. So if the movie studios ever decide to use 100 GB discs, say for TV series box sets, then Blu-ray owners will have to upgrade their Blu-ray players again. And I say again because many have already had to upgrade their profile 1.0 players to 1.1 or 2.0, to access features like PiP and Internet content. Chances are, this won't ever happen, because it will just hurt the format too much if people are yet again forced to adopt new hardware with new disc drives, which further highlights just how out of date the idea of using discs is in the age of digital distribution. And I don't think people mind having a bunch of discs in a box set, as I think it actually makes it look like more value.

China Blue HD, which is HD DVD for China, is being imported into Europe, along with cheap movies. Can't see the studios being happy about it, since they licensed movies to CBHD for sale in China only, and the cheap player that comes with a dozen free movies may confuse buyers when they're out there shopping for Blu-ray.

And for Trekkies or Trekkers, and those who don't mind a bit of DRM, then this might be for you: A Starfleet badge shaped USB thumb drive with a copy of the latest Star Trek movie on it? How can one resist!

Not much going on in gaming, as everyone is waiting for the delayed NPD stats (due on Thursday, but has been delayed until Monday). It is expected that the Sony PS3 will jump to first place, from third, for the first time since its launch in 2006. Most expect the Wii to be second, with the Xbox 360 third. Microsoft has already came out with a pre-emptive attack on the numbers, calling it a temporary bump and saying that the 360 will still be the number one selling console for 2009.

2010 is looking like a decisive year for this generation. Sony has it's Wii like motion system, but Natal may trump it as the must have casual gaming gadget. Nintendo has been quiet, which makes me suspect they've got something up their sleeves.

The NPD analysis for September 2009 should be posted sometime during the week, so until the next edition of the WNR, I hope you've had a good time reading this, have a good week and don't forget to tip the waiter.

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3. Weekly Software Roundup

October 18, 2009	multiAVCHD 3.0 build 709 Freeware
October 18, 2009	XMedia Recode 2.1.4.8 Freeware
October 18, 2009	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 2009.10.17 Freeware
October 18, 2009	SmallDVD 2.0 Beta 3 Freeware
October 18, 2009	D2MP 4.11 Freeware
October 18, 2009	Windows 7 Codecs 2.0 Freeware
October 18, 2009	Vista Codec x64 Components 2.1.9 Freeware
October 17, 2009	MediaCoder 0.7.2 Build 4524 Freeware
October 17, 2009	MediaInfo 0.7.23 Freeware
October 17, 2009	The KMPlayer 2.9.4.1436 Beta1 Freeware
October 17, 2009	Fraps 2.9.99
October 17, 2009	RipBot264 1.14.5 Freeware
October 17, 2009	LiVES 1.0.4 Freeware
October 17, 2009	CDBurnerXP 4.2.6.1748 Freeware
October 16, 2009	DivFix++ 0.34 Freeware
October 16, 2009	DV Scheduler 5.42 Freeware
October 15, 2009	Vista Codec Package 5.4.7 Freeware
October 15, 2009	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.0.5.4
October 15, 2009	Roxio Popcorn 4.0
October 15, 2009	LameXP 3.13 Freeware
October 15, 2009	DV Media Player Pro 4.1
October 15, 2009	VideoSpec 0.8.1 Freeware
October 15, 2009	K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 5.2.0 Freeware
October 15, 2009	K-Lite Codec Pack 5.2.0 Freeware
October 15, 2009	MP4Box 0.4.6 Dev (20091013) Freeware
October 14, 2009	Subler 0.9.3r2 Freeware
October 14, 2009	Video DVD Maker Pro 3.14.0.38
October 14, 2009	Video DVD Maker 3.21.0.52 Freeware
October 13, 2009	x264 r1292 Freeware
October 13, 2009	BurnAware Free Edition 2.4.1 Freeware
October 12, 2009	TV Scheduler Pro Rev 135 Freeware
October 12, 2009	TS-Doctor 1.0.2 Beta Freeware
October 12, 2009	Q DVD Author 2.0.0 Freeware
October 12, 2009	BDInfo 0.5.3 Freeware
October 12, 2009	Splash Lite 1.0.3 Freeware
October 12, 2009	ProgDVB 6.21.1 Freeware
October 12, 2009	madVR 0.11 Freeware
October 12, 2009	eac3to 3.17 Freeware
October 12, 2009	HD-DVD/Blu-Ray Stream Extractor 0.6 Freeware
October 12, 2009	BD Rebuilder 0.30.04 Beta Freeware
October 12, 2009	VSO PhotoDVD 3.0.9.6
October 12, 2009	K-Lite Video Conversion Pack 1.6.0 Freeware
October 12, 2009	Clown_BD 0.74 Freeware

======END OF LIVEUPDATE NEWSLETTER======

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 167

11 October, 2009

******************************************************************

INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

******************************************************************

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

How was your week then? Mine? Pretty much more of the same really, kind of boring, but at the same time still feel like there just isn't enough time to do everything I wanted to do. Must also get more sleep. But before I can do that, I'll have to churn out this week's WNR, and there's quite a bit to go through.

Let's start with copyright news, as if I have to say this since every issue of WNR has started with copyright news, and the graphics to the left of this sentence sort of hints at it a bit.

This week is the week that the high profile "movie studios versus ISP" trial started in Australia, with the MPAA backed AFACT and Australian ISP iiNet going head to head in court over allegations that iiNet "allows" its users to pirate stuff. There's all sorts of arguments and statements being thrown around in court over the week, too much to go through all of them here in great detail (check out the link for more details). The AFACT doesn't think iiNet is doing all it can to stop piracy, and iiNet claims that this whole thing has been a set up by the AFACT to get its day in court. The AFACT claims over 90,000 acts of infringements occured on iiNet's network over the period of time they monitored activities, while iiNet believes this number is exaggerated and inaccurate due to the way the AFACT counted them (they counted partial downloads, even by the same person downloading the same file over time, as separate infringements). iiNet also revealed they were sent thousands of infringement notices by the AFACT over the course of a week, far too many for iiNet to be able to verify and process and they believe this "infringement spam" was a deliberate ploy by the AFACT to ensure iiNet would fail to remove users from its network and hence, "allow" piracy to occur.

I'm obviously a biased individual, but everything that iiNet has said so far makes sense. The plain facts, and the AFACT will agree, is that there's a lot of piracy going on. A lot! But to get ISPs to police the thousand of infringement notices per week  is just really unfeasible, even if the ISP in question does not verify any of the notices and simply ban users at the first sign of trouble, which could then lead the ISP into legal trouble as the innocent users that got kicked of can sue for compensation. It's easy for groups like the AFACT to produce a list of IP addresses of offending users, since they can just monitor the IP addresses on torrents, but the ISP will have to go through the data, match the IP address and the timestamp with user information, and then take action. But as IP addresses can be spoofed, and that just because an user's IP address was on a torrent, it does not mean they downloaded it successfully or even intended to download it in the first place, or gave authorization to the person to started the download. Only the police have the resources and authority to get to the bottom of such allegations, and I doubt they will have time to investigate potentially tens of thousands of cases per week. Which is why going after the downloaders is such a stupid idea in the first place. Anyway, I'll be posting more updates on the iiNet trial every week, but a decision in the case is unlikely to be had this year. Obviously, the AFACT would love a win here, but even if they lose, it may give them just enough to push the government into adopting some kind of three-strikes legislation to ensure this "travesty" doesn't go on for much longer.

And the chance of such a legislation becoming a reality in Australia is quite high given what has happened with France adopting similar laws (pending appeal in their Constitutional Council). A big supporter of the laws,  is French President Sarkozy. But a French paper has revealed this week that Sarkozy is in fact a big supporter of piracy as well, but when it benefits himself. He allowed his staff to make 400 pirated copies of a movie about himself so he can give it out to diplomats to promote how great he is or something. His staff even went as far as making photoshoped jackets for the DVDs that removed the logo of the official distributor, so obviously they knew what they were doing was wrong, yet still did it. If downloading a pirated movie three times gets you thrown off the Internet and possibly into jail for 2 years, under the law that Sarkozy supports, then how many years will distributing 400 copies, which is way worse than downloading, get? By my calculations, it should be about 500 years.

The Pirate Bay has just been chased out of the Netherlands, after their version of the MPAA, BREIN, successfully sued TPB's web host, a tactic that seems to be working. TPB was chased out of Sweden using similar tactics. And last week, even Google did their bit to kill of TPB, by removing the home page listing for the website from its index due to a DMCA complaint – luckily, the listing was quickly restored, possibly due to the public backlash.  The Pirate Bay website seems to have relocated to the Ukraine, in a bunker style hosting center that claims to be able to withstand a nuclear attack. The question is, can it withstand a MPAA attack? Let's wait and see how the Ukrainian courts deal with this issue. As for the proposed Pirate Bay sale, there's a lot of confusion as to what's happening, because the handover was supposed to have occurred already.

Still continuing with the theme of lawsuits, Viacom claims to have the "smoking gun" in their legal battle with Google/YouTube. Viacom got hold of some internal emails which suggested that YouTube managers were aware of the unauthorized content issue, but refused to take action. There were also claims that YouTube employees may have also uploaded unauthorized content themselves. Google/YouTube want to attack this case on the basis that Viacom employees had uploaded content for promotional purposes, and as such, it was impossible for them to know which clips were authorized and which were not. What interested me was that Viacom obviously knew the positive effects of YouTube, and thus were employing people to upload promotional clips. You can argue that they also benefit from unauthorized clips as well. I wonder would they be happier or angrier if YouTube banned all Viacom clips from their website, which would definitely solve the piracy problem for Viacom, but is this what they really want? It seems that these media companies want to exploit YouTube's user base, but only if they have full control over what happens, which is not how YouTube or similar websites work – it's the lack of control, the total freedom and spontaneity of the content and the users who upload them that makes or breaks sites like YouTube. If the content owners don't realise this fundamental shift in the relationship between content owners and content users, then they're in for a rough ride.

Still more lawsuit news, this time it's the MPAA versus Real Network's RealDVD case. An injunction was granted against the sale of RealDVD earlier in the year, but Real Networks is appealing the decision. It's unlikely to be successful, since an injunction is the "safe" thing to do pending the verdict, but it's also a "nothing to lose" situation for Real, which has already spent a bundle in legal costs, an appeal won't make much of a difference now.

And from the "another way to solve the piracy problem without rooms full of lawyers" section, here's Spotify's solution – music renting. By paying a small monthly fee, customers gets to download up to 3,333 different ad-free songs at any given time to their PCs, iPhones or Android phones for offline enjoyment, but they lose access once they stop paying the subscription fee. It's not an ideal solution, especially since DRM is involved, but it's certainly cheaper than buying 3,333 songs, and less likely to involve you going to court.

Onto high def news, Blu-ray is probably not coming to the Macs anytime soon. The well sourced blogger who first broke the news that Blu-ray may be coming, then later posted that, well, it's probably not.

Either move would have been understandable. Adding Blu-ray make sense, since Blu-ray is not that popular in the computing arena, but every PC has the ability to support it, unlike Macs.  Apple is also on the board of the Blu-ray group, and has done a lot of work to promote high definition video. On the other hand, Apple's iTunes and Apple TV strategy means that they prefer online distribution over disc based distribution, so Blu-ray may be seen as a competitor.

People may still be getting use to HD being standard, but already the next "big thing" in home entertainment is being hyped: 3D. Unfortunately, consumers don't seem to be buying the hype, at least now right now, because a study has shown that there's very little interest in 3DTV or 3D Blu-ray, not unless it comes at little or no cost to the consumer, which defeats the whole purpose of having something new. It is a bit gimmicky, but I personally like these kind of gimmicks, and I think 3D has a place in the home, even if it doesn't exactly reach mainstream popularity.

What may be popular with consumers is the new generation of TVs. No, I'm not talking about higher than 1080p resolution sets, but rather, TVs that allow you to do more than just watch TV. Panasonic and Samsung went with Internet capable TVs that allows you to watch YouTube videos, check out the weather, and all sorts of other things without leaving the comfort of your couch. Toshiba is doing something different, mainly because it can. Toshiba owns the Cell processor that the PS3 uses, and they've been talking about it for a while, but they've finally managed to find a good use for it on their TVs. Their new Cell Regza range can record up to 8 channels of HDTVs at once to the internal 3TB HDD, for up to 26 hours. This means that if you missed on anything in the last day and a bit, on up to 8 channels, you can go back and watch it without having to torrent it. The powerful Cell processor also allows the TV to show 8 different channels at once. We don't even have 8 HD channels here in Australia, but this would be extremely handy to have in lieu of a dedicated TiVo like set top box.

And finally in gaming, I posted about firmware induced problems for the PS3 last week, and it turns out I'm not the only one who wants answers, because a class action lawsuit has been launched against Sony regarding the problematic 3.00 (and 3.01) firmware.

I think people sue too much over in the US, and I think this is certainly something that probably shouldn't waste the court's time, but if it gets Sony to be a bit more careful about their firmware releases, or to come clean on why the drive freezing and no more disc reading problem seems to only come after firmware updates, then the effort would have been worth it.

The lawsuit is certainly going to divide the PS3 owners, some of which like me have personally experienced the problem first hand, while others don't believe it's actually real. It is certainly rare enough, but not so rare as to never happen, to have caused this divide. What I don't like is the PS3 fans, that haven't yet experienced this problem, claiming it's all made up to make Sony look bad or it's caused by people not knowing how to use their PS3s. I take these quotes from postings on the official PS3 board to illustrate this phenomenon:

The "you're all Sony haters making this up, or you're too stupid to own a PS3" brigade:

I still think many failures are cases of what's called "future shock". You have a rather sophisticated piece of electronics and users really don't know how to operate it properly.

The "I've had this happen to me" group's response:

And I think that's a pretty ridiculous thing to assume. What's to "operate"?, it's a closed system!  That's more like a lot of the unsubstantiated claims and misinformation I've been reading…on this board in particular. For some reason. Especially from people who think because there's nothing wrong with their unit, everbody who's does is either lying or too incompetent to know how to plug it in.

It's real. It's rare. It may already be a non existent issue in the new redesigned PS3 Slim. But it's not right for Sony to charge people to repair something that I can think is almost certainly a manufacturing or design defect (either in hardware, or in the firmware), and it's certainly not the owner's fault.

Alright, that's it for the week. More news next week, definitely more iiNet stuff, possibly NPD stats for game console which may see the PS3 become the number one seller, beating the Wii for the first time. See you then.

