BeSweetGUI 0.6b38 has an improved file selection/validation, and the scale input by switch for lame has been colored (as BeSweet supports it). OggMux 0.76 has some internal code cleanups and restructurizations and there's a picture in the about box that blows up the size considerably ;)

And if I'm not mistaken this is the first month where I had some news every day without exception. Happy Easter!

MaestroSBT 2.3.2.1 has an aspect ratio correction option for fonts, an aspect ratio check in the preview window, resolutions up to 720x576 are now permitted in the preview window, keyboard accelerator switches have been added to the main window, rough Captions Inc. export has been added, the rendering resolution has been improved, 4-bit RLE bitmaps and TIFF compression should work now thanks to the use of a new library, inter-word spacing when using an outline has been corrected as well as coordinate display errors in the edit/preview window.

Have you noticed? On Feb 28th, 8:20pm local time I switched from TheCounter to SiteMeter. If you have a look at the SiteMeter bitmap you'll see a pretty large number which means that for the first time in the history of this site we've had more than one million visitors in a single month :) These numbers obviously have some bandwidth consequences. Despite optimizations and outsourcing the two most popular applications we'll be using about 600GB this month, but thanks to a couple of nice people who provided additional mirrors no server is getting overloaded. And a tidbit from the stats: DVDx and DivX5 have been the most popular downloads in terms of bandwidth consumption this month.

OggMux 0.75 supports AAC and AC3 audio (if you have an appropriate DS filter installed), has tooltips and warning message when the soundtrack list is empty, supports files on different directories/drives and has some error messages.

I've contacted Pulsent and asked for a demonstration copy of their encoder. They told me that they're still working on the ASIC chip and would only have demonstration boards early next year.

OggMux 0.72 allows you to modify all files in the list, buttons are deactivated if using them makes no sense, director's comment has been added as possible language choice and the reset function also resets the latest additions.

I also have some more links on the CBDTPA: Stoppoliceware.org has some info on the bill and instructions on what you can do about it, the US Senate judiciary committee has a feedback page and last but not least here's some info on how to contact US Senators directly. Please keep it civil, you can reach much more using well researched arguments than just flaming. And even though judging by the stats the majority of people comes from European countries (me included) I think we should still care. There's an Euro DMCA on its way already and should the CBDTPA become reality we have to expect to get something similar within a few years time.

OggMux 0.7 has a reset button, an about button, the encoding quality parameters have been corrected, a progress percentage output has been added, the output file gets flushed before writing the output, it's possible to modify files in the list (not the first one for now) and the GUI is generally more functional.

Pulsent has announced a new video compression technology that is based on objects, rather than blocks. It is supposed to be 400% more bandwidth and storage efficient and should be able to deliver broadcast quality video at 1.1mbit/s. As usual, these numbers have yet to be proven. I'll try to get a copy of the encoder if possible, and put it through my standard tests.

OggMux 0.5 has a progress bar, audio encoding capabilities for .wav file and you can add a title for the video stream (not shown during playback yet). Also, I've finally managed to get DivX4log 0.45.

And if you want to do something against the CBDTPA here's your chance: An online petition to stop the bill before it becomes law.

Last but not least, you should read this announcement if you're a member of my forum or intend to become one. It boils down to this: There's too many people violating the forum rules so we have to act before it gets completely out of hand (as it has on ultimateboard, which was closed for a bit and is now back but has more strict rules). One of the most respected moderators has already retired because he couldn't take the massive forum rules violations anymore. Also, the mark as read functionality has been changed so don't worry if the next time you visit the forum every post will be marked unread. Just use the "Mark All Forums Read" at the bottom right of the table to mark everything as read, and from then on you will have a better mark as read functionality. Only posts that you have read, or forums that you have marked as read will be marked as that, whereas before, 30 minutes after leaving the board all posts older than 30 minutes would be marked read even if you hadn't read them. This feature will only work for people using cookies.

The Ogg DS filters v0.9.8.9 fixes a a memory management bug in the splitter and multiplexer that could cause crashes, input AVIs no longer have all frames marked as keyframes and the use of the ICL compiler makes the process faster, especially Vorbis encoding. OggMux 0.4 has a restructured GUI and allows more input streams now.

