Phew, it has been a week again... real life has a nasty habit of making you think you've just missed one day of news.

RipIt4Me 1.4.4.0 now has an IFO mode which can be used for reburning the disc - it's not terribly useful for DVD2DVD transcoders because the ISO contents aren't being cleaned the same way as separate files. Removal of unplayed cells can also be made a preference so it will be applied to every disc.

FixVTS 1.403 should no longer make DVD Shrink crash on empty VOBs, has an open button and fixes a rare bug.

After losing out in the world cup, the French can't catch a break: In response to members of parliament asking for a reexamination of the recently passed copyright law, Frances highest court further weakened the DRM interoperability clause. The right for customers to demand interoperability has already been stripped away in parliament and replaced with a regulatory body (where customers have no means to take influence) - now not only can only that regulatory body enforce interoperability, but the DRM maker also has to be compensated for it. On top of that, the high court has reestablished prison for filesharers. If you can read French, here's the full text of the decision.

Has the MPAA finally found a their match? In their lawsuit slinging match, they've sued a millionaire vowing to fight.

Last but not least, I'll be away on business until next Friday so don't expect any news updates for the next few days.

RipIt4Me 1.4.3.0 prevents autorun from launching an autorun application on a DVD you've just inserted, opens the disc tray after a successful one click run and fixed a few bugs.

DGMPGDec 1.4.8 is the final version of the 1.4.8 series. It contains no changes over the beta 7 release.

RipIt4Me 1.4.2.0 shows the DVD label in step 1, converts accented characters to underscores in the disc label and fixes a few bugs.

SubtitleCreator 2.0.1 can overlay subtitles on DVDs in real-time, supports multiple languages, has a much improved DVD wizard that allows you to add subtitles to a DVD while retaining the menus and the GUI has been improved.

Sony's first Blu-Ray burner for PCs - the BWU-100A can handle both single and dual layer BD-R/E discs as well as DVD±R/W and their dual layer counterparts. It will be available next month and set you back by $750.

While Japan has joined other countries to extend copyright until kingdom come, at least a Tokyo court saw reason when it ruled that the 2004 law to extend copyright protection by 20 years cannot be applied retroactively.

It's a bad time to be living in Denmark - their implementation of the EU snooping directive requires that IP address, port number, start and end time be logged for each packet that starts a session (I guess they mean a TCP SYN.. I wonder how they want to classify UDP traffic, especially if the protocol is proprietary).

FixVTS 1.401 prevents Nero from complaining about removed menu VOBs.

The movie studio owned online movie retailer Movielink has just announced that they now allow buyers to burn their own DVDs. Obviously, it's not your average DVDs that you can rip easily but likely another perversion of the standard (you couldn't even burn DVDs protected with CSS if you wanted, that has been made physically impossible when recordable DVDs were first devised - obviously on request by the movie studios). Now, where's that primetime content?

Last but not least, Colombia falls in line with the MPAA and now has their own DMCA flavor.

DVDx 2.51 is the first 64 bit DVDx release. Its supposedly up to 25% faster than the 32bit counterpart. Of course, being 64 bit you need a 64 bit OS to run it - a 64bit compatible CPU won't do.

As you've probably noted, the Forum has been down for a bit.. Unfortunately we have no estimate when it will be back up.. the hosting company has yet to respond to our inquiries why the server isn't working properly anymore.

Intel's new CPU generation has finally been launched. After lagging behind AMD considerably for quite some time, it seems they've recaptured the performance crown in the DVD backup area - although I find it somewhat suspicious that no codecs that have not been unilaterally optimized for intel chips have been used for the benchmarking process. Using XviD and x264 would be much more indicative of a chip's true performance, and on top of that x264 kicks the living daylights out of Apple's AVC encoder, both in speed and quality.

ZoomPlayer 5.0 preview 7 comes with improved fullscreen navigation interfaces, supports global hotkeys and has been optimized for speed.

RipIt4Me 1.4.1.0 checks the FixVTS version number, warns if DVD Shrink is started when FixVTS has not been previously run and the disc contains protected sectors, saves the logfiles in a RipIt4Me subdirectory and numbers the directories so no logs are being overwritten, checks if the target drive has enough free space and fixes a few bugs.

DVDFab Decrypter 2.9.8.1 supports yet another ARccOS version and can better handle some previous ARccOS versions.

What happens if the RIAA sues somebody for illegal filesharing and the accused insists on due process? It appears the RIAA's strongest suit is scaring defendants into settling out of court - and when they have to go to court, they prefer to dismiss the case rather than back up their claims.

Meanwhile, the lawsuit machine has come to a temporary stop in the Netherlands, when an appeals court found that the automated IP address collection in MediaSentry's piracy tracking software wasn't enough to compel ISPs to turn over subscriber data to the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN.

As previously reported, the next batch of copyright legislation in Germany aims to turn P2P downloads into major offenses and give the industry broad reaching privileges to compel ISPs to turn over subscriber data without a court order. Now the "Verbraucherzentrale" - a consumer watchdog organization - has launched a petition to restore balance in Germany's copyright law.

Mimicking the US launch, HD DVD appears to have several months of exclusive market before Blu-ray makes it to Europe. While Toshiba is poised to launch the first HD DVD players in September, Blu-ray players won't be available before January 2007.

That must've stung: The British arm of the music industry - British Phonographic Industry BPI - recently asked several ISPs to terminate the accounts of people they suspect of filesharing. However, some of the ISPs were a little less than accommodating and one even pointed out that the BPI needs a court order before they can divulge subscriber data - also known as due process.