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3. Weekly Software Roundup

October 11, 2009	BD Rebuilder 0.30.03 Beta Freeware
October 11, 2009	multiAVCHD 3.0 build 707 Freeware
October 11, 2009	XMedia Recode 2.1.4.5 Freeware
October 11, 2009	DVD slideshow GUI 0.9.2.8 Freeware
October 11, 2009	Real Alternative 2.0.1 Freeware
October 11, 2009	QuickTime Alternative (QT7) 3.0.0 Freeware
October 10, 2009	K-Lite Codec Pack 64-Bit 2.7.0 Freeware
October 10, 2009	IsoBuster 2.6
October 10, 2009	SimpleMovieX 3.9.2
October 10, 2009	DV Scheduler 5.41 Freeware
October 10, 2009	Preferred Filter Tweaker for Windows 7 1.9 Freeware
October 10, 2009	Windows 7 Codecs 1.3.7 Freeware
October 10, 2009	Vista Codec x64 Components 2.1.7 Freeware
October 10, 2009	Vista Codec Package 5.4.6 Freeware
October 10, 2009	InstalledCodec 1.10 Freeware
October 10, 2009	TV Scheduler Pro Rev 133 Freeware
October 10, 2009	Nero Burning ROM 9.4.26.0
October 10, 2009	Nero Vision 6.4.17.0
October 10, 2009	Nero Recode 4.4.38.1
October 10, 2009	ConvertXtoDVD 3.8.0.193j
October 9, 2009	WinDVD Pro 2010
October 9, 2009	AVIFrate 2009 Freeware
October 9, 2009	uncropMKV 1.3 Freeware
October 9, 2009	AVStoDVD 2.2.2 Freeware
October 9, 2009	Kdenlive 0.7.6 Freeware
October 9, 2009	StaxRip 1.1.1.9 Beta Freeware
October 8, 2009	Kiss DajeVu Encoder 2009.R01.8 Freeware
October 8, 2009	LameXP 3.13 RC1 Freeware
October 8, 2009	BDSup2Sub 3.9.8 Freeware
October 8, 2009	x264 r1281 Freeware
October 7, 2009	Wii Video 9 5.03 Freeware
October 7, 2009	PSP Video 9 5.03 Freeware
October 7, 2009	PS3 Video 9 5.03 Freeware
October 7, 2009	Videora Xbox360 Converter 5.03 Freeware
October 7, 2009	Videora iPod Converter 5.03 Freeware
October 7, 2009	Videora iPhone Converter 5.03 Freeware
October 7, 2009	Videora Apple TV Converter 5.03 Freeware
October 7, 2009	Muxman Pro 1.2.3
October 7, 2009	MP4Box 0.4.6 Dev (20091005) Freeware
October 7, 2009	ffdshow 3096 (generic/x64) Freeware
October 6, 2009	Net Transport 2.88
October 6, 2009	Goldwave 5.54
October 6, 2009	Avanti 0.4.1 Freeware
October 6, 2009	Submerge 1.8.2
October 6, 2009	J. River Media Center 14.0.79
October 5, 2009	VideoCacheView 1.52 Freeware
October 5, 2009	DigitalVideo Converter 1.16.0.48 Freeware
October 5, 2009	VisualSubSync 0.9.20 Freeware
October 4, 2009	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.0.5.3
October 4, 2009	DVDStyler 1.7.4 Freeware

======END OF LIVEUPDATE NEWSLETTER======

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 166

4 October, 2009

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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1. Introduction

I already cover this in the intro to the WNR below, but every Windows PC these days should have anti-virus and a firewall installed, and with an anti-malware scanner run monthly to get rid of everything the other two misses.  And the cost of putting this in place? Nothing. Name brand PCs usually comes with a trial version of a security suite these days, but I think it would be better to just include a set of free security software that won't expire and leave the computer vulnerable. So here are some links to free security software (in alphabetical order) that should mean ther are no excuses left as to why a Windows PC is unprotected:

Anti-Virus (includes anti-spyware modules):

• Avast Home Edition
• AVG Free
• Avira Free

• ZoneAlarm Basic

• Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware
  

2. Weekly News Roundup

Welcome to another, slightly later than usual, WNR. Time to do a PSA, or public service announcement. With Microsoft revealing its new free anti-virus software, there's now now reason, none at all, why you should not have security software on your PC (that's firewall, anti-virus and anti-malware). Just with free anti-virus software, there are now at least 6 well known free software to choose from. With malware, at least passive protection, then you can't really do worse than scanning your computer monthly using the full scan function of Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware, another free software. And as for firewall, then ZoneAlarm Basic will offer you basic protection that's better than the built in Windows Firewall. And with a little bit of discipline in terms of updating your operating system/browser with the latest patches, and not clicking on every link you find in emails and on website, then there's a decent chance that your computer will remain malware free. Decent, but not guaranteed of course, which is why if you have the money, then investing in a security suite like Norton or Kaspersky Internet Security is a good idea, especially considering licenses often now come in 3's and so you can protect all the computers in your home for a low yearly subscription fee.

Next week's PSA: backups – do you have a system and if not, why not? Let's move onto the news.

In copyright news, The Pirate Bay appeal is about to begin, but there has been some shuffling of the judges in the case. Judges, or just clerks, I'm not quite sure – the Swedish legal system is a bit different to that of the US or Australia. But a judge, or a clerk, has been removed due to bias, but the request for removal came from the people suing TPB, not from TPB.

This leads me to believe that this might not be done to ensure the result cannot be challenged, as the RIAA/MPAA claims, but rather that the person's removal may in fact hurt the TPB. The bias in question was related to this person owning shares in Spotify, which has content distribution deals with the RIAA. Does this mean the person would benefit from TPB not existing? Possibly, as Spotify aims to offer what TPB offers illegally. However, it also might mean this person has the required technical knowledge to understand the major issues behind the case, and that in turn might hurt the copyright holder's case more. I was once told that this type of case is often won or lost on the ability of the judge(s) to understand the technical implications of their decisions, and that judges that do not come from a technical background (that is, most of them) will usually rule in favour of the industry group. It's understandable, as if the first thing you think of when someone says "torrent" is rain, then you would also be more likely side with major Hollywood studios as opposed to a bunch of kids who set up this website about pirate ships.

Which is precisely why there should be more education and more public lobbying of the issues, which has generally been one sided in favour of the copyright holders. The Swedish Pirate Party's fantastic results in the European Parliament elections shows that this is an issue that people care about and politicians and judges should realise that there are two sides to this issue, and is not a case good versus evil as portrayed by the copyright lobby. Which is good news then that Pirate Party Australia has managed to sign up enough members to contest the next Federal election, and I suspect they will do rather well in the polls, since there has been a lot of Internet related issues that have become major issues, such as the government's ridiculous pursuit of a national censorship system, or the much needed national broadband network. And the piracy issue, particular with the current high profile copyright court cases, and the government's hints at moving towards a three-strikes system, should ensure a lot of protest votes go the way of the PPA.

Speaking of high profile Australian copyright court cases, it will start next week but the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) has dropped another key part of their case against iiNet. Previously, they had dropped the "conversion" charge, as they could not prove that iiNet was the main copyright infringer. Now, they've dropped the part of the case which say that iiNet engaged in primary acts of infringement, based on the fact that iiNet caches content for its subscribers. Of course, all ISPs cache content, that's how ISPs work, and if an ISP can be found guilty this way, then all of them need to be shutdown immediately as they've all helped to plan terrorist attacks, share child pornography, commit acts of fraud and every other bad thing that has gone through their cache. The fact that charges are being dropped this late into the preparation phase, suggest that the original charges were far too ambitious, and lacked understanding of even some basic facts like how ISPs work. Were they perhaps too ambitious deliberately to scare iiNet into submission, into a settlement, not expecting iiNet to be so determined to fight the charges out in court? Who know.

Now, whenever there's a clever new way to fight piracy, no matter whether it will work or not, I'll report it here. The latest is interesting, and it's actually good for consumers, as if the plan works, you'll be able to download legal MP3s for free, and all it will take is a moment of your time. The new idea, well not exactly new, is ad-supported MP3s. The plans is that after the user views  a short video ad, they will then be able to download the DRM-free MP3s to keep. Sounds pretty good to me, although it's a US only thing apparently so I can't take advantage of it. But if it sounds too good to be true, then it might just be that. The major problem I can see immediately is, well, how will the video ads actually manage to pay for the MP3s, each of them costing at least $0.50 each – a single view of a video ad, unless the user clicks on it, is going to generate a lot less than 50 cents, probably a lot less than 5 cents. But if the ads do manage to pay for the music, then it becomes a good business model and will go a long way towards killing piracy, much more than a new DRM scheme or more lawsuits. Let's hope my math is wrong and that the system does work, because I don't people will mind sitting through an ad or two if it means free stuff.

Let's move onto high definition news, the latest rumour is that Apple will finally add Blu-ray support to its iMac range, despite Steve Jobs calling Blu-ray `a bag of hurt', referring to the messy and expensive licensing process and the lack of user penetration. Both problems have been greatly reduced thanks to lower and simpler licensing schemes, and with current  market share double that of when Mr Jobs spoke.

But as it is, it's just a rumour for now, and I haven't really heard enough from the right sources to think that this is a certainty, not like with the PS3 Slim and Xbox 360 price cut rumours. Will Apple's support help Blu-ray? Of course it will. Will it be a major help, probably not. Why? Well, Blu-ray has been available on Windows systems from day one, and despite there being a lot more Windows systems than Macs, it has been of almost no help to the format, and penetration of Blu-ray on PCs remain quite low. Still, with Apple's well known and respected ability for working with HD video, having Blu-ray support is almost a necessity these days, rather than a luxury, although it remains to be seen whether hardware acceleration will be enabled in software (the Nvidia GPUs that iMacs use should support at least H.264 acceleration for Blu-ray playback).

One rumour about Apple's reluctance towards Blu-ray is that its current Apple TV devices would be hurt by Blu-ray's success, since Apple would prefer everyone to be buying movies through iTunes, as opposed to on disc. I don't know if I believe this, as I think Apple's reluctance is more to do with how people use Macs, and whether Apple thinks people will use it as a Blu-ray player, when they take into account the number of people who currently use it as a DVD player.

But it is true that technologies like iTunes are in some ways competing with Blu-ray for the home video market share. But even within downloads, there's great competition from the way it is being offered. The latest thing here in Australia is that our major cable/satellite subscription TV provider, Foxtel, has just announced that they will offer 400 hours of downloadable content for free per month for all subscribers. It's technically just allowing subscribers to download for free the content they've already paid for and with subscribers using the IQ set-top-box, content that they already have the ability to record and keep. But with a billing system already in place, and an user base that is already willing to fork out cash for TV shows and movies, it will be interesting to see if Foxtel extends this download service to premium content like the latest episodes available straight after their showing in the US – with the payment being handled through the monthly bill. Foxtel already does this with on-demand HD movies through their set-top-box, so it's not a huge step to extend this to TV and movie downloads on the PC.

Everyone knows about the infamous Xbox 360 RRoD problem, but I wonder if the PS3's "no disc reading" problem might also get some unwanted spotlight in the near future. The problem I describe is one that I have personally experienced and posted about on this blog, and it seems to be still happening with the latest firmware updates.

I have no doubt that this problem is far less widespread than the RRoD problem, but there are still a large group of people who have suffered from it, and it seems to occur after every firmware update. I would guess that less than 1% of PS3s are affected, possibly much less than this, so it's no surprise that some people feel the problem doesn't exist because it has never happened to them. But it has happened, I can confirm from personal experience, with the people who posted comments on the blog, from users posting about their problem on the official PS3 forum and elsewhere, and so the problem is not imaginary. The worst part is that Sony charges $150 per repair of this problem out of warranty (mine was in warranty at the time), and if it is the firmware update process that somehow causes this to occur (and the PS3 firmwares themselves are not really known for their bug free nature), then I wonder if charging users this large amount is the right thing to do. And this problem pretty much only started showing up after the 2.40 firmware update, so something must have changed then that causes this problem to appear, but it's all just speculation as Sony has refused to release any information in regards to this issue. And with the wholesale hardware changes in the PS3 Slim, I don't think this will be an issue for the Slim, so that's one reason to upgrade your old PS3s to the new one, even if the styling isn't to my taste (I still like the old one better, hmmm, glossy).

Okie dokie, that's itie for this weekie. More next week, so until then …

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3. Weekly Software Roundup

October 4, 2009	OpenShot Video Editor 0.9.42 Developer Preview Freeware
October 4, 2009	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 2009.10.04 Freeware
October 4, 2009	MovieGate 3.07
October 4, 2009	AVI ReComp 1.5.0 Freeware
October 4, 2009	TS-Doctor 1.0 Beta Freeware
October 4, 2009	Windows 7 Codecs 1.3.6 Freeware
October 4, 2009	Vista Codec x64 Components 2.1.6 Freeware
October 4, 2009	Vista Codec Package 5.4.5 Freeware
October 4, 2009	CDBurnerXP 4.2.6.1706 Freeware
October 4, 2009	Goldwave 5.53
October 3, 2009	MovieConverter 1.53
October 3, 2009	AVCHDCoder 09.10.02 Freeware
October 3, 2009	ProgDVB 6.21 Freeware
October 3, 2009	ConvertXtoDVD 3.8.0.193h
October 3, 2009	TV Scheduler Pro Rev 130 Freeware
October 3, 2009	multiAVCHD 3.0 build 706 Freeware
October 3, 2009	SolveigMM AVI Trimmer 1.6.910.1 Freeware
October 2, 2009	Clown_BD 0.73 Freeware
October 2, 2009	HDConvertToX 2.2.492.3692 Freeware
October 2, 2009	PopCorn MKV AudioConverter 1.79.1 Freeware
October 2, 2009	LameXP 3.13 Beta 2 Freeware
October 2, 2009	ffmpeg2theora 0.25 Freeware
October 2, 2009	MediaCoder 0.7.2 Build 4522 Freeware
October 2, 2009	Splash Lite 1.0.2 Freeware
October 2, 2009	Subtitle Edit 2.8.1 Freeware
October 2, 2009	TMPGEnc Authoring Works 4.0.6.28
October 1, 2009	Wii Video 9 5.02 Freeware
October 1, 2009	PSP Video 9 5.02 Freeware
October 1, 2009	PS3 Video 9 5.02 Freeware
October 1, 2009	Videora Xbox360 Converter 5.02 Freeware
October 1, 2009	Videora iPod Converter 5.02 Freeware
October 1, 2009	Videora iPhone Converter 5.02 Freeware
October 1, 2009	Videora Apple TV Converter 5.02 Freeware
October 1, 2009	The KMPlayer 2.9.4.1436 Beta1 Freeware
September 30, 2009	SolveigMM Video Splitter 2.2.909.30
September 30, 2009	DVDRemaster Pro 5.2.2
September 30, 2009	DVDRemaster Standard 5.2.2
September 30, 2009	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.0.5.2
September 30, 2009	Chapter Grabber 3.7 Freeware
September 30, 2009	BD Rebuilder 0.30.02 Beta Freeware
September 30, 2009	Any Video Converter Free 2.78 Freeware
September 30, 2009	EncodeHD 1.1.140.0 Freeware
September 29, 2009	LiVES 1.0.3 Freeware
September 29, 2009	FFCoder 0.96 Beta Freeware
September 28, 2009	MP4Box 0.4.6 Dev (20090925) Freeware
September 28, 2009	ffdshow Rev. 3092 Freeware
September 28, 2009	VideoSpec 0.8.0 Freeware
September 28, 2009	CopyToDVD 4.3.1.1
September 27, 2009	Preferred Filter Tweaker for Windows 7 1.8 Freeware
September 27, 2009	AVIsynth 2.6.0 Alpha 2 Freeware
September 27, 2009	EMDB 0.87 Freeware
September 27, 2009	Plato Video To iPod PSP 3GP 10.09.01
September 27, 2009	Plato Video to iPhone Converter 10.09.01
September 27, 2009	Plato Video Joiner 10.09.01
	More updates from Plato software company...