I've reported about the SSSCA before. Last week it has been renamed to CBDTPA (Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act) and been sent to Congress.. The implications of these act, should it pass, are monumentous. Almost every device we use in our everyday life will be touched. Televisions, VCRs, DVD players, computers, cameras, scanners, mobile phones, etc. The act makes it illegal to import or manufacture any device that does not implement copy protection mechanisms. In the computer world almost every program would have to be rewritten. Even a simply copy command can be used to copy a copyrighted text after all. Read more about it on Wired. And if anybody knows an online petition aganst this law (personally I think it's more a crime against comsumer interests than a law) let me know and I'll do whatever I can to get everybody I know to sign.

I've made some small changes in the XviD guide. And after talking to the author about the future of the program now that DivX5 is out and being reassured that development is still ongoing and DivX5 support is on its way I've decided to put my DivX4log guide online. May be worth looking into if you're still using DivX4 as it can offer better size predictability and quality.

The release of Koepi's OggMux utility makes it much easier to create ogg media streams. Obviously I had to update the ogg media stream creation guide, so enjoy ogm made simple ;)

The Ogg DS filters v0.9.8.8 support 6 channel Vorbis playback (speaker mapping is still hard coded in this version), the default output media type of the Vorbis decoder is now 32bit floats to make full use of soundcards having a D/A that can handle more than 16 bits, a bug in the Ogg multiplexer that could lead to a crash at the end of the multiplexing has been fixed and some Windows98 related problems have been fixed. All the Ogg Vorbis related guides have been updated to reflect the new playback filter situation.

Sorry about the non working downloads that occurred from time to time. We had a problem related to the automatic mirroring but everything should be working fine now.

The latest Ogg DS filters has better memory management, audio stream switching works even when the audio tracks have different bitrates, a FOURCC mapper is included in the splitter, the splitter can show all pins and some bugs in the muxer have been fixed. The latest Ogg subtitle filter fixes a problem with the codepage selection and has an aspect ratio property page. And there's now a utility to split Ogg media streams: Ogg Cutter. Since this is major news for the Ogg format I've already updated the guide. MaestroSBT 2.3.0.2 corrects misplaced subs due to outline settings, italic text misplacement when emphasizing only a part of the text, a small shift in text when using italic styles and a small memory leak. DVD Decrypter 3.0.0.14 has improved multiangle processing allowing you to select which angle to keep (in the settings screen), brute force CSS cracking for people with RPC-2 drives wanting to rip a disc of a different region, adds a "check for update" function, the drive detection routines have been partly rewritten, ISO mode can now split files at 4GB when writing on a FAT partition and there are some minor GUI changes and some bugfixes.

Last but not least you may be interested in this petition to get Vorbis support on hardware players

SSRC 1.29 is more accurate, a windows binary of the high precision version is included, a fast mode has been added, -att can be used with --normalize and --twopass, the noise PDF function can now be specified, the windows binary is compiled with MSVC6 and there's no support for the Japanese language anymore. DivXFix 1.07 is faster, no longer stops responding until processing corrupted parts, using the Keep the original file option you can keep a backup of the original file and the cut out the bad parts option will not copy corrupted frames into the backup file.

About the PDFs: I don't make em so mailing me, or post to the forum about them is useless. The guy can only be reached via my IRC channel. And second, only RathO is allowed to distribute these docs.

Thanks to everybody who sent suggestions about the mirroring. We're trying out lftp now, seems to work quite well but we're still working on optimizing the whole process, generate useful logs and error reports and such. We're doing our best to ensure that the testing has no effect on operation capabilities of any of the servers.

MaestroSBT 2.3.0.0 has intelligent collision support, a collision prevention mechanism, support for hard spaces, sticky colors should work now, RLE bitmaps have been re-enabled but TIFF compression is currently not working.

