FixVTS 1.602 now runs on Linux (Wine)

DVDSubEdit 1.36 updates the subtitle timecode after a re-timing operation and enforces an even number of pixels when moving subtitles vertically (odd numbers could lead to weird effects)

It appears, that the Internet is beginning to draw a significant number of people away from their TVs. The added flexibility of watching content online is beginning to make a dent in TV viewership according to a BBC study. And while part of that online viewing might be non sanctioned content, the experiments by US majors have clearly shown that if you offer a legal alternative, it can be successful. Now if they just got rid of those darned country checks? There is especially no reason to lock out people from countries that only get dubbed content.. those willing or wishing to watch a show in its original form cannot and will never be satisfied by the dubbed, standard resolution, stereo only and a year after the US variety served by local TV stations.

Is copyright reason coming to the UK? Besides calls for Fair Use, copyright law may not be extended to cover music for 95 years rather than the current 50.

With the help of the Bush administration, the RIAA has finally managed to get a death sentence for Russia's AllOfMP3 online music store. Dare I wonder what would've happened with Russia's WTO bid if they haven't essentially caved in to all the demands by the US copyright industry? I mean, who is to profit the most by the adoption of DMCA like legislation and shutting down legitimate but RIAA unsanctioned businesses? Russia? I dare venture there are some more pressing matters looming. And if the RIAA sanctioned music stores had an only halfway as interesting offer, you can bet it would put a serious dent into P2P music downloads.

It was to be expected: after getting a cut of Zune sales, Universal is now greedily looking at the iPod. The argumentation is of course the same: a lot of music on those devices is illegal so their cut is essentially compensation for copyright infringement. Of course, that levy won't give you the right to copy X songs, despite having paid for pirating music. Don't you love that logic? I'm awaiting the day I have to pay for humming music while listening to online radio (then again, I pay nothing for that radio other than our national radio reception license so I'm probably already a pirate in the RIAA's book).

Last but not least, Wal-Mart is entering the movie download business. Along with the DVD you pick up in the store, you can shell out another $1.97 for your portable video player, or $2.97 for a copy to play on your PC. Stop right there: Can't you just make a copy of the DVD you just bought? Well...

ProgDVB 4.80.4 contains some bugfixes.

DVDFab Decrypter 3.0.4.0 contains updated language files and fixes the error 400 that could occur when copying DVDs.

The first DMCA review by the Librarian of Congress has resulted in 6 DMCA exceptions - unfortunately none that would confirm fair use.

While intellectual property laws have been expanded almost without limit in the past decade, the fashion industry serves us with a good example on how the free market can work just fine without overbroad legislative protection.

DVDPlanner 0.2.0.4 can seamlessly join VOB IDs, set regions, create chapters automatically and force the final subtitle. The options menu has been replaced by a new settings tab and there are a couple bugfixes as well.

As you may know, current UK copyright law knows no fair use exception to allow private copying. If you think that should be changed, there's a petition on an official government website you can sign.

ProgDVB 4.80.3 contains a few bugfixes for Skystar1 / Livewiev cards as well as for the Elecard edition.

VobBlanker 2.1.2.0 is currently in beta stage. If you want to follow the development, just visit the forum.

RipIt4Me 1.5.7.0 fixes the disc recognition problems introduced in the previous release.

The CD/DVD drive emulator Daemon Tools 4.08 comes with the latest SPTD driver, support silent installation and fixes problems with Intervideo DVD Copy 5 as well as a bunch of installation issues.

The MPAA is bringing out the big guns again - this time, a company called Load 'N Go Video is in their crosshairs. The company sells DVDs and iPods, and will transcode your DVDs and put them into the iPod you buy. It's all Fair Use, right? Well, we've long known that the MPAA wants to charge us for every device we play content on, so this lawsuit is no surprise.

Meanwhile, Universal has made good on their threats towards community video sites and has filed a lawsuit against MySpace. Interestingly, that's the same MySpace that Fox uses to spread some of their TV shows online. And while we're on the subject of TV series and online watching, a poll taken by CBS shows that those streamed episodes actually lead to more people watching shows.

And back to music again, the music industry has faced a setback in China, where they sued music search engine Baidu. A court has now ruled that the service does not constitute copyright infringement as no songs are hosted on Baidu's servers.