======END OF LIVEUPDATE NEWSLETTER======

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 165

27 September, 2009

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

******************************************************************

1. Introduction

Are you still using a 32-bit OS? Want to switch to 64-bit, but don't know whether it's worth the trouble, or whether compatibility will become a major issue? Then I've got the blog for you, because these are the very questions that I asked before I made my decision (and I did eventually decide on the 64-bit version of Vista, back when I purchased my new computer last year). With Windows 7 being released in about just over 3 week's time, it's now time to decide on 32 or 64.

• The Windows 7 64-Bit Question: Should I Switch? 
  

2. Weekly News Roundup

With Windows 7 coming in less than a month's time, it certainly seems like it's the operating system that Vista should have been, and I think Microsoft are on their way to a very successful launch, despite their horrible marketing campaign. And for those upgrading – and I hope you're opting for a clean install because that's the only way to get the best out of Windows 7, performance wise – then this is the perfect opportunity to go to a 64-bit OS if you're not already using one. The reason is that to go from 32-bit to 64-bit, even within the same OS version, you'll need a clean install, so you might as well bite the bullet when doing the XP/Vista to 7 upgrade. If you're already using a 64-bit OS, then please ignore the blog I've just written, otherwise it's well worth a read to find out if 64-bit is for you, or if 32-bit is good enough for now.

Otherwise, it was a fairly quiet week, with a few stories occupying the headlines to still make it a very interesting week, although most of it was yet again about the issue of copyright.

Let's start with the copyright news. There was only really one news item that really caught the attention of people this week. And not even Sir Elton John could push the news out of the headlines, much of it thanks to the reactions to the story on the Internet.

Earlier in the week, musician Lily Allen decided to take a stand on the issue of online music piracy. But unlike many others who have come out against the proposed three-strike Internet banning policy, Ms Allen has come out for it, even launching a blog called "It's Not Alright" to voice her views on piracy. Now there is nothing wrong with someone expressing their views, in fact, that's what the Internet is for. However, if you do come out with some opinion, especially a controversial one, then make sure you are untouchable when it comes to arguing the facts. Unfortunately, Ms Allen made the mistake of not doing enough vetting into her personal history in regards to piracy, and in netspeak, she has been truly and thoroughly pwned. It turns out that, in publishing her anti-piracy views, that she might have pirated the article of high tech news and discussion website, Techdirt. And not only that, a few days later, it was revealed that Ms Allen was a distributor of pirated music herself, with some self-made mixtape MP3s that was available for download from her website, that featured songs that she (and her record company) did not have the distribution rights to. Oops.

Some dude said nearly 2000 years ago that "let he who is without sin, cast the first stone". And if one is to take the moral stance that anyone who has downloaded or shared an illegal MP3 (and that's a lot of people) is a thief and should be punished harshly, than he, or she, should at the very least ensure that they have not committed the same "crime". Because the truth is that it's very easy to commit this crime, it may be because you think you're not doing anything wrong by not paying for something you never had the intention to pay for in the first place, or perhaps you think sharing songs is a great way to promote the song and the artist and it may lead to you, or the people you shared the song with, to become a fan and start buying. There are legitimate arguments for and against a heavy crackdown on piracy, but as the Lily Allen incident showed us, it's far too easy to be labeled a pirate just because, earlier in your music career, your appreciation of other artists led you to make a mixtape that somehow ended up online. And as Ms Allen posted on her blog about the mixtapes, "I made those mixtapes 5 years ago, I didn't have a knowledge of the workings of the music industry back then". But Ms Allen, under the very legislation that you support, you would be punished for what you claim you did out of ignorance 5 years ago, and guess how many other people might get punished for similar acts if what you support becomes law? And the article you stole from Techdirt, well, that's copyright protected as well, even if it were just some text on some website you've never seen before. So I'm glad Ms Allen spoke out, because she has successfully demonstrated the worst aspect of the three-strikes system, something nobody else could do until it was actually made into law. Ms Allen has since then decided to quit the music business, which could be to her genuine loss of hope in the future of the music business due to continuing losses to piracy, a publicity stunt, a bit of sulky sulk sulk over the whole affair,  or a bit of everything.

Oh, and Sir Elton John made similar statements but nobody really cared, not when the Lily Allen Show was so interesting.

In all of this, it's sometimes easy to forget that the whole point of the anti-piracy drive, and the three-strikes system, is all just about increasing profits for the music industry (and other industries). Not that there's anything wrong with this of course, they have the right to take actions to increase their profits. But will the three-strikes actually stop piracy, and what about the cost to implement and maintain such a system. One of UK's leading ISPs, BT, has came up with some estimates as to the cost of spying on Internet users, and they put the cost at £24 per person, or roughly £365 million per year in the UK. The UK music industry actually only claims £200 million in lost profits due to piracy per year, and as with their estimates, the actual loss is probably less than a quarter of this amount, if that much. The extra cost, the full amount of which will no doubt be passed onto the consumer, will hurt the Internet as access plans become less affordable and some are priced out of being able to connect altogether. This will in turn hurt legal online music sales and promotional efforts. I would be surprised if the music industry actually comes out ahead at all, but for them it's of little risk since they scream so loudly about the seriousness of online piracy, yet are unwilling to fork out a single cent for a solution that they came up with. Probably the most effective way to actually kill off the three-strikes system is to actually force the music, movie (and other) industries to come up with the cash to implement such a system.

But the movie studios (or at least movie theaters) are spending on implementing systems that try and stop camcorder pirates. The latest such system uses infrared pulsing lights situated behind the screen that the human eye cannot see, but will be recorded onto camcorder images. This is supposed to deter pirates and purchasers of said pirated content, but they've obviously never bothered to download and examine a cam recording of a movie, what with part of the picture being blocked by somebody's head, and the sound of popcorn chewing louder than the explosions in the movie. I don't think quality is what people care about when it comes to cam recordings, and so feel free to spend millions upgrading cinemas with this technology, and in the end, some guy who works at the cinema for $10 an hour will still manage to get their hands on the original reel and hand it over to the right people to make a perfect rip.

So what would drive the copyright holders to spend so much fighting against online piracy, when by reasonable estimations, the loss to online piracy isn't anywhere near as bad as the copyright holders make out, and that the benefits of the Internet will probably eventually outweigh any effect that piracy has. Many people can see that Internet and digital distribution provides a lot of new opportunities, but why does the industry treat it as a disease that must be eradicated? Well, William Patry, the senior copyright counsel at Google might have found the reason in his new book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. He explains that this isn't, nor will it be the last, time that copyright holders show mass panic in the face of a new distribution medium, to identify it as the enemy and do all in their powers to stop it, and then only to find out later on that it actually benefits them the most in the long run. It happened with the introduction of radio, television, VCRs, and now, it's the Internet that's public enemy number one where copyright is concerned. I guess it is understandable to a degree. To have something so valuable, you will want to protect it, against new things that you don't fully understand and sometimes that means going too far. I keep on thinking back to the Susan Boyle episode, and wonder if her performance, and the show she performed on, would have been as popular if somebody hadn't illegally uploaded the clip of the show onto YouTube. Had the copyright holders got to the video before the general public, how much of an adverse effect would that have had on the finances of said copyright holders, I wonder. Not to mention the financial fortunes of one Susan Boyle (although the publicity has had an adverse effect on her personal life, but that's a whole other problem).

Onto high def news now. Still not much happening, and that's true on the release front as well, as the last few weeks (after the Watchmen bump had subsided) has been fairly quiet ones. However, one thing is for certain, and that's the price drops for Blu-ray happening all over the place, for both hardware and software.

I've noticed this trend from analyzing the NPD stats, and NPD themselves have also been monitoring the situation and found that average prices have indeed dropped and are getting closer to the pricing of the DVD versions, even compared to just a few months ago. And from looking at the price history info on our own Amazon Blu-ray Price Index section, you can see the trend quite clearly. New releases, which used to be priced at just below $28 on Amazon, are now almost always under $24, with older releases previously hardly ever discounted, sometimes now falling to under $10. And whenever there has been a discount for older titles, it will usually shoot to the top of the charts. It's good new for consumers and good news for the Blu-ray format, but probably not great news for the backers of the format, who have envisaged a premium format to combat ever lowering DVD prices. It hasn't totally failed in this respect, as DVD prices are falling faster and so Blu-ray has at least slow downed the bleeding, but I think it's time studios start to think about ways to sell more copies of the movies, rather than to make more money per copy.

Not much happening in gaming as it's still a couple of weeks away from official sales figures for September, which should tell us how well the PS3 Slim is doing, and whether the discount to the Xbox 360 Elite has worked or not. The Wii price drop has been confirmed as well, but it comes too late in September to really have an effect on the month's sales figures. But the fact that Nintendo is doing it may suggest they've had a look at the September sales figures and weren't really happy with what they saw. And there is also news of a further $50 rebate offer for the Xbox 360 Elite, which suggests that Microsoft weren't that happy with what they saw as well.

That's it for now, have a great week, and see you in about 168 hours time.

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3. Weekly Software Roundup

September 27, 2009	Clown_BD 0.72 Freeware
September 26, 2009	ProgDVB 6.20.5 Freeware
September 26, 2009	AVCHDCoder 09.09.25 Freeware
September 26, 2009	VOB2MPG 3.0.100 Freeware
September 25, 2009	MediaInfo 0.7.22 Freeware
September 25, 2009	multiAVCHD 3.0 build 704 Freeware
September 25, 2009	EncodeHD 1.1.131.0 Freeware
September 25, 2009	Windows 7 Codecs 1.3.4 Freeware
September 25, 2009	Vista Codec x64 Components 2.1.4 Freeware
September 25, 2009	Vista Codec Package 5.4.3 Freeware
September 25, 2009	Submerge 1.8.1
September 25, 2009	Wii Video 9 5.01 Freeware
September 25, 2009	PSP Video 9 5.01 Freeware
September 25, 2009	PS3 Video 9 5.01 Freeware
September 25, 2009	Videora Xbox360 Converter 5.01 Freeware
September 25, 2009	Videora iPod Converter 5.01 Freeware
September 25, 2009	Videora iPhone Converter 5.01 Freeware
September 25, 2009	Videora Apple TV Converter 5.01 Freeware
September 25, 2009	Replay Media Catcher 3.11
September 25, 2009	ConvertXtoDVD 3.8.0.193g
September 25, 2009	x264 r1271 Freeware
September 24, 2009	DV Media Player Pro 4.0
September 24, 2009	FFCoder 0.94 Beta Freeware
September 24, 2009	MP4Box 0.4.6 Dev (20090922) Freeware
September 24, 2009	Splash Lite 1.0.1 Freeware
September 24, 2009	Elecard Converter Studio 3.3
September 24, 2009	Net Transport 2.87
September 24, 2009	TVersity 1.7.2.1 Beta Freeware
September 23, 2009	VideoLAN (VLC) 1.0.2 Freeware
September 23, 2009	HC 0.24 Beta (2009-09-22) Freeware
September 23, 2009	J. River Media Center 14.0.71
September 23, 2009	CorePlayer Mobile 1.3.6 build 7427
September 22, 2009	Collectorz.com Movie Collector For Mac OS X 3.2.1
September 22, 2009	BD Rebuilder 0.29.05 Beta Freeware
September 21, 2009	BurnAware Free Edition 2.4.0 Freeware
September 21, 2009	iPix Flash Slideshow Creator 1.6.1
September 21, 2009	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 2009.09.20 Freeware
September 21, 2009	Rapid Menu Writer 1.3 Freeware
September 21, 2009	Auto DVD Labeler 1.2
September 20, 2009	VirtualDub 1.9.6 (Build 32618) Freeware

======END OF LIVEUPDATE NEWSLETTER======

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 164

20 September, 2009

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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1. Introduction

No mid week blog this week as I spent the week busy working on various things, and did not, I repeat, did not waste my time creating dozens of Monopoly City Street accounts to buy up famous streets from all over the world only for cheaters to ruin it all and for others who hate me to put hazards on all my streets. No, that did not happen.

• Monopoly City Streets 
  

2. Weekly News Roundup

Welcome back to another edition of the WNR. How was your week? I spent the week doing odd things, to be honest, I can't really remember all that much about it, except I did waste a bit of time on Monopoly City Streets, except the cheaters on there makes it annoying for the rest of the players. It's a good distraction, but I wish they'd put more thought into the rules before launching the game. Onto the news then.

In Copyright news, subtitle download sites are now under the spotlight in Israel, or rather, the people who upload subtitles to these sites are the ones being targeted. Three individuals have been sued for uploading subtitles to the site Qsubs, and have been ordered to pay $240,000 in damages each, and to further humiliate them, made to publicly apologise for uploading them.

Subtitle files are really just text files, but they are protected by copyright. But unlike things like film scripts (which a few places offer downloads for) which have legitimate use, subtitle files are mostly for use with pirated video files. For the files you make from your own DVDs, well, you can rip your own subtitles in most cases (technically breaking the DMCA or similar legislation), although legitimate use does exist when certain editions of the DVD do not have the subtitles you need, and since region control prohibits you from buying the other editions, using downloaded subtitles are the only way (although you may have to perform additional processing on said subtitle files because it all syncs up). Then there's the issue that some US DVDs only have closed caption, which is not available in many other countries, and so if you have such a DVD, and you have convert it to XviD, you'll need to source subtitle files for it from other editions. But these are pretty rare uses for downloaded subtitles, and in any case, copyright still exists for the ripped files. But suing individuals, while leaving the upload site alone, seems like a bit of a strange move.

And unexpected as it may be, there was a win in court for Veoh in their legal battle again Universal Music. Universal had sued Veoh for copyright abuse, due to music videos being uploaded by users of the video sharing website. YouTube came under a similar suit from Viacom. But the decision, which Universal will seek an appeal on, means that Veoh cannot be held fully responsible for the actions of its users, as long as it takes appropriate action in trying to combat copyright theft. Just like YouTube, Veoh has the ability for copyright holders to seek removal of content, and they have removed content deemed unauthorized on a regular basis, and this was enough for the judge to declare that Veoh has done enough not be to held responsible for those other uploads that it has failed to remove. After all, the responsibility of stopping copyright theft should be shared between copyright owners and websites like Veoh and YouTube, the copyright holders cannot simply demand that these websites, which deals with thousands of videos per day, to do all the work to protect their own content. And it certainly shouldn't be considered "reasonable" for these websites to censor each and every piece of user generate content, as if this is true, then websites like Twitter and Facebook would have to be. As long as websites show they are making a genuine effort, I think, that should be enough. In any case, the legal boffins at YouTube should be delighted at the ruling, although Universal's appeal may reverse the decision in due time.