Many have submitted DVDx1.8a to me, but if you scroll down to the news of 3/3 you'll see that I've already posted the update 2 weeks ago. There's also a P4 version, I guess it was compiled with P4 optimizations but I have no idea if it makes any difference. Experience with previous P4 compiles have shown that SSE capable processors (Athlon XP, Duron 1GHz+, P3) also gained in speed.

And a last warning for people with inactivated forum accounts. I'm going to delete all such accounts older than 2 weeks soon. So please contact us if you want to keep your account.

Last but not least: My guides are now available in PDF format. I do not maintain them, but they should be updated frequently (though not as frequently as the ones on this page).

Today I have an ASF/WMV to DivX/(S)VCD conversion guide for you. And I've updated the Maestro guide, it is now possible to get the chapterpoints directly from ChapterXtractor which spares us from entering all chapter positions manually. And along with the release of the latest BeSweet and GUI I've updated the BeSweet guide for MP3 and MP2.

BeSweet GUI 0.6b26 has the Vorbis quality settings in the right format, has 5.0 AIFF and 5.1 AIFF output options and support for the --alt abr and cbr presets of Lame. The latter requires BeSweet 1.3b1.

Yesterday I wrote that HP would start shipping PCs with built-in DVD+RW drives. This is of course not accurate as they've been doing that for a while already. And in regard to Winrar, version 2.9 can also handle files created using version 3.0. I missed the NVIDIA nForce 620 announcement yesterday. The new chipset pretty much has the same features but also support DDR-333 RAM. And talking about chipsets VIA announced the P4X333 which is the latest P4 chipset and supports DDR-333 RAM, USB2 and 6 channel surround.

Did nobody notice that this site turned 2 years old yesterday? I certainly didn't forget but I also didn't feel like throwing a big party. Is there anyone who knew about this site prior to April 8th 2000, the day I published the first HTML guide? I think that date is much more appropriate as official site launch date.

DivX Player 2.0alpha 2 allows you to disable the splash screen, has error handling in the custom aspect ratio dialogue and to set a play mode by default (for instance fullscreen), audio handling in DivX3 files have been improved as well as MPEG-4 file handling. Furthermore the performance has been improved and the startup version check has been made asynchronous. Then there's a couple of bugfixes: exit upon loading a video file should no longer occur, resuming mode works better, pressing ESC in the newsletter subscription dialogue no longer freezes the application and having a filename containing ~ in the name no longer causes visual artifacts.

Do you follow the CeBit news? There's been some interesting stuff yesterday: DVD+R has been officially launched, ATI announced their chipsets for AMD and Intel platforms including Ethernet, 6 Channel sound and built-in along with a Radeon graphic chip, Abit announced a line of legacy-free mainboards (you can bet on me getting one of these) and DVD+R/W made a big step ahead as HP, Dell and Compaq are going to put DVD+RW drives into their computers (German link, sorry).

I've created a full listing of every document on this site (minus the old news). Now you can access every guide fragment directly. However, since there are no longer guide flows you have to be aware that after following a chunk of a guide you may be left stranded as there's no way to find which of the fragment would come as the next operation so use it at your own risk.

Also, I'm getting an increasing number of complaints about forcing people to use IE. I'd like to clarify that this is completely groundless. I create this page using DreamWeaver and that does not generate any non standard HTML code to begin with as far as I know. Then I have tested my site on the 3 main browsers (IE, Netscape and Opera) many times and just in case I installed the latest Netscape v6.21 and Opera v6.01 and tested my page again. Both the quicklaunch bar and the left frame do work just fine. So, if you use the latest version of your preferred browser there really is no problem.

Also.. everyone should update WinRar to version 3.0 if you get an "unknown method" error when extracting a .rar file. Apparently WinRar 3.0 uses a different format and files created with it can no longer be extracted with older versions (maybe there's a compatibility setting, but that wouldn't help you either if a file has been created without such a switch).

ZoomPlayer 2.50 continues the history of huge changelogs. Then there's BeSweet GUI 0.6b22 that should fix all known bugs of the previous release.