And in a rather creative defense attempt, one of the filesharers in the RIAA's crosshairs is arguing that since the lawsuit against him is based on his use of Kazaa, and since Kazaa settled with the RIAA for copyright infringement, individuals making use of Kazaa's services are therefore already covered by Kazaa's settlement.

The Australian government's proposal of a copyright reform has come under heavy fire from many sides: the Internet Industry Association, along with scientists, and even the senate's committee on legal and constitutional affairs think that the proposal goes way overboard, and would make Australia the first country in the world where even unknowingly committing a minor copyright offense could lead to criminal prosecution. (Editor's note: if you think, heck a crime is a crime, consider that the state's criminal attorneys are supposed to go after the really bad folks, murderers, rapists, and other people that are a real threat to society - and if you swamp criminal courts with people who download a handful of songs, the courts no longer have the resources to go after all the really bad people).

RipIt4Me 1.5.6.0 fixes a few bugs.

Zoom Player 5.0 RC1 has a fully interconnected fullscreen navigation interface, has a completely rewritten options interface and fixes various minor issues.

Even though either blue laser based format has yet to make an impact, the writing speed increases are already coming: LG's GWB-H10N Blu-ray burner writes BD-R discs at 4x. Rewriteable speed remains at 2x and there's no dual layer support either. And as usual, no SATA.

With Windows Vista released to the presses and already available to business customers, Computerworld offers a detailed look at all the DRM that's coming our way.

DVDFab Decrypter 3.0.3.8 supports yet another of Sony's DVD structure perversions and fixes a few bugs.

After Warner, Fox is the second studio to start selling low priced DVDs in China to offer a legal, but affordable alternative to pirated discs. They are aiming for a price that's 2-2.5 times the price of a pirated disc, or below $3.

What is fair use as supported by this very site? According to the sitting RIAA chairman, being able to make a copy of what you legally own is 'an extremist interpretation of fair use to frighten and mislead consumers and policymakers', and people who might defend P2P downloading are in fact 'fair use revisionists'. There's one thing Cary got right though: fair use is a balancing of interests. So let me give you our side: We want content for a fair price, to be played on any device of our liking, versus having to pay for each use / device separately, and having to pay again each time you get the latest tech gadget. And before you start the DRM is good litany, how about all those people with PlayForSure equipment - sorry, Microsoft has just moved to Zune and unless you crack that DRM, you'll have to pay all over again for your music collection.

RipIt4Me 1.5.5.0 works under Win95/98/ME (I'm sorry.. I have to comment here: why oh why would anyone invest as much as a second of his time to make an app run on a pocket calculator OS is beyond me), and SPTI is used to copy the original IFOs where available (not on pocket calculator OS'es ;).

ProgDVB 4.81 has an updated Geniatech module and contains some bugfixes.

mkvtoolnix 1.8.0 can set the stereo mode flag for video tracks, is prepared to handle the upcoming FLAC 1.1.3, defaults the open file directory to the directory of the last opened file even if a file was loaded via drag & drop, defaults to the A_AAC codec ID for AAC tracks and fixes a bunch of bugs.

So this is how Microsoft got the studios to license their songs for their upcoming iPod competitor Zune: pay the studios for each player sold. The logic for this is that the device will not only be used to hold songs bought via Microsoft's online store - which makes this a non government mandated levy, of which only 50% go to the artists (hey, it's all about the artists, right?). I'm left wondering though, what would've happened if Microsoft didn't agree to give Universal a cut of each player?

In an interesting development, that if it turns out to be successful, could well have drastic changes on the RIAA's current lawsuit spree, a defendant in one of the RIAA's filesharing lawsuits, the defense will be allowed to challenge the studio's $750 per song damage claim (in the light that the wholesale price of a song is just 70 cents).

RipIt4Me 1.5.4.0 should be more robust in dealing with severely corrupted DVD structures, writes more information to the log to help track down problems, saves logs in ISO mode in a folder based on the name of the target rip folder and fixes two bugs that could lead to a crash / cause problems copying IFOs.

SubRip 1.50 beta 4 fixes a crash when editing character matrix files.

While drive manufacturers seem to have taken a step back and away from combo HD DVD / Blu-ray players, component makers are gearing up for it: NEC, Broadcom and STMicroelectronics are all preparing drive components that can handle both formats.