Speaking of appeals, the service provider that was forced to disconnect The Pirate Bay via legal action initiated by the MPAA is appealing the decision. They had to disconnect TPB because the judge ruled that the service provider, which provided network services to the web host of The Pirate Bay, is liable for the content being made available using its services. This is a big ruling, and a very messy one, as these service providers may service an entire city or even country, and for them to be made liable for everything that is being hosted, essentially puts them out of business, and an end to the Internet. I keep on going back to this analogy, but again, this is like the phone company being made liable for the actions of criminals that are using their phone services. Except, this time, it's not even the phone company we're talking about, it's the company that helped to lay the undersea cables that the phone company uses, being sued for someone using the phone to scam people. In real life, neither the phone company nor the cable layers would get sued (and if they do, they'll win without question), but when it comes to the Internet, the largely clueless legal establishment are handing out rulings left and right that have huge repercussions that they are not close to being aware of. If the government should be taking any action on Internet piracy, it should be to establish clear guidelines as to jurisdiction, responsibility, and all those other legal definitions that make the legal system work, not to do the MPAA's dirty work and denying it's own citizens their right to communicate by kicking them off the Internet.

And it's a shame, because the French government has just successfully licked clean the bottom of the RIAA/MPAA's shoes by passing their version of the three-strikes rule, although not exactly what the music and movie studios wanted (they didn't want that pesky thing called due process), it is still a extremely harsh piece of legislation which hopefully will be appealed. The legislation will even fine or ban anyone who lets other use their connection to download pirated content, and jail time could even be handed out for serious offenders. So if you pirated 3 songs, worth a total of $2.97, you might have to spend a year or two in prison for daring to do something so nasty to those poor poor billionaires at the music and movie studios. Jean Valjean would be rolling in his grave if he were in fact a real person and not a fictionalized character, so Victor Hugo will have to be doing the rolling.

Across the Channel, a group is seeking to add DRM to DTV by adding a piece of encrypted data to broadcasts, which can only be unlocked if you pay them money to buy the license to the decoder. It's all in the name of stopping piracy of course, and the millions they are set to make in licensing fees is just a nice side effect, honest! Using the piracy bogeyman to scare the bejesus out of the government to force them to put in measures which allows you (or your lawyers) to make a bundle, while inconveniencing legitimate users and not stopping piracy at all – yep, that sounds about right as the MPAA is doing exactly this with the FCC at the moment. If only the rest of the world behaved in the same way as the Japanese, then groups like the MPAA won't even have to make this effort. They can just bring out the DRM in force and make people use it, which is why all new Japanese phones will now have DRM to prevent playback of anything that it may detect as illegal, including songs and movies you've ripped from your own collections. This would also mean that anytime you want to play a song, you'll have to connect to the Internet to have it checked by the powers that be to ensure you are not in fact a dirty pirate. Japan must be like some kind of utopia for the likes of the RIAA/MPAA, if phone companies can get away with doing something like this without a huge public backlash or government interference.

In high def news, well, there wasn't anything of real note to be honest. I could talk about Blu-ray sales numbers, but I've already covered them in this thread on a weekly basis. Or maybe talk about how all the studios are talking about bringing 3D movies to the home via Blu-ray, but I've talked about that before. Some websites are still talking about the Toshiba Blu-ray thing, which suggest there really isn't that much happening right now. Things will certainly pick up as we get closer to the holiday period, and there are some big releases lined up for Blu-ray this season. So let's skip high def news for this week and hope that there's some news of substance soon.

And in gaming, as predicted, firmware 3.01 for the PS3 has been released as a hotfix for many of the issues introduced by the disappointing 3.00 firmware. Sony needs to reduce the number of firmware updates and make each update more substantial (and bug free), because things are getting more ridiculous with each new firmware release. And despite having released tons of firmware updates, none of them have been as substantial or welcomed (relatively) as the New Xbox Experience update from Microsoft last year, which proves that quality, not quantity, is what people want.

And as for the Wii price drop, you can pretty much notch it up as "fact", following more leaked catalogues (this time from Best Buy) showing the $50 price drop to come in this month. Is it enough to combat the resurgent PS3, and the Xbox 360 price drop? Price, I don't think, is the Wii's major problem. I think the novelty factor is wearing off a bit, and it's going to be even less unique when Sony and Microsoft introduce their own motion systems, especially Microsoft's controller-free Natal. Time for the Wii to concentrate on it's core gamers, so a new Zelda game, a new Mario game or some new devices like Wii Fit, might be what's needed. Wii Sports Resort helped, but more is needed.

That's all the news I bothered to "report" on this week. See you next week.

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3. Weekly Software Roundup

September 20, 2009	AC3Filter tools 0.3b Freeware
September 20, 2009	LameXP 3.12 Hotfix 4 Freeware
September 20, 2009	ProgDVB 6.20.4 Freeware
September 19, 2009	Collectorz.com Movie Collector 6.4.1
September 19, 2009	Windows 7 Codecs 1.3.3 Freeware
September 19, 2009	Vista Codec x64 Components 2.1.3 Freeware
September 19, 2009	PEnGUIn Encoder MP4 0.98b2 Freeware
September 19, 2009	Nero Linux 4.0
September 19, 2009	WinMPG Video Convert 8.9.8
September 18, 2009	MP4Box 0.4.6 Dev (200900918) Freeware
September 18, 2009	DV Scheduler 5.39 Freeware
September 18, 2009	ffdshow Rev. 3078 (generic/x64) Freeware
September 18, 2009	Cole2k Media - Codec Pack 7.9.0 Freeware
September 18, 2009	SolveigMM Video Splitter 2.2.909.17
September 17, 2009	Videocharge Studio 2.1
September 17, 2009	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 2009.09.17 Freeware
September 17, 2009	MediaCoder 0.7.2 Build 4512 Freeware
September 16, 2009	Any Video Converter Free 2.77 Freeware
September 16, 2009	WinDVD 2010 Pro
September 15, 2009	Moovida 1.0.7 Freeware
September 15, 2009	AmaRecLite 1.03 Freeware
September 15, 2009	The KMPlayer 2.9.4.1435 Test Freeware
September 15, 2009	Splash Lite 1.0 Freeware
September 15, 2009	Avanti 0.4.0 Freeware
September 15, 2009	Kiss DajeVu Encoder 2009.R01.7 Freeware
September 15, 2009	DVD slideshow GUI 0.9.2.7 Freeware
September 15, 2009	x264 r1259 Freeware
September 14, 2009	VoltaicHD for Mac 1.8.8
September 14, 2009	Rapid Menu Writer 1.1 Freeware
September 14, 2009	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.0.4.8
September 14, 2009	Srt iPhone 0.31 Freeware
September 14, 2009	XMedia Recode 2.1.4.2 Freeware
September 14, 2009	Opti Drive Control 1.41
September 14, 2009	DVDStyler 1.7.4 RC1 Freeware
September 14, 2009	BD Rebuilder 0.29.04 Beta Freeware
September 14, 2009	multiAVCHD 3.0 build 700 Freeware
September 14, 2009	PSPVC 3.75 Freeware
September 14, 2009	PopCorn MKV AudioConverter 1.79.0 Freeware

======END OF LIVEUPDATE NEWSLETTER======

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 163

13 September, 2009

******************************************************************

INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

******************************************************************

1. Introduction

I finished the August 2009 US video games sales figures analysis yesterday. No big surprises, with the PS3 improving due to the price cut, but we'll have to wait until this time next months to see the full effects of the PS3 Slim, as well as Microsoft's price cut response.

• Game Consoles - August 2009 NPD Sales Figure Analysis 
  

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2. Weekly News Roundup

I managed to get the August 2009 US video games sales analysis done, based on NPD stats as usual. August was an interesting month, with the PS3 price cut and the PS3 Slim announcements, plus the Xbox 360 price cut as well. September may prove to be even more interesting, with the PS3 Slim official going on sale right at the beginning of the month and the Xbox 360 price cut in full focus as well. But August was, in most areas, as expected, but Nintendo has got to be worrying a bit because it might lose its steady hold on second place in the hardware charts, and may even slip back to as much as fourth, depending on how successful the Xbox 360 price cut is. Other than that, it was a pretty quiet week with the US Labor Day holiday meaning no news for a couple of days. This allowed me to finally complete GTA IV, to gain the 100% completion stat (don't believe me? Go to the Rockstar Social Club's GTA IV 100% page, and search for my nick, LastMinuteGoal, which is the 3895th global entry if you sort by "joined"). Read it and weep (you read it, I weep as I realise the amount of time I've wasted trying to get this stat).

Let's start with copyright news in this very quiet week, which means I'll have to ramp up my rant-o-gizmo to fill the space. I can also write completely meaningless sentences that occupy a lot of space, which makes this WNR look more content rich at first glance, but not too much as to make it too boring to read or too much like the ramblings of a mad men, which does nobody any favours, unless of course you're auditioning for the TV show of the same name, which I have yet to watch a single episode of, although I've been meaning to. I've heard good things about it.

With the above 85 useless words out of the way, do you still remember the Amazon Kindle thing? Well, it was a huge PR disaster for Amazon as they deleted 1984, of all books, from people's Kindle e-Book reader remotely without their permission. They've apologised, issued refunds, and lots of other things, but the latest should finally settle matters once and for all. Or at least Amazon hopes so. They've promised to replace copies of the deleted books, this time with authorised copies, and this should restore people's notes that were also lost when Amazon pulled the plug. Those that no longer want the books can choose to receive $30 gift certificates instead. It's nice of them, but it's too little too late, and while I doubt Amazon would pull a stunt like this in the future for fear or further backlash, but the fact of the matter is that the ability to do so remains, and DRM is still evil.

Hollywood's latest target is Redbox, the DVD rental vending machine. Universal Studios, Fox and Warner Bros. have threatened to stop the supply of movies to Redbox, so they will no longer be able to rent out movies from these studios. Redbox had earlier made deals with Paramount and Sony, but the demands of these other studios were designed to basically to put Redbox out of business, and so at the moment, no deal seems likely. Amongst the demands are that Redbox destroy all rental copies they no longer need, which previously they sold cheaply on the second hand market. I won't mention the environmental impact of this, but since Redbox has already agreed to this demand with Paramount and Sony, this wasn't the major point of contention. What Universal and co. wanted was 40% of all of Redbox's profit from the rental business as royalty, which is simply ridiculous and something they do not demand from other rental businesses. Also, they want to price fix the rentals to ensure it doesn't go below $1.00 per night. And as if these demands weren't enough, the studios also want Redbox to only rent movies 45 days after release, so as not to hurt the straight sales business. You might wonder why the studios want Redbox to fail? It could be because Redbox's cheap rentals means less profits for studios, or that it might really hurt their sales business (although in my experience, people who buy movies will always buy them, and people who rent will rarely buy them, regardless of how many days you delay the availability of rentals). But I think it's because studios fear losing control, and Redbox's business model means studios have less and less control over how their discs are sold. It doesn't matter if it benefits consumers, or that this could lead to bigger and better things, even for studios, as Redbox expands and perhaps gets into the digital download kiosk business. Change is what the Hollywood studios fear, change to their traditional business models for which they've gotten very rich on over the years. And it's not the first time Hollywood has challenged innovation, as they did with VCRs (it was also Universal Studios, back then versus Betamax), DVRs, HDTV (see last week's story on selectable output control), digital movie storage systems (like Kaleidescape) and digital downloads.

And it's not just Hollywood, the music industry is even worse at dealing with change. The whole DRM'd music fiasco, which eventually forced the studios to back down, was a total waste of time and money. And now, their crusade against Internet users seems to be succeeding, at least when it comes to lobbying governments for three-strike Internet banning systems. But the studios claim they are only looking after the musicians, whose hard work does deserve to be rewarded, but do musicians really think that banning potential customers and fans from the Internet is really the solution? They do not. At least not the UK ones, as groups representing the likes of Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney have made it clear that they vehemently opposed to any such plans to ban people from the Internet. The Featured Artists Coalition, the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and the Music Producers Guild have all called the three-strikes system as "extraordinarily negative". They believe there are other ways to raise profits, like through integration with video games like the Guitar Hero series, and they are right. Video gaming is a growing business, often at the expense of music sales, as interactivity is what people crave these days. There are also other solutions, such as a subscription download system, or more focus on music video digital downloads, but just like Hollywood, the music studios want to protect their old way of doing things, which has also served them well, but perhaps no longer cuts it in today's digital world.

Movies, music – software is another product that's experiencing growing piracy. But again, the industry fails to grasp and take advantage of the changes in people's needs, and their latest attempt at an anti-piracy video, dubbed the worst ever, proves this. It only shows how out of touch these industries are when it comes to dealing with piracy, and how they totally fail to connect to the current generation by using a modified campaign from the 90's (against floppy disk piracy, no less) to fight piracy. The fact that the video compares a college student sharing some DVDs with professional pirates who are arrested and sent to prison, just shows how they are not grasping at the difference between piracy for profit and personal piracy. They're also still assuming people do it because A, they don't think they'll get caught, and B, that they don't know it's illegal. They do know it's illegal, and maybe they do think they won't get caught (and statistically, they're right), but most do it because they can't afford to do anything else if they really really need a piece of software, or music or movie (academically, or even for social reasons, as you want to keep up with friends who do use said software or have watched and listened to the movie or music). It's not an excuse, that is true, but it's also a fact. The legal alternative is of course for the people who cannot afford it to not use it, but does that really help the software, music or movie industry? They don't get any extra profit from people not using their products, and they certainly lose a lot of the Internet based hype surrounding tools like Photoshop, or the latest movie, or music video. And from the loss of this, they  actually lose more money as a result. Of course, they could discount things to make it affordable, so that every person who pirates it now will become a loyal customer. And I suspect for a $300 piece of software, the number of people who pirate it will greatly outnumber the people who buy it, possibly by a factor of 100 to 1 – and so the companies can reduce prices by a factor of 100 (to $3) and still make the same amount of money, but they only need to reduce prices by a much smaller factor, and they will actually come out ahead. Would you still pirate Windows 7 if you could buy a copy for $49, as opposed to $199?

Let's move on to high def news. Sony is the latest manufacturer to add video streaming support to their Blu-ray player. This is actually kind of a big news, for the founding father of Blu-ray to adopt support for a form of video distribution that is seen as a competitor to Blu-ray, and perhaps even eventual successor once bandwidth catches up. Sony will add Netflix, YouTube and Slacker support to the BDP-N460.