2 notes about the forum: 1) We have about 1000 inactivated accounts, some as old as the board. At the end of the week we're going to remove every inactivated account that is more than 2 weeks old so please get your account in order, that is locate activation mail that has been sent to you and click on the activation link or contact us if you can't locate it (and use the Contact Us link in the forum if you need to talk to an admin, doom9@whatever or whatever@doom9.net is not the address you want to use).
2) Forum rules. They've been revised twice within the last few days, to make it all more streamlined and take less long to read. But there's simply too many people not respecting these rules. Please take this opportunity to read the revised rules and then stick to them.

It appears that Netscape 4.x has problems displaying the navigation bar ever since I had to switch from TheCounter to SiteMeter. I'm afraid there's not much I can do about this as this script is not under my control (but SiteMeter is by far the best counter I've looked into). But I had a friend of mine test it with the latest version of Netscape (6.21) and it appears to be working just fine there, plus since the 6.x series has a better CSS engine my design should no longer be mutilated so I suggest that if you have problems you upgrade to the latest browser.

And if we're talking about tech trouble: You should all upgrade Winrar to version 3.0. Rarsoft changed something so you'll get some strange errors when you try to open rar files created with version 3.0 in an older version. The BeSweet GUI is such a case, and many more will come as Winrar gets installed more and more.

I'm still looking for ideas for the file mirroring issue. The best that has been suggested to me is LFTP. Is there somebody having some experience with that program? Or if you have other ideas, keep in mind that I need to synch servers (overwrite files that have changed, upload new files, delete files that are no longer on the master server), that it has to be possible to run it from different servers (in case one is down), and only use FTP (telnet/rsh/ssh is out of the question). And it has to be launched via a php page (guess that's no problem.. I'm just not too familiar with php programming - never used it, I can read the code since I understand perl but write code is quite another thing, if only for time constraints), rather than on a regular basis, or I will still have to deal with desynched servers before the next synch process starts. And last but not least.. some feedback on what has been executed after the synching would be useful (capture the output of the synching tool, display it on a webpage).

BeSweet GUI 0.6b21 has a copy command to clipboard button, disables the .lst to BeSweet .lst conversion, disables -azid(-g max) in .lst files, double clicking the logfile textbox will open the file, a substream selection has been added for .lst inputs, PCM and MPA substreams have been added to the substream selection, there's a process priority setting, WAV/MP2/MP3/MPA input is supported now, OTA options have been added along with Ogg Vorbis output options, the max gain settings is changed to post max gain in MP3 output mode resulting in a one pass only procedure and you still get the best gain possible, the batch mode settings are saved in the registry now, the lame --alt presets are supported now, the GUI is no longer enabled when a process is active, the expert mode has been removed and the memory consumption has been decreased. IfoEdit 0.9 allows PGC-command editing via the right mouse button (more options coming), has support for seamless branching titles (the pointers will be corrected), you can now strip unwanted branches/PGCs and titles, the VTS_Overview has been enhanced to show the layer break point on cell level, new dialogues for editing audio and subpicture attributes have been added, the Create IFO button has been fixed and been enhanced to extract audio channels and quantization values, a bug in the total frame calculation has been fixed, the DVD player has been enhanced, the Create Image button has been enhanced and will now check the size and execute GET VTS Sectors on each file, new IFO files now have the correct framerate set and last but not least the progress window no longer stays on top.

Also, as you probably know I have multiple servers. Until now I manually synch most of them (2 have auto synching since they're on the same LAN). I'd like to get an automated solution for keeping the various servers updated. It needs to be something that is platform independent (I have all kinds of server OS and ftp servers) and that I can launch from basically anywhere. As I have php on all but one server it would probably be best to have a php based solution, that keeps track of the changes I make on the main server and the FTPs them to the other servers. It should also be possible to run this from different servers in case one is down and then when it comes back up, update the server that has been down during the last update session. If anybody knows of such a solution let me know, it would make my life a lot easier (and fix the broken link problems when I accidentally forget to upload files to a server).

ZoomPlayer 2.50RC2 is out. As usual there are truckloads of changes. Decomb 3.8 adds pattern guidance for PAL.

Since the new IfoEdit has made my DVD-9 -> 2 DVD-R guide outdated I've updated it. I've also added an Ogg Vorbis guide using BeSweet.