That has got to sting: a draft government report in Australia labels the statistics the copyright industry uses (or, comes up with), as unreliable, and even absurd. Time to send those lobbyists...

That won't fly well with the government snoops in Germany: The Bundesgerichtshof - that's Germany's Supreme Court - ruled that ISPs have to delete logs they keep on their customers, if a customer requests so. So at least for now it's unsupervised surfing for free citizens.

And a little message for EA: ever heard of widescreen? At this day and age, a game that doesn't support widescreen screens is pathetic (in other words.. I got NFS Carbon today and me and my 30" Dell aren't happy).

Hello world. I hope you weren't too concerned about the lengthy time without any news. I'm doing fine, but I have been very busy these last few months, and while I would always find time to gather newsworthy stuff (I have a really long list of bookmarks gathered since the last news update), there wasn't any time left to compile them into something newsworthy, but I just couldn't leave the writers of all the concerned emails hanging so here I am again, with the longest news item ever, wrapping up what has happened.

VirtualDub 1.67 fixes a few bugs. The experimental VirtualDub 1.70 has a new feature called "smart rendering", which helps to reduce the amount of re-encoding needed when editing a video, allows audio to be extracted in RAW format, has an option to retain empty frames during recompression, supports PNG output, supports relative and aspect-ratio based resizing in the resizing filter, supports more input and output formats, contains some improvements in the capturing area, and last but not least, it's the build you should use for the soon-to-be finalized Windows Vista.

MPEG-4 Modifier 1.4.3 doesn't remove delay frames, shows the FourCC code and user data information in the video info text and can pack videos containing drop frames.

AutoGK 2.37 beta fixes the preview that wouldn't work properly in certain localized Windows versions, uses an up-to-date XviD CVS build and contains updated versions of the ColorMatrix, VSFilter, Decomb and LeakKernelDeInt filters.

ProgDVB 4.80 supports a bunch of new DVB cards from DVBWorld, Acorp and Nextorm.

TSConverter 2.5 can now process AVC TS streams (demux and cut), supports AC3 WAVs and has an improved GUI.

MPEG2Schnitt 0.87 adds a lot of flexibility in automatic filename and extension assignment.

XviD 1.1.2 contains some updated profiles and fixes a bunch of bugs. XviD also got a brand new website outlining the future of XviD: they're working with hardware makers to certify standalone players, and unlike the DivX or NeroDigital certification, XviD certified means a device will support the full MPEG-4 ASP standard. XviD 2.0 (AKA XviD AVC) is also still in the works, but no date has been set for its release. And as usual, you can download Koepi's compiled version right here.

AC3Filter 1.11 saves output settings in its presets, fixes the tray icon and an incompatibility with TMPG.

Haali's latest media splitter supports cuesheets and subtitles in dsmux, creates better variable framerate MKV files based on AVC input, and fixes bugs in the MPEG TS parser and compatibility with an old version of mkvmerge.

RipIt4Me 1.5.30 can exclude unreferenced titlesets and fixes a bug that would destroy disk navigation.

DVDFab Decrypter 3.0.3.5 contains some updated language files and fixes decryption problems when the disk and drive region don't match.

HC 0.19.1 turns off the preview in the GUI by default and fixes the CQ_PFACTOR and CQ_BFACTOR settings.

And here's some irony for you: the same company that's selling MPAA studio licensed content line, also offers access to various alt.binary newsgroups where you can download the same content (and much more) for free ;)

And Sony Europe is shutting down a Hong Kong based game console importer Lik-Sang despite some of its senior executives getting their PSPs from that very company (due to the stacked release of consoles around the world, it can take months for a console to be available in all major markets and not everybody likes to wait that long). Shouldn't they have waited a few months to import a PSP3 and then put the hammer down?

In a ruling that has the RIAA fuming, a filesharing suit against a 48 year old Spaniard was recently dismissed and the judge ruled that if the purpose of making a copy is not to gain wealth, it cannot be considered illegal.

And last but not least, as the RIAA kept failing to shut down the thorn in their digital music behind called AllOfMP3 - despite the help of the US administration even - they finally managed to get some leverage by getting Visa and Mastercard onboard.. buyers will no longer be able to use those major credit cards to purchase music at AllOfMP3 (one of the few online music services that primarily caters to the wishes of their customers by offering multiple versions of songs in your preferred format, and all without DRM).

Last month's news can be found here.