In the same news post, LG also announced that they're adding Vudu support via a firmware update to their Blu-ray player range, which already includes impressive support for Netflix, YouTube and CinemaNow, as well as Wifi capabilities and support for home network media streaming. Samsung has been equally busy adding everything from YouTube support to MKV playback and USB drive input. It seems the disc playing capabilities of these players have been relegated to almost a side feature, as these "media boxes" (for want of a better description) can do a lot of things that were once limited to a cumbersome HTPC, or games consoles. And this is good for the consumer as they get these for no added cost, and great for the video streaming companies that can forgo expensive and usually ineffective set-top-box rollouts. And it's all thanks to BD-Live, or rather, the requirement of BD-Live to include Internet connection capabilities on players (and to a lesser extent, Bonus-View, which requires on-board storage that can be used for video streaming, as well as downloads). And BD-Live being available so quickly after Blu-ray's introduction is, in a small part, thanks to HD DVD's mandatory Internet connection requirement, without which the Blu-ray people might not have had the competitive urge to ad what could be seen as a entry point or a Trojan Horse for a competing distribution service.

And lastly in gaming, Sony is still feeling great after the successful launch of the PS3 Slim, and the price cut that went along with it. What they're not feeling too great about is perhaps the reaction to the PS3 3.00 firmware, which has disappointed a lot of PS3 owners. I know I talked about this last week, but this week, even Sony admitted that some of the changes brought about by the new firmware has been a failure, like the changes to the friend list, and they've suggested that changes are being made. So 3.01 shouldn't be too far away, but it's nice to know that they do respond to feedback, which they haven't done enough in relation to firmware updates. And whoever thought that using a major version number like 3.00 was a good idea without introducing any major new features, should be sacked. It wasn't even as if the previous firmware had reached 2.99 and there was no way to go by to 3.00, and even then, they should have done a 2.991. Don't raise people's expectations, especially when it comes to fanboys that have very active imaginations when it comes to pre-emptive gloating about how great the new firmware is going to be when it comes out.

So that's all for this week. Should be more news next week, and with GTA IV out of the way, I might even bother to search the net and find some, although that Monopoly Cities Streets thing has been interesting me enough to suggest I might have found something else to occupy myself (please don't put hazards on my streets, pretty please!). See you then.

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3. Weekly Software Roundup

September 13, 2009	Clown_BD 0.67 Freeware
September 13, 2009	MediaCoder 0.7.2 Build 4506 Freeware
September 13, 2009	HDPVR Capture 2.5.3 Freeware
September 13, 2009	PopCorn MKV AudioConverter 1.78.5 Freeware
September 13, 2009	LameXP 3.12 Hotfix 2 Freeware
September 13, 2009	AMV VIdeo Codec 3.00f
September 12, 2009	LiVES 1.0.2 Freeware
September 12, 2009	DVD slideshow GUI 0.9.2.6 Freeware
September 12, 2009	Wii Video 9 5.00 Freeware
September 12, 2009	PSP Video 9 5.00 Freeware
September 12, 2009	PS3 Video 9 5.00 Freeware
September 12, 2009	Videora Xbox360 Converter 5.00 Freeware
September 12, 2009	Videora iPod Converter 5.00 Freeware
September 12, 2009	Videora iPhone Converter 5.00 Freeware
September 12, 2009	Videora Apple TV Converter 5.00 Freeware
September 12, 2009	SmallDVD 2.0 Beta 2 Freeware
September 12, 2009	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 2009.09.09 Freeware
September 11, 2009	All My Movies 5.6 build 1287
September 11, 2009	Advanced X Video Converter 5.0.6
September 11, 2009	PSPVC 3.74 Freeware
September 11, 2009	Windows 7 Codecs 1.3.2 Freeware
September 11, 2009	Vista Codec x64 Components 2.1.2 Freeware
September 11, 2009	Vista Codec Package 5.4.2 Freeware
September 11, 2009	RipBot264 1.14.4 Freeware
September 10, 2009	XviD4PSP 5.037.5 FCP Freeware
September 10, 2009	CCCP 2009-09-09 Freeware
September 10, 2009	TVersity 1.7 Beta Freeware
September 10, 2009	Submerge 1.8
September 10, 2009	AVCHDCalculator 1.1 Freeware
September 10, 2009	AVCHDCoder 09.09.09 Freeware
September 9, 2009	Opti Drive Control 1.40
September 9, 2009	DVDStyler 1.7.4 beta 2 Freeware
September 9, 2009	ProgDVB 6.20.3 Freeware
September 9, 2009	BD Rebuilder 0.29.03 Beta Freeware
September 9, 2009	Real Alternative 2.0.0 Freeware
September 8, 2009	VOB2MPG 3.0.060 Freeware
September 8, 2009	Kino 1.3.4 Freeware
September 8, 2009	ffdshow Rev. 3069 Freeware
September 8, 2009	MeGUI 0.3.1.1056 Freeware
September 7, 2009	Video Thumbnails Maker 3.0.0.1 Freeware
September 7, 2009	BDSup2Sub 3.9.7 Freeware
September 7, 2009	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.0.4.7
September 7, 2009	PEnGUIn Encoder MP4 0.98b1 Freeware
September 7, 2009	Subtitle Edit 2.8 Freeware
September 7, 2009	x264 r1251 Freeware
September 6, 2009	DV Scheduler 5.38 Freeware
September 6, 2009	VideoCacheView 1.51 Freeware

======END OF LIVEUPDATE NEWSLETTER======

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 162

6 September, 2009

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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1. Introduction

Still recovering from my throat infection, which developed into a chesty cough soon after. I'm much better now, but still not 100%. So no mid week blog post, and I was in such a foul mood that I probably shouldn't have been allowed near a keyboard or risk spreading negativity to you innocents. I'll do it through this newsletter instead.

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2. Weekly News Roundup

Welcome to another WNR. Hope you've had a good week. Me? I've had a lousy one, and you might be able to see hints of this in my rantings below, which contains 11.4% more bile than my usual efforts. A good rant is actually a good way to finish off a bad week, I find.

Starting with the copyright news, the Canada government is currently in a consultation phase in regards to changes to copyright laws, holding a series of town hall meetings to allow for public input. But this might actually make the copyright lobby look bad, and might make the government think twice about giving away its own citizen's rights to corporations, and so the all powerful copyright lobby had to take action.

The action includes hiring private security guards and arresting anyone with a different opinion, while changing the format of the town hall meeting as to stack it in their favor. When a Canadian member of parliament (MP), a member of the NDP party, joined students to protest the changes, by handing out flyers informing people of the possibly biased meeting, they were threatened by security guards at the event. And even after the incident, The American Federation of Musicians issued further threats towards the NDP MP, asking her party to penalize her for daring to take part in the democratic process. It also labeled the action of students and the MP, basically involving only handing out flyers, as "disgusting". Yes, the democratic process can be a bit disgusting at times, especially if it leads to the "wrong" opinion.

But you wonder why so much time and effort is being spent fighting piracy, when the act of fighting piracy itself is quite profitable. Step forward Digiprotect, a company specializing in tracking down online pirates and suing them on behalf of copyright holders. Companies in the same business as Digiprotect has been accused of various unsavoury acts previously, such as hacking into servers and stealing information, but in an interview, Mr. Hein, the account manager of Digiprotect, revealed some very interesting tidbits on how the anti-piracy industry has matured and now employs a specific business model. Mr. Hein claims, and even I have a hard time believing this to be the case, that they actually lease copyright on certain content from copyright holders, release these content on P2P networks as honey pots to attract potential downloaders, and then catch them in the act. And then they will chose the countries that make suing easier and more profitable, and sue those users. There is even a formula to determine how much money to seek, but it's not related to actual losses or damages – the amount is set so that it's not too much to make the judge sympathetic to the defendant, but obviously large enough to make the whole process worthwhile. The whole interview is extremely candid and interesting, so it's definitely worth a read, but the impression you get out of all this is that it is, in the end, all about profit for companies like Digiprotect. And if governments pass laws to allow for three strike based Internet bans, you can bet that companies like Digiprotect will set to profit, as someone will need to do doing all the hard work of tracking down who the copyright holders deem unsuitable to be connected online.

And ISPs will then have to be the one forking over the money to companies like Digiprotect, the cost of which will then be passed onto the consumer, even those who has never downloaded anything illegal. This is just one of the reasons why UK ISPs have joined forces to oppose the government's Internet anti-piracy banning plans. In an open letter, the CEOs of some of UK's largest ISPs have stated their joint opposition to such a plan, due to the cost issue and also due to the fact that they can see innocent customers being caught up in the system and being banned for no good reason. This is not to mention the burden to the tax payer of having a government agency to deal with the thousands upon thousands of Internet banning requests that will flood in. Per week. But the technophobic government, mostly due to their lack of understanding of the issues, will side with the lobby that has the most pull, and Hollywood and the music studios are where the money is. ISPs, and all Internet users, tax payers, will have to the ones to foot the bill so these billion dollar corporations can resist change for a few more years.

And if you want further evidence of the fear of digital technology and the industry's reluctance to move on, all you have to do is to look at the MPAA's second attempt to add DRM to HDTV. They have asked the FCC again to look into the issue of selectable output for HDTV, to close the so called "analog hole". The MPAA wants to prevent people recording 1080p TV broadcasts to VHS tape, which I wasn't aware was such a big issue piracy wise. Do people still use VHS tape? But of course, it's not just VHS tape, it's the analog recording of digital content, whether it's done so on a VCR, your computer's analog video inputs or on your DVD recorder. But again you must ask, does analog recording from TV lead to a lot of piracy? So much that the MPAA must spend considerable resources to lobby the FCC for changes, especially after it has already failed in their previous attempt not too long ago due to opposition from, um, practically everyone including the former FCC chairman. And the proposed changes, which in essence means DRM for HDTVs, means that everyone will have to upgrade their HDTV equipment again so that they are DRM compatible. The MPAA argues that this is actually a pro-consumer move, because by adding DRM to everything, the content owners will stop being anti-consumer by holding back content for longer periods. Awesome!

And on  that note, we move effortlessly to HD news. Cnet has reviewed Oppo's new Blu-ray player, the BDP-83, and declared it the best Blu-ray player they've seen so far. The superior picture quality was as expected, given Oppo's experience with DVD upscaling and the price tag of the machine, which puts it in the  middle/upper end of the price range for Blu-ray players. The fact that the player supports pretty much every format under the sun (except for HD DVD – more on that later) also helped – DVD-Audio, SACD, and all Blu-ray profiles are supported, as well as DivX, AVCHD playback.

But it's also the little things that Cnet noted, including a bundling of an HDMI cable that many players neglect. The player also comes in a soft cloth bag, which is a nice touch. Cons include the lack of Wi-Fi, no support for video streaming services and the high price. The problem for people who don't live in Blu-ray region A is that the player is pretty useless, but there's ongoing work on region-free firmware and it already works if you don't mind using an older firmware. That there's no official region B or region-free version is a big shame, and once again, blame goes towards the few selected greedy studios for forcing region coding upon us.

From one special Blu-ray player, to another, perhaps even more special one. That's right, Toshiba's first Blu-ray player, the BDX2000, will soon be available in stores for under $250. It is special of course because this is the first and only Blu-ray player Toshiba has produced so far, and it comes 18 months after the death of their HD DVD format, the failed competitor for Blu-ray. The player itself is nothing special from the information released so far, a pretty standard affair with the only notable feature being SD card support. There's no NetFlix or Amazon streaming services as per the LG/Samsung/Panasonic players. There's no mention of DVD upscaling or use of the Cell chip to enhance Blu-ray/DVD playback. And it doesn't even play HD DVDs, which the press release specifically mentions. I guess that's forgivable for a first attempt, and we may yet hear more about the video processing features as we get closer to the release date, but one can't help being slightly underwhelmed. A special discount for HD DVD player owners would be welcomed as well.

And in gaming, the focus is still on the PS3 Slim. Users who have got their hands on one have benchmarked it against the PS3 Fat, and found it to be both slower and faster. It was faster in game loading, but slower in other areas such as booting and Blu-ray disc loading. Those using their fat PS3s for Blu-ray only will not need to upgrade, it seems.

To go with the PS3 Slim, firmware version 3.00 was released for the PS3 (all versions) as well, replacing the 2.80 firmware released in June. So far, as with most of the PS3's firmware releases, the response to the new firmware has been extremely mixed. The usual report of bricked PS3s (or at least the Blu-ray drives), plus problem unique to this version including controller issues, as well as the fact that with such a major version number, almost nothing major was added feature wise, has some PS3 fans fuming. The use of the major version number, possibly more to denote the introduction of the PS3 Slim than anything else, is what I think confused many people, who were expecting a "New Xbox Experience" type update, but instead got version 2.85 instead.

More Xbox 360 rumours, this time for a new 250 GB Xbox 360 with two wireless controllers. But it's supposed to retail $100 more than the PS3, and I just can't see it happening.

So that's another WNR out of the way. Not as much bile as I had imagined when I first started writing, but too much anger, and you become numb as a result. Or something. See you next week.

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3. Weekly Software Roundup

September 6, 2009	PopCorn MKV AudioConverter 1.78.1 Freeware
September 6, 2009	CDBurnerXP 4.2.5.1541 Freeware
September 6, 2009	BD Rebuilder 0.29.01 Freeware
September 6, 2009	ProgDVB 6.20.2 Freeware
September 5, 2009	IsoBuster 2.6 Beta
September 5, 2009	TS-Doctor 0.99 Beta Freeware
September 5, 2009	MediaInfo 0.7.21 Freeware
September 4, 2009	BabyaTV 1.5 Freeware
September 4, 2009	K-Lite Codec Pack 5.1.0 Freeware
September 4, 2009	K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 5.1.0 Freeware
September 4, 2009	DVD slideshow GUI 0.9.2.4 Freeware
September 4, 2009	ffdshow Rev. 3065 Freeware
September 3, 2009	DVDINFOPro HD 6.126
September 3, 2009	x264 r1247 Freeware
September 3, 2009	RAD Video Tools 1.9p Freeware
September 3, 2009	Rendr 1.0
September 2, 2009	WinDVD 2010
September 2, 2009	MeGUI 0.3.1.1055 Freeware
September 2, 2009	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.0.4.6
September 2, 2009	Collectorz.com Movie Collector For Mac OS X 3.1.1
September 2, 2009	MKVtools 2.2.1 Freeware
September 2, 2009	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 2009.09.01 Freeware
September 2, 2009	DVDStyler 1.7.4 beta 1 Freeware
September 1, 2009	myDVDEdit 1.1 Freeware
September 1, 2009	Clown_BD 0.66 Freeware
August 31, 2009	Video Download Capture 2.2.7
August 31, 2009	Nero Burning ROM 9.4.12.3d
August 31, 2009	Nero Free Edition 9.4.12.3d Freeware

======END OF LIVEUPDATE NEWSLETTER======

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 161

30 August, 2009

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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1. Introduction

• Movies, TV, Music & Gaming: Which is the best value? 