I've been testing the new DivX5 settings on Constant Quality mode in the kung-fu scene in Matrix @ Quality 90 and compare the effects. Unfortunately that didn't quite turn out to be so easy. What was clearly visible are the strange effects QPel has. It appears as if the texture is moving from the support, like you had a 3D wireframe where the texture is placed upon, but instead of the texture being attached to the wireframe it's lose and moves in all directions. Quality wise there's not much of a difference visible between none of the MPEG-4 options activated, B frames, GMC and both of them activated. However, since we're taking about constant quality mode that is not very surprising. On the other hand I had quite a difference size wise. The plain DivX5 file was 22.5MB, the DivX5 file with B-frames only 17.9MB, the GMC version was 21.6MB and B-frames and GMC combined 17.6MB. Using QPel in that would bring another 0.2MB but at a visible picture distortion. Using the psy setting also brought a gain in filesize, however, this feature is still buggy and sometimes gave shitframes so I did not extensively test it. I also tested against DivX4.12, the file was 23MB at the same quality. XviD at the same setting using H.263 quantizers returned a 20.5MB file, using lumi masking that went down to 19.7MB and using MPEG quantizers I had a size of 21.7MB. Since the clip is rather short I have no fps numbers at this point but I'll try on longer clips. I encoded the whole movie in 2 pass mode using GMC and B-frames and the average framerate was 26.54fps which means slightly lower than DivX4 and around the same as XviD (though these numbers are taken from the last test, so XviD speed may have changed in the meantime). I would assume that switching off the new options would at least restore DivX5 speed. I took a couple of screenshots to compare the detail level and XviD is still more detailed, plus it has less artifacts around the edges of objects. In any case, these results look rather promising, if we have such a size reduction without loss of quality we can expect better quality when using 2 pass mode. Now we just need fixed psy settings and a properly working and accurate rate control in DivX5. And on a last note we may see some of the MPEG-4 features like B-frames in XviD in the not so distant future so things will remain very interesting.

Oggmachine 0.16 is the stable release of Oggmachine and it automatically exchanges the azid max gain search parameter with the better internal max gain search option, and it does the same for the DRC in azid and Wavebooster, double clicking on the output file will play it and the start button has been renamed. BeSweet 1.2 has a new post gain engine and other enhancements that make it 10% faster than the 1.11 version, and mp2enc.dll was modified to support floating-point processing. Xmpeg 4.31alpha has better overlay, better multipass support, multipass support is always enabled, error messages when opening a file have been adapted to show the real error, a parsing bug in interlaced content has been fixed, the aspect ratio is set by default, a menu activation/deactivation error has been fixed, slider players are more clear, audio extraction can be accessed separately and do direct stream copy, wav or VBR mp3, deinterlacing code has been added, the mism to be used can be selected and will be used for all files, a demuxer bug has been corrected, there's an IEE1180 and speec test for the iDCT algorithms, a resolution bug in the multichannel audio mixer has been fixed and the output pad algorithms have been fixed. And I bet after having translated all that I will find the English changelog ;)

Oggmachine 0.14 has a quality -> bitrate correspondance indicator (I wished DSPGuru would include a changelog file). The Ogg DS filters 0.9.6.0 fixes a muxer bug that could lead to wrong stoptimes for subs, remuxing an Ogg file with subs no longer causes a deadlock in the muxer, a commen editor has been added in the property page of the muxer, the muxer will automatically copy the comments from the Ogg splitter when connected together and mono Vorbis files should no longer be played too fast. The Ogg subtitle filter 1.1.2.0 should no longer crash some players when pressing stop, media type negotiation has been fixed, all codepages should be supported now, the position of the subs can be shifted upwards, there's a new filter to extract subtitle streams again and HTML tags in the srt files can be ignored.

Then I've been working hard on a new IfoEdit guide that teaches you how to use CCE generated output in IfoEdit. Be aware though, it's not as simple as it seems as you will have to use a DVD authoring program in any case. And I've finally come around to update the DVD2SVCD guide. In fact, large parts of it have been completely rewritten since so many things have changed lately.