Movie theater chains in fear for revenue in the face of mounting pressure to shorten the delay between theatrical and DVD release (down to a simultaneous launch if Disney has a say in it) have found an ally in the Motion Picture Academy - the organization responsible for the Oscars. The Academy is considering a rule to prevent any movie that launches simultaneously on DVD and in theaters from participating at the Oscars. And I'm wondering what the release date has to do with an awards show. I've often wished that I could watch a movie again at home after getting back from the movie theater.. yet I have to wait for 6 months for that to happen, way too long for my taste.

50 TB (that's 50'000 GB) on a DVD? While Blu-ray gets up to 50GB and with multiple layers up to 200GB, an Indian researcher is putting all that to shame.

RipIt4Me removes any cell shorter than 2s except the last one in movie-only mode, asks for the path of FixVTS in 1-click mode if the path has not been previously set, generates the target path automatically from the disc label, modifies the PSL file to exclude cells that lie in a scratched area of the disc, can terminate AnyDVD / DVD43 before starting the process and there's a couple minor improvements along the way.

It didn't take long: Intervideo's WinDVD 7.5 B41.071 no longer has the screenshot option when playing HD DVDs (it remains available when playing Blu-ray discs). That's what we call progress: less features ;) I guess the build immediately before will become a hot seller in the warez scene..

FairUse 2.5 can add a logo to the resulting movie (who on earth would do that?), includes an up-to-date x264 codec and fixes compatibility issues with DivX 6.2 as well as reading problems with certain discs.

Are these the first signs that just like in the DVD- / DVD+ format war there will be no victory? Ricoh has announced an optical pickup that can handle Blu-ray, HD DVD, both DVD formats as well as CDs. Naturally, all formats can be read and written, and the product should be available by the end of the year.

After Warner Brothers, 4 independent studios have signed up to deliver their movies via the BitTorrent P2P network.

Now I'm really back. Work and the world cup developed an unholy alliance that basically kept me busy from the moment I got up till the moment I went to bed.

Let's start with RipIt4Me - a tool that helps you handle ARccOS or other DVDs messed up by structure based copy protections. It is based solely on freeware tools.

ProgDVB 4.74.1 has been released, without changelog so far.

FixVTS 1.4 no longer collides with Nero (reallocation error) and fixes problems with PGC cells that have the wrong VCID.

Windows Media Encoder Studio Edition Beta 1 has been released. It's the first program to give you full access to the new VC-1 codec. I can't say it has gotten faster since I first looked at the VC-1 encoder though.

Just after the launch of the first Blu-ray burners, LG has launched the first Blu-ray - the GBW-H10N - burner capable of handling all 3 formats (Blu-ray, DVD and CD), fast DVD recording (up to 12x for DVD±R, and 8x/6x for DVD±RW) and 4x BD-R recording. While dual layer DVDs are supported, dual layer BD discs are not.

It's DVDRip all over again. Those that have been around since DVD launched may recall a software called DVDRip, which hooked into a software DVD player, made screenshots of every frame, and saved the result in another video stream. The software preceded tools like mpeg2avi and FlaskMpeg which only became viable once CSS encryption had been beaten (you may also recall that this was achieved for the first time by the DOS based dodsrip ripper which was released in October 1999). Now, we may see a revival of DVDRip since the first version of the HD DVD and Blu-ray capable WinDVD allows for the same mechanism to grab the video stream. So as a result, screenshot functionality will now be removed.

While ABC has been at the forefront of new technology by offering free TV episode streaming of some of their most popular TV series for the past 2 months, they are not always so consumer friendly. In fact ABC would love to disable the fast forward button on your DVR.

The RIAA is bringing out the big guns in China now and are gearing up to sue Yahoo China because the search engine provides links to websites where users can download illegal music.

As previously reported, with the ratification of the Australia - US free trade agreement, the DMCA moves down under. Now Linux Australia has started a campaign to ask the government to restrict the anti-circumvention articles of the FTA to cases where it really assists copyright infringement.

I guess the FBI thought if the NSA can do it, so can we. Their sweeping amendments to the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) aim at including backdoors in every piece of telecommunication equipment. Does anybody recall the Clipper chip with built-in backdoors? How many a software needs to be compromised for people to realize built-in backdoors are a bad idea and they will inevitably be exploited by people with less than honest intentions? Assume every home router has a backdoor - if you thought identity theft was bad now, just wait until until the bad guys can freely access your home network by logging into your router at home.

DGMPGDec 1.4.8 beta 5 can automatically set the transport PIDs to the first program when a stream is opened.

DVDFab Decrypter 2.9.8.0 uses a new VSO burning engine and fixes a couple issue with ARccOS titles.

ProgDVB 4.7.4 supports DXVA and has an updated media server and client.

France's new copyright law has been finalized including the watered down passages on DRM interoperability that Apple and Co so feared and lobbied hard to get abolished. It remains to be seen if the watered down passages will really have any effect with regards to digital music interoperability. EUCD.info has the scoop on what's wrong with the bill.

And here's the missing part of Spain's new copyright law: not only is there a levy on blank media, but P2P downloads for personal use are now illegal (could it be that the industry went into lobby overdrive after Spain's chief prosecutor said downloads for personal use were allowed)? Of course there are also passages to make ISPs liable for what their customers do. One is left wondering why we don't hold car markers responsible for accidents, hold postal services responsible if somebody sends kiddie porn or other disgusting stuff via snail mail, etc... Bottom line: Spanish consumers lost worse than their team last Tuesday.

Last month's news can be found here.