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2. Weekly News Roundup

Damn, can't believe August is nearly over already. Can't believe it's nearly 2010, you know the year we make contact, and only three years away from the end of the world in December 2012. And there's still aren't any flying cars. Meh. Oh, I did as promised and updated the blog post I wrote two weeks ago about the value of digital entertainment, but this time instead of basing it on pricing/length of the entertainment, I did it on the price per "bit" of digital data. Blu-ray, it seems, is the best value if you want to minimize the cost per byte of data you buy. Once again, digital music is the least value, costing 500 times more than Blu-ray on a bit-by-bit basis.

Let's start with copyright news for this relatively news lite week. The Pirate Bay continues to be attacked by the MPAA, via the Swedish courts. This time, the MPAA has forced the Pirate Bay's web host's web host to shut off traffic to TPB, which managed to shut down the torrent listing site for an entire three hours. Millions of dollars spent in legal proceedings don't give you much, do they?

And as a preview of what could happen if the TPB would go down forever, the temporary downtime of the TPB led to server spikes for the other torrent sites. So unless the MPAA/RIAA go and take down every single torrent website, then people will just move on to the next one. Eventually, someone will open a website in a country that won't bow down to the MPAA, maybe Antigua or somewhere, and then the MPAA would have finally forced piracy to become fully resilient. Evidence shows this to be the trend, that the more the industry fights against piracy, the harder it becomes to prevent it. Evidence also shows that through more competitive pricing and less DRM, piracy can be reduced.

Going to another big trial going on at the moment, the judge in IsoHunt's trial actually wants the MPAA to prove direct infringement, of which they have presented zero evidence of it so far. The MPAA are of course outraged, that they would actually have to prove direct piracy, because it might be a bit hard to prove that a text file, which is basically what a .torrent file is, can do any damage at all when it comes to piracy. The text file has to be fed to a software program, which interprets the data, connects to the right trackers, and then through the tracker, connect to users to initiate downloads and uploads. Not exactly direct, and nothing other than the original text file is hosted by torrent sites like IsoHunt – everything else is hosted or produced by someone else, and even at the end of this, you still cannot prove piracy unless a complete copy of a file has been uploaded or downloaded, not just chunks of it. A chunk of a file is just digital garbage, and is neither unique nor will it contain any artistic or commercial value, and hence, no copyright abuse. It would be almost as ridiculous as someone copying a couple of word from an AP news article, and then AP going after them for copyright abuse. Oh.

Going to yet another big trial, a Dutch court has ruled that Mininova must remove all infringing torrents within three month, as the Dutch MPAA, BREIN, has won a court case. It's funny because Mininova was only set up after Suprnova was shutdown, and Mininova, despite the name, is not much larger and much easier to use than Suprnova. I'm looking forward to see what advances Micronova will have when Mininova goes down, if it goes down. And if you can't stop torrent sites, then you can go after the people who download them. The UK government is planning to have their own three strikes system that will ban anyone suspected of downloading pirated material. All this will do is to put further pressure on the courts, which might need to handle a couple of thousand claims every week. Happening in the UK, this reminds me of what happened over there in the 19th century, where moral outrage ensure every other poor person were sentenced for trivial crimes, and sent to penal colonies all around the world. Just don't send them to Australia this time please, because we've got enough of our own pirates already.

None of this will actually stop people pirating though. As mentioned above, people will just open new torrent sites that will become super popular instantly. And the people who download pirated material will simply switch to encryption technology, which won't really slow down downloads that much, but will mean it would be next to impossible to monitor what files you are downloading. So the industry can spend millions on lawsuits, the government can spend millions on new legislation and put further pressure on the judicial system, ISPs can be forced to spend millions on monitoring (which will kill off the smaller ISPs), and further millions can be spent on DRM, but what will all this get you? Piracy that can't be stopped. Well worth the money spent, if you ask me. For people pirating stuff, and people downloading pirated stuff, that is. Eventually, all of this will force piracy to be even more convenient and private, and then at that time, everyone will do it because they know they can't get caught anymore. Good one, MPAA.

Let's get to HD news. Blu-ray may be gaining popularity in the home theater, but hardly anybody is using it on computers, and the situation is likely to continue well into the 2010's, according to analysts.

There are a lot of reasons why Blu-ray hasn't taken off on PCs, the main reason may be because other than movies, there's nothing else that uses Blu-ray. Games could come on Blu-ray instead of 2 or 3 DVDs, but that will only work if most people have Blu-ray drives, and because games can be installed to people's huge HDDs, the convenience only comes in at installation time. So instead of swapping out the disc once or twice during the install, Blu-ray can save you the trouble, but after this, you will still only ever need to insert one disc into the drive to play the game, whether it is the first DVD, or the single Blu-ray. It's not like the transition from CD to DVD, because at that time, some CD games came on as many as 5 discs, and because people's HDDs were smaller, you had to swap discs during play which was really annoying. And even then, the gaming industry successfully resisted using DVD-ROM for gaming for many years.

So without BD-ROM applications, then it comes down to Blu-ray recordables (BD-Rs and BD-REs) to offer huge amounts of storage on a single disc. But do people really need these 25 and 50 GB discs? They aren't big enough to store a full backup of your PC's content, usually several hundred GBs in size. They may be too big to store the odd file or two, most people use USB drives for that now. So there is probably a use for them for archival purposes, to store content that you don't want someone to erase, but then again, 25 GB is a lot to store on an easily lost and damaged disc. The fact is between DVDs, USB thumb drives with ever increasing capacity, external HDD redundant arrays, there may be no place for Blu-ray recordables other than for storing HD movies. Imagine if DVDs were only good for making your own DVD movies, would it have become as popular as it is today?

Plasma TVs are dying, and that's sad thing, because they are still the best quality, and in some cases, the best value screens on today's market. LCDs, even the newer LED based ones, cannot hold a candle to the quality plasmas can give you. Candle is an appropriate term to use here because it's the contrast ratio that usually separates the plasma TV with LCD equivalents. And there aren't any viewing angle issues either with plasmas. But because plasma panels are hard to scale down, they can't be used as PC monitors or on even smaller devices, and so the LCDs are much more cost effective to produce. And this is why plasma is dying. OLED will come along one day and replace LCDs and plasmas, both in terms of cost and quality, but for now, it remains a rich man's toy ($2000+ for a 11? screen? No thanks).

And finally in gaming, the reaction to the PS3 Slim is still the focal point of this week's news. All eyes are on Microsoft to see how they respond, with analysts calling for a Xbox 360 Slim, which Microsoft needs much more than Sony. But Microsoft's response, or perhaps it was pre-planned all along, is to drop the Pro bundle and reduce the Elite to Pro prices. Something that you would have already heard about back in July, if you read the WNR.

Sales wise, the PS3 Slim should give Sony's console a much needed boost, particularly in the short term. Remember it won't be just people who are buying their first PS3, due to the price drop, but there will be many who will buy their second PS3, as another Blu-ray player perhaps. Expect Sony's console to outsell the Xbox 360 quite handsomely over the next few months, which is good timing on Sony's part as the holiday season is so close. You won't get the same effect with the Xbox 360 Elite price reduction, although Natal should see the Xbox 360 remain strong in 2010.

And I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks the PS3 Slim doesn't look as good as one had hoped. Instead of calling it the PS3 Slim, it really should be the PS3 Flat, because it's as if they've taken the old PS3 and basically flattened it, making it actually lengthier in size. And as Examiner.com article mentions, it may be because it's far too early the product lifecyle to have a slim SKU, as least compared to what happened with the PS2. Sony couldn't make the PS3 Slim any smaller without having to suffer cost issues again, and in the end, they didn't make it as small as it should be. I don't think this is a problem for the Xbox 360 Slim, as the Xbox 360 is a year older and the PS3, and the technology it uses was already a bit out of date at the time it came out, and while incremental improvements have occurred, there's large scope for miniaturization, which could help to both decrease cost and improve reliability. But I guess Microsoft's Xbox 360 hardware division are still suffering from PTSD due to the RRoD issue, and they won't be too keen to put out another piece of hardware. But I won't be surprised to if the Xbox 360 Slim makes its appearance right around the time Natal comes out.

Wordpress tells me I've nearly used up this week's word limit, so I'll have to stop now. Have a great week, and I'll be back next week with the same mix of news, ranting, and outright lies.

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3. Weekly Software Roundup

August 30, 2009	doubleTwist 2.3 Beta Freeware
August 30, 2009	Fraps 2.9.9
August 30, 2009	Subler 0.9.2 Freeware
August 30, 2009	GB-PVR 1.4.7 Freeware
August 30, 2009	x264 r1240 Freeware
August 29, 2009	MediaPortal 1.1.0 BETA 1 Freeware
August 29, 2009	multiAVCHD 3.0 build 697 Freeware
August 29, 2009	ConvertXtoDVD 3.8.0.193f
August 28, 2009	XviD4PSP 5.037/5.037.4 FCP Freeware
August 28, 2009	DScaler 4.1.19 (Test) Freeware
August 28, 2009	WinFF 1.1 Freeware
August 28, 2009	DVD PixPlay 5.03
August 28, 2009	MP4Box 0.4.6 Dev (20090828) Freeware
August 28, 2009	DVD slideshow GUI 0.9.2.2 Freeware
August 28, 2009	StaxRip 1.1.4 Beta Freeware
August 28, 2009	Vegas Pro 9.0b
August 28, 2009	BurnAware Free Edition 2.3.9 Freeware
August 28, 2009	Windows 7 Codecs 1.3.0 Freeware
August 27, 2009	WinMPG Video Convert 8.9.7
August 27, 2009	VSO PhotoDVD 3.0.8.1
August 27, 2009	Burn4Free 4.8.0.0 Freeware
August 27, 2009	Media Player Classic HomeCinema Edition 1.3.1249.0 Freeware
August 27, 2009	Video Monkey 0.5 Freeware
August 27, 2009	Video Thumbnails Maker 3.0.0.0 Freeware
August 26, 2009	Mobile Media Converter 1.5.0 Freeware
August 26, 2009	ffdshow Rev. 3060 Freeware
August 26, 2009	K-Lite Video Conversion Pack 1.5.0 Freeware
August 26, 2009	PopCorn MKV AudioConverter 1.77.2 Freeware
August 25, 2009	Rapid Menu Writer 0.5 Freeware
August 25, 2009	CorePlayer Mobile 1.3.5 build 7340
August 25, 2009	Comskip 0.80.025
August 25, 2009	K-Lite Codec Pack 64-Bit 2.6.3 Freeware
August 25, 2009	AVIsynth 2.6.0 Alpha Freeware
August 25, 2009	QuickTime Alternative (QT7) 2.9.2 Freeware
August 25, 2009	DVD2oneX 2.4.0
August 25, 2009	DVD2one 2.4.0
August 25, 2009	ProgDVB 6.12.1 Freeware
August 25, 2009	SmallDVD 2.0 Beta 1 Freeware
August 24, 2009	Vista Codec x64 Components 2.1.0 Freeware
August 24, 2009	Vista Codec Package 5.4.0 Freeware
August 24, 2009	PEnGUIn Encoder MP4 0.97b9 Freeware
August 24, 2009	DVDRemaster Pro 5.2.1
August 24, 2009	DVDRemaster Standard 5.2.1
August 24, 2009	LameXP 3.12 Freeware
August 23, 2009	XP Codec Pack 2.5.0 Freeware
August 23, 2009	VirtualDub 1.9.5 (Build 32593) Freeware

======END OF LIVEUPDATE NEWSLETTER======

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 160

23 August, 2009

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

******************************************************************

1. Introduction

• Movies, TV, Music & Gaming: Which is the best value? 

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2. Weekly News Roundup

There are so many sources of home entertainment these days, it's hard to know what you spend your hard earned money on. I find that I'm now spending more and more on gaming, and less and less on movies (and a bit more on TV DVDs). Despite games costing a lot more than movies (for each game I buy, I can probably buy 4 to 6 cheapo DVD movies, or one and a half, two TV series on DVD), I still feel that games offer better value for money, just by the number of hours I spend on them (and to a lesser extent, TV series). So I wrote a blog that examines that various forms of home entertainment, the number of hours of entertainment each activity provides, and the cost of such – plot them in Excel and draw a graph, and you have the results.  And I was right – gaming is the best value, followed by TV DVDs, although it only applies to good games that you want to put a lot of time into. What may be surprising (or not) is that digital music downloads turn out to be the least good value, costing nearly $20 for each hour of enjoyment (compared to just $2 for a good game, or just less than $3  for a whole season worth of TV on DVD). During the week, I plan to upgrade this blog entry to include cost per MB of data – this is a silly way to look at value, but it should put Blu-ray on top, followed closely by games and with digital music still the least value. The music industry needs to take a closer look and price music accordingly.

Otherwise, it was a pretty quiet week, and not just because I proved my own point by spending large chunks of this week playing GTA IV (so yes, I finished the story missions on the PC version, and I'm only 5% away from a 100% completion score – but I did not let it affect work, honest!). Enough chit chat, let's get started with the WNR.

In Copyright news, Australian ISP iiNet is still frantically fighting the AFACT over allegations that it isn't taking enough action to combat piracy. 'Enough' being the important term in the previous sentence, as iiNet sets out to prove that there is not much more they can do, not when faced with existing laws.

iiNet's two new lines of defence sees them first claim that the existing Communications Act prohibits them to spy on their customers in order to monitor piracy. The second sees them arguing that since the AFACT has not demanded other ISPs to take similar action, that it is unreasonable to expect iiNet to be the only ISP that needs to take action. I've mentioned quite a few times what the copyright holders want ISPs to do is often in breach of privacy laws, although governments around the world are bending over backwards (and sometimes just bending over) to accommodate groups like the MPAA's efforts to curtail piracy by removing your right to privacy. It all comes down to politicians (and some judges) not really understanding the Internet and what it all means, but the simple fact is that the Internet is now an utility like your telephone service, and is just another form of communication where privacy should be expected. I mention utility because homeowners should now be guaranteed the right to have the Internet, that there should not be any laws in which people are somehow denied essential utilities just because the utility companies don't like what you're doing with their services. It would be like your electricity provider shutting down your power just because you might be using electricity do to something illegal – it's not up the provider to decide whether you should have power or not, it's up to the judicial system to determine that and to hand out penalties. But governments and judges often see the Internet and the digital revolution as this thing that threatens the very foundations of civilization, and they overreact. In the short term future, when the current digital generation has grown up and are occupying the positions of power, I think they'll look back at the court cases of today and see just how ridiculous and self damaging the whole thing was – just like how we view McCarthyism today (well, most of us anyway).