OggMachine 0.13 fixes all the bugs that have been reported in the audio forum, BeSweet 1.2RC introduces one pass normalization using a new module for asserting the gain after encoding to MP3 which speeds up things quite a bit. It also offers new output formats including Ogg Vorbis, 5.1ch Aiff and 5.0ch Aiff which is useful for MPEG-2 multichannel file creations (the free Philips encoder supports these input formats). Ogg encoding requires the Ogg DirectShow filters. Besweet now prints a summery when encoding is done. And last but not least the whole thing is Azid 1.8 based. AviUtl 0.97f basically should fix all the problems the a release had (though I haven't tested it.. I only use VirtualDub). DVD2SVCD 1.0.7b4 has several bugfixes: titlepicture size for PAL, bitrate for audio2, overlap that caused a too large last CD image, deinterlacing settings are weren't stored properly and decomb 3.6 is used now. There's also several enhancements: DVB support, XML file must no longer be included in the final image, a summary file is being created, using resampleaudio for Avisynth is now selectable and the ifo file having the longest length is being selected now.

A few words about DivX5: A codec only installer should be released soon. When testing, the best mode to see what the new settings do is use CQ mode (and of course use CQ for the codecs you're comparing). QPel seems to be most effective if you encode at a 1/4 of the original resolution and may therefore not be of much use for DVD rips. GMC may cause some problems though at this point I cannot confirm this. So for now you should mostly look into B frames and GMC. Also, don't use the resize/crop/deinterlace/IVTC of the codec.. the regular tools work better so keep on using them. As for the psychovisual settings, they are indeed kinda broken and lots of people get very bad results using it.. so if you want to test the effect, encode only short clips. Even I got some very bad results using it on a full movie. And another thing, the guide includes a method how to prevent the banners from showing, but here's something better: How to deactivate the ad tool altogether (don't remove it though.. that may cause problems): Press Start - Run, enter msconfig, click on the Startup tab and uncheck gain_trickler_3102, then reboot and the app is no longer active. There you go, no more banners and no need to flame anyone.

And about the speed of the page, if you get on the 2 T1 servers, we're still having some problems there. I was not around today but tomorrow I may be able to reconfigure the DNS servers to send more load to the servers that have a faster connection to make things better for everyone.

DivX5 is out. As I've reported before MPEG-4 licensing terms have changed so now DivXNetworks may have to pay for distributing their codec (50cents per downloaded copy) which changes the picture for them quite a bit. So there are now 2 versions: DivX5 standard which contains AMD optimizations, psychovisual modeling and MP4 output along with the regular AVI output. The Pro version adds QPel motion estimation, Global Motion Compensation and B frames. Both versions are free but the difference is that the Pro version comes bundled with a background application that will display a banner every now and then to cover the licensing cost. If you don't like that you will be able to buy an ad-free Pro version for $30. A few words about MP4 output: Currently there's no way to add audio to these files but a solution will be released on this very page shortly.

And I have another goodie for you: 2 new guides on how to use CCE to create DVD output in best possible quality and how to use Maestro to author your own DVDs. The two guides work together hand in hand. I've also restructured the guides pages a bit, hope you like it (and the Linux ripping guide is finally linked via the guides page too).

After the first frenzy some more news: First of all if my site is slow that's because you're getting onto one of the 2 servers that only have a T1 connection. Due to the high demand for the new DivX codec these 2 servers are maxed out. There are 3 other ones that works just fine though I just learned that I'm going to lose a 10mbit connection in 10 days and one of the T1s is bound to be shut down eventually. So if you're sitting on a 10mbit line and could spare a part of that line to host a mirror of my site let me know.

VirtualDub 1.4.9 fixes a bug in the IVTC department that would drop the last 8 frames, the temporal smoother now initializes from the first frame, the LameACM deadlock has been fixed and there's a couple of capturing related bugfixes as well. There's also a new version of the VirtualDub subtitle plugin that fixes a memory trashing bug and has been slightly optimized.