Just to prove how the digital revolution has caught the old guard, well, off guard, news broke that 25% of all music in the US are now sold through iTunes. While the majority of music are still sold in CD form through retail stores, 25% means that iTunes is the single biggest source of music sales in the US already. Now, had the music industry being brave enough to embrace digital, they would be the ones operating the big digital music stores, as opposed to making Apple rich. And had it not been the whole DRM debacle, digital music would have gained market share even faster. While it is unfortunate that I cannot say the industry in general has learned the lessons from misuse of DRM, in that most of them still believe DRM has a place, at least some are trying to address the biggest problem that DRM provides consumers – the inability to do what they want, legally, with these files. Marlin is a new DRM scheme that actually promotes sharing amongst family (and some friends), but it does so in a controlled manner where you (and the copyright holders) know exactly who is sharing your file at all times. But Marlin is still a DRM, and while you are now "allowed" within the scope of the DRM to do all the things you could have done with DRM-free files, the framework is still there to restrict your freedoms if and when the powers that be deem time to do so. To paraphrase Wendy Seltzer of the Berkman Center, DRM is like a maze, and while the old DRM was a maze with a single path that you had to follow, Marlin presents many paths, possibly all the paths you might be able to take legally: but it's still a maze, and one that you have to hand over your rights as a consumer to enter.

Then there are those situations where nobody gets hurt, yet everyone suffers. One of which is YouTube video uploads. How many times has an enthusiastic user uploaded a video he or she has spent hours editing, finding the right background music and clips to include in the video, upload to YouTube and then had the video removed because it violated someone somewhere's copyright. Or in the pursuit of the next meme or viral video, someone uploads a clip of something they captured from TV or a DVD – the positive effects of a video going viral are so great that companies now spend millions to professionally produce viral videos – but the home user produced video, which costs companies nothing, gets taken down and all that positive energy is lost. Some companies are only starting to get the fact that people using their material isn't necessarily a bad thing – it used to be the case where only copyright abuse that actually hurt the copyright holders would get prosecuted, but the fear about digital now means any potential, possibly not even real, copyright abuse gets maximum attention, forcing websites like YouTube to take drastic action to filter out all sorts of content, many of which are perfectly legal (like the time when a TV network used a clip of this guy's home video, and then when the guy uploaded the same video to YouTube, the video got removed due to a complaint from the very same TV network). But there is money to be made in online advertising, and YouTube is now starting to share revenue with content owners, if they decide to allow the "unauthorised" videos to remain online. YouTube gets a bit of the money because they're hosting the promoting the videos, the uploader doesn't get his or her ass sued and gets to keep the video online, and the copyright holders make the money. Doesn't sound like a bad compromise to me, and who knows, maybe someday the copyright holders will start to appreciate all the free promotion they get from uploaders, and give them a free hat or something for their troubles.

Onto HD news now. Nothing much happening, expect more analysis and analysis of analysis on the Toshiba move into Blu-ray. I'm going to link to one such analyst that came up with pretty much the same conclusion I did when I first heard the news, that Toshiba is doing this merely to promote their own anti-Blu-ray strategy.

Well, not so much anti-Blu-ray, as anything-but-Blu-ray, because you can see from the statements Toshiba has made, they still believe that Blu-ray isn't going to be the one format the rules over all in the early part of this century, and that downloads, streaming and flash memory storage are the future. SD flash cards and USB drives are getting to a point where they equal small hard-drives from just a few years ago, and certainly will beat Blu-ray rewritables in terms of capcity, cost and simplicity. Digital video and still cameras all use SD, most do not use Blu-ray recordables. HDTV PVRs do not use Blu-ray. And even the Blu-ray people don't want people to use Blu-ray, because it might lead to people making copies of Blu-ray movies through hacking their HDMI cable or something equally absurd. Flash storage is simply more convenient, and there needs to be someway for it to be used for movie distribution before insanely fast Internet connections become the normal to allow us to download a 50GB HD movie in a few minutes. There are many situations where you will still need optical storage, but for everyday use, it is already a bit outdated. Can you imagine using CDs and DVDs in place of your USB drive? No, neither can I.

And going back to what I mentioned above about digital music downloads taking over from CDs, the movement towards pure digital distribution is gaining momentum all the time.

And finally in gaming, the big news of the week is of course the PS3 Slim and the PS3 price cut. It shall be known as the week when the collective gaming community yelled out all at the same time the words "finally", as it heard about the PS3 price cut, and for once, the rumours turned out to be true about the PS3 Slim.

My first impressions? That the PS3 Slim didn't look as good as I thought it would be. I think I got ruined by those fake pics of the silver PS3 Slims that have been around forever – the actual PS3 Slim is a big flat piece of black matte plastic, that looks a bit cheap, to be honest. And while it is definitely slimmer, only about half the height of the PS3 Fat, it's actually deeper (longer in length) than the old PS3. At the very least, they should have used a glossy finish, and perhaps offer it in some new colours, like white (Wii, Apple) or a sexy red like a sports car. Who knows, maybe they will.

As for the price cut, that's very much welcomed relief for the ailing PS3 sales, although at this point, sales will need to increase by 100% on current numbers in order to make Microsoft of Nintendo really nervous, much more than the predicted 40 to 60% sales increase.

And what of the response from the other gaming companies? Nintendo remains silent, but Microsoft is rumoured to drop the Xbox 360 Pro package and to price the Xbox 360 Elite at the same price point of $299 ($100 off). Will that work to negate the expected surge in PS3 sales? Probably not, but as someone who is looking to upgrade his Xbox 360 to a new one, it can't hurt. I would still love to have  an Xbox 360 Slim, or at least an Xbox 360 Cool&Quiet – technology advances should allow Microsoft to do this without increasing costs (and possibly lower them as well), and if they are to stick true to their recently proclaimed 10 year strategy for the Xbox 360, then they need to this sooner rather than later to keep the nearly 4 year old platform alive and viable.

That's all I have for you this week. More next week!

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3. Weekly Software Roundup

August 23, 2009	multiAVCHD 3.0 build 692 Freeware
August 23, 2009	MOV Download Tool 1.2.0 Freeware
August 23, 2009	K-Lite Codec Pack 64-Bit 2.6.2 Freeware
August 23, 2009	ProgDVB 6.12 Freeware
August 23, 2009	BD Rebuilder 0.28.04 Beta Freeware
August 23, 2009	Vista Codec x64 Components 2.0.9 Freeware
August 23, 2009	Vista Codec Package 5.3.9 Freeware
August 22, 2009	PopCorn MKV AudioConverter 1.77.0 Freeware
August 22, 2009	Serif MoviePlus X3
August 22, 2009	EncodeHD 1.1.119.0 Freeware
August 22, 2009	Collectorz.com Movie Collector For Mac OS X 3.0.3
August 21, 2009	ffdshow Rev. 3058 Freeware
August 21, 2009	x264 r1222 Freeware
August 20, 2009	VoltaicHD 2.3.5
August 20, 2009	DivX Codec 7.2.1
August 20, 2009	Rapid Menu Writer 0.4 Freeware
August 20, 2009	MPEG-2 Transport Stream packet analyser 2.1.0.0 Freeware
August 20, 2009	D2MP 4.10 Freeware
August 20, 2009	MediaCoder 0.7.1 Build 4492 Freeware
August 19, 2009	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.0.4.5
August 19, 2009	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 2009.08.18 Freeware
August 19, 2009	TMPGEnc XPress 4.7.3.292
August 19, 2009	LameXP 3.12 RC8 Freeware
August 18, 2009	DVRMSToolbox 1.2.1.8 Freeware
August 18, 2009	Windows 7 Codecs 1.2.9 Freeware
August 17, 2009	MPEG StreamClip for Mac OS 1.9.3. beta 2 Freeware
August 17, 2009	AviDemux 2.5.1 Freeware
August 17, 2009	InfraRecorder 0.50 Freeware
August 17, 2009	Q DVD Author 1.11.1 Freeware
August 17, 2009	TFM Audio Tool 1.0.0.5 beta Freeware
August 16, 2009	Mp3tag 2.44 Freeware
August 16, 2009	FinalBurner Free 2.13.0.164 Freeware
August 16, 2009	Splash Beta 5 Freeware
August 16, 2009	Net Transport 2.86
August 16, 2009	Sublight 1.5.0 Freeware

======END OF LIVEUPDATE NEWSLETTER======

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 159

16 August, 2009

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

******************************************************************

1. Introduction

• Womble MPEG Video Wizard - Basic Video Editing Guide 
• Game Consoles – July 2009 NPD Sales Figure Analysis 

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2. Weekly News Roundup

I was going to apologise for this incredibly late WNR, but it turned out that I managed to get it done in time. Combinations of factors led me to believe that I wouldn't be able to get this issue out in time, mostly due to my throat infection. 2009 hasn't been a good year for me health wise, has it? The other reason is the odd bouts of electricity blackout that's been happening around here due to the high winds overnight. Luckily, I have an UPS, and thanks to Wordpress's auto-save feature, at least I haven't had to re-write passages of this WNR lost during the blackouts.

Some site related bit and pieces before we get to the WNR proper. In cooperation with Womble, I've launched a new Womble software sub-forum, in an effort to offer more support for their software. To go along with the new forum, I've also written a new guide on how to use Womble MPEG Video Wizard to make basic MPEG video edits. Having using MVW for a while, it's a very handy piece of software and unlike many other pieces of software I've tried, it's actually pretty quick, no bloat, and very stable.

The July 2009 US video games sales NPD analysis has been posted as well. And in case you're wondering why being sick allowed me to write a guide *and* a blog post all in one week (I know, this sounds like way too much work compared to what I normally produce in a week), I only became violently ill several hours after posting the analysis. And no, the poor video game sales figures wasn't the reason why I became sick. Anyway, onto the WNR.

Copyright news first. The New Zealand wing of the MPAA has urged the government to side step due process and hand down Internet bans as quickly as they can print out the banning order pre-made using MS Word templates or something even faster. Just another day in our bizzaro world where expediency in protecting billion dollar companies comes before justice and liberty. But then again justice and liberty don't make monetary contributions to politicians.

Not too far away here in Australia, the government, possibly also acting under orders, I mean suggestions, from the music and movie lobby is trying to introduce a bill that will allow ISPs to spy on customers for copyright holders. The government says that's not what the bill is intended for (it's for terrorism, just like every law made since 2001), but that makes things even worse because that's the government basically saying they're coming up with a law in which they don't know the full consequences of (or just don't care). The bill, if passed in December, will make the US DMCA and the French three-strikes system seem restrained, almost anti-copyright, by comparison. The UK government is also planning on it's own piracy crackdown, to label up to 7 million of it's own citizens are criminals because they've downloaded some pirated stuff (or at least the copyright owners say so, but an IP address is hardly unique nor tamper proof). But at least the UK is getting it's own Pirate Party, which if the government crackdown continues, could gain popularity very quickly.

Onto this week's court actions. And there's been lots happening, all bad news of course. Real Networks, defending it's RealDVD software which adds more DRM to existing DVDs (but you do get to play it back on your computer without the disc), has suffered the first setback as the judge extended or continued the injuction currently placed on sale of the software. It just means that a full jury verdict will have to be handed down before the future of RealDVD is settled, and that the judge saw that the MPAA had enough evidence to proceed to trial. In the same week,  there was another victory in court again innovation to protect the hardly working DVD DRM, known as CSS. The company at the center of the trial, Kaleidescape, originally won a trial that declared it's hard-disk based DVD playback system completely legal (the system also plays DVDs without the original disc, and also adds more DRM to prevent unauthorised copying), has now lost an appeal that the DVD CCA bought forth against the original verdict. So that's basically two products, one software and one hardware, neither of which defeats or circumvents the DVD CSS system, and I would be willing to bet that no one in their right mind has ever used to illegally copy DVDs (because RealDVD is not what people use to rip DVDs on computers, and people who can afford the multi-thousand dollar Kaleidescape system usually buy their movies) – but both may be deemed illegal just because the copyright holders don't like innovation (or may even be coming up with their own products like managed copy, and these competitors are standing in their way).

And of course, piracy goes on, gains more popularity, while the lawyers, like the ones suing 10,000 South Koreans for sharing pirated porn, get richer. The US DOJ has also made a statement on the obscene $1.92 million damages handed down against a single mother Jammie Thomas-Rasset, saying that in their opinion, it's perfectly constitutional. This is the same DOJ whose associate deputy attorney general was one of the lawyers representing the RIAA in Thomas-Rasset case, and loaded with many other ex-RIAA lawyers. You would at least understand the music and movie industry's actions if they were working, but they are not, and may in fact be encouraging more people to pirates music and movies. I've always said the best way to combat piracy is to provide legitimate alternatives, and a recent study of UK youngsters seem to back up this opinion. The survey found that people want to pay for music, but only if it doesn't have DRM, and is based on a subscription based "all you can eat" model, with a monthly fee and unlimited downloads (or some reasonable limits). 85% of those surveyed were willing to pay for this service, and 40% said that they would stop pirating altogether if such a service existed. And yet all we see are more lawsuits aimed at the very same people who are willing to pay, all because copyright holders are afraid of change.

In HD news, Toshiba has finally confirmed what has been rumoured for a while, that they will get into the Blu-ray business. It was also unlikely that Toshiba would not produce a Blu-ray player when their target is to gain a foothold in the home electronics market, as well as their active participation in the laptop arena. However, they also (perhaps bitterly) referred to Blu-ray as only a small part of their HD strategy, one that also covers SD (flash memory) distribution and downloads. Toshiba's first Blu-ray players might be here this year (probably next year though), and I wouldn't be surprised to see it have both SD playback and streaming capabilities (as well as outstanding DVD upscaling thanks to the Cell powered machines).

Not much happening in gaming, except that Sony will probably officially announce a price cut and the new PS3 Slim anytime now. Or not. But if this turns out to be a hoax, then it's one of the best staged ones I can remember, so I'm putting my money on the rumours being real.

If you've read my July 2009 NPD analysis, you'll know how badly Sony is struggling at the moment, with the PS3 barely outselling the PS2, which itself has dropped massively in sales over the last year. While the Wii hasn't done much better in July either, the Xbox 360 continued strong sales (or rather, not-as-weak-as-the-others sales). So a price cut, and a new SKU, may be exactly what Sony needs and while I don't really think a new SKU is necessary considering how much more "cooler" the PS3 already is compared to the Xbox 360, the price cut if key here (and if the slim model was the only reason the price cut was possible, then you do wonder why there isn't a Xbox 360 Slim, as Microsoft needs a cooler console, in more than one sense of the word, than Sony).

The fall in Wii sales may suggest either saturation has been reached, or that a price cut may also be needed for it to remain competitive (it is still the only console to not have had a price cut or more added features since launch).

That's it for this week. Back to bed rest for me until I recover from this nasty infection. See you next week.