And now for the full feature list of DivX5: Full MPEG-4 compatibility. The codec plays MPEG-4 simple profile and MPEG-4 advanced simple profile and H.263 video. MPEG-4 fileformat. The Pro version includes support for the new DivX MPEG-4 file format. Smaller file size: Up to 41% smaller files can be achieved at the same visual quality (depending on the material to encode), integrated video encoding tools like resize, crop, deinterlace and IVTC. The Pro release adds temporal and spatial noise reduction to that. Then there's psychovisual modeling, which results in smaller sizes without loss of quality by taking into account some knowledge about the human visual system. The Pro version furthermore has B-frame support, Global Motion Compensation and Quarter Pixel motion estimation and last but not least there's data partitioning for streaming purposes. DivX5 is also compatible with DivX3 and DivX4 content and the playback filter has better seeking than the DivX4 filter though it's still not up to the level of Ogg media streams.

And to conclude the day I wrote a DivX5 encoding guide that will explain you the new options and tells you how to disable the ads in the Pro version (fully legal of course;)

RadLight 3.03 R5.1 is a bugfix release. The OggMachine v0.11 is a BeSweet based tool to create Ogg vorbis files from your AC3/WAV/MP2/MP3 files. TMPG 2.53 has a progress bar in the MPEG tools, the DirectShow multimedia reader has been improved and the elapsed time now includes the encoding time when using an external audio encoder.

The DVD forum has decided on the next generation of DVD. Unlike Blu-ray discs it will use traditional red laser and have the same capacity as current DVDs but use more efficient compression schemes like MPEG-4 or improved MPEG-2 with heavy pre and post processing to cram more data on a disc. DivXNetworks will demo DivX5 to the press today in L.A. Does that mean it will be released today? I don't know and I don't care much for speculation. But you can be sure that you'll find it on this very page as soon as it's out. Thereg has an interesting story about the MPAA/RIAA delegate in congress (that would be Sen Hollings) lashing out at the Intel Executive VP during a hearing. Apparently some people can't stomach other opinions. Let's make this clear for everyone: the SSSCA means the death of fair use and the beginning of the pay per use society. If Mr Hollings were my elected representative he'd sure hear a lot about his commendable actions to screw each and everyone who buys music and or movies.

vStrip 0.8f_css creates DVD2AVI project files. DSPGuru has released a first beta of his upcoming program called The OggMachine, which, as the name says, does on the fly AC3/WAV/MP2/MP3 -> Ogg compression based on BeSweet.

I've spent almost all my computing time this week working with IfoEdit and TMPG and trying to get the two to work together. Finally, yesterday I've been successful and I spend the entire afternoon doing some huge changes all over the DVD -> DVD-R guides section. No guide has been left untouched and I've added a new guide on how to handle multiangle movies including how to use TMPG to re-encode the video stream, how to use the new playback and image creation features in TMPG and last but not least a document with notices about seamless branching titles (tested on Matrix). To make these guides even better I need your help. As I have no DVD burner I need somebody to test the IfoEdit generated images with the burning programs that come with his/her burner and tell me about compatibility. And, a guide on how to import the image into a DVD burning program and actually burn it would also be useful.

And if you wondered why there's a new counter and why the numbers are so low: TheCounter had a new price plan and wanted more than $700 a year for my site. Clearly, this is unacceptable and I think it's just a move to kick out the high traffic sites like mine. So I switched the SiteMeter, which is still free but doesn't have as much options (unless you pay for it and then it would be about the same amount as TheCounter again). And since SiteMeter only allows you to enter a 6 digit start number for the hitcounter I decided to start from 0, thus the grand total is the SiteMeter number plus 8.2million ;) And thanks to all the people who submitted solutions for the Quicklink problem, it's working again now :)

And last but not least an update on the FXP situation: My stupid router (Prestige P642-R) changes every PORT command to a site on port21 and puts my IP as the source IP, thus rendering FXP connections to a FTP server running on port21 impossible. Using the alternative method is a solution but conflicts with one of my server that only supports outgoing FXP connections so we ended up changing the FTP ports and now everything works fine, but if somebody know how to turn of the port and address translation feature on the router for port21 let me know.