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3. Weekly Software Roundup

August 16, 2009	multiAVCHD 3.0 build 683 Freeware
August 16, 2009	ProgDVB 6.11.8 Freeware
August 16, 2009	LameXP 3.12 RC7 Freeware
August 16, 2009	ReClock DirectShow Filter 1.8.4.8 beta Freeware
August 15, 2009	MovieConverter 1.51
August 15, 2009	Clown_BD 0.65 Freeware
August 15, 2009	J. River Media Center 14.0.50
August 15, 2009	CDBurnerXP 4.2.5.1490 Freeware
August 15, 2009	DivXLand Media Subtitler 2.0.6 Freeware
August 14, 2009	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 2009.08.13 Freeware
August 14, 2009	x264 r1210 Freeware
August 14, 2009	ConvertXtoDVD 3.8.0.193d
August 14, 2009	MKVToolnix 2.9.8 Freeware
August 14, 2009	DivFix++ 0.33 Freeware
August 13, 2009	uncropMKV 1.2 Freeware
August 13, 2009	DVDStyler 1.7.3 Freeware
August 12, 2009	GPEG2 Codec 1.0
August 12, 2009	AC3Filter 1.63b Freeware
August 12, 2009	Windows 7 Codecs 1.2.8 Freeware
August 12, 2009	Vista Codec x64 Components 2.0.7 Freeware
August 12, 2009	Vista Codec Package 5.3.7 Freeware
August 12, 2009	SimpleMovieX 3.9.1
August 11, 2009	MeGUI 0.3.1.1053 Freeware
August 11, 2009	ChrisTV Standard 5.40
August 11, 2009	ChrisTV Lite 5.40 Freeware
August 11, 2009	BD Rebuilder 0.28.03 Beta Freeware
August 11, 2009	TFM Audio Tool 1.0.0.4 beta Freeware
August 11, 2009	Video Thumbnails Maker 2.1.0.6 Freeware
August 11, 2009	Plex Media Center 0.8.2 Freeware
August 11, 2009	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.0.4.3
August 11, 2009	HDConvertToX 2.1.458.3528 Freeware
August 10, 2009	ccextractor 0.55 Freeware
August 10, 2009	AoA Audio Extractor 2.1 Freeware
August 10, 2009	MediaCodeSpeedEdit 1.2.0.2 Freeware

======END OF LIVEUPDATE NEWSLETTER======

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 158

9 August, 2009

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

******************************************************************

1. Introduction

• PC Gaming FAIL: GTA IV Stutter, Freezing and Troubleshooting Tips 

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2. Weekly News Roundup

Another relatively quiet week. There are actually lots of news stories, but most of them say the same things, are followups to (or just really really late versions of) previous week's news stories, and some are nothing more than PR fluff pieces. I try to filter out these kinds stories, and only report on the important, interesting ones. When I'm not busy playing games that is. Or rather than playing, let's say "fixing" instead, because that's what playing GTA IV feels like. Rockstar's PC efforts have always been poorer cousins of the console versions, but GTA IV in its current state takes the bugginess to a whole new other level. Read my blog post to find out more about how to fix or work around some of the more annoying bugs, but nothing I wrote really helps to make the problems go away, only to make them slightly more manageable.

In Copyright news, the owner of Filesoup, one of the oldest torrent sites around, has been arrested. His home was raided, things left in a complete mess, he was denied a phone call or access to legal council for 7 hours, and the Filesoup website is still up and running.

Since when did these sorts of copyright infringements, something that at worst only does monetary damage to billion dollar corporations, become such a serious offence that the police need to get involved? Are there no terrorist left to capture? No murderers to apprehend? The copyright lobby has been telling governments around the world scary bed time stories in an effort to scare them into doing things against the very principles of democracy, against the constitutions of their respective countries, and against normal legal procedure, and it's all working. And that's just the ones that get to court – governments at the behest of copyright agencies are still trying to bring in a 3 strike system where they can get rid of this little thing called due process entirely. But the ones that do get to court, are even more notorious, just like the recent two cases with the 6 and 7 figure damages being rewarded against defendants that probably don't even have 6 or 7 thousand dollars in their names.

The rewards were so outrageous, that even copyright lawyers representing the content owners are not too happy at the damages being rewarded, fearing it may backfire. Content owners want to use these damage rewards to deter future infringements, but too much money and it may force the courts and the government to step in a put a limit on things, due to the public backlash. But does anyone really thing this will stop piracy? Every copyright warning message, yes including those annoying ones you can't skip on DVDs, point out the possible consequences of piracy – a large fine and even prison time, but why do people still pirate stuff? Is it because they have no alternative, as they can't afford it, like the cost of filling up your average iPod with purchased music? Is it because illegal downloads are easier and more user friendly, not having to go to shops to buy DVDs, and no DRM? Or as in some cases, you aren't being allowed to purchase something until the content owners have maximised their profits through rental agreements, TV licensing, tiered releasing, and that the only alternative becomes downloads?

But the law is on the side of content owners, ever since they pushed the DMCA through the US congress, on the back of fears that the digital revolution was going to bring about the end of capitalism as we know it. And the politicians believed them, even easier to do so when you have large contributions to smooth your doubts. The latest case is that of an Xbox 360 modder has been arrested and could face 10 years in prison, thanks to the DMCA. See under the DMCA, you don't have to actually do damage to anyone to break this law. All you have to do is to circumvent copyright protection, regardless of how badly implemented the copy protection may be, or what you intend to do after copy protection has been broken. I could mod my Xbox 360, and then smash it up so that it won't work anymore, and yet, I've still broken the DMCA (if I was an American, of course). Or take a more common situation, where I mod my Xbox 360 so I can play backups of my legally purchased games that the Xbox 360 keeps on scratching (through the well known design fault, or just through daily abuse). Now if I do this, then who am I hurting exactly? Not Microsoft or the game publishers, because I'm still buying games from them. In fact, the only one I may have hurt is myself as I might have just voided my warranty. And I'm actually helping Microsoft by not bringing in the console to repair the disc scratching problem. But I've still broken the DMCA and I could face big fines and time in prison. Some countries have laws where you're guilty until proven innocent – the DMCA simply assumes you're guilty in all situations.

Speaking of game consoles, Nintendo's DS is one of the most pirate friendly consoles around, thanks to flash carts. Nintendo still makes big money from the DS though, and the DS's popularity is probably directly linked to the ease in which you can play backup or pirated games on it. The DSi, Nintendo's update for the DS, was supposed to address this by introducing frequently firmware updates that disables flash carts from being used. The latest version, 1.4, managed to do to almost all known flash carts, but it only took a week for the flash cart manufacturers to bring out their own firmware update that made piracy possible again. If you can play it, you can copy it (and play the copy) – that's that conclusion I've come up with after many years of observing various copy protection methods. Again, it goes back to the point of how one stops piracy, and perhaps some of the things I listed above like looking at prices, release schedules, and making purchases easier, are way more effective than firmware updates. Or even putting your hands up and admitting, okay our system is pirate friendly, but that's why it's so popular and it's something we have to live with.

The Australia ISP, iiNet, is still engaged in legal battle with Australia's own MPAA/RIAA, the AFACT. iiNet is now seeking help from industry bodies to testify on its behalf that ISP in general are helpless to stop the torrent of copyright abuses that its customers are guilty of. If one takes a view that things like human rights, privacy, are important, then ISPs shouldn't be spying on their customers on anyone's behalf, just like phone companies shouldn't be recording and listening in on your phone calls just to see if you've been saying naughty things. Now the police, through a court order, may be able to perform eavesdropping (and I see monitoring Internet usage the same as phone tapping, actually even more effective because you get a much more complete picture of a person's activities) – private companies cannot, and no court would grant a private company the right to spy on an individual, no matter how serious the offence is (because if it is the private company petitioning the court, then it is only a civil matter, not a criminal one). So if McDonald's can't tap my phone to find out why I've stopped eating Big Macs, why should Warner Bros. get the right to monitor my downloads to see if I've stopped buying their movies?

Copyright rant over (is it me, or is the Copyright section getting longer and longer, and rantier and rantier?). On to HD news. Not much this week, but just some continuing trends that may concern the Blu-ray people.

On the surface, Blu-ray has a great week thanks to Watchmen. According to the sales stats, Blu-ray has its best week since The Dark Knight, again thanks to a Warner release. Part of the reasons for the good numbers may be because the PS3 special edition of the Watchmen game, which came with the Blu-ray version of the movie – I have no idea if sales of these packs were included in the stats though (the game itself did rather average business, so it may not matter). There are a couple of even bigger releases this year, including Star Trek, Transformers 2, Terminator Salvation – movies that will definitely do well on Blu-ray, not only because they were big movies at the box office, but these are exactly the types of movies to attract early adopters, HT enthusiasts, and the PS3 demography.

So what's the bad news? Panasonic is going to include Amazon video-on-demand in its Blu-ray players, as part of the VieraCast service which already streams YouTube videos. Why is that somehow bad news? Well, it's not bad news. It's news to be concerned about, because that's the third major Blu-ray manufacturer to include video streaming, after LG and Samsung chose to support Netflix. It's good news for Blu-ray because players are now more fully featured and attractive to buyers. It may be bad news in the future if this video streaming thing takes off and Blu-ray becomes nothing more than a sideshow in the home theater arena. I doubt this will happen because you'll get tons of people like me who like discs. But I also like things on demand, and a subscription service for unlimited access to a huge movie library works out to be cheaper than buying each movie individually eventually. But that's for something to worry about in the future, because Blu-ray quality HD streaming is years away from becoming available in every home. But the movement towards video streaming is gathering pace, you cannot deny this.

While not HD specifically, Google has purchased On2, which makes several video codecs including the VP6, VP8. This is all part of the browser video wars that I brought up a few weeks ago. Nothing to concern your average net user, but developers and video enthusiasts will be interested to see if an open source video codec, like Ogg Theora, can take center stage, or will a commercially effort like H.264 win out. Google likes Ogg, and it can now use the expertise and technology purchased through the On2 deal to help out Ogg to improve quality, where H.264 is still  a better choice than Ogg. I love open source, but I also like H.264 for its quality and wide acceptance, but I don't see how the consumer can be hurt by having a couple of alternatives, including an open source one.

Not much happening in gaming. We're still waiting for the Sony PS3 Slim announcement, and maybe something will happen next week, or the week after, in this front.

Now when fanboys argue, they use stats. One of the stats is that Sony's PS3, while only doing half the sale of the Xbox 360 in the US, is actually only slightly behind the 360 in worldwide numbers, thanks to strong sales in Japan and stronger sales in Europe (compared to the US). And this is all despite the PS3 being released a year later than the 360. Now this seems to suggest that the PS3 isn't doing as badly as the media portrays (including this blog, if you can call it part of the "media"), and it will lead fans of the PS3 to say that there's a media bias in play here. The figures are not wrong, and neither is the conclusion that the PS3 is on level terms when it comes to worldwide sales, but for this to be "good news" for Sony, it assumes one thing: that the Xbox 360 was supposed to sell on even terms with the PS3. The actual fact was that the PS3 was expected to outsell the Xbox 360 handsomely, even with the delayed release – if the PS2 versus Xbox is any indication, an 8 to 1 sales ratio wouldn't have been a surprise. The Wii kind of made a mess of the scene, since nobody figured Nintendo was going to be in it, let alone win it, but ignore the Wii and the PS3 was still supposed to sell a lot better than the Xbox 360, with US and worldwide numbers more in line with what we are currently seeing in Japan, where the Xbox 360 struggles badly.

But this hasn't happened. And Microsoft's gamble of launching a faulty, less sophisticated console a year earlier seems to have paid off. If at the end of this console generation, Microsoft can claim a 1 to 2 sales ratio (that's one Xbox 360 for every PS3 sold), then they've done tremendously well and made huge strides into the gaming industry, of which Sony has much more  experienced with. If the Xbox 360 can sell on level terms with the PS3, then that's something even the most optimistic Microsoft projections wouldn't have dared to proclaim just 3 years ago. But of course, the Wii will outsell both combined.

Okie dokie. That's the news/rant for the week. More next week.

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3. Weekly Software Roundup

August 9, 2009	x264 r1204 Freeware
August 8, 2009	multiAVCHD 3.0 build 671 Freeware
August 8, 2009	Kiss DajeVu Encoder 2009.R01.6 Freeware
August 8, 2009	ProgDVB 6.11.7 Freeware
August 8, 2009	LameXP 3.12 RC3 Freeware
August 7, 2009	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 2009.08.07 Freeware
August 7, 2009	avi.NET 2.6.5.0 Freeware
August 7, 2009	Subtitle Edit 2.7 Freeware
August 7, 2009	Q DVD Author 1.11.0 Freeware
August 7, 2009	Avanti 0.3.9 Freeware
August 7, 2009	J. River Media Center 14.0.46
August 7, 2009	ReClock DirectShow Filter 1.8.4.7 beta Freeware
August 6, 2009	Moovida 1.0.6 Freeware
August 6, 2009	DVDRemaster Pro 5.2
August 6, 2009	DVDRemaster Standard 5.2
August 6, 2009	Bitrate Viewer 2.1.1 Freeware
August 6, 2009	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.0.4.0
August 6, 2009	Collectorz.com Movie Collector For Mac OS X 3.0.2
August 6, 2009	K-Lite Codec Pack 64-Bit 2.6.0 Freeware
August 6, 2009	K-Lite Codec Pack 5.0.5 Freeware
August 6, 2009	K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 5.0.5 Freeware
August 6, 2009	BD Rebuilder 0.27.01 Beta Freeware
August 6, 2009	Vista Codec Package 5.3.6 Freeware
August 6, 2009	Windows 7 Codecs 1.2.7 Freeware
August 5, 2009	Media Player Classic 6.4.9.1 (20090706) Freeware
August 5, 2009	FLV Splitter 1.0.0.5 (20090428) Freeware
August 5, 2009	VobSub/DirectVobSub/VSFilter 2.23 (VSFilter: 2.39 2009-06-24) Freeware
August 5, 2009	ffdshow Rev. 3054 (generic/x64) Freeware
August 4, 2009	DVD PixPlay 5.02
August 4, 2009	DVDStyler 1.7.3 RC2 Freeware
August 4, 2009	iPodME 2.3 Freeware
August 4, 2009	AVIAddXSubs 9.3 (3 Aug 2009) Freeware
August 4, 2009	MeGUI 0.3.1.1052 Freeware
August 3, 2009	Cyberlink PowerDirector 8.0
August 3, 2009	VoltaicHD for Mac 1.8.7
August 3, 2009	VoltaicHD 2.3.4
August 3, 2009	Vista Codec x64 Components 2.0.5 Freeware
August 3, 2009	MagicISO 5.5 Build 276
August 3, 2009	RipBot264 1.14.3 Freeware

======END OF LIVEUPDATE NEWSLETTER======

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 157

2 August, 2009

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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1. Introduction

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2. Weekly News Roundup

Another bad week health wise for me, as I think I've caught a cold or flu or whatever has been floating around recently. 2009 hasn't been a good year for me so far in terms of my health, starting the year right away with shingles, possibly had the swine flu last month, and now a cold when the last time I was this sick was ages ago. I have back pain too, just to add to discomfort. But as they say, 'the blog must go on'. Or something like that. Good thing this week's a bit quiet in terms of news, although still a couple of big stories to go through. And oh, the winners of Digital Digest's 10th Anniversary competition has been drawn, and if you're a winner, you should have gotten an email already – the full list of winners will be